Rand Paul is a crazy conspiracy theorist and is therefore too gullible to be taken seriously as a presidential contender.
This is the thesis of a rambling, historically ignorant article published by the Daily Beast. In the piece, Sam Kleiner contends that Senator Paul’s alleged anti-vaccine comments are part and parcel of his “broader conspiratorial worldview.”
Anyone who questions the Establishment’s program of poking every kid and revoking parental prerogative is labeled as a kook and someone who probably watches YouTube videos of alien autopsies conducted at Roswell.
Kleiner explains:
“Almost by definition, conspiracy theories are irrefutable; rejections by scientific authorities just become part of the conspiracy,” notes science journalist Chris Mooney, and “analyses of anti-vaccine views, undertaken by analyzing their expression on the web or on YouTube in particular, have found them to be highly conspiratorial in nature.”
Regardless of Paul’s right to express uncertainty about the innocuousness of inoculations, the Daily Beast’s real beef with the constitutional-minded senator is his relationship to libertarian icon Ron Paul. Kleiner continues,
Rand Paul’s embrace of vaccination skepticism is a reminder, just when he’s trying to enter the presidential race, of his tawdry background growing up with and propagating an array of conspiracy theories.
Though he avoids talking about it now, Paul has repeatedly railed against the Bilderberg Group’s quest for world government, a conspiracy to create a North American Union that would replace the dollar with the Amero currency, and a United Nations effort to take away Americans’ guns. Today he is trying, as the New York Times framed it, to move away from his father’s shadow and towards the political center. Paul may not talk about these conspiracies today, but his vaccine comments remind us just how central conspiracy theories are to his worldview.
Another brick in the Daily Beast’s wall of proof surrounding Paul’s wing nut worldview is his apparent belief in conspiracies in high places.
“Rand grew up inheriting much of his father’s conspiratorial worldview, in which secret cabals run out of the East Coast were seeking to destroy the country. Rand Paul came of age when his father was writing mind-bogglingly conspiratorial newsletters that warned about the Trilateral Commission,” the article reports.
The above review of Paul’s past represents the sort of yellow journalism to which many of the Establishment’s mouthpieces will undoubtedly descend as the 2016 presidential campaign approaches and Paul’s participation in the same becomes a certainty.
Wouldn’t it be more ethical and informative to enumerate the particular “questionable” theories Paul’s espouses and then set about systematically debunking each and every one so that the millions of potential Paul supporters can jump ship now before he steers them into the conspiracy coral reef?
Unfortunately, there is no such examination, and one is left to assume that Kleiner and his editors would rather leave their ignorance of the role of conspiracy in the history of the world to speculation by not commenting on it rather than confirm the fact by wading into deep waters without their talking point water wings.
The French philosopher Charles Pinot Duclos explained how a study of history teaches the informed that the past is prelude to the future. He wrote:
We see on the theater of the world a certain number of scenes which succeed each other in endless repetition: where we see the same faults followed regularly by the same misfortunes, we may reasonably think that if we could have known the first we might have avoided the others. The past should enlighten us on the future: knowledge of history is no more than an anticipated experience.
Duclos rightly asserts that one’s familiarity of history should train one to recognize patterns. One of the most persistent patterns is that the great republics and empires of history have nearly all been brought to ruin by the hidden machinations of conspiring men — powerful men clothed in the unassailable robes of populists.
Kleiner and his editors should read Polybius (one of the classic chroniclers most often cited by the Founders). They would discover on nearly every page of his book The Histories (which covered the period of 264–146 B.C. in detail) the conception or carrying out of a conspiracy of highly placed politicians or aristocrats. These cabals caused the demise of nearly every republic of the past.
Those who are truly steeped in the historical record of the rise and fall of the grand republics and empires of history realize that the powerful conspiracies contrived to enslave mankind are not concocted in advertised meetings attended by secretaries transcribing the minutes. Those confabs and the plots hatched therein are more secretive and surreptitious than any of the fantastical fiction ever produced by the penny press.
Paradoxically, the aspersions cast at Rand Paul by the Daily Beast (“if we did get a good look at the nonsense he’s been preaching for years, we might then realize just how unqualified he is to be president”) could lead many fence sitters — those who consider Paul a neoconservative shill planted by the Establishment to snare constitutionalists — to hop down and run through the undecided meadow straight into the “Rand in 2016” camp.
Truthfully, though, there is harm in believing conspiracy theories for people such as Kleiner who work for establishment media. The most pernicious danger is that perhaps one will come to question the pre-packaged answers and the party-line press releases and discover for himself a more harmful purpose (other than accident) in the fulcrums upon which the axes of history turn.
Photo of Sen. Rand Paul: AP Images
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton.
