It’s ultimately far more plausible for a Jonah Goldberg- or Ramesh Ponnuru-type to claim that they are devotees of MLK’s legacy than a Rothbardian, in the sense that King was a socialist egalitarian, at war with natural hierarchies—and who wanted to use the state to equalize society. In their very persons, people like Ponnuru and Goldberg are expressions of what MLK’s legacy has come to mean—they are Melting Pot Americans enthralled with expanding democracy and consumer capitalism around the globe, utterly discontinuous figures with a traditional American Right exemplified by Madison Grant and Henry and Brooks Adams.
Moreover, the “libertarianism” offered forth by DiLorenzo is, in the end, a photographic negative of American Left-liberalism: one side wants to achieve social equality via Civil Rights legislation; the other, through free-market capitalism; both are dedicated to “The Dream.” (At the end of the day, this is probably all that libertarianism can ever be.)
It’s also worth pointing out that the mainstream media haven’t taken Jamie Kirchick’s lead and attacked Paul as a “Angry White Man,” the progeny of the Paranoid Persuasion, etc. They have, more of less, accepted Paul’s explanation that he didn’t write the newsletters, and have instead stuck to badgering Paul about how he could ever have allowed such offensive material to be published under his name.
The reason why this controversy is worth discussing is that it reveals the degree to which the media and intellectual Establishment will not tolerate any serious discussion of race as a biological reality. DiLorenzo simply re-affirms the taboo.
The logic of his recent pieces can be boiled down to something like this:
William F. Buckley is a “neocon,” because Thomas di Lorenzo says so...and William F. Buckley once said kinda nice things about South African apartheid and Jim Crow…therefore neocons are racists and hate Martin Luther King Jr….and Jamie Kirchick, the Left-liberal homosexual activists, agrees with the neocons on foreign policy...so, you know, he’s a racists, too...unlike Ron Paul who’s wonderful...
DiLorenzo might want to read up on what his mentors and employers once wrote about Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. in former lives. He would discover to his horror that there were some racist neocons writing for the Rothbard-Rockwell Report!
