Libelous Leftist Lynch Mobs

by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

Watching Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson get away with libeling Rush Limbaugh with several outrageously spectacular lies recently (they falsely claimed Limbaugh "defended slavery" and praised Martin Luther King, Jr.’s murderer) reminded me once again how the American Left throws all morals out the door when it comes to any challenges to their secular "religion" of welfare statism and socialism. (The neocon Right, which includes Limbaugh, tells even bigger lies, such as the ones that "justified" the Iraq war.) It also reminded me of how campus leftists at Loyola University Maryland libeled Dr. Walter Block last year with equally outrageous slanders.

LRC readers may recall that after Dr. Block presented a very mainstream economics lecture on "The Economics of the Gender Gap" the university president, Rev. Brian Linnane, S.J., who did not attend the lecture, issued an email to all faculty, staff, students and alumni that did not mention anything that was said in the lecture, but libeled Dr. Block as a racist and sexist. Dr. Block’s apparent "offense" was to use economic theory to challenge one of the superstitions of academic feminism – the dubious notion that all of the difference in male/female wages is caused by sex discrimination, something that no self-respecting economist would ever claim. The obvious goal of such obnoxious tactics is to censor all views of such subjects that do not conform to left-wing political correctness. (Linnane's academic field of specialization is "feminist theology.")

I suspected from the beginning that the libeling of Dr. Block was a set-up by the self-appointed Campus Thought Police, who never stop reminding everyone that they are in favor of "social justice." (The implication is that anyone who opposes their socialistic political agenda must be in favor of injustice.) It was this "social justice crowd" on the Loyola campus who immediately claimed after Dr. Block’s lecture that a student complained to them about the "insensitivity" of Dr. Block’s rendition of the economics of discrimination. Within twenty-four hours I learned that the university president was preparing his libelous letter despite the fact that he had neither attended the lecture nor contacted Dr. Block to ask him if the scurrilous slanders about him were true. I have always suspected that the student was sent to the seminar with specific instructions to cause trouble, which he did. READ MORE