Thomas Massie, Israel, and Libertarians' Ugly History with Jew Haters
America's strategic interest in maintaining an ally in a dangerous region, and a refresher on the real Ron Paul.
Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky is commonly named in conservative circles as one of the few truly good members of the House of Representatives, thanks mostly to his antipathy for establishment GOP leadership, his opposition to wasteful federal spending, and his voice on Covid-19. Unfortunately, the root of Massie’s anti-government starting point for all these stands is not conservatism but libertarianism, meaning he could only do so much good before alternating back to bad.
The bad manifested this week with a Twitter post suggesting that “Congress these days” is more interested in “Zionism” than in “American patriotism,” which...well, you can imagine how well that went over.
Massie’s slur is just a regurgitation of one of isolationist demagogues’ favorite fallacies, the idea that any focus on foreign policy must necessarily come at the expense of America’s domestic issues. We addressed that at length on October 24, so I won’t rehash it here beyond noting that there is no chance Massie doesn’t understand perfectly well that America's interest in supporting Israel and America's other interests are not mutually exclusive, and that his colleagues’ concern for one issue has absolutely nothing to do with why other colleagues (which consist of people who do and don’t overlap with all the different views he’s lumping together) neglect and exacerbate others. Irrespective of the foreign policy judgments at play here, this is first and foremost a simple matter of basic intellectual honesty, and the Congressman fails it.
Anyway, I thought I would instead take this incident as an occasion to fill in some background that is all too often missing from these arguments, starting with a quick reminder that U.S. support for Israel is not a matter of sacrificial charity (or more sinister motivations), but something with clear justification in America’s own strategic interests.
For starters, as should not exactly be news to anyone with any basic awareness of the last twenty years, the United States has a lot of enemies in the Middle East. The value of friendly relations with, and the continuing survival of, the lone democracy in the region with whom we share some baseline degree of Judeo-Christian values should not need a great deal of elaboration. The Israelis kill a lot of jihadists who are part of networks that also want to kill us. They obtain and share useful intelligence, as with the operation to kill Iranian terror general Qasem Soleimani. Through the Stuxnet computer virus of 2010, they set back Iran’s nuclear program two years.
And the price tag for all this? Roughly $3 billion a year. The federal government spent $6.3 trillion last year (while taking in $4.9 trillion in revenue for a $1.4 trillion deficit). Israel aid comes to less than half a percent of just America’s defense spending ($751 billion). We could cut it all tomorrow, and we’d never even notice it on the country’s overall fiscal situation.
Massie’s tweet—and particularly its use of the loaded term “Zionism” as a catchall—was met with various people questioning whether he was anti-Semitic. I have no idea how Massie personally feels about Jews, and in the absence of clear evidence otherwise it should be presumed that he isn’t. He does, however, seem to be playing to the darkest corners of the libertarian coalition—much like the godfather of modern isolationist libertarianism with whom Massie was approvingly photographed in October, Ron Paul.
The former gadfly presidential candidate hasn’t been a major player in years, allowing a more sanitized image of Paul as a kindly old man who just happens to really, really understand economics and government overreach to settle. But knowing the real Ron Paul is essential to understanding the relationship between libertarianism, isolationism, and anti-Semitism.
A lifetime ago as a writer for the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s long-since-scuttled website NewsRealBlog, battling Paul’s frothing minions (who in many ways were a precursor to MAGA) was one of my specialties. I compiled a lot of information about his and his movement’s crackpottery here and here (disclaimer: some links may be defunct but should be revivable through the Wayback Machine), but for now two stories in particular should suffice to convey the essentials.
First, a January 2008 report from Reason on an infamous series of newsletters bearing Paul’s name in the 80s and 90s that were chock-full of pandering to racists (and not in the “leftists call anything conservative racist” sense, but in the “cheering David Duke for ‘scaring the blazes out of the Establishment’” sense), which contributed to a 1993 income of $940,000 for Paul and company, and which Paul has given various conflicting answers regarding his knowledge and involvement in over the years:
But a source close to the Paul presidential campaign told reason that [Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Lew] Rockwell authored much of the content of the Political Report and Survival Report. "If Rockwell had any honor he'd come out and I say, 'I wrote this stuff,'" said the source, who asked not to be named because Paul remains friendly with Rockwell and is reluctant to assign responsibility for the letters. "He should have done it 10 years ago" [...]
The newsletters' obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic "paleolibertarian" movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new "paleo" coalition.
Second, a 2017 Daily Beast piece by journalist James Kirchick, a longtime Paul critic, on the ex-congressman’s then-new Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and its...interesting...personnel. A few highlights:
Next on the list of Paul Institute board members are the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Most prominent among them is Judge Andrew Napolitano, a legal analyst for Fox News who has said that “It’s hard for me to believe that [7 World Trade Center] came down by itself” and that the 9/11 attacks “couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.”
He is joined by Eric Margolis, who, despite an apparent lack of a Ph.D. or appointment at an institution of higher learning, is listed as a member of the organization’s “academic board.” Margolis says that “conclusive proof still lacks” connecting Osama bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks and has speculated that the events could have been “a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up” [...]
Also on Paul’s board are prominent former government officials who claim that American Jews constitute a “fifth column” aimed at subverting American foreign policy in the interests of Israel. Michael Scheuer, a former CIA intelligence officer, has used this precise phrase, alleging that a long list of individuals, organizations, and publications are “intent on involving 300 million Americans in other people’s religious wars.”
But to hear today’s knee-jerk critics of Israel and US-Israeli relations tell it, any suggestion of anti-Semitism is completely baseless, a malicious attack that actually validates their opposition to the “Israel lobby.”
As honest and fair people, we should stipulate that most libertarians or isolationists, Massie included, probably aren’t anti-Semites. At the same time, Massie and his fellow travelers shouldn’t get away with playing dumb about how their own coddling of bigoted people and elements planted the possibility in their critics’ heads.