Several people have sent me email links today from various appendages of the hate machine Murray Rothbard used to call the Kochtopus, meaning CATO and other functionaries of billionaire Charles Koch. This is the center of the smear campaign against Ron Paul and almost everyone associated with him. Several of these former Koch Foundation-funded youngsters have been repeating the mantra, emanating from a certain CATO vice president, that those of us associated with this Web site and the Mises Institute “want to bring back the Confederacy.”

By saying we want to “bring back the Confederacy” they are suggesting that we want to “bring back slavery.” Are people really so stupid that they can read my books and articles, and those of others like Tom Woods, and believe this? The Kochtopus apparently believes that you are indeed that stupid.

If criticizing Lincoln, as classical liberals from Lord Acton to Felix Morley and Murray Rothbard and others have done necessarily makes one a slavery defender, then logic would suggest that anyone who criticizes say, FDR, would necessarily be an advocate of “bringing back Nazi Germany and Fascist Japan.” In the “logic” of the Kochtopus, Acton, Morley and Rothbard must have been defenders of slavery. Nothing could be more preposterous and illogical.

Then there’s the equally nutty mantra that an organization founded by a Jew, named after a Jew, whose current chairman of the board is Jewish, whose faculty includes several prominent Jewish intellectuals, and whose faculty organized “Jews for Ron Paul,” is somehow filled with Holocaust deniers! (Is it not an abomination that all these (mostly) non-Jews are calling my Jewish friends the worst thing they could possibly be called? What kind of scum does this to people he has never met?).

Have you ever heard of a weirder gang of conspiracy theorists?

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