For example, Rand Paul has not merely embraced many of the War Party’s policies, but has adopted its talking points. By doing so he is in practice working to undo his own father’s most important advances for peace (although thankfully not very effectively, since he’s not making much of impact in any direction).

What Ron Paul accomplished for peace, he did so by using his position, not as a policy lever, but as an educational pulpit. He spent his time in Congress giving speeches and voting no. And even his no votes were speeches in a sense: registered statements of protest. They almost never directly affected policy, since he never made political deals.

He used his Presidential campaigns in the same way: essentially pirating the excessive bandwidth the media allots to the Presidential campaigns to broadcast the philosophy of peace and liberty. His campaign was far more an educational campaign than a political one.

His success was spectacular. With one conspicuous act of courage and statement of principle in particular, he changed the minds of multitudes and launched a movement.

It happened during a televised Republican Primary debate for the 2008 election. On that stage, Ron Paul radically distinguished himself from the rest of the candidates by characterizing the 9/11 attacks as blowback from the US government’s interventionist foreign policy.

Rudy Giuliani, the “mayor of 9/11,” immediately anathematized Ron Paul for blaspheming the greatest sacrament of the Holy Homeland and demanded a retraction.

Ron Paul treated Giuliani’s demand as a lovely opportunity for more speaking time to use to hammer his point home even harder: to elaborate on his public mini-lecture on the concept of blowback. What to most would have been a backtrack-inducing, career-ending incident was for Ron Paul a movement-launching, teachable moment. Countless people have said that they became anti-war after watching Ron Paul in those debates, and particularly after that moment.

Rand Paul has been criticized for never seizing his own “Giuliani moment” in the 2016 campaign. But it is worse than that. His campaign trail showings have been rife with statements that are actually antithetical to his father's “Giuliani moment.”

In his exchange with Giuliani, Ron Paul famously said:

“They don’t come here to attack us because we’re rich and we’re free. They come and they attack us because we’re over there.”

This was a rebuttal to Bush’s catchphrase: “They hate our freedoms.” The ludicrous implication is that our female drivers and voting booths are so offensive to our attackers’ Islamist sensibilities that it drives them into complex international campaigns of murder-suicide.

This was the crude narrative that Ron Paul heroically dispelled for so many. Terroristic guerrilla wars against empires often draw from religious extremism to galvanize their warriors. But that does not change the fact that they are primarily driven by opposition to imperial domination.

Rand, however, seems to be working to restore the crude narrative his father had combatted. He has adopted as his oft-repeated foreign policy slogan: "The enemy is radical Islam." In his announcement of his candidacy he said:

"Without question we must defend ourselves and American interests from our enemies, but until we name the enemy, we can’t win the war. The enemy is radical Islam. You can’t get around it. And not only will I name the enemy, I will do whatever it takes to defend America from these haters of mankind.”

According to Rand then, and contrary to Ron, the challenge before us is not defusing extremism by ending the interventionism that energizes it. It is not about "just coming home" as Ron always preached. It is not about thereby ending the war, but about "winning" it. Our chief problem is not our blowback-generating empire, but our foreign "enemy." And our enemies aren't "attacking us because we're over there"; they are attacking us simply because they embrace radical Islam. Their religion makes them, not just haters of freedom, but "haters of mankind." With this, Rand actually one-ups Bush. They don't just "hate us because we're free"; they hate us because we're human!

This is the worst kind of simple-minded, jingoistic rhetoric and "analysis" parading around in the mantle of liberty. It is a "Giuliani moment" in the sense that it sounds like something Giuliani himself would say while denouncing Rand's father.