I have to admit that when Woods posted his delayed "no propaganda" 9/11 show, I winced and thought to myself, "Don't tell me this is yet another Scott Horton interview." Not that I dislike Horton, whose anti-war stance I generally agree with, but Woods' "no propaganda" tag is an oxymoron.
Of course, I know about Tom Woods' hero worship of Ron Paul. I've always had a bit of a contrarian/iconoclastic quirk to my personality. I generally don't like cheap shots. Now on Mitt Romney, I differ from him on policy and am well aware he flipped on issues like abortion in an attempt to get elected in deep blue Massachusetts. I thought he made some strategic errors in 2012, a prominent one being he had an opportunity to turn the tables on Obama by attacking the Bush/Obama involvement in the Gulf region wars, but he tried to move to the right of Obama on the wars if that was possible. Romney was unquestionably the brightest nominee nominated by either party over the last few decades. He had earned both an MBA and JD from Harvard. His professional success with Bain Capital was phenomenal It's like the old basketball saying, "You can't teach height", something I (average height) learned in failing the final cut on my eighth grade basketball squad despite shooting better than most of the guys on the squad. I'll take a bright guy with good morals like Romney any day of the week to lead my squad. He's coachable; he learns from his mistakes.
There are also things I like about Ron Paul: his principles and consistency over the years. But he wasn't that influential in Congress, beyond criticizing and wanting to audit the Fed (once). He was quick to confront his own caucus colleagues. Now I don't know the specific of Woods' involvement with the Presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, but I've seen this reference to him ghostwriting a Ron Paul manifesto in the former and some Wikipedia reference to him in a money bomb (fundraiser) in 2012. Most notoriously he is a contributor/business partner in Ron Paul's home school curriculum, and he's frequently interviewed Ron Paul and associates (including Lew Rockwell) over the tenure of his long-running podcast.
I had encountered Tom Woods originally from some of his books on Catholicism, western civilization and the free market and his top-selling politically incorrect US history. At some point I had become aware of his podcast and his Facebook group. To put it bluntly, Woods gets a little too full of himself and is almost Trump-like in self-promotion. I usually have a bit of tolerance in dealing with other people's nonsense, but one day in his Facebook group, he wrote an open Happy Birthday greeting to Ron Paul. This is a bit of a paraphrase from memory: "I thank God every day you're not a phony like Mitt Romney." Now I'm sure that he was especially bitter in the aftermath of Paul's loss to Romney in the 2012 GOP primary, but I didn't like him bashing Romney's integrity. I called Woods out directly on this, but if anything, he doubled down on his nonsense. In our thread, he managed to piss me off enough (he was accusing me of being some Romney cultist infiltrator to his group) that at one point I challenged him to a public debate, which he quickly laughed off. (Dude, you really don't want to debate me. I used to juggle literally hundreds of references in writing my academic articles and book chapters. I'm used to the give and take in academic disputes.) He encouraged his groupies to go after this dastardly Romney interloper. I shot back I would leave his group and unsubscribe from his podcast. He goes on to describe his free podcast as his selfless gift to humanity and ungrateful people like me didn't deserve it. Yup. He obviously read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.
At some point, maybe 2-3 years later, I decided to look at some of his more current content and probably include 2 or 3 of his podcasts episodes a week (out of maybe 20 clips) in my daily blog posts. I don't necessarily agree with much of anything he says; on the COVID-19 crisis, he doesn't think like a scientist who does research and is absurdly dismissive of the risk of COVID to kids (I've mentioned in tweets, my oldest nephew and his wife caught it from two of their daughters after a school trip). Even after he caught COVID pneumonia, he swears he'll never let them jab him with a COVID-19 vaccine (never mind compelling evidence of superior immunity with it).
Now Lew Rockwell has an interesting potpourri website. I'm not sure exactly when I stumbled across it. It is a destination for one of my favorite free market economists, the recent retired Tom DiLorenzo. I get a daily digest of content by links from the website, a potpourri of things ranging from non-interventionism, natural health/science skepticism, conspiracy theories on voter fraud in the California recall election, etc. Currently, a lot on 9/11 and its "causes" and subsequent policy and COVID vaccines/mandates.
As for the conspiracy theory bit, just a taste; one article on the site was entitled "More Americans Are Questioning the Official 9/11 Story." Another obvious example: the kerfuffle about the origins of COVID-19. But the website even has twists over the infamous Wuhan lab allegation, e.g., "COVID-19: Further Evidence That the Virus Originated in the US". Oh, don't think I've forgotten the infamous Deep State: '"General Milley & The Deep State: The Real Insurrectionists".
So what led to the current rant? Consider my following tweet from Sept.12:
Oh, I'm a libertarian, but I've had my fill of crackpots like Ron Paul trying to rationalize crimes against humanity by Al Qaeda with blowback, etc. I agree with non-interventionist policies, but what happened on 9/11 is inexcusable, plain and simple.
— raguillemette (@raguillemette) September 12, 2021
"Tulsi Gabbard" https://t.co/596s0q0Kog
I was really directing my comments on the rationalizations of 9/11 meme based on alleged allegations of dead Iraqi children "caused" by economic sanctions, Kashmir (?), Chechnya, Somalia (not sure what the #Twidiot was alleging, at least in the former two; Al Qaeda focuses on them, but I think they are more related to Indian or Russian interests).
Now I seriously doubt Woods is following my blog or Twitter feed--and he may have recorded the episode before my tweet--but in his usual amiable style, he attacks the "low-IQ" others accusing conspiracy theorists of making excuses for the terrorists; he insists we need to understand the motives of mass murderers, as if understanding Hitler's state of mind was important in understanding his genocide of 6 million Jews and others. People don't need a reason to do deadly or violent things; I loathe people blaming the victim, like she provoked her rapist with her appearance. I remember my Aunt Grace picked me up for the weekend while I attended Officer Indoctrination School in Newport. As she drove into Fall River, there were young hoodlums dropping snow-packed rocks on passing cars from an overpass. They could have literally caused fatal auto accidents. They didn't give a damn who was driving. I don't want to hear a psychologist explain that the lead hoodlum's dad had been killed in an auto accident.
Let me be clear: I know Al Qaeda was upset about an American presence in Saudi Arabia and other grievances, enough so to declare war in a 1996 fatwa. There was a notorious attack on the USS Cole less than a year before 9/11, not to mention 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. UBL was the target of US missile attacks in August 1998 and reportedly Clinton almost pulled the trigger on a Dec. 98 attack but was discouraged by likely high collateral damage deaths of civilians.
This doesn't mean I knew from the get-go that Al Qaeda was responsible for the 9//11 crimes against humanity. There are rumors that United Flight 93 was targeting the Capitol or White House. And I certainly wasn't aware of kamikaze-style guerrilla tactics among religious fanatics.
There may be valid reasons behind Ron Paul's blowback theories, that collateral damage from US attacks sow the seeds for revenge on the US. I myself promote a non-interventionist foreign policy. And I certainly agree we need to look at how our adversaries persuade others to join them. But fear-mongering conspiracies by libertarians are no better than neo-con ones.
