Lew Rockwell

Llewellyn Harrison Rockwell Jr. (born July 1, 1944) is an American author, editor, and political consultant. A libertarian and a self-professed anarcho-capitalist,[1] he founded (and is chairman of) the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a non-profit dedicated to promoting the Austrian School of economics. His website, LewRockwell.com, which began in 1999, features articles and blog entries by right-wing libertarian columnists and writers.

Lew Rockwell
Rockwell in 2007
Born
Llewellyn Harrison Rockwell Jr.

(1944-07-01) July 1, 1944
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
OccupationPolitical commentator, editor, blogger, podcaster, and former Congressional staffer
Spouse(s)Mardelle Rockwell
WebsiteLewRockwell.com
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Life and career

Rockwell was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1944.

After college, Rockwell worked at Arlington House publishers and became acquainted with the works of Ludwig von Mises.[2]

In the mid-1970s, Rockwell worked at Hillsdale College in fundraising and public relations.[2]

Rockwell met Murray Rothbard in 1975 and credits Rothbard with convincing him to abandon minarchism and reject the state completely.[2]

Work for Ron Paul
Further information: Ron Paul

Rockwell was Ron Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982[3][4] and was a consultant to Paul's 1988 Libertarian Party campaign for President of the United States.[5] He was vice-chair of the exploratory committee for Paul's run for the 1992 Republican Party nomination for president.[6]

Mises Institute
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Further information: Mises Institute

In 1982, Rockwell founded the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama and is currently its Chairman of the Board.[7]

The Mises Institute published Rockwell's Speaking of Liberty, an anthology of editorials which were originally published on his website, along with transcripts from some of his speaking engagements.

Burton Blumert, Rockwell, economist and philosopher David Gordon, and Murray Rothbard.

Paleolibertarianism
Further information: Paleolibertarianism

In 1985, Rockwell was named a contributing editor to Conservative Digest.[8] During the 1990s Rothbard, Rockwell and others described their views as paleolibertarian to emphasize their commitment to cultural conservatism, even as they continued to hold anti-statist beliefs.[9] In a 2007 interview, Rockwell revealed he no longer considered himself a "paleolibertarian" and was "happy with the term libertarian." He explained "the term paleolibertarian became confused because of its association with paleoconservative, so it came to mean some sort of socially conservative libertarian, which wasn't the point at all...."[10]

LewRockwell.com

Rockwell's website, LewRockwell.com, formed in 1999, features articles and blog entries by multiple columnists and writers. Its motto is "anti-war, anti-state, pro-market".[11] There also is a weekly podcast called the Lew Rockwell Show.[12] As of March 2017 LRC was in the top 10,000 websites in the United States.[13] LewRockwell.com publishes a variety of articles opposing war and imperialism, questioning United States participation in World War II, opposing "economic fascism" and supporting Austrian economics and secessionism.[14]

Brian Doherty of Reason wrote that the site's "Mises Institute-associated writers" tend to emphasize the domestic and international fallout from government action.[15] Conservative writer Jonah Goldberg of National Review wrote that the site regularly hosts invective against icons of American mainstream conservatism, including the National Review, The Weekly Standard, neoconservatives, and William F. Buckley.[16] A writer in The American Conservative described the site as paleolibertarian and "an indispensable source" of news on Ron Paul.[17] The site has been criticized for presenting articles which advocate AIDS denialism, the view that HIV does not cause AIDS,[18] and the vaccines DO cause autism.[19]

Ron Paul newsletters
Further information: Ron Paul newsletters

Reason magazine reported Rockwell was a founding officer and former Vice President at Ron Paul & Associates[20] which was one of the publishers of a variety of political and investment-oriented newsletters bearing Paul's name.[21][22]

In January 2008, during Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign, James Kirchick of The New Republic uncovered a collection of Ron Paul newsletters that contained "decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays."[22][23] For instance, one issue approved of the slogan "Sodomy = Death" and said homosexuals suffering from HIV/AIDS "enjoy the pity and attention that comes with being sick".[22]

Kirchick wrote that most of the articles contained no bylines.[22] Numerous sources alleged that Rockwell had ghostwritten the controversial newsletters;[24] Rockwell is listed as "contributing editor" on physical copies of some newsletters[25][26] and listed as sole Editor of the May 1988 "Ron Paul investment Newsletter".[27] Reason magazine reported that "a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists – including some still close to Paul" had identified Rockwell as the "chief ghostwriter" of the newsletters,[20] as did former Ron Paul Chief of Staff (1981–1985) John W. Robbins.[28]

Rockwell admitted to Kirchick that he was "involved in the promotion" of the newsletters and wrote the subscription letters but denied ghostwriting the articles. He said there were "seven or eight freelancers involved at various stages" of the newsletter's history and indicated another individual who had "left in unfortunate circumstances", but whom he did not identify, was in charge of editing and publishing the newsletters.[29] Ron Paul himself repudiated the newsletters' content and said he was not involved in the daily operations of the newsletters or saw much of their content until years later.[24] In 2011 Paul's spokesperson Jesse Benton said that Paul had "taken moral responsibility because they appeared under his name and slipped through under his watch".[30]

Other activities and views
Lew Rockwell speaking at an event hosted by the Mises Institute.

Rockwell was closely associated with anarcho-capitalist theorist Murray Rothbard until Rothbard's death in 1995. Rockwell's paleolibertarian ideology, like Rothbard's in his later years, combines a right-libertarian theory of capitalist anarchism based on natural rights with the cultural values and concerns of paleoconservatism, and he identifies strongly with the modern Rothbardian tradition of Austrian economics. In politics, he advocates federalist or Anti-Federalist policies as means to achieve increasing degrees of freedom from central government and secession for the same political decentralist reasons. Rockwell has called environmentalism "an ideology as pitiless and Messianic as Marxism."[31]

Rockwell also serves as Vice President of the Center for Libertarian Studies in Burlingame, California.

Books

Author
  • Speaking of Liberty (2003; online e-book) ISBN 0-945466-38-2
  • The Left, The Right, and The State (2008; online e-book) ISBN 978-1-933550-20-6
  • Against the State: An Anarcho-Capitalist Manifesto (2014) ISBN 0990463109
  • Fascism vs. Capitalism (2013) ISBN 1494399806
  • Against The Left: A Rothbardian Libertarianism (2019) ISBN 978-0-9904631-5-3

Editor
  • Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard (with Walter Block) (1986; online e-book) ISBN 99911-786-2-7
  • The Free Market Reader (1988; online e-book)ISBN 0-945466-02-1
  • The Economics of Liberty (1990; online e-book) ISBN 0-945466-08-0
  • The Gold Standard: Perspectives in the Austrian School (1992; online e-book), ISBN 0-945466-11-0
  • Murray N. Rothbard: In Memoriam (1995; online e-book) ISBN 0-945466-19-6
  • The Irrepressible Rothbard (2000; online e-book – Rockwell's introduction) ISBN 1-883959-02-0

Notes
  1. "About". LewRockwell.com.
  2. Doherty, Brian. "Libertarianism and the Old Right", Mises.org. 1999. Orig. published by SpintechMag.org. May 12, 1999.
  3. Berlau, John. Now playing right field – Rep. Ron Paul – Interview Archived May 27, 2005, at the Wayback Machine Insight on the News. February 10, 1997.
  4. Hayes, Christopher, The Nation, Ron Paul's Roots, December 6, 2007, retrieved January 14, 2008
  5. "Campaign staffs announced", LPNEWS, May/June 1987, 10
  6. Burton Blumert, "Ron Paul for President Exploratory Committee" fundraising letter, October 1, 1991.
  7. About the Mises Institute page at Ludwig von Mises Institute website.
  8. Berlet, Chip. The Write Stuff: U. S. Serial Print Culture from Conservatives out to Neonazis, Library Trends – Volume 56, Number 3, Winter 2008, pp. 570–600.
  9. Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. "The Case for Paleo-libertarianism" in Liberty magazine, January 1990, 34–38.
  10. Kenny Johnsson, Do You Consider Yourself a Libertarian?, interview with Lew Rockwell, May 25, 2007.
  11. About LewRockwell.com; Columnists listing; The LRC Blog at LewRockwell.com website.
  12. Lew Rockwell Show.
  13. Alexa analyctics for LewRockwell.com, accessed May 5, 2013.
  14. For example: Rogers, Mike. "Dying For the Emperor? No Way." LewRockwell.com. October 12, 2005; Gonella, Jason. "The Decline and Fall of the United States Empire." LewRockwell.com. December 9, 2004; DiLorenzo, Thomas J. "Economic Fascism" LewRockwell.com. November 23, 2004.
  15. Doherty, Brian (February 16, 2009). "Libertarianism in an Age of Economic Crisis: Why being truculent, oppositional, and hard to pigeonhole are not signs of ideological death". Reason.
  16. Goldberg, Jonah (March 7, 2001). "Farewell, Lew Rockwell. The final word". National Review. Archived from the original on September 28, 2013. The site also features regular screeds about how Abraham Lincoln was a murderous war criminal, how the American military is a hotbed of criminal imperialism and murderous warmongering, and why Southern secession not only was honorable and noble but how it still is a viable option. (In this article, Goldberg was responding to criticisms of another article he had written about LRC.)
  17. Antle III, W. James (January 14, 2008). "The Paleocon Dilemma… The Ron Paul campaign illustrates the choices facing the antiwar Right". The American Conservative. [A] decade ago...Rockwell hoped to mobilize grassroots conservatives on behalf of anti-statism, during the Bush era he has detected a whiff of 'red-state fascism' among the Republican base. Other [LRC] writers prefer terms like 'neoconofascist'.
  18. Kalichman, Seth; Nattrass, Nicoli (2008). Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy. New York, London: Springer. pp. 49–53, 142, 182, 191. ISBN 978-0-387-79475-4. OCLC 390487079.
  19. Gorski, David (June 22, 2009). "Cranks, quacks, and peer-review." Science-based medicine. Author is Assistant Professor of Medicine (Surgery) at Wayne State University, holding an M.D. and Ph.D. in Cellular Biology from Case Western University)
  20. "Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?". Reason.com. January 16, 2008. Retrieved April 30, 2013.
  21. The newsletters had various names: Dr. Ron Paul's Freedom Report (OCLC 38365640, 15124395), The Ron Paul Survival Report (OCLC 27301727), the Ron Paul Investment Letter (OCLC 27301651), and the Ron Paul Political Report (OCLC 31695178).
  22. Kirchick, James (January 8, 2008). "Angry White Man: The Bigoted Past of Ron Paul". The New Republic. Retrieved February 17, 2012.
  23. "TNR Exclusive: A Collection of Ron Paul's Most Incendiary Newsletters". The New Republic. December 23, 2011. Retrieved January 13, 2012.
  24. Jim Rutenberg and Serge F. Kovaleski, Paul Disowns Extremists’ Views but Doesn’t Disavow the Support, New York Times, December 25, 2011.
  25. Hicks, Josh (December 27, 2011). "Ron Paul and the racist newsletters (Fact Checker biography)". The Washington Post. Retrieved April 30, 2013.
  26. "Masthead of a 1987 Ron Paul Investment Letter" (PDF). Archived from the original on January 21, 2013. Retrieved January 21, 2013.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
  27. "May 1988 "Ron Paul investment Newsletter"" (PDF). Archived from the original on January 21, 2013. Retrieved January 21, 2013.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
  28. Thomas, Will (January 18, 2008). "Likely Author of Shocking Ron Paul Letters Exposed". Huffingtonpost.com. Retrieved April 30, 2013.
  29. Kirchick, James. "Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters?". New Republic. Retrieved April 30, 2013.
  30. Jackie Kucinich, Paul's story changes on racial comments, USA TODAY, December 21, 2011.
  31. Rockwell, L. H., Jr. (1990). "An anti-environmentalist manifesto." From The Right, Quarterly II, 1(6), 1. (newsletter of Patrick J. Buchanan), p. 1; Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. Rockwell's Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto, May 1, 2000 version published by Lewrockwell.com

Further reading
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