By far the oldest candidate in the race at 75, Ron Paul is suddenly a top contender. He has a lot of younger supporters, mostly because he favors legalizing pot, and adopts the sort of extreme intellectual positions that have also drawn college age kids to "pure" philosophies like Communism and Ayn Rand's Positivism for generations. You know, "clean" uncompromising positions that get rid of all those messy human feelings and complexities.
Ron Paul loves to brag about being a straight-talker who doesn't change his positions. He says he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (on property rights grounds, not to defend racism natch.) He wants to legalize all drugs, including heroin, withdraw all US troops from other countries immediately, end government flood control efforts and return to the gold standard.

And speaking as someone who has been researching candidate scandals for many years now, he's pretty darn squeaky clean. Sorry to disappoint you haters, but (like Obama) Ron Paul shows no sign of screwing around on his wife (unlike Newt or Bill Clinton), or doing favors for special interests who then put money in his pocket (unlike Newt or Rick Santorum). That's admirable.

But Congressman Paul does has a paranoid, fringey side that he does NOT like to admit. Paul has written and spoken a lot about hidden conspiracies of bankers, diplomats, the Trilateral Commission, secret plans to merge the US with Mexico and Canada, etc. (He calls it the North American Union.) If that sounds like the kind of stuff that John Birchers and right-wing militia racists say, well, he's very popular in that crowd too. (Read the Stormfront and other neo-Nazi websites if you dare, and you'll see.)

Ever since he began running for Congress again in 1996, Ron Paul has tried to downplay or deny responsibility for some incredibly racist newsletters he sold to that conspiracy crowd. But it's hard for him to deny responsibility for a publication called "The Ron Paul Survival Report", edited by Ron Paul, when it says stuff like "When I was in Congress....." He had no problem cashing the checks certainly. And if it wasn't paranoid militia conspiracy, why was it called the Survival Report?

The sad truth is that Ron Paul is a consummate politician. He's just better at tailoring his message to his different audiences than, say, Mitt Romney, whose adjustments are painfully obvious. Ron Paul is the cool grandpa pothead to college kids, the prophet of racial fear to neo-Nazis, an opponent of public schools to Christian home-schoolers, and a crusader against the coming One World Government to the anti-flouride conspiracy crowd. And each group thinks he's their own, special warrior.

Racist Newsletter
Starting in 1985, Ron Paul published a series of related newsletters, called the Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul Freedom Report, Ron Paul Survival Report, etc. He had over 100,000 subscribers at one point and is said to have made over a million dollars a year. Over ten years, the newsletters published a bunch of inflammatory racist, homophobic and conspiratorial columns. You can read 50 of the originals on this website. Warning -- it's pretty raw stuff.

One article said Martin Luther King Jr. was “a world-class adulterer” who “seduced underage girls and boys” and “replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.” Another offers this strategy against "urban youth":

"If you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).”

“I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.” -- A June, 1990 article

In 2001, as Paul moved to the mainstream and rejoined the Republican party, he disavowed these comments and blamed them on an unnamed ghostwriter. He said he didn't know about them until years later and that he had lied in 1996 when he didn't say he didn't write them.

You see, when Paul ran for Congress in 1996, as a Libertarian, his opponent brought these newsletters up to show that Paul had fringe ideas. At that time, they were still being published, and Paul didn't deny writing them. He said that the inflammatory quotes his opponent gave were taken out of context, and that his commentaries about blacks came in the context of "current events and statistical reports of the time." (You can check the context of the inflammatory quotes yourself on the link above, but they look pretty representative to me.)

In fact, Dr. Paul defended some of these racist statements in an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1996. One newsletter said that young Black men are "unbelievably fleet of foot." Dr. Paul confirmed this opinion by telling the newspaper "If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them." Another article in the newsletter (from 1992, just 4 years before this controversy first erupted) said:

"Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

When the Dallas reporter asked Ron Paul about that quote, he said "These aren't my figures. That is the assumption you can gather from" the report.

Whichever story is true, he's clearly responsible for the contents of that newsletter and pretty squirrelly about the whole thing. The President manages millions of people. Even if you take Ron Paul at his word, he couldn't manage a staff of 10 without them suddenly printing extreme racist progaganda FOR TEN YEARS. I just don't believe him, but if you do, he's a piss-poor manager.

The thing is, Ron Paul has published a lot of similar (but milder) material since then, and much of it is still on his congressional website, under his name. (Read any of his "Texas Straight Talk" columns from 2005 or 2006, and you'll see what I mean.) He rails against "anchor babies," warns of conspiracies to impose a "North American United Nations," complains about secret cartels of international bankers -- all big parts of the racist right-wing's world-view. (See quotes, above.) So far he hasn't claimed that someone else wrote these "Texas Straight Talk" columns, but I haven't seen any reporters ask him about them, either.

But there's plenty more. Ron Paul defenders claim Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero of his, but Paul voted against the Martin Luther King Day holiday -- both times - and it fell 5 votes short the first time. (It passed the second time despite his opposition.)

He said on MSNBC that the Civil War was not necessary, and gave a rave review to a pro-Confederacy revisionist book called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" by Thomas E. Woods. Ron Paul said Wood's book "heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole.” Woods, who founded the secessionist group "League of the South," and Ron Paul both teach at the Ludwig Van Mises Institute in Alabama, which was founded by Lew Rockwell -- Ron Paul's former chief of staff. In fact, many Paul supporters claim Lew Rockwell wrote the racist newsletter columns under Ron Paul's name, but Rockwell denies that.

The fact is, Ron Paul has said a lot of things similar to (but milder than) the shocking newsletter quotes, things he does not dispute. In 2007, Dr. Paul republished his 1987 book "Freedom Under Siege" which has a lot of choice passages, such as calling the AIDS sufferer "a victim of his own lifestyle [who] victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care"; saying sexual harassment victims bear some responsibility because they didn't quit their jobs; and complaining that whites would be called bigots if they formed a white caucus in Congress, but minority caucuses are OK.

Ron Paul is firmly enmeshed in the right-wing, conspiracy subculture. He has appeared on the Alex Jones radio show 40 times over 12 years, and given extensive interviews to the John Birch Society newsletter. So whether or not he wrote any one particularly nasty racist sentence of a given issue, he is behind all of it. He has been living in that world for years, building connections with the people in it, spreading its ideas, and making money off of doing so. It's cowardly of him to deny it all now.

http://www.realchange.org/ronpaul.htm

For a certain segment of the Ron Paul fanbase, no evidence of his disseminating hateful, paranoid material will ever be enough. Citing James Kirchick's piece in The New Republic wasn't sufficient, because Kirchick could have just been "making everything up." Then, when I and others posted copies of "The Ron Paul Political Report Special Issue on Race Terrorism," that too wasn't convincing.

"Proof that he said/endorsed racist things? Hardly. Doing it repeatedly in one document isn't enough to prove that he did it. Now, if there were many documents..."

Well, now there are many documents. Over fifty. Right here.


As I said in my rundown on the Paul platform over at Vice, reasonable fans of Dr. Paul now must accept that
there's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content [of] 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

• He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.
• He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate, but too obvious about it to win.
• He's actually a racist, which makes him unfit to be a human being.
Further, you can't dismiss this in the name of higher political or socioeconomic aspirations. Since Paul has no chance of winning — seriously, no chance at all — his only value is as a voice, a conduit for principles. And if your only hope is to change the discourse by amplifying ideas, you can do that via many voices and avenues. As I said in my Vice follow-up, acknowledging some of Paul's good ideas,
when you opt to support anti-imperialist and civil liberties ideals by supporting Paul the Candidate, you end up supporting everything else about him. That includes those newsletters and the unambiguous message to those who enjoy them: You can write these things and succeed; this works. The other good ideas to which he's signatory can't erase the fact that he put his name to those words printed above. The moral weight of those newsletters drags down even the most high-minded aspirations he has about civil liberties, and everything crashes down on all of us.
It's fine to have convictions about things he believes in. But when you voluntarily whitewash his record or choose to ignore it and champion him anyway, you are complicit in supporting the idea that racism and homophobia are morally inconsequential to the process of running for President of the United States. And, while many Paul supporters consider racism a social injury subordinate to extra-legal military conflict, there are just as many who disgustingly handwave at racism because it's an inconsequential burp on the way to more tax cuts, Free Markets, Free Money, Free Black Peop — stuff for me!

And still, for the faithful, this will not be enough.

Below, I've tried to give helpful general (bold) titles to each excerpt of the various Ron Paul newsletters available. These come courtesy of a zipfile of scans sent to me by reader Heresiarch, who, along with others, compiled it from various sources — although the lion's share, if not all, come from James Kirchick, who wrote the original, big Ron Paul story in The New Republic, in 2008. (You can see many of his highlights on the scans.) I have omitted the over 65 pages of scanned federal earmarks Ron Paul requested for his district, in a fit of States' Wants pique. I have also omitted the scans of Von Mises Institute brochures about a Secession Conference at which Paul spoke.

No attempt has been made to organize these via topic, since pages of each newsletter are apt to feature mini-articles on multiple topics, making organization futile. (My summaries don't indicate all that go on in the scans, so please click away.) Finally, below some of the scans, I've offered some comments in plain text. Those within quotation marks are direct quotes from the text appearing in the newsletter scans. Those without quotation marks are my own observations.

(Open each image in a new tab to embiggen.)

http://www.mrdestructo.com/2011/12/game-over-scans-of-over-50-ron-paul.html

Ron Paul Newsletter—February, 1990: The Coming Race War and Shame of MLK Day

"Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for that pro-communist philanderer, Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day. Listen to a black radio talk show in any major city. The racial hatred makes a KKK rally look tame."

And futurist Walt Disney today unveiled his plans to create a new themepark style attraction in Anehiem, California.

Some people are just broken records for old BS news..... like Bull Oreally and Fake Noise

I have my opinion too, like the writer of this hype.....and it's a whole different story, no less credible than this drivel!

The simple fact is that the Pauls scare the neo cons..

"The highest greatness, surviving time and stone, is that which proceeds from the soul of man. Monarchs and cabinets, generals and admirals, with the pomp of court and the circumstance of war, in the lapse of time disappear from sight; but the pioneers of truth, though poor and lowly, especially those whose example elevates human nature, and teaches the rights of man, so that "a government of the people, by the people, for the people, may not perish from the earth;" such a harbinger can never be forgotten, and their renown spreads co-extensive with the cause they served so well."

Charles Sumner

I am so not reading all that..

So, instead...

I'll just pretend I did and say..

"I approve this message."

(Since it's political; I'll also add.)

"I had nothing to do with that. It was just the media."

..sweet!

Been a while since we had a president die in office.

Maybe I'll like who he chooses for VP.

*debates*

George Bush Sr. and Jr. had the support of the KKK and Nazi party,they still ended up president.But then again their granddaddy had ties to Hitler.By the way the Tea Baggers that are scared of Obama turning this country into socialism"which it already is before Obama became president"are wanting their SS and Medicare protected yet these 2 things alone represent socialism...just sayin.

People seem to affiliate socialism with communism,actually those 2 words meanings are different.

I guess in theory you can say that.

I suppose Hitler's socialism was different than Stalin's communism..

Communism is political socialism. It's socialism taken to it's logical extreme.

Both are left wing philosophies.

And FDRs "New Deal"socialism.Funny all 3 of these political figures are around at the same time....hmmmmmmm

http://mises.org/daily/5850/The-Liberation-of-the-Demons

Same Difference!
Brainbrothers!

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/communism.html

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/socialism.html


http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/fascism_and_communism-socialism.html

this country is a melting pot it has socialism,capitalism,fascism and federalism in one republic.

PAULTARDS UNITE RP FTW

We will see on Saturday.