He needs to be more careful with his rhetoric.
Exactly.
Rhetoric is the science of the use of language, techniques, devices, and tricks if necessary to persuade others to believe in one's ideas.
I once had a Humanities professor who used to lie to us over and over again in his classes and speeches in order to pound that point into our heads. He was so good at it that we would always fall for it. Often at the end of the class as we were about to leave he would say something like, "Oh yeah, remember that story I told you earlier in the class about how I was once recruited by President Ford's speech writers to be a consultant on some of Ford's speeches? That was a lie I made up to set you up to make you think I was a big shot traveling in elite circles in order to make you be more open to my argument."
The anti-libertarian right has been lying and equating libertarianism to racism since at least the time of Buckley.
The left and the beltway libertarians have learned their rhetorical lessons well from CIA Officer Buckley. They have been fabulously rhetorically successful at equating libertarianism with racism for many decades.
So what sort of rhetorical techniques have we seen libertarians use to successfully refute these lies?
I saw a recent Tom Woods video that explained how one should only speak in sentences that stand on their own in any context. That might be a good idea especially in interviews with regime mouthpieces such as NYT reporters.
But libertarianism by definition is a set of 1, 2, and 3 step logical reasoning chains. Its rhetoricians such as Block and Ron Paul must explain to their audiences the exciting news of how not only are libertarian principles in opposition to 19th century enslavement of blacks, BUT libertarianism for the same reasons opposes 21st century government enslavement of you and me.
But equating 19th century enslavement to today shuts down the brains of seemingly everybody, just like equating the cops to the gestapo.
So where have we ever seen a rhetorical breakthrough that actually seemed to win lots and lots of people to the libertarian idea that today right now all of us--black and white--are living on a government plantation and that the cops are worse than the gestapo?
Let me see I'm going through my list of successful libertarian movements...let's see...There was Barry Goldwater ...but oh yeah, he wanted to nuke the commies and keep shoveling money to the MIC...let's see...There was Ronald Reagan...but, oh yeah, same thing...let's see...There was the 1994 Republican Revolution...but, oh yeah, same thing. None of those salesmen were selling libertarianism.
If you narrow it down to actual libertarianism, then there's only been one libertarian sales job in the last 50 years that has managed to gain any rhetorical success at all and it was quite remarkable.
But it was successful ONLY because of this miraculous chain of events:
1. Ron Paul was almost completely incapable of hiding his pure libertarianism. He might only have gotten 1 minute in a network televised 90 minute debate. But in that 1 minute the contrast between his unvarnished libertarian truth and goodness and the other 89 minutes of lies and evilness was the rhetorical device that broke through to a certain audience. Libertarians had never been revealed to such a large audience in such a way before.
A good example is how Ron couldn't help himself from giving the South Carolina Christians the hard medicine. They booed loudly and it was insulting to much of the live audience and a rhetorical sin according to his handlers who were more cognitively dissonant to Ron's ideas than much of the electorate. But it was rhetorical gold. Libertarianism had never seen anything succeed on such a large scale like that.
2. There was a big enough audience out there who could be penetrated by Ron's rhetoric and it was an extremely high quality audience. 1 Ron Paul caucus vote was worth 100 of the others.
The best example of this was when CNN broadcasted Sheldon Adelson's private Nevada caucus as 15 random delegates in a row gave killer anti-militarism speeches that probably made Ron's handlers squirm. CNN and Wolf or whoever it was were so stunned they were speechless and just let the random delegates go off one after the other. I think they were hoping a pro-Empire delegate would be the next to be randomly chosen to speak. But, they just kept picking Love-o-lutionaries one after the other. Network television has NEVER allowed that kind of pure libertarian rhetoric on the air for that long before and never intends to again I can assure you. Just think of how many high quality people of like mind saw that and were sold on doing something other than what they would have done otherwise.
3. A larger but lesser "quality" audience--libertarian-leaning conservatives and liberals who were sympathetic to but not fully convinced by Ron's 1, 2, and 3 step libertarian logical reasoning chains--were still sold enough on Ron's ideas to vote for him and gain a clearer understanding of and adopt more libertarian ideas for themselves.
I can think of several people in my circle of friends and family who were like that. They've been listening to me for years and agreeing with a lot but not all of it. Hearing it from Ron convinced them that there was something about it much more honest and true than the alternatives even if they were still scared of Muslims and/or afraid the hungry might not get fed.
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So, yes Walter Block needs to work on his rhetorical skills just like the rest of us. This lawsuit could be a good kickoff to a properly run presidential campaign for that purpose.
Unfortunately, they will NEVER again allow another pure libertarian such as Ron Paul in a network presidential debate and it was Ron's sneaking into that venue and the amazing spectacle of truth being spoken where it literally had never been spoken before that really kicked off the miraculous chain of events that resulted in such an unprecedented level of libertarian rhetorical success.
But Walter should do it anyway--especially if Ron would come out and help him inform jurors at the court houses and sit on the marathon town hall meetings and press conferences where Walter would be holding court breaking down the principles of freedom in detail and discussing his plan to dismantle the state.
