Regular blog readers know I've had issues with historian/podcaster Tom Woods. He's widely known and admired in the libertarian circles, unlike me. I was initially made aware of Woods through 2 or 3 books he wrote that I had purchased on my own. As a fellow Catholic (Woods converted), I was interested in what he had to say about Catholicism and Western Civilization and also the free market. He also wrote an intriguing politically incorrect guide to American history. At some point I became aware Woods had a Facebook group and joined it. I was aware of when Woods started his signature podcast (during the life of this blog) and subscribed. I've embedded dozens, if not hundreds, of his Youtube podcast episodes. Brian McClanahan, who is on the faculty of Wood's Liberty Classroom and is an occasional guest on Woods' podcast, is another contrarian scholar I've included in my daily posts.
I've had 2 personal disagreements with Woods that readers may be familiar with, the first somewhat public. That one requires a context of Woods' personal connection with Ron Paul. One of the obvious connections is his working connection with Ron Paul's homeschool curricula. Tom Woods has a tendency to overshare on his podcasts and I remember him griping for sympathy about all his work into developing lessons impacting his podcasting, I remember in the past I saw more about Woods in connection with Paul's 2008 and/or 2012 campaigns, particularly the latter; I saw a Wikipedia reference to Woods with a 2012 Ron Paul campaign fundraiser. He has multiple podcast episodes interviewing Ron Paul and/or discussing the Presidential campaigns, but I haven't seen a succinct summary of Woods' involvement.
My first kerfuffle with Woods was in his (public) Facebook group at the time. Now just for context, I have publicly posted my differences on Romney's policies and failed political strategy. He has not been very principled. For example, he decided to challenge liberal lion Sen. Ted Kennedy and decided that he couldn't get elected in progressive Massachusetts as pro-life. Kennedy, of course, was pro-abort. I don't think Romney expected to win over pro-aborts but I think he wanted to preemptively take the issue off the table. It didn't work in the sense Kennedy counterattacked Romney as a politically opportunistic phony, and I think the reputation stuck in subsequent campaigns by his political opponents, especially when he decided his GOP electoral ambitions required a reversal to a pro-life position. Romney's challenge to McCain ultimately failed, and I suspect he attributed his loss to McCain's more hawkish neo-con views in the Gulf Region. When it came to 2012, I think Romney was determined to run to the right of Obama on foreign policy, even as I thought a smarter political strategy was to run against Bush/Obama policy in the Gulf Region. I actually vacillated between Romney and Ron Paul during the 2012 campaign. I was still evolving to a more libertarian perspective and generally preferred Paul on policy; where I preferred Romney involved his proven administrative and political skills (governor in a deep blue state with an opposition legislature). Ron Paul had no obvious managerial experience and while he was philosophically consistent, he really didn't win over a growing like-minded faction during his career on Capitol Hill. I was more of a realist then vs. now, while I'm more likely to cast a protest vote. I felt Romney was teachable on policy, while I didn't want an inexperienced administrator in the White House.
Ron Paul's minions, including Tom Woods, were near cultish in their support, and were furious about the primary campaign; one such conflict involved Romney's narrow caucus victory in Maine. So, that set up the kerfuffle I had on the Tom Woods Facebook group. One day it was Ron Paul's birthday. Now I almost never celebrate birthdays outside my own family, certainly not politicians. I didn't mind so much Woods celebrating the birthday so much as the unnecessary cheap shot at Romney: words the effect, "I thank God every day that you are not some phoney like Mitt Romney." Now I can be critical or judgmental on occasion, but I don't go out of my way to personally insult others. I'm more likely to mock them with sarcasm. When I gently pushed back on the Romney shot, he personally responded by turning the tables on me, arguing I was some Romney groupie who had infiltrated his group, He encouraged his followers to sic me. I don't recall capturing the thread, but at the time I believe I suggested that he could lose me as a podcast subscriber if he didn't change his tone. This seemed to trigger one of the self-sacrificial rants. If you've ever listened to his podcasts, you've encountered this. For a long time, he was working on survey history courses for the Ron Paul homeschool curriculum. (I think he also separately or through an affiliation where he promises exclusive bonuses to the same material.) So, for a long time he was whining between delivering the course and the podcast, he had no free time. [Before going on, I should note according to some somewhat dated sources, Woods probably pulls a six-figure salary from his podcast and has a 7-figure net worth.] So, in this thread, he's whining about how he does his podcast as his gift to humanity and I'm this unappreciative, ungrateful jerk. I left his Facebook group, never to return, and stopped clipping the Youtube clips (generally, more of an audio player than video) in my daily miscellany posts. After an extended absence, I started resuming clipping the podcast and I remained on his mailing list which he built using free pdf documents on various topics. Occasionally I would give a brief reply to some of his regular emails. Usually nonjudgmental specific feedback in context, and he replied to some; if he remembered me from the Romney kerfuffle, he didn't mention it.
So, why did we have a second kerfuffle? Well, it had to do with his coverage of the COVID-19 situation. I'm not going to reproduce his 12/15/21 email (not personal but to his marketing list promoting his podcast, speaking appearances, books, etc.) here (I don't have his permission, and I don't know if he archives them for public access), but I finally unloaded on him (beware Ron Paul sycophants):
I've held my tongue since your Facebook days when your Ron Paul worship somehow led you to feel the need to bash Romney in wishing Paul a happy birthday. You are still pulling that inner asshole behavior, the last insufferable speech you gave with multiple shots at Romney and Pawlenty. Never mind your guy has nothing to show from a career in DC and has ZERO public executive experience--unlike the 2 people you trash. Your guy has never been able to overcome signing off on racist newsletters, never mind his crackpot 9/11 bullshit alone is enough for Dems to finish him off.
Never mind you have the audacity to diss vaccines because you weren't smart enough to take one and you caught the disease. More than two-thirds of American adults are vaccinated and nearly all of those hospitalized and dying are from the remaining third. I don't care how many idiot scientists you find from elite university, almost all of what you say on vaccines is bullshit. There is almost zero evidence of downstream spread of COVID from vaccinated individuals. Most of this is based on a few studies finding comparable viral loads from vaccine breakthroughs, not longitudinal, empirical data. I can cite studies showing lab tests of virus from breakthrough case and others showing antibodies in mucous linings from vaccinated people--guess what that means? Equal loads aren't so equal. If you weren't so scientifically illiterate, you would understand the cocooning strategy. As if I need to also address your insane point about lower severe infections among kids--as if viruses spread any differently including to vulnerable kids or adults. Do you know a goddamn thing about MIS-C?
You need to stop this insane obsession; some of us are getting fed up. Not all libertarians are ignorant like you, Rand Paul, and Tom Massie. Yeah Massie with 2 MIT degrees who thinks, despite scientific evidence, his "natural immunity" improves on vaccines. Don't tell him natural immunity expires faster than vaccines.
His terse response: "I don't interact with midwits."
Midwit: "Described by Vox Day as "individuals of above average intelligence, yet not too far from average...Midwits are truly cursed to be neither blissfully dumb nor reap the benefit of being of superior intelligence or a genius. They can grasp general concepts, but are less capable of digging deeper, understanding nuance, or adapting quickly to complex problems, leading to an entire middle class of perpetually unhappy, often vaguely angry people."
This "midwit" was a high school valedictorian and had a 3.97 GPA in college (before grade inflation; there were only 2 or so of us with comparable summa cum laude credentials, the other pre-med), perfect 4.0 in his major fields of math and philosophy, and holds 3 advanced degrees, including a PhD. He won a competitive university-wide fellowship at UH, a dissertation award, innumerable academic awards, scholarships, and honorary societies and was selected to 2 doctoral consortia. He has published a dozen academic papers, 3 book chapters, and presented papers at national conferences. He has reviewed research and conference papers and textbooks. He has served on a PhD (program) faculty. Since leaving academia, he has worked for employers like IBM, Oracle, CSC (national Oracle practice), and Coopers & Lybrand.
I probably would tweak some things from the original rant above; when I wrote, more fully vaccinated people had been recently vaccinated or boosted and omicron and its variants were highly contagious. (Not all vaccines are sterilizing, but these provide boosters for your body's natural defenses to fight off the infection. Duration of transmission to others and the nature of transmission to others should be qualitatively different.) My youngest brother was not bivalently boosted, caught it on a vacation trip and transmitted it to his wife. But I know 2 related families where it didn't spread to everyone. I would say today vaccination lowers risk of both infection and retransmission, although I haven't seen numbers on the latter.
Note: I am not an epidemiologist, and do your due diligence. but Tom Woods was cherry-picking people echoing his anti-vaxxer views, using his platform to spread misinformation against public health. I have been critical of the CDC; I know they wanted to stave off a public run on N95 quality masks, and cloth masks are useful against respiratory splatter from symptomatic infected--but little against bioaerosols. I bought a box of affordable N95 masks from Amazon long before CDC finally acknowledged their superior protection.
I wrote a brief follow-up to Woods after discovering he had removed me from his mail list (email notification?) and once again suspended his feed from my blog, where it remains today with no plans to resume. I had been increasingly unhappy with Woods' anti-vaxxer perspective and including it in my blog. He has this elitist perspective: "I have these EXPERTS from the likes of Harvard and Stanford on my show; who the hell are you?". [Yeah, he graduated from Harvard and has a PhD in history from Columbia; why isn't he a professor at some elite college? I think he has had some teaching gigs post-PhD, like McClanahan; I think I heard about it from a blurb on a book review. I'm not going to be judgmental here because I've been in bad academic job markets; I loved being a professor but haven't had an offer since the mid-90's.] Unlike Woods, I'm an informed layman who has read hundreds of articles and dozens of related research studies and subscribe to some medical emails; I don't go around promoting a handful of charts from fifth grade science class.
I'll return to the Woods situation shortly. (I haven't blocked him from my Twitter feed although I don't follow him.) But in transitioning note that Scott Horton is one of Woods' favorite guests, particularly known for his opposition to neo-con/interventionist policies. I have a more nuanced perspective on Horton, but there is little doubt that Horton made short work of arch-nemesis neo-con Bill Kristol several weeks back.
Before going into a more detailed discussion on the Scott Horton/Twitter kerfuffle, a summary: of sorts: Horton is a prominent anti-war libertarian. He edits antiwar.com and hosts a related radio show, he has his own podcast and directs the Libertarian Institute. He is highly articulate and, in my opinion, has a condescending attitude to match: he does not suffer fools gladly. On Jan. 10 he was permanently suspended by Twitter, leading to protests by many libertarians to Musk; I haven't seen a writeup on what happened from Twitter; I don't know if he appealed and the appeal reversed the decision, if Musk intervened, etc., but his suspension was short-lived, and he started tweeting out again 2 days later. He may have had or need to delete some unspecified tweets. Twitter doesn't always provide specifics; at least for temporary suspensions you are presented with a target tweet to delete. Horton thinks it involves the celebrity conservative psychologist Jordan Peterson who was championing an Iranian person or group that Horton considers nefarious. Horton was apparently agitated that some celebrity psychologist was straying from his field of expertise and claims that he said, not directly to Peterson, that he should go jump in the lake or words to that effect, and emphatically denies suggesting Peterson should kill himself. I have seen multiple references in Tweets to the term 'unalive' but don't know if that is just a false Internet rumor. I did find a particularly appalling exchange of purported bullying behavior by Horton from a few months back in a screen capture (below) which, if true, is harder for Horton to explain away.
I'm still not sure of the specifics leading to an initially announced Twitter ban of Scott Horton (see annotated clip below) on Jan. 10. At some point I learned of the controversy and tried to see if I could find the offending tweet, but Twitter was cloaking a number of his tweets in the time period. I had been suspended: pre-Musk) a number of times mostly over incidental use of politically incorrect terminology like a variation of the r-word (which McAdams notoriously used to describe Hannity getting him banned). So, I don't know what Twitter does to content during the suspension period. Usually, short of a ban, you'll get accused of harmful or threatening behavior, patently absurd in context. They'll lock your account, you may have an idea of which tweet offended them, because they'll stick your nose into the urine and make you delete the tweet before they START your suspension. They won't give context-specific messages like "you're in trouble for using the r-word. Your suspension can start at 12 hours, and you are warned repeat offenses can get you longer suspended or even banned. I can recall getting suspended twice for a week under my old account. I have been in Scott Horton's place where he wrote during the ban, "Well, I've been spending too much time on Twitter anyway..."
I remember reading in one of the threads he allegedly said someone should "un-alive" himself, a phrase I hadn't heard before. In one thread someone posted an image he suggests as to what might have been the target of the suspension; I cannot verify, not even the listed commenter below. It could be Twitter forced Horton to delete tweets; he does post, post-restoration, that some worm is going through his old tweets and he's having to delete some damn good tweets:
Here is Scott Horton's own account of the suspension:
In the meanwhile, Scott Horton got a lot of supporters from his noninterventionist cluster in the LP like the Mises Caucus, Tom Woods, Ron Paul. et al. like this post by Hannah Cox , arguing Scott Horton is too important a voice on foreign policy to silence on some technicality. if not some nefarious plot against noninterventionists. Tom Woods definitely thought the ban reflected an ideological bias using a pretext of Twitter infractions
That provides the context for a rare, brief encounter with a famous libertarian, Nicholas Sarwark, a past 3-term chair of the Libertarian Party National Committee. I know a lot of Mises people and Sarwark have issues with each other I haven't looked into. But apparently Peterson hasn't been the only target of Horton's wrath. A Ukrainian immigrant published the following alleged screenshot last September 14:
Wow. If valid, Scott Horton has some real issues. I would have suspended Horton myself if it was a legit screenshot. The reason why I happened across this tweet is because my conversation started with a quote tweet from Sarwark where he referenced shooting himself. Maybe Twitter was responding to this exchange vs. the reference to Jordon Peterson?
So, anyway, here's my quote-tweet of a Sarwark tweet:
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The last I heard, Woods was engaged and probably remarried by now. I question his choices, but I'm more concerned with his other behavior.
So welcome to the tribal struggles within the libertarian movement.
