From Palmer's website:
I have been very occupied with other matters and not very attentive to the scandal surrounding “those newsletters,” but I’ve gotten a fair number of emails, some from friends with links to very strange internet postings and some from, well, really disturbed people. Julian Sanchez of Reason (why, at one time, he even was a colleague of mine, and before that, he attended seminars at which I lectured! he is therefore my tool, or, since I have also written for Reason, maybe I am his) shines the light of reason on the whole ugly matter.
For the record, as I have stated elsewhere, I had never met or communicated with Mr. Kirchik prior to the publication of his article. (After the publication of his article, he introduced himself to me at a happy hour and we talked for less than five minutes.) The fact that, as it turns out, I am “openly gay” and he is “openly gay,” and we live in the same city must, you know, mean that we were, you know, “friends” is one of the favorite insinuations of the LewRockwell.com crowd and has been posted on a number of prominent websites. Sorry to disappoint. But then, it seems we may both live near metro stations (I’m between a Red line station and a Green line station), so if the sexual orientation doesn’t clinch it, that certainly does. Whatever.
While not teaching at a university (the horror), I can say that I have also not been a “ringleader” of any movement to “smear” anyone by unearthing things he wrote or published under his name. I guess that’s a lot of “nots” for one life. (I am also not a member of the Trilateral Commission and I’m not a member of the CFR. And I’m not a member of the Federal Reserve Board. Whew. I don’t know how I manage it. So many nots!)
But while not doing those other things, I do have some things to attend to that keep me pretty busy.
My observations:
1. Palmer's denial that he knew Kirchick before this rings hollow to me for many reasons. Kirchick's relationship with the Cato crowd has been documented to predate this story by at least a year. Kirchick is on the facebook friends list of Palmer's colleague David Boaz and several of the Reason guys with Cato connections. Julian Sanchez (one of the Reason authors) has admitted on his blog and on this very forum that he trades notes with Kirchick before each of the Ron Paul hit pieces break (he calls it "professional courtesy" but its effects are no different than outright collusion). These are the same social circles that Palmer runs in, and they all seem to know Kirchick very well. But Palmer says he doesn't. Excuse me if I'm a little more than skeptical
2. Palmer says he first met Kirchick at a "happy hour" last week. I think the timing of that concession is just a little bit suspect. Think about it. You claim you don't know a guy who hangs out with virtually all of your friends on a regular basis, then that guy hits it big with a story. People start asking you if you knew him as well since all your friends know him, and it would look bad if you said "yes." Furthermore, people now know what Kirchick looks like and may have seen him talking to you in public the other day. The explanation: I met him for the first time at a random bar's happy hour last week right after the story broke. The timing is a little more than convenient.
3. Palmer's hyperbolic denunciations of the "conspiracy" angle are intended to make a caricature of his critics and obscure a valid point in so doing. Nobody sane is contending that Palmer is some sort of nefarious puppet master who sends messages to his minions' decoder rings ordering them to destroy Ron Paul. That's just silly. But Palmer is at the heart of a DC-area libertarian social network, and social networks are well documented in the sociology literature to influence the way that messages shape up. Palmer doesn't head a secretive conspiracy to infiltrate the libertarian movement with mind-numb robots, but he does have many fierce loyalists who used to work for him as Cato interns and who are now placed in various other DC-region libertarian think tanks in part due to recommendation letters and the sort that they received under Palmer's watch at Cato. He doesn't send out daily coded marching orders to them, but he does routinely hang out with them at the D.C. bar and party scene. The point has always been that Palmer is well known for his hatred of the Ludwig von Mises Institute crowd, and that hatred is shared by the majority of his social network due in large part to his direct influence.
4. Palmer complains of "insinuations" about his homosexuality being involved in this story. These insinuations are certainly childish, but I submit that Palmer himself is at least in part to blame for them. Kirchick's homosexuality is also indisputably one of his motives in attacking Paul (he's on record saying so, and saying that is the reason he's backing Giuliani). Palmer is in part to blame for insinuations about his sexual orientation because Palmer himself has a well known reputation as a party boy. He hangs out at happy hours and frequents the D.C. Adams-Morgan bar scene, usually hanging out with people who are half his age (including Kirchick, who he admitted to meeting last week at a happy hour). That does NOT mean he's sexually involved with people on the bar scene, but it creates a public perception about him that makes himself vulnerable to "insinuations." It's kinda like the guy who goes for an evening tour of the red light district but insists he's just jogging. Maybe he is just jogging, but if you do that all the time you're gonna get a reputation whether you deserve it or not. And Palmer has that kind of reputation (contrast that to other well known gay libertarians like Justin Raimondo and you'll see what I mean).
5. Palmer's word choice is imprecise when he describes the bloggers at Reason and elsewhere who are driving this story as his former "colleagues" at Cato. The word "colleague" implies someone of comparable rank and function within the institute. They were not. Palmer is a Vice President of Cato and the "colleagues" he describes were almost all student interns. You'd have to bring in the janitors to find a bigger disparity in rank between them. This point is important to remember, because in social network analysis rank matters. It explains how spheres of influence operate, and how people within the network get job placements on the recommendation of others in the same network. Again, it doesn't mean that a subordinate is controlled by the senior rank. But the senior member's sphere of influence almost always extends to the subordinate rank, and the evidence of this is plain in Palmer's case: Palmer's well known grudge against Rockwell and the Mises crowd is openly shared by virtually all of his subordinate "colleagues"...and they even OPENLY CREDIT him for it with links to his old blog posts on Rockwell.
0 comments:
Post a Comment