Tom Woods writes in a recent e-mail newsletter: “This will lose me subscribers.”
He continues:
But if I censored myself instead of saying something that might be unpopular, I wouldn’t be worth a whole lot.
So, here goes.
“I stand with Ukraine,” everyone said in unison in February 2022.
They hadn’t said, “I stand with Yemen,” where the greatest humanitarian disaster in the world had been taking place, because the people they allow to form their opinions for them hadn’t particularly wanted them to, and they themselves didn’t bother to find out about it.
But when all the powerful people demand they say something? Doggone it, whatever it is, they’ll say it!
Polling data shows a close correlation between people’s opinions on Ukraine and their opinions on Covid, even though the two issues have nothing to do with each other.
Except one thing.
In both cases, the official opinion molders took one side, and dissident voices were portrayed as evil.
And human beings are readily tempted into going along with whatever the influential and powerful say and do. (If you went to high school, you will recognize this phenomenon.)
In short, there are tens of millions of Americans who, whatever they’ve been told to say when confronted with dissident arguments, will say it.
The result is that we live in an unserious society, in which it is impossible to discuss anything important. Challenge any aspect of the CIA’s perspective on Russia and Ukraine and you’re a “Putin lover” or you’re repeating “Russian talking points” – or, worse still, the dreaded “Russian disinformation.”
On the Tom Woods Show I spoke in 2022 to Pierre Kory, a physician who was aghast at the official Covid response – which, as you know, was almost defiantly unscientific and self-contradictory. He couldn’t believe the utter lack of curiosity among his colleagues.
Well, that episode in history did something to him. He realized: if the New York Times publishes scientific nonsense in a subject area where I’m an expert and can recognize it, in what other areas, where I am not an expert, has it been misleading me?
So he further concluded: I’m not changing my social media avatar to whatever the symbol of The Current Thing is ever again, unless I see overwhelming evidence that The Current Thing is legitimate. I refuse to be a lemming. I have too much self-respect for that.
I think a lot of us have reached that point.
It’s of course not metaphysically impossible that the American establishment – a group of profoundly unimpressive people – could get something right. It’s just highly, highly unlikely. And I’m likewise not saying that no one could have an honorable disagreement with me on this issue.
What I am saying is, the treatment of the issue has been cartoonish, and Americans could stand to hear a bit more context.
Hence today I am releasing this free eBook: “Your Facebook Friends Are Wrong About Ukraine“
The purpose of this book is not to be contrarian for the sake of contrarianism – every once in a great while, in spite of themselves, the establishment manages to get something right, though usually for the wrong reasons.
Instead, its purpose is to remind people of a lesson that Americans in particular need to learn: history did not begin five minutes ago.
Now if your attitude is that the American government is awesome and the only reason anyone around the world might dislike it is that they’re jealous of our awesomeness, then the arguments in this book will not find fertile ground.
A lot of conservatives have been tricked into thinking this kind of vulgarity is the correct conservative position, although many of them are thankfully beginning to see through that.
Our ruling class, which is bipartisan – the uniparty, some call it – has been extremely cavalier in its words and actions under circumstances in which a wrong move could mean the end of the world.
I don’t think it’s a Russian talking point to call the end of the world a bad thing.