• "Well written, well researched, and the thesis put forth is well argued.... Woods has opened up an area of historical analysis that should invite further study."
    -Journal of American History

  • "During these times that challenge our freedoms there is no one more qualified to make U.S. history relevant to the fight against big government than Thomas Woods."
    -Barry Goldwater Jr.
    Former Member of Congress

  • "I strongly recommend Woods's work."
    -The Honorable Ron Paul,
    U.S. House of Representatives

  • "Written with great clarity and fluency, making the complex philosophical and theological concepts approachable."
    -Journal of American Studies

  • "A must-read."
    -Barron's

  • "An excellent reading source for anyone interested in financial markets, and much more so for anyone interested in learning about capitalism without all the misinterpretations being thrown about in the financial media."
    -Asia Times

  • "Provocative, well-written, and deserves to be read."
    -Catholic Historical Review

  • "An engaging and important contribution to scholarship on the history of American Catholicism."
    -Journal of the Historical Society

  • "Woods and [co-author Kevin] Gutzman appeal to both left and right in this constitutionalist jeremiad…. The authors' exegeses of the Constitution and court decisions, heavy on original intent arguments, are lucid and telling."
    -Publishers Weekly

  • "A marvelous read. Every chapter taught me something new and unexpected."
    -Tom Bethell, senior editor,
    The American Spectator

  • "The hottest book today is Meltdown, by my friend Tom Woods."
    -Judge Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst,
    FOX News Channel

  • "Should be required reading."
    -Economic Affairs (London)

  • "Woods, one of the best classical liberal [libertarian] scholars of his generation, has once more placed us in his debt with this lucid and tightly argued book."
    -David Gordon, The Mises Review

  • "Tom Woods is one of my dearest allies in the struggle against wrong-headed and dangerous economic policy."
    -Peter Schiff

The Brainwashed Refrain: “Ron Paul Is Crazy”

What they really mean, of course, is that Ron Paul defies political categories and takes positions outside the continuum from Hillary Clinton to Mitt Romney, and people whose minds have been formed in the ideological prison camps we call public schools cannot abide unapproved opinions.  Tax me 35% or tax me 40%, but don’t raise the possibility that taxation itself may be a moral issue rather than just a matter of numbers.  Either bomb or starve that poor country, but don’t tell me there might be a third option. The Fed should loosen or the Fed should tighten, but don’t tell me our money supply doesn’t need to be supervised by a central planner.

Meanwhile, those who accuse Ron Paul of being “crazy” hold a whole slew of positions that I think qualify as crazy, but the word crazy isn’t employed to refer to them because those positions happen to be politically mainstream.

Read Glenn Greenwald on the bipartisan, Orwellian phenomenon of calling people “crazy” because they step outside the three-inch area the establishment has set out for us to occupy.

Unlearn the Propaganda!

  • http://twitter.com/BrooklynBrett Brett Ruiz

     Fantastic as always Tom. I tried to debate one of these zombies recently and he just couldn’t understand what I meant when I said “there really isn’t a fundamental difference between (R) and (D).”

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Tom-Hurst/663908906 Tom Hurst

    Well done Tom! It seems the media zombies assume that are choices can only be framed by establishment thinking. Thank God for Ron Paul.

  • NeilBJ

    I wrote a letter to my local paper (The Arizona Republic) in which I attempted to make the case for Ron Paul.  Much to my surprise it was printed.  The letter was also made available on the newspaper’s blog.

    It’s amazing how many “Ron Paul is crazy” comments I got, but you knew that already.  

  • http://www.facebook.com/brandonkharnish Brandon Harnish

    Oh, yes.

  • http://teconom.blogspot.com/ Tony Fernandez

     Very true, and much why this country is in shambles. The mainstream is a very bad policy at the current time, but one cannot question it for some reason. It’s an interesting psychological observation.

  • Ce Ment

    Glenn Greenwald’s article is not very good, either. How can Ron Paul persuade ANY regressives if he can’t Glenn Greenwald? (“Civil Rights Act” issue, which is pretty clear to me, but Glenn clearly has no idea how to take it).

  • http://www.youtube.com/user/RepublicConstitution?feature=mhum TruthRegimes

    Establishment Republicans are virtually identical to Establishment Democrats: both love warfare, both love torture, both love secret renditions, both love Guantanamo, both love Big Government, both love the Welfare/Warfare State, and on and on.

    The good Congressman from Texas, Dr. Ron Paul, is the only choice for 2012.  He needs Judge Andrew Napolitano for his VP.

  • http://www.mises.org Mike

    Yeah. Even Glenn Greenwald seems to foolishly call Ron Paul crazy. Are people really THIS dense?

  • Paulmollon

    Ron Paul, preaching nothing but peace and liberty for decades is “crazy”. Obama continues Bush’s wars, adds a few of his own and is awarded a “peace prize”. Somewhere George Orwell has a grim, knowing smile.  

  • http://twitter.com/JamesLJ James J

    Gay marriage should be legalized or criminalized, but don’t suggest the state should stay out of the marriage business.

  • Dave

    Really?  In Arizona?  I would never have guessed.  I get that a lot here in Oregon, but then this is a pretty liberal state.   Thankfully the North Coast isn’t as bad as the valley, but I digress…..

    Don’t be dissuaded my friend.  Remember the words of Sam Adams: “It does not take a majority to prevail…..but rather, an irate, tireless minority keen on setting brush fires of Freedom in the minds of men.”

    Semper Fidelis

  • http://twitter.com/gbozic1 George Bozic

    Thank you for the Laugh Out Loud (first pump) of Praise!   I have to borrow your flawless line!

  • kwb

    People are basically creatures of comfort and selectively lazy. Someone who runs five miles a day and eats the finest organic foods available can be as dumb as a fence post when it comes to her (or his) political awareness and sense of what is going on outside their daily chosen “media intake”. Those of us who choose to look under every rock and question status quo cannot simply complain any longer about the acute ignorance in the general public. We need to be our ignorant associates’ worst nightmare, nagging them like overbearing mothers to extract themselves from the vacuum they have accepted as “normal”. Ignorance is no longer bliss…which we are currently finding out. 

  • Davidus Romanus

    Has anyone else seen the coin figure of Ron Paul on the LRC political theatre page?  I have difficulty telling if it’s Dr Paul or Randolph Scott. 

  • http://profiles.google.com/richard.carpenter7 Richard Carpenter

    Many Christians hate Ron Paul because he is against aggressive wars and torture. Perhaps biblical scholars can find something in the New Testament to support Ron Paul’s position on aggressive war and torture.  I don’t know much about the bible, but did Jesus really say to kill them all and let God sort them out? 

  • TJC

    Why not? The state should be out of the marriage business. In the eyes of government it’s just a legal contract, and as such government has no business saying who can or who can’t enter into a legal contract with another.

  • Anonymous

    TJC, the original poster agrees with you.  He’s suggesting this as another of the excluded possibilities I list in the post.

  • TJC

    Ah, thanks for the clarification. I had a bad feeling that may have been what he meant after I had already hit the post button.

  • Rob

    Glenn Greenwald thinks that a lot of Ron Paul’s crazy ideas aren’t really so crazy, but then goes on to assert that others are. How does he separate the crazy from the merely unconventional? Perhaps, if he took the trouble to examine these issues more thoroughly, he might not find some of RP’s other ideas to be so crazy after all.

    But then we need to apply the same principle to ourselves. We go to the same web sites and hear the same things over and over and then forget to question. Right now Bob Murphy and Bob Wenzel are engaged in an argument over whether or not we should sell our gold supply. This is a healthy situation, but we need to recognize that it is also rather unusual. We need more of this, not less. If Ron Paul or Tom Woods says something that doesn’t seem to ring quite right, we shouldn’t conclude that we’ve had it wrong all this time. We might just be crazy enough to have it right.
     

  • Ryan G

    Thank you for delineating how ignorant political “commentators” have become. Your ruthless absent use of direct examples from any of Dr. Paul’s books is evidence of your unknowledgeable stance. Your blundering opinions debilitate healthy debate in this country.

  • Anonymous

    Whom are you addressing? 

  • karnak

    So having a dollar that’s worth nothing and loosing value daily isn’t crazy?  So an $800,000,000,000 defense budget isn’t crazy?  Nope I guess that’s fine.  Ron Paul….he’s the crazy one. 

  • Patricia Davis

    Tom, please make a new interview with a zombie video, a Ron Paul edition, addressing “he can’t win”, “isolationist”, “unelectable”, “fringe”, etc.

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