DiLorenzo is lying.
The Dallas Morning News wrote:Neo-Confederate economist at Ron Paul's Fed hearing
12:27 PM Thu, Feb 10, 2011
Todd J. Gillman/Reporter
Texas Rep. Ron Paul intended his first hearing as chair of a House subcommittee to showcase one of his complaints about the Federal Reserve - that central planning of the money supply makes unemployment worse, by creating booms that inevitably lead to recessions worse than would otherwise occur.
The hearing did do that. But that was overshadowed somewhat when Democrats noted that Paul's star witnesses, Thomas DiLorenzo, an economist at Loyola University in Baltimore, has called Abraham Lincoln a "dictator" and "mass murderer" - and has links to a neo-Confederate group called League of the South.
The League seeks a Southern breakaway nation led by "European-Americans."
To hear DiLorenzo tell it, linking him to the League is defamation. His only connection, he told the DMN, is that he lectured to some League members "15 years ago" at the invitation of an Emory University professor, and didn't even realize they were League members. He did concede, though, that he sympathizes with anyone who wants to secede from a government they disagree with, be they Southerners in the USA or Soviet Republics under the USSR.
His dismissal of any substantive link don't square with material collected by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which views the League as a hate group.
Issues of the "Southern Patriot" - the League's newsletter - describe DiLorenzo as a lecturer at its 2001 summer school and 2002 national conference. The League also sold tapes of his lectures.
In late 2000, he authored a front-page essay for the League's Alabama affiliate about vote fraud; its newsletter identified him as a League member.
And in 2005, DiLorenzo authored an essay defending the League.
Heidi Beirich, research director at the Southern Poverty Law Center, called it "appalling... for a congressman to bring someone in from a group that has these kinds of hate views."
Paul said he didn't know about DiLorenzo's involvement with the League and said Democrats only attacked to deflect attention from the substance of the Fed critique.
Southern Poverty Law Center wrote:Ron Paul Invites Neo-Confederate Witness to Testify in Congress
Posted in Neo-Confederate by Heidi Beirich on February 9, 2011
This morning, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) hosted his first hearing as chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank. Paul wants to look at the institution’s impact on job creation and the unemployment rate. Paul, a vicious opponent of the Fed, in the past has called for its abolition.
One of the witnesses invited to testify was Thomas DiLorenzo, a longtime activist in the neo-Confederate hate group, League of the South (LOS). The LOS advocates for a second Southern secession and a society dominated by “Anglo-Celts” – that is, white people. LOS leaders have called slavery “God-ordained” and described segregation as necessary to the racial “integrity” of black and white alike. DiLorenzo also is an economics professor at Baltimore’s Loyola College.
According to the Washington Post, “when Paul opened up the hearing to questions from committee members, Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) directly took on DiLorenzo for his membership in the League of the South,” pointing to the designation of the LOS as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Clay also cited DiLorenzo’s many revisionist works about the Civil War and Lincoln, including “More Lies about the Civil War,” “In Defense of Sedition,” and “The First Dictator-President,” which examines “how Lincoln’s myth has corrupted America.”
“After reviewing your work and the so-called methods you employ, I still cannot understand you being invited to testify today on the unemployment crisis, but I do know that I have no questions for you,” Clay concluded.
DiLorenzo has a long history with the LOS. His essays have appeared in the group’s publications, and he was identified as a member in a 2000 issue of its Southern Events. DiLorenzo spoke at the LOS’ 2002 conference and that year’s Southern Heritage Conference, hosted by longtime LOS leader Steve Wilkins. DiLorenzo was listed for years, up until at least late 2009, as an “affiliated scholar” at the League’s Institute for the Study of Southern Culture, dedicated to ending any furtherance of the idea “that the commercial value of slavery was the cause of the war.”
DiLorenzo has other extremist connections. He has spoken at events that included other hate group members, and has been published by neo-Confederate outfits. In 1995, he wrote an essay entitled “A Defense of the Confederate Cause” published in the Journal for Historical Review, a Holocaust denial publication. It argues that “slavery was not one of the rationales” for the Civil War. “Since the battle flag represents a fight against high taxes and centralized government, every freedom-loving American should honor it,” DiLorenzo’s essay concludes.
Though trained as an economist, DiLorenzo’s life work appears to be rewriting the history of the Civil War and Lincoln’s role in it. DiLorenzo argues Lincoln was a paragon of wickedness, whose secret intent was to destroy states’ rights and build a massive federal government. “It was not to end slavery that Lincoln initiated an invasion of the South,” DiLorenzo writes in his 2002 attack on the 16th president, entitled, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. “A war was not necessary to free the slaves, but it was necessary to destroy the most significant check on the powers of the central government: the right of secession.”
In addition to his position at Loyola, DiLorenzo is a senior faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a hard-right libertarian foundation in Auburn, Ala. In 2003, LewRockwell.com, a Web site run by Von Mises Institute President Llewellyn Rockwell that at the time included a “King Lincoln” section, hosted a “Lincoln Reconsidered” conference in Richmond, Va., starring DiLorenzo. The conference became a bit of a road show, reappearing around the South and headlined by DiLorenzo.
Ron Paul has connections to von Mises as well. When several of Paul’s newsletters from the 1980s and 1990s were found to include bigoted rhetoric about African Americans and gays, Paul claimed not to know who wrote them. But in 2008, Reason Magazine fingered the culprit: Paul’s chief ghostwriter was none other than von Mises founder Rockwell, who had earlier served as Paul’s chief of staff. To this day, the institute runs Paul’s commentaries and, according to Reason, “Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul.”
Update: This morning DiLorenzo posted an angry screed in which he described Congressman Clay as “sleazy” and claimed he had “lied about my non-existent working relationship with the League of the South.” DiLorenzo says that his last interaction with the League was 13 years ago. So it is somewhat ironic, or perhaps hypocritical, that the League has DiLorenzo listed as a speaker at a 2009 League of the South Summer Institute on what is a favored topic of DiLorenzo’s, “Lincoln Reconsidered.”
They aren't a racist organization. I am personal friends with all of the directors and vacation with them annually. I have been to a great many of their events. I attend church services with many. I regularly visit the home of several prominent members. I am not, however, a member as I disagree with the League on the issue of homosexual southrons. They understand and accept my decision though there is mounting pressure to create a sister organization that will be more friendly to the less conservative southrons. It's a work in progress.
But yes also your flag see my last edit. I see nothing wrong with it. I support succession myself.