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Entry: Ron Paul, the Birchers, and the Delicate Sensibilities of David Weigel Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/ron_paul_the_birchers_and_the_delicate_sensibilities_of_david_weigel#22663 Post contents: Justin, thanks for the balanced and informative piece, and thanks to you, Mr. Newland, for your kind comments about TNA. The New American has been radically denatured over the past couple of years, but as long as it consistently features Bill Jasper's work it's worth getting. Unfortunately, the current JBS management decided in 2006 to abandon investigative reporting, despite the fact that Bill is a top-tier investigative journalist. There was a tumultuous management shake-up at the JBS home office in fall 2005. CEO Vance Smith was ousted, along with VP Tom Gow and a handful of others. The build-up to that event was ugly and stressful, and the aftermath included roughly a year of very expensive and pointless litigation. The chief casualty of this conflict was Robert Welch University, the single most promising venture the JBS had undertaken since the mid-1960s. As to my own situation -- I was fired, by the new management, in October 2006 for reasons they still cannot clearly explain. The pretext was my refusal to take down a personal, after-hours blog I started after JBS management decided -- without informing me or anyone else -- to discontinue the old Birch Blog. My new blog was entitled Pro Libertate. My understanding has always been that an employer rents my time; he doesn't own me 24/7. As long as I'm not covertly working for a competitor or otherwise engaged in illegal or unethical behavior, my personal time belongs exclusively to me. The same is true of my name: As a JBS employee I was not a WWE character whose name and likeness were copyrighted property of the company. For the purposes of inventing a pretext to fire me, JBS management pretended that this wasn't the case. I was given an ultimatum to which no self-respecting individual would submit: I was told to take down my blog, apologize in writing for EVERYTHING I'd published therein, and promise -- in writing -- that every syllable I wrote or spoke for public consumption would be subject to approval by JBS management. They knew me well enough to know I wouldn't submit to that ultimatum. So it's clear to me that they simply wanted me gone, and wanted to contrive some cover story to justify the idea that I had "quit." I was a contributor to The New American for about 15 years at the time of my firing, and had been on staff with the JBS for 13. Yet within HOURS of being fired, my name was being stripped from TNA's masthead, and I was informed that the magazine was no longer interested even in receiving freelance submissions from me. On the very day that I was fired, the chief instigator of that decision, VP for campaigns and missions Alan Scholl, was circulating falsehoods about my supposed offenses and shortcomings. This continued until Bill Jasper essentially forced Alan to back down. I must admit that and ideological divide played a role in all of this. Alan Scholl, to put matters bluntly, is an authoritarian prick. He was once a friend, but given what he's done to me and my family (I have five small children and a wife who's an invalid), I don't think I owe him the courtesy of civility. Alan's objective in early 2006 was to make the JBS a third-string concubine in the GOP's seraglio. We were to "ride the [Republican] wave," he insisted to me. That "wave," of course, had a totalitarian undertow. We are being dragged into undisguised despotism at home and permanent warfare abroad. I had no interest in trying to curry favor with the mouth-breathing cultists -- Ditto-heads, Hannitization victims, war-crazed denizens of Mega-Church madrassas -- whom Alan had identified as the "core market" for the nJBS. If you could read my blogs from the period (JBS management has scrubbed them from the web, but I copied most of them), you'll find that most of them deal with EXACTLY the same set of issues on which Ron Paul built his campaign. I thought at the time that the JBS should try to reach out to freedom-centered people irrespective of their partisan attachments or incidental characteristics, as Ron Paul now has done. Please forgive me for going on at such length. T Sent at: 2008 07 20