One Person to Exclude from the Conversation

As the Republican Party and the conservative movement reconstitute themselves, hopefully with drastic reform and modernization and an acknowledgment of demographic changes, there is one person who should play no role in the discussion: Ron Paul. Though he raised millions of dollars on the internet, he wasn't well-received by voters in the Republican primaries. Furthermore, his orbit came to include adherents to various conspiracy theories about 9/11, world government, and a NAFTA superhighway. If Dr. Paul is not marginalized in the conservative conversation it will represent a repudiation of the tough work William F. Buckley Jr. did in ostracizing the Objectivists and the John Birch Society, or as he recalled it: "You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks." In case anyone forgot, here is something I wrote earlier this year about an association I regard as extremely revelatory about Dr. Paul's sordid beliefs:

By now you will have read that during the past thirty years various newsletters bearing the name of Texas Congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul have promulgated racism and paranoia. While the titles have changed—Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Survival Report—the themes have not. The newsletters espouse bigotry of the kind that comports perfectly with his xenophobic, isolationist ideology. This is no cosmopolitan libertarian, as many antiwar liberals have been duped into believing. Ron Paul is a sinister extremist.

Having first appeared in the late 1970s, the newsletters were published without bylines, but “Ron Paul” was cited several times as the editor or publisher (or both). Contained therein are his views on why the Watts riots in 1992 ended: “it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks”; his suggestions to black activists who wanted to rename New York City after Martin Luther King Jr.: “Rapetown,” “Welfaria,” or “Zooville”; his take on the holiday honoring the slain leader: “Hate Whitey Day”; and his assessment of the end of apartheid in South Africa: the “destruction of civilization.” The newsletters also opined on the Louisiana senatorial bid of David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, advising readers that their challenge was to take the “message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.” A speech he delivered at a neo-Confederate conference in 1996, an announcement for which read “We’ll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it,” rounds out the primordial racial views propagated by Dr. Paul’s communiqués.

Predictably Dr. Paul’s bigotries are not confined to racism. He indulges in an array of paranoia and hatred, from calling Israel “an aggressive, national socialist state” (a vile statement considering “national socialism” and “Nazi” are synonymous) to entertaining the notion that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was “a setup by the Israeli Mossad.” Other conspiracies the newsletters give voice to include that the Waco shootout was a way for Bill Clinton to have his former bodyguards murdered and that David Rockefeller and fascist bankers were behind the Panama Canal Treaty. It should be obvious that what informs these newsletters is not enlightenment or empiricism but vague insinuations about Jewish bankers and shady global elites.

As these damning revelations about Dr. Paul’s lunatic past have come to light there have been laughable explanations from his campaign. One of his staffers said Dr. Paul wrote some of the articles but “Most of the incendiary stuff, no.” This is implausible and silly and belied by Dr. Paul himself, who in 1996 admitted authorship but complained the media had taken his racist statements “out of context.” The denials are complicated by the fact that, throughout the years, the newsletters have been written in the first person while referring to Dr. Paul’s personal life. There can be little doubt Dr. Paul wrote or approved of the newsletters.

Dr. Paul’s presidential campaign is essentially an artifice composed of two parts. His public proclamations titillate faddish young leftists and libertarians and generate huge fundraising, but with code words and in lesser venues he underhandedly massages reactionary crackpots and conspiracy theorists. It makes perfect sense that the “Ron Paul Revolution” is rife with the creepy dunderheads who accept the “inside job” interpretation of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Now that Dr. Paul’s reprehensible prejudices have been brought to light, I think the naïve liberals who have thrown in with this small-minded chauvinist owe themselves and everyone else an explanation.