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While the Rush Limbaughs
and Sean Hannitys of the world became enormously
wealthy by kissing the boots of the neocon
businessmen who have monopolized the talk radio industry in America there was
one "old Right" voice of freedom that did not waver: Ron Smith of WBAL
Radio in
Baltimore. When the neocons lied
the nation into the senseless and unconstitutional war in Iraq in 2003,
cheered on by conservative chickenhawks like
Limbaugh and Hannity, Ron Smith remained "the
voice of reason," as he is known in Baltimore, by opposing the war.
(Unlike these chickenhawks, Ron Smith joined the
Marines as a teenager).
For opposing the war Ron quickly lost 40 percent of
his audience, but stuck to his guns and continued to oppose the war over the
airwaves. The heroic management of WBAL Radio stood by Ron, and it paid off:
nearly all of the audience returned once it became glaringly obvious that Ron
was right about the war all along, and that the entire nation had been
neo-conned (and continues to be).
I first met Ron Smith in the early ‘90s when I
moved to Baltimore and he invited me to join him on his radio program to talk
about the free market, Austrian School of economics. He called me the
"Minister of Economic Truth," which I thought was hilarious in
light of the fact that the totalitarian nightmare of the Soviet Union was
still a fresh memory in the minds of many Americans. Every year since then,
Ron has invited me on the show on occasion to talk about markets, capitalism,
interventionism, the evils of Maryland politics and politicians, my books, my
LewRockwell.com articles, and more.
I run a lecture series at Loyola University Maryland
and have arranged for many of my speakers to appear on Ron’ show. These
have included Congressman Ron Paul, Tom Woods, Yuri Maltsev,
John Lott, Gene Epstein of Barron’s, and many other voices of
freedom. The very first guest who I recommended and who Ron interviewed was
the late Murray Rothbard. Murray appeared on
Ron’s show in the early ‘90s to make the case against the Fed. I
recall Ron saying to me that Murray was brilliant, but really did not have
much of a radio voice! Anyone who knew Murray would agree.
In addition to educating his audiences about markets
and the evils of intervention for some thirty years, Ron Smith has been a
powerful voice in defense of constitutionalism, especially the Second
Amendment’s right to bear arms. I have never heard a more articulate
and educated defender of the Second Amendment on any other radio or
television program.
He has also been fearless in his critiques of the
totalitarian-minded censors who have turned much of higher education into an
Orwellian farce of political correctness. When the "multicultural"
Marxist president of Loyola College maliciously libeled Professor Walter
Block for daring to present a public lecture in which he challenged some of
the superstitions of academic feminism (the university president’s
academic "specialty"), Ron invited Professor Block and me to spend
a total of three hours on his show to respond to such bullying.
The academic Left has so monopolized the university
world that such people routinely assume that they can libel and smear any and
all dissenters to their Official Leftist Dogma by simply calling them
vile-sounding names. Ron Smith enabled Walter Block and me to force these
intellectual and moral frauds to pay a very heavy price for their bullying, for
once. (I had university alumni writing me to say such things as, "after
hearing this, I’m giving that $50,000 donation to my church instead of
giving it to Loyola College").
When a despicable, serpentine political hack named
Congressman Lacy Clay (D-Banksters) libeled me as a
supposed member of a "hate group" for my writing and speaking in
favor of the traditional, Jeffersonian ideas of decentralized government,
nullification, and secession, Ron immediately invited me on his show to
respond to the sleaze. ("You’ve been favorably quoted by a Web
site called Dump D.C.!" the congress critter hysterically and
indignantly ranted at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee in
Washington).
Thanks to such people as Ron Smith, Mike Church of
Sirius Radio, Lew Rockwell, RealClearPolitics,
and other elements of "the new media," Clay was also forced to pay
a price in terms of negative publicity for his boorish, bullying behavior. He
and his Democratic colleagues on the House Financial Services Committee
(including the odious Barney Frank) responded to the bad publicity by
boycotting the next hearing of the committee held by Congressman Ron Paul,
behaving like so many five-year-olds.
Readers of LewRockwell.com learned on the blog last
week that Ron Smith is now battling inoperable stage-four pancreatic cancer.
Ron is once again behaving heroically by carrying on with his show, which I
pray he will do for many years to come.
Thomas DiLorenzo
Article originally published on www.LewRockwell.com. By authorization
of the author
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