A Tribute to Linda Ronstadt
I’m currently driving to Texas and have two goals before I return to Virginia: one, to finish listening to the audio version of Jim Bovard’s excellent book Last Rights (which I can already highly recommend even without yet finishing the book) and, two, listen to Linda Ronstadt’s 24 albums.
Ronstadt is my favorite rock and roll singer of all time, even more so than Buddy Holly, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, all of whom are close behind. But it’s not just because of Ronstadt’s phenomenal voice and musical versatility that I have come to deeply admire her over the years. It’s also because of certain courageous political stands she has taken.
Back in 2004 Ronstadt appeared at the Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas for a performance. During the performance, she praised Hollywood producer Michael Moore for making the anti-Iraq War film Fahrenheit 9/11.
Those who are old enough will recall the extreme pro-government, pro-military, pro-interventionist fervor that followed the 9/11 attacks. It was unbelievable. In fact, even most of the libertarian movement was rallying to the federal government and jumping on board the much-vaunted “war on terrorism” and the invasion of Afghanistan. People were willing, even eager, to surrender their liberties for “security” — anything to be kept safe from “the terrorists” and the Muslims who were supposedly coming to get us and establish Shariah law in every city and community across America. That’s what the USA PATRIOT Act was all about; it was one of the greatest destructions of the liberty of the American people in U.S. history, and if you didn’t support it, you weren’t a “patriot.”
Here at FFF, we experienced this “rally-to-the-government” phenomenon in a very big and negative way. We were holding lonely ground in the libertarian movement, including pointing out that the 9/11 attacks were generated by the anger and hatred arising from the U.S. government’s deadly and destructive interventionist foreign policy in the Middle East. In other words, we were saying that the U.S. government’s explanation for the attacks — that they were supposedly motivated by hatred among Muslims for America’s “freedom and values” — was entirely bogus.
We also ardently opposed the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, pointing out that most of the people who would be killed, maimed, and injured in these wars of aggression would be entirely innocent of the 9/11 attacks and that such invasions would end up generating more anti-American terrorism and more destruction of our rights and liberties at the hands of our own government.
We also opposed the so-called PATRIOT Act, the TSA takeover of the airports, the illegal telecom surveillance schemes, and all the other attacks on our civil liberties.
We were inundated with hate mail and cancelations of support. We even lost a board member who resigned because of our foreign-policy position. I was severely condemned by another libertarian speaker when I gave a talk at a libertarian conference in Phoenix criticizing the U.S. government’s interventionist foreign policy and the “war on terrorism.”
But we never wavered, and I’m glad we didn’t. And to my everlasting gratitude, the donors who stuck with us carried us through.
When Ronstadt made clear her opposition to the Iraq War at her appearance at the Aladdin hotel, she knew exactly what the reaction was likely to be. Half of the audience of 4,500 booed her and walked out. About 100 people demanded their money back. The manager of the Aladdin, in one of the most shameful acts in the history of the U.S. hotel business, evicted her from the premises.
A few years ago, I wrote about this episode, along with similar treatment meted out to the Dixie Chicks for much the same thing that Ronstadt did — oppose the U.S. war on Iraq. The title of my article was “The Shameful Mistreatment of Linda Ronstadt and the Dixie Chicks.”
More recently, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Ronstadt announced her opposition to Republican Donald Trump’s use of a concert hall in Tucson, where she was born and raised, for a campaign rally. The concert hall is named The Linda Ronstadt Music Hall. Ronstadt didn’t want her name to be associated wit
Article from The Future of Freedom Foundation
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