Kevin Gutzman: NY Times Says Rand Paul is Guilty….by Association

NY Times Says Rand Paul is Guilty….by Association

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – (Please note this interview was condiucted on the Mike Church Show of 04 February, 2014 and originally Published on: Feb 4, 2014) “On Sunday last, an essay appeared on the pages of the New York Times.  It was about the Paul family, Ron and Rand, he, former congressman, and his son, current senator from the State of Kentucky.  It was Sam Tanenhaus and Rutenberg who wrote this essay.  In the essay they basically assailed the entire libertarian movement as a closet operation for a bunch of people that apparently are running around about the countryside just looking for the next act of overt racism or anarchy that they can get involved in.”  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Professor Dr. Kevin Gutzman is on the Dude Maker Hotline with us.  On Sunday last, an essay appeared on the pages of the New York Times.  It was about the Paul family, Ron and Rand Paul, he, former congressman, and his son, current senator from the State of Kentucky.  It was Sam Tanenhaus and Rutenberg who wrote this essay.  In the essay they basically assailed the entire libertarian movement as basically a closet operation for a bunch of people that apparently are running around about the countryside just looking for the next act of overt racism or anarchy that they can get involved in.  They threw Ron and Rand in that number.  Then they went on to mention: By the way, the Pauls are supported by the intellectual efforts of men like Tom E. Woods, he and co-author Professor Kevin Gutzman of this disastrous, this horrific little screed called Who Killed the Constitution?  Tom wrote a response to this.  Lew Rockwell, who was also accused in the piece, responded to it.  You have some things to say about this, correct?

Kevin Gutzman:  I wasn’t aware that Tom had written a response to it.

Mike:  Maybe he just referenced that Lew had responded to it.

Gutzman:  I think that’s right.  Basically what the article did was to find every remote association of the Pauls and find some way to make negative insinuations about Senator Paul’s attitudes on various hot-button social questions, including race.  Somebody could do the same thing to Hilary Clinton.  Somebody could say: Well, she’s a member of the Democratic Party, which was founded in 1824 to keep the slavery issue out of federal politics.  Her husband is Bill Clinton, whose mentor was J. William Fulbright, famous segregationist senator from Arkansas.  Easily one could do this to Mrs. Clinton.  She supports Planned Parenthood, which was founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger who said we need to have fewer people from “inferior ethnic groups” in society.  She’s been supported by the New York Times, which famously denied that the Ukrainian famine was being instigated by Stalin even as millions of Ukrainians were starving to death.  This is essentially the level on which the Times was attacked Senator Paul.

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Along the way, it said that one fellow who has been associated with the Mises center in Alabama, which had a friendly relationship with the Pauls since the Mises Institute is a libertarian institute, is Tom Woods.  Tom Woods is the co-author of Who Killed the Constitution?, a book that criticizes the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Education.  That’s all it says about Tom Woods and Who Killed the Constitution?  It doesn’t say anything about the fact that we repeatedly say in the book that the reason we’re criticizing the Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education is that people on the Supreme Court at the time said it wasn’t consistent with the Constitution, it wasn’t consistent with the way that the authors of the 14^th Amendment understood the 14^th Amendment.  It doesn’t mention that we’ve said repeatedly in public, not only published but in various radio shows and so on, that the 15^th Amendment should have been used instead of the 14^th.

Actually, your listeners may not be familiar with the fact that it was the 15^th Amendment being enforced that ended segregation.  It was the Voting Rights Act that ended segregation.  Brown v. Board of Education said there should be no more segregation, but ten years later there was no less segregation than there had been before.  Essentially by the time the Voting Rights Act was adopted, there were almost no black kids in Alabama going to school with white kids.  It didn’t have any effect.  The Voting Rights Act, on the other hand, was passed in 1965 and within five years segregation essentially was at an end.

Our point in Who Killed the Constitution? is that not only was Brown v. Board of Education ineffective in doing what it was intended by the court to do.  It also gave a kind of moral cover to the Supreme Court’s succeeding career of just going out, finding laws it didn’t like, and declaring them to be unconstitutional.  That’s what we lamented.  We went on in the next chapter to describe the forced busing fiasco in which millions of little kids were made to ride buses for racial balance and for thousands of hours of their lives.  Of course, there have been various other social experiments that were forced on us by the federal courts, all with the cover of: If you criticize that, what are you saying?  You don’t like Brown v. Board of Education?  Brown v. Board of Education became this kind of license for the Supreme Court to get into the legislating business, and that’s what it did, and I would argue is still doing.

The New York Times’ description of Tom and of our book is just a total cheap shot and ignores the fact that we make clear that we think segregation should have been ended using the 15^th Amendment.  Not only that, it was ended using the 15^th Amendment.  I think this is just part and parcel of the general smear of Senator Paul that was attempted in that article.  I had read that Tanenhaus is supposed to be some kind of conservative, but I can’t detect it in anything I’ve ever read that he’s written.  Actually, I’m on an email list of conservative and libertarian scholars run by Professor Jensen out of Chicago.  He posted a link to the article.  Then another scholar on the list referred to Tanenhaus as a conservative.  I wrote in and said: This is slander and here’s Lew Rockwell’s response to it.  Notice that he describes our book in accurate detail.  I don’t understand why anybody would like this kind of dog whistle Democrat Party campaign description of Tom or our book or the Mises Institute or anything else that was mentioned in the article.  It was a complete hack job as far as I could see.

Mike:  The 15^th Amendment reads, “The right of the citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”  You and I both know that this was a feeble attempt by the radical Republicans to try to hold onto their majorities when the Southern states were readmitted and an avalanche of new Democrats were headed to Washington.  That’s what they were trying to, according to Michael Holt, anyway, that’s what they were trying to do.

Gutzman:  The thing about the 15^th Amendment is, if it had actually been enforced from the beginning, there never would have been segregation in a large number of Southern states.  At the time the 15^th Amendment was adopted, black people were actually the majority of voters in South Carolina.  They were equal in number to white people in both Louisiana and Mississippi.  There were other states where their vote could have maintained a non-segregationist majority in the state government.  It’s only because force and fraud were used to keep them from voting and the 15^th Amendment was essentially unenforced for a century that segregation ever happened.  Ultimately Congress decided in 1965 to pass the Voting Rights Act and enforce black peoples’ right to vote, and segregation came almost to an immediate end.

Mike:  To understand this correctly, if during Reconstruction, as they call it, or as it should be properly called, subjugation, if those Union generals and those appointed governors or overlords would have been saying: Hey, guys, you’ve got a 15^th Amendment here.  You’ve got to let them vote.  You can’t put taxes on the polls and all these hurdles up here.  You can’t put impediments in their way.  If they want to register and vote, you gotta let them vote.  This would then have made it so that the legal segregation that occurred after that probably never would have occurred.  That’s what you’re saying, right?  I just want to make sure I’ve got this right.

Gutzman:  Certainly in a state like South Carolina where when the reconstruction period ended blacks remained 60 percent of the population, you can’t imagine segregation having been imposed by the state government on 60 percent of the people.  What happened was, as I said before, force and fraud, mainly force in South Carolina, through the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations, were used to bring the Democratic Party back into control of South Carolina.  For a century, the Democratic Party across the South even had state seals that said things like “white power” and “white man’s party” and that kind of thing.  Everybody knew that what the Democratic Party stood for was not letting black people vote.

Once Congress in 1965 decided: We’ve had enough of that.  We’re going to make sure that black people get to vote.  Black people began voting and segregation came abruptly to an end.  In fact, some politicians like Strom Thurmond in South Carolina, who had been the face of segregationism, immediately changed his position.  Thurmond stopped acting like a segregationist just immediately when this happened.

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That’s the ground on which Tom and I insist that the segregation system should never have occurred.  If the 15^th Amendment had been enforced for the century that it was ignored or flouted, then there wouldn’t have been this problem.  For this New York Times article to say Tom Woods and his co-author have a book that criticizes Brown v. Board of Education, of course, it’s supposed to imply that he thinks segregation was a good thing, the Mises Institute thinks segregation was a good thing, and that must mean that Senator Paul thinks segregation was a good thing.

Mike:  Guilt by association.

Gutzman:  And all of it is a lie.  As we have repeatedly said — I’ve explained myself twice.  It’s a lie.  It’s a lie by omission.  I’m sure the people at the New York Times knew it.  This is what they’re infamous for, for just running articles that lie about people.  I posted on Facebook a couple days ago: Have I mentioned lately how happy I’m going to be when the New York Times inevitably goes bankrupt?  I’m really looking forward to that.

End Mike Church Show Transcript