Lying Politicians Gonna Lyingly Politick

House Speaker Mike Johnson speaking on Holocaust Remembrance Day:

We remember what happened then [in Nazi Germany], and today, we are witnessing American universities quickly become hostile places for Jewish students and faculty.

The very campuses which were once the envy of the international academy have succumbed to an antisemitic virus. Students who were known for producing academic papers, are now known for stabbing Jewish peers in the eyes with Palestinian flags.

Faculty who once produced cutting-edge research are linking arms with pro-Hamas protestors calling for a “global intifada.”

Administrators who were once lauded by their peers for leadership are barring Jewish faculty and choosing not to protect their Jewish students. Jewish students are physically threatened when they walk on campus, as their peers hold posters repeating the Nazi propaganda and the program: the final solution.

Now is a time for moral clarity – we must put an end to this madness.

The Purpose of the Antisemitism Awareness Act

The point of the House-passed (and misnamed) Antisemitism Awareness Act is not to empower the Education Department to sue and defund colleges under civil rights law. It is to make lawsuits unnecessary by chilling expression.

Zionism versus Judaism

From the start, political Zionists identified their program with Judaism the religion (despite their secularism, even atheism).

Also from the start, Jews -- including the most tradition-bound Jews -- vigorously disavowed that identification. They were shamed as self-hating traitors to "their people." As a consequence, many went silent and eventually acquiesced in the creation of Israel, the self-identified "Jewish state." Some even converted to Zionism.

So don't blame non-Jews for being unclear about the relationship between Zionism and Judaism.

Richman and Woods

Tom Woods and I discuss alleged antisemitism on U.S. college campuses:

TGIF: Another Bogus Antisemitism Scare

I've been watching and thinking about the nationwide campus antiwar demonstrations in support of the suffering Palestinians of Gaza, and the appalling reaction to and "coverage" of those events. Something important needs to be addressed.

I won't be concerned here with the violence committed by anyone, including the police, or by lesser misconduct, such as occupying and damaging buildings and other violations of university rules. It's also irrelevant whether the demonstrations stand any chance of ending Israel's onslaught or ending U.S. and university complicity in it, or whether most of the pro-peace demonstrators share a libertarian orientation. (Not likely.) All that is for another time.

I want to examine the overwhelming depiction of the demonstrations as nothing more than rank antisemitism -- the blind hatred of all Jewish people because and only because they are -- by birth, blood, belief, or practice -- Jewish.

Are the demonstrations antisemitic and hence pro-Hamas, as Spiked magazine and many other observers claim? Are the protestors tapping into what CNN's Dana Bash called "a deep undercurrent of antisemitism"? (The smears know no bounds.)

To sort this out, I thought I might employ one of my areas of expertise. I spend a lot of time watching excellent British television police dramas. I consider myself a student of British detective techniques. (The Brits take their police dramas very seriously.)

Among other things, I've learned that if a crime is alleged to have been committed by a particular person, but you have no damning CCTV or credible witnesses, you begin your investigation by asking if the "person of interest" has a plausible motive for the offense. If not, the chances are good that the person is innocent. People act, which means they have motives.

That's what I want to do here regarding the campus demonstrations, which are on their face objections to Israel's bloody (not just in the British figurative sense) seven-month campaign against the Gaza Palestinians. That campaign has taken at least 34,000 lives, injured and starved countless other people, and destroyed so many homes, hospitals, universities, and other facilities vital to life.

So here's the detective's challenge: why would non-Jewish pro-peace demonstrators on college campuses across the country knowingly, intentionally alienate their clearly Jewish pro-peace co-demonstrators with whom they encamp all day every day, sharing meals, having teach-ins together, and participating in ecumenical outdoor religious events, like Passover seders? Why would antisemites want to do it?

Does that sound remotely plausible? Are the Jewish students idiots who don't recognize antisemitism when they're supposedly drowning in a sea of it? Are the antisemites able to threaten Jewish non-demonstrators and pro-Israel demonstrators while keeping it a secret from Jewish demonstrators standing next to them? That seems unlikely.

What do they take us for -- those pro-Israel alarmists, who see an existential threat to all Jewish people every day around every corner? They assume (or pretend to believe) that anti-Zionism -- that is, opposition to a Jewish supremacist state -- is the same as antisemitism. But a moment's reflection reveals that this is bunk -- no matter how many times Israel's partisans say so. On a variety of grounds, many Jewish people fundamentally oppose Israel as a Jewish state. They have since the time of Theodor Herzl, the reputed founder of Zionism.

As an aside, this is not the first time that America has been subjected to a false antisemitism scare. The boy has cried wolf falsely many times before. Whenever Israel lays waste to Gaza, a sudden spike in antisemitism is reported by the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, and their congressional spokesmen. Isn't that interesting? Or is it? Could it be that the Israel lobby weaponizes antisemitism to shut up anyone who would object to Israel's crimes against humanity?  (For a close look at this weaponization, see Norman Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History.)

Israel's partisans tell us that America's campuses today are indistinguishable from 1930s Nazi Berlin. Jewish students, they say, are routinely harassed, threatened, and assaulted. They can't walk safely to class. The Hitler Youth rule. Really? I can't recall newsreels from the Nazi years showing Jews and non-Jews peacefully celebrating the sabbath and Passover with open-air religious services and meals. Have you ever seen films from Nazi Germany in which Jewish Germans enthusiastically sported tee-shirts emblazoned with sayings like: "Jewish Voice for Peace," "Not in Our Name," "Jews for a Ceasefire Now," and "Jews for Freedom in Palestine." Maybe the memory is suppressed, but I'm pretty sure I haven't.

My policy is to assume good faith in my opponents, but it's tough in this case. I am confident that the alarmists do not believe their own words when they say that terrorists and Nazis control the universities.

So why do they say it? Because it distracts attention from Israel's unending massacre. The apologists' agenda is to support Israel no matter what and to explain away the palpable atrocities. It's also an attempt to continue America's shameful complicity.

If Israel and its supporters were truly concerned about antisemitism (rather than needing it to prevent assimilation and abandonment of Israel), they'd do some soul-searching. Israel identifies itself as the Jewish state and claims to represent “the Jewish people” -- not only Jewish Israelis but Jews everywhere whether they want it or not. Thus Israel’s long mistreatment of the Palestinians encourages, at least tacitly, the relatively few antisemites, who are eager to point to anything they can use to describe “the Jewish people” as bad actors. "The Jewish state equals the Jewish people" — that’s what they’ve been told by the pro-Israel side. It’s not true, but they're happy to believe it.

In other words, Israel’s definition of itself and its abuse of the Palestinians ratify the antisemites’ crazy ideas about the international conspiratorial malevolence and collective guilt of "the Jewish people." Antisemites are encouraged to ignore the overrepresentation of Jewish Americans in the ranks of Israel's opponents.

Israel and its supporters then aggravate matters by strategically equating odious antisemitism with honorable anti-Zionism. That in turn gives cover to the antisemites, who can hide in plain sight among the anti-Zionists.

That amounts to Israel's protection of antisemitism!

You’d think that would be a bad thing. And it is. So why do Israel’s leaders and supporters do it? Because all that matters is the tribal sanctuary, Israel.

My Latest Interviews

Michael Liebowitz, the host of The Rational Egoist, interviewed me about my life in the libertarian movement. Enjoy!

Also have a look at my interview covering my libertarian experience and the Israel-Palestine conflict on the Bob Murphy Show.

Israel's Amazing Feat

Israel has accomplished quite a feat: its crimes against the people of Gaza are of such a large scale that they make Hamas's Oct. 7 crimes look small.

Here's an Idea

If you can't tell the difference between 2024 America and 1930s Germany, let's not have a conversation, okay? 

TGIF: Spooner versus bin Laden

In his 2002 letter to America justifying the savage 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (himself killed in 2011) wrote after listing his grievances against the U.S. government:

You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:

(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates....

It's a flawed and evil argument, to say the least, but it is clever. He threw the grandiose claims about democratic rule right back in the faces of hypocritical U.S. leaders. (Remember the panic last  year when young TikTok users read the letter for the first time and as a result news sites took it down?)

There's nothing easier than criticizing bin Laden's crackpot theory of popular responsibility for the U.S. government's crimes. What needs to be better understood, however, is that bin Ladenism was not unique to bin Laden. Look at what's happening in Gaza. Look what happened in Vietnam Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the many other places I'm forgetting just now. The American and Israeli war planners are bin Ladenists! Those officials routinely kill noncombatants, regarding them as active or tacit guilty parties for not rebelling against their rulers. It's cruel to infer consent and approval from acquiescence. Overthrowing a government is no piece of cake, especially when the government has most of the guns.

But there is a difference between bin Laden and the others. The U.S. and Israeli governments devastate populations that don't even get to go through the motions of voting. Those leaders criticize bin Laden, but they should see him when they look in the mirror.

Bin Laden, like the American and Israeli rulers, never read Lysander Spooner (1808-1887), the libertarian anarchist and political/legal scholar who wrote in his short-lived periodical No Treason (nos. 2 and 6) that voting is no indication that the voters support the government. (If that's true of voters who picked the winners, it's surely true of voters who picked the losers and nonvoters.) Voters can have many reasons for voting that don't entail acceptance of the government's many impositions. Since the government will tax and regiment them whether they vote or not, they might vote to try to lessen the tyranny. It's self-defense. It does not imply acceptance of a candidate's plan for foreign intervention.

As Spooner put in No Treason: The Constitution, no. 2, and repeated in No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority, no. 6 (1870):

In truth, in the case of individuals, their actual voting is not to be taken as proof of consent, even for the time being. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, without his consent having even been asked a man finds himself environed by a government that he cannot resist; a government that forces him to pay money, render service, and forego the exercise of many of his natural rights, under peril of weighty punishments. He sees, too, that other men practise this tyranny over him by the use of the ballot. He sees further, that, if he will but use the ballot himself, he has some chance of relieving himself from this tyranny of others, by subjecting them to his own. In short, he finds himself, without his consent, so situated that, if he use the ballot, he may become a master; if he does not use it, he must become a slave. And he has no other alternative than these two. In self-defence, he attempts the former. His case is analogous to that of a man who has been forced into battle, where he must either kill others, or be killed himself. Because, to save his own life in battle, a man attempts to take the lives of his opponents, it is not to be inferred that the battle is one of his own choosing. Neither in contests with the ballot—which is a mere substitute for a bullet—because, as his only chance of self-preservation, a man uses a ballot, is it to be inferred that the contest is one into which he voluntarily entered; that he voluntarily set up all his own natural rights, as a stake against those of others, to be lost or won by the mere power of numbers. On the contrary, it is to be considered that, in an exigency into which he had been forced by others, and in which no other means of self-defence offered, he, as a matter of necessity, used the only one that was left to him.

Doubtless the most miserable of men, under the most oppressive government in the world, if allowed the ballot, would use it, if they could see any chance of thereby meliorating their condition. But it would not, therefore, be a legitimate inference that the government itself, that crushes them, was one which they had voluntarily set up, or ever consented to....

So lay off the noncombatants, war-makers of all parties. That means no more massacres of essentially powerless people. Even the unintended consequences are foreseeably horrific. You claim you're smart, so find another way.

Class versus Identity Politics?

Parts of the "left" and "right" often lament that class politics has given way to identity politics. I don't get that. Class was the original modern political identity, and state privilege was part of the cause. Libertarians and classical liberals long warned that lethal and impoverishing social disintegration would result from an ideology -- socialism-- based on Marxist class conflict, which pits business people against working people (as if business people don't work).

We need to abolish politics, not reform it because it's toxic. That won't eliminate classes, or useful social categories. We'll always have people who own businesses, people who manage them, and people employed by them. But those are not and won't be pure categories. Owners work. Managers work. And workers own -- shares in corporations. (Check your retirement account.) Ultimately, in the free market everyone has the same boss: the consumers.

What we must strive for is, to coin a phrase, classes without borders. That is, mobility. To get it we need free markets, which would end: occupational licensure, home-bulding restrictions, business permits, the minimum wage, immigration control, and so much more.

TGIF: Thomas Szasz - Unappreciated Libertarian

R-L: Thomas Szasz, Raico Raico, Me

I maintain that mental illness is a metaphorical disease: that bodily illness stands in the same relation to mental illness as a defective television set stands to a bad television program.

There is no psychology; there is only biography and autobiography.

--Thomas Szasz (1920-2012)

Monday, April 15, was the 104th birthday of Thomas Szasz, the late great debunker of the system of social control perpetrated, in cahoots with the state, by institutional psychiatry, the mental-health establishment. That system has included among its methods lobotomy, electroshock, involuntary "hospitalization" (a "crime against humanity"), outpatient commitment, forced "medication," and other means. For Szasz, who excelled at exposing how scientific language is often used to subjugate, forced hospitalization, treatment, and medication were in fact imprisonment, torture, and poisoning.

Szasz's soft accented voice was powerful because he had credentials: he was a medical doctor, psychiatrist, practicing psychotherapist (for consenting clients only), and professor of psychiatry at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse. He knew from the inside what he was talking about.

Born in Budapest, Hungary, he came to America in 1938 at age 18. He adored America's founding principles, which proclaimed the natural right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. He was a libertarian, favoring private property and free enterprise. He loved autonomy and self-responsibility. As a result, he fought tirelessly against the government-medical complex and its persecution of people who, though perhaps disturbing to others and even themselves, had violated no one's rights.

I knew Tom Szasz. He wrote a column for The Freeman (Foundation for Economic Education) during my 15 years as the editor. Working with him was a great honor, not to mention a great pleasure. He was unique. He was wise.

Szasz (pronounced like the first syllable in Saskatchewan) wrote dozens of books and hundreds of articles and kept writing practically to the end of his long life. He made his first big splash with a radical book, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (1961), which people should read regardless of their interest in psychiatry. This book and the work that followed got him routinely denounced by the government-medical establishment. Ironically, "experts" said he was crazy and called for his firing from his university. Call it an early attempt at cancellation. Why? Because Szasz disturbed the peace. Later, people acknowledged his contributions, perhaps because he had exposed the worst psychiatric abuses, such as the warehousing called hospitalization. He even won awards. But his view of human behavior has not yet won the day.

By "myth" Szasz meant that mental illness is a metaphor that is unfortunately taken literally. He wrote, "Typhoid fever is a disease. Spring fever is not a disease; it is a figure of speech, a metaphoric disease. All mental diseases are metaphoric diseases...." He did not deny that people can behave oddly, annoyingly, disturbingly, and even threateningly. But he denied that behavior was disease: "In asserting that there is no such thing as mental illness, I do not deny that people have problems coping with life and each other." They may need many things, but physicians and psychiatrists are not among them.

Nor did he deny that people can suffer from brain disease or that currently unknown brain diseases could be discovered in the future. Again, he meant that disapproved or immoral behavior is human action not illness: it has reasons, motives, purposes, and stories -- not causes, as we observe in nature. "There is no psychology," Szasz aphorized. "There is only biography and autobiography." What's more, if all mental illnesses were brain diseases, Szasz asked, why would we need psychiatrists? We have neurologists already.  Moreover, people with real brain diseases, like other physical diseases, are free to reject treatment. Ergo...

He was fond of philosopher Gilbert Ryle's insight about myths in The Concept of Mind: "A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms belonging to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them." That's Tom's approach.

Thus when people asked Szasz if he was saying that no one was crazy, he'd say something like, "I didn't say no one was crazy. I said no one was mentally ill." Of course, if there is no mental illness, then there is no mental health either. Health and illness have historically referred to the body, he said. The "mind," however, is not a literal organ; it's a metaphorical organ. How can it be ill? Pathologists find no mental illnesses when they do autopsies.

By the way, his book The Meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience is a gem. Spoiler: "Mind is a verb." In other words, mind is not something we have, but something we do. We aren't robots, as some neuroscientists think; we are minders -- conscious and self-conscious beings who mind. We say, "Mind your own business" and "Mind your manners." Szasz taught us to mind our metaphors.

The connection to freedom and libertarianism, if not already obvious, becomes clear when we see that instead of being about controlling disease, psychiatry is about controlling behavior that someone else finds objectionable, for good or bad reasons. Aggression, he said, is properly handled by the criminal justice system. As he wrote in concluding The Myth:

Psychiatrists ... [in] actual practice ... deal with personal, social, and ethical problems in living.... [Emphasis added.]

Human behavior is fundamentally moral behavior. Attempts to describe and alter such behavior without, at the same time, coming to grips with the issue of ethical values are therefore doomed to failure.

Szasz viewed many issues through this lens. He wrote two books defending the freedom to take recreational drugs and to self-medicate without a doctor's permission (prescription): Ceremonial Chemistry: The Ritual Persecution of Drugs, Addicts, and Pushers and Our Right to Drugs: The Case for a Free Market. Addiction -- although perhaps a bad habit that takes great effort to break -- is not a disease. Nor were any of the other "addictions": gambling, shopping, sex, you name it.  He also published two books on the right to commit suicide.

From the start Szasz opposed psychiatry's regarding homosexuality as a mental illness properly subject to forcible "treatment" and called for full recognition of the individual rights of gay men and lesbians. In the 1970s the American Psychiatric Association board finally voted to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness. In real medicine, Szasz pointed out, physicians do not vote on what is and is not an illness. That tells you something.

He also spoke out against the insanity defense in criminal trials. Criminals are human beings, he said, who should be judged morally and held accountable for their actions. 

His life's mission was to battle for liberty and self-responsibility by discrediting what he called the "therapeutic state." He thus fought courageously against the "medicalization of everyday life," that is, the recasting of human freedom, choice, and action as medical, not moral, concerns and in the case of disapproved choices and actions, as diseases. F. A. Hayek, whom Szasz admired, called the misapplication of science to areas outside its province scientism. As Szasz put it, "Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations."

I thought about Szasz often during the pandemic and the government's "science-based" restrictions on liberty. What exactly would he have been saying? I am certain of two things.

First, he would have insisted that physicians and scientists are not qualified to tell us what trade-offs we should make between liberty and health. That's not a medical or scientific issue, but a moral one that should be left to each individual. Advice, if requested, is one thing. Colluding with the state to violate liberty is something else.

Second, he would have condemned all government and scientific attempts to quash public debate about what COVID-19 was, where it came from,  and what to do about it. He loved John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and its plea for freedom of speech.

His magnum opus is Insanity: The Idea and Its Consequences, which I recommend. Highly readable and entertaining, it covers much of what he had to say over the years and responds to critics. He also published several collections of wise aphorisms, a form in which he was brilliant. Samples: "The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself." And: "A child becomes an adult when he realizes that he has a right not only to be right but also to be wrong." You will learn from his aphorism alone.

I especially want to draw attention to Szasz's 2004 book, Faith in Freedom: Libertarian Principles and Psychiatric Practices, in which he argued that the freedom philosophy is incompatible with psychiatry as we know it. Besides chapters on that theme, he also has chapters on particular libertarians and civil libertarians: Ludwig von Mises, F. A Hayek, Murray Rothbard, Robert Nozick, Julian Simon, Deirdre McCloskey, Ayn Rand, Nathaniel Branden, Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill, and the American Civil Liberties Union. His analysis is at times critical because libertarians have too often failed to apply the nonaggression principle (obligation) to those whom state-deputized psychiatrists have declared mentally ill. The chapter "Economics and Psychiatry: Twin Scientisms" is pathbreaking. In the Preface, he wrote:

I believe that involuntary psychiatry [like chattel slavery] is -- regardless of any good in it, real or attributed -- immoral and illegitimate. The proper response to the outrage of psychiatric slavery is abolition, not reform.

I contend that this position is not merely consistent with the basic philosophy of libertarianism but inherent in it. Unfortunately, liberty is something for which everyone regards himself as fit, but most people regard certain other persons or the members of certain groups as unfit. In the past, among the unfit were blacks, women, Jews, and "perverts" such as homosexuals. Today the persons most often considered unfit for liberty are the mentally ill.

Thomas Szasz is definitely someone whom libertarians ought to check out.

In the meantime, see my article "Szasz in One Lesson" and my 2005 video interview with Tom on YouTube. And visit Jeffrey Schaler's Thomas S. Szasz Cybercenter for Liberty and Responsibility for many articles by and about him.