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"Republicans" Painting Ron Paul
As A Racist
Angry White Man
The bigoted past of Ron Paul.
By James Kirchick
08/01/08 "The
New Republic" -- -- If you are a critic of the
Bush administration, chances are that, at some point over the
past six months, Ron Paul has said something that appealed to
you. Paul describes himself as a libertarian, but, since his
presidential campaign took off earlier this year, the Republican
congressman has attracted donations and plaudits from across the
ideological spectrum. Antiwar conservatives, disaffected
centrists, even young liberal activists have all flocked to
Paul, hailing him as a throwback to an earlier age, when
politicians were less mealy-mouthed and American government was
more modest in its ambitions, both at home and abroad. In The
New York Times Magazine, conservative writer Christopher
Caldwell gushed that Paul is a "formidable stander on
constitutional principle," while The Nation praised "his
full-throated rejection of the imperial project in Iraq." Former TNR editor Andrew Sullivan endorsed Paul for the GOP nomination,
and ABC's Jake Tapper described the candidate as "the one true
straight-talker in this race." Even The Wall Street Journal, the
newspaper of the elite bankers whom Paul detests, recently
advised other Republican presidential contenders not to "dismiss
the passion he's tapped."
Most voters had never heard of Paul before he launched his
quixotic bid for the Republican nomination. But the Texan has
been active in politics for decades. And, long before he was the
darling of antiwar activists on the left and right, Paul was in
the newsletter business. In the age before blogs, newsletters
occupied a prominent place in right-wing political discourse.
With the pages of mainstream political magazines typically
off-limits to their views (National Review editor William F.
Buckley having famously denounced the John Birch Society),
hardline conservatives resorted to putting out their own, less
glossy publications. These were often paranoid and
rambling--dominated by talk of international banking
conspiracies, the Trilateral Commission's plans for world
government, and warnings about coming Armageddon--but some of
them had wide and devoted audiences. And a few of the most
prominent bore the name of Ron Paul.
Paul's newsletters have carried different titles over the
years--Ron Paul's Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The
Ron Paul Survival Report--but they generally seem to have been
published on a monthly basis since at least 1978. (Paul, an
OB-GYN and former U.S. Air Force surgeon, was first elected to
Congress in 1976.) During some periods, the newsletters were
published by the Foundation for Rational Economics and
Education, a nonprofit Paul founded in 1976; at other times,
they were published by Ron Paul & Associates, a now-defunct
entity in which Paul owned a minority stake, according to his
campaign spokesman. The Freedom Report claimed to have over
100,000 readers in 1984. At one point, Ron Paul & Associates
also put out a monthly publication called The Ron Paul
Investment Letter.
The Freedom Report's online archives only go back to 1999, but I
was curious to see older editions of Paul's newsletters, in part
because of a controversy dating to 1996, when Charles "Lefty"
Morris, a Democrat running against Paul for a House seat,
released excerpts stating that "opinion polls consistently show
only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions," that
"if you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you
know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be," and that black
representative Barbara Jordan is "the archetypical half-educated
victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism."
At the time, Paul's campaign said that Morris had quoted the
newsletter out of context. Later, in 2001, Paul would claim that
someone else had written the controversial passages. (Few of the
newsletters contain actual bylines.) Caldwell, writing in the
Times Magazine last year, said he found Paul's explanation
believable, "since the style diverges widely from his own."
Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was
able to track many of them down at the libraries of the
University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Of
course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any
particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the
earlier newsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority
of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating
matters, many of the unbylined newsletters were written in the
first person, implying that Paul was the author.
But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had
one thing in common: They were published under a banner
containing Paul's name, and the articles (except for one special
edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another
writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were
written by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are
decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the
right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against
blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is
not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe
they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some
of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.
To understand Paul's philosophy, the best place to start is
probably the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think
tank based in Auburn, Alabama. The institute is named for a
libertarian Austrian economist, but it was founded by a man
named Lew Rockwell, who also served as Paul's congressional
chief of staff from 1978 to 1982. Paul has had a long and
prominent association with the institute, teaching at its
seminars and serving as a "distinguished counselor." The
institute has also published his books.
The politics of the organization are complicated--its philosophy
derives largely from the work of the late Murray Rothbard, a
Bronx-born son of Jewish immigrants from Poland and a
self-described "anarcho-capitalist" who viewed the state as
nothing more than "a criminal gang"--but one aspect of the
institute's worldview stands out as particularly disturbing: its
attachment to the Confederacy. Thomas E. Woods Jr., a member of
the institute's senior faculty, is a founder of the League of
the South, a secessionist group, and the author of The
Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, a
pro-Confederate, revisionist tract published in 2004. Paul
enthusiastically blurbed Woods's book, saying that it
"heroically rescues real history from the politically correct
memory hole." Thomas DiLorenzo, another senior faculty member
and author of The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln,
His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War, refers to the Civil War as
the "War for Southern Independence" and attacks "Lincoln
cultists"; Paul endorsed the book on MSNBC last month in a
debate over whether the Civil War was necessary (Paul thinks it
was not). In April 1995, the institute hosted a conference on
secession at which Paul spoke; previewing the event, Rockwell
wrote to supporters, "We'll explore what causes [secession] and
how to promote it." Paul's newsletters have themselves
repeatedly expressed sympathy for the general concept of
secession. In 1992, for instance, the Survival Report argued
that "the right of secession should be ingrained in a free
society" and that "there is nothing wrong with loosely banding
together small units of government. With the disintegration of
the Soviet Union, we too should consider it."
The people surrounding the von Mises Institute--including
Paul--may describe themselves as libertarians, but they are
nothing like the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato
Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine. Instead, they
represent a strain of right-wing libertarianism that views the
Civil War as a catastrophic turning point in American
history--the moment when a tyrannical federal government
established its supremacy over the states. As one prominent
Washington libertarian told me, "There are too many libertarians
in this country ... who, because they are attracted to the great
books of Mises, ... find their way to the Mises Institute and
then are told that a defense of the Confederacy is part of
libertarian thought."
Paul's alliance with neo-Confederates helps explain the views
his newsletters have long espoused on race. Take, for instance,
a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in
June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that
year. "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the
blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting
began," read one typical passage. According to the newsletter,
the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the
black community with "'civil rights,' quotas, mandated hiring
preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered
voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black
curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate
crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question
the black agenda." It also denounced "the media" for believing
that "America's number one need is an unlimited white checking
account for underclass blacks." To be fair, the newsletter did
praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had
the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back.
Koreans were "the only people to act like real Americans," it
explained, "mainly because they have not yet been assimilated
into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced
by raging blacks to lie back and think of England."
This "Special Issue on Racial Terrorism" was hardly the first
time one of Paul's publications had raised these topics. As
early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter,
titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial
Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare
recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white
'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming
Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If
you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you
can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In
June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's
Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the
D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of
the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item
about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably
Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to
use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming." That
same year, a newsletter described the aftermath of a basketball
game in which "blacks poured into the streets of Chicago in
celebration. How to celebrate? How else? They broke the windows
of stores to loot." The newsletter inveighed against liberals
who "want to keep white America from taking action against black
crime and welfare," adding, "Jury verdicts, basketball games,
and even music are enough to set off black rage, it seems."
Such views on race also inflected the newsletters' commentary on
foreign affairs. South Africa's transition to multiracial
democracy was portrayed as a "destruction of civilization" that
was "the most tragic [to] ever occur on that continent, at least
below the Sahara"; and, in March 1994, a month before Nelson
Mandela was elected president, one item warned of an impending
"South African Holocaust."
Martin Luther King Jr. earned special ire from Paul's
newsletters, which attacked the civil rights leader frequently,
often to justify opposition to the federal holiday named after
him. ("What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!" one newsletter
complained in 1990. "We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey
Day.") In the early 1990s, a newsletter attacked the "X-Rated
Martin Luther King" as a "world-class philanderer who beat up
his paramours," "seduced underage girls and boys," and "made a
pass at" fellow civil rights leader Ralph Abernathy. One
newsletter ridiculed black activists who wanted to rename New
York City after King, suggesting that "Welfaria," "Zooville," "Rapetown,"
"Dirtburg," and "Lazyopolis" were better alternatives. The same
year, King was described as "a comsymp, if not an actual party
member, and the man who replaced the evil of forced segregation
with the evil of forced integration."
While bashing King, the newsletters had kind words for the
former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke. In a
passage titled "The Duke's Victory," a newsletter celebrated
Duke's 44 percent showing in the 1990 Louisiana Senate primary.
"Duke lost the election," it said, "but he scared the blazes out
of the Establishment." In 1991, a newsletter asked, "Is David
Duke's new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial
election, good for anti-big government forces?" The conclusion
was that "our priority should be to take the anti-government,
anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege,
anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more
consistent package of freedom." Duke is now returning the favor,
telling me that, while he will not formally endorse any
candidate, he has made information about Ron Paul available on
his website.
Like blacks, gays earn plenty of animus in Paul's newsletters.
They frequently quoted Paul's "old colleague," Representative
William Dannemeyer--who advocated quarantining people with
AIDS--praising him for "speak[ing] out fearlessly despite the
organized power of the gay lobby." In 1990, one newsletter
mentioned a reporter from a gay magazine "who certainly had an
axe to grind, and that's not easy with a limp wrist." In an item
titled, "The Pink House?" the author of a newsletter--again,
presumably Paul--complained about President George H.W. Bush's
decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite "the heads of
homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony,"
adding, "I miss the closet." "Homosexuals," it said, "not to
speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social
pressure forced them to hide their activities." When Marvin
Liebman, a founder of the conservative Young Americans for
Freedom and a longtime political activist, announced that he was
gay in the pages of National Review, a Paul newsletter implored,
"Bring Back the Closet!" Surprisingly, one item expressed
ambivalence about the contentious issue of gays in the military,
but ultimately concluded, "Homosexuals, if admitted, should be
put in a special category and not allowed in close physical
contact with heterosexuals."
The newsletters were particularly obsessed with AIDS, "a
politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence
of the homosexual lobby," and used it as a rhetorical club to
beat gay people in general. In 1990, one newsletter approvingly
quoted "a well-known Libertarian editor" as saying, "The ACT-UP
slogan, on stickers plastered all over Manhattan, is 'Silence =
Death.' But shouldn't it be 'Sodomy = Death'?" Readers were
warned to avoid blood transfusions because gays were trying to
"poison the blood supply." "Am I the only one sick of hearing
about the 'rights' of AIDS carriers?" a newsletter asked in
1990. That same year, citing a Christian-right fringe
publication, an item suggested that "the AIDS patient" should
not be allowed to eat in restaurants and that "AIDS can be
transmitted by saliva," which is false. Paul's newsletters
advertised a book, Surviving the AIDS Plague--also based upon
the casual-transmission thesis--and defended "parents who worry
about sending their healthy kids to school with AIDS victims."
Commenting on a rise in AIDS infections, one newsletter said
that "gays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good
sense," adding: "[T]hese men don't really see a reason to live
past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children,
and their lives are centered on new sexual partners." Also,
"they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."
The rhetoric when it came to Jews was little better. The
newsletters display an obsession with Israel; no other country
is mentioned more often in the editions I saw, or with more
vitriol. A 1987 issue of Paul's Investment Letter called Israel
"an aggressive, national socialist state," and a 1990 newsletter
discussed the "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of
Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the
Mossad in their area of expertise." Of the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing, a newsletter said, "Whether it was a setup by
the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was
truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters
little."
Paul's newsletters didn't just contain bigotry. They also
contained paranoia--specifically, the brand of anti-government
paranoia that festered among right-wing militia groups during
the 1980s and '90s. Indeed, the newsletters seemed to hint that
armed revolution against the federal government would be
justified. In January 1995, three months before right-wing
militants bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a
newsletter listed "Ten Militia Commandments," describing "the
1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty" as "one of
the most encouraging developments in America." It warned militia
members that they were "possibly under BATF [Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco and Firearms] or other totalitarian federal
surveillance" and printed bits of advice from the Sons of
Liberty, an anti-government militia based in Alabama--among
them, "You can't kill a Hydra by cutting off its head," "Keep
the group size down," "Keep quiet and you're harder to find,"
"Leave no clues," "Avoid the phone as much as possible," and
"Don't fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war,
let it begin here."
The newsletters are chock-full of shopworn conspiracies,
reflecting Paul's obsession with the
"industrial-banking-political elite" and promoting his distrust
of a federally regulated monetary system utilizing paper bills.
They contain frequent and bristling references to the Bilderberg
Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign
Relations--organizations that conspiracy theorists have long
accused of seeking world domination. In 1978, a newsletter
blamed David Rockefeller, the Trilateral Commission, and
"fascist-oriented, international banking and business interests"
for the Panama Canal Treaty, which it called "one of the saddest
events in the history of the United States." A 1988 newsletter
cited a doctor who believed that AIDS was created in a World
Health Organization laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. In
addition, Ron Paul & Associates sold a video about Waco produced
by "patriotic Indiana lawyer Linda Thompson"--as one of the
newsletters called her--who maintained that Waco was a
conspiracy to kill ATF agents who had previously worked for
President Clinton as bodyguards. As with many of the more
outlandish theories the newsletters cited over the years, the
video received a qualified endorsement: "I can't vouch for every
single judgment by the narrator, but the film does show the
depths of government perfidy, and the national police's tricks
and crimes," the newsletter said, adding, "Send your check for
$24.95 to our Houston office, or charge the tape to your credit
card at 1-800-RON-PAUL."
When I asked Jesse Benton, Paul's campaign spokesman, about the
newsletters, he said that, over the years, Paul had granted
"various levels of approval" to what appeared in his
publications--ranging from "no approval" to instances where he
"actually wrote it himself." After I read Benton some of the
more offensive passages, he said, "A lot of [the newsletters] he
did not see. Most of the incendiary stuff, no." He added that he
was surprised to hear about the insults hurled at Martin Luther
King, because "Ron thinks Martin Luther King is a hero."
In other words, Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as
a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his
underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be
more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the
newsletters only sporadically--or if the newsletters had just
been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine
how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism,
homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be
printed under his name for so long if he did not share these
views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the
most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he
disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would
think that at some point--over the course of decades--he would
have done something about it.
What's more, Paul's connections to extremism go beyond the
newsletters. He has given extensive interviews to the magazine
of the John Birch Society, and has frequently been a guest of
Alex Jones, a radio host and perhaps the most famous conspiracy
theorist in America. Jones--whose recent documentary, Endgame:
Blueprint for Global Enslavement, details the plans of George
Pataki, David Rockefeller, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands,
among others, to exterminate most of humanity and develop
themselves into "superhuman" computer hybrids able to "travel
throughout the cosmos"--estimates that Paul has appeared on his
radio program about 40 times over the past twelve years.
Then there is Gary North, who has worked on Paul's congressional
staff. North is a central figure in Christian Reconstructionism,
which advocates the implementation of Biblical law in modern
society. Christian Reconstructionists share common ground with
libertarians, since both groups dislike the central government.
North has advocated the execution of women who have abortions
and people who curse their parents. In a 1986 book, North argued
for stoning as a form of capital punishment--because "the
implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually
no cost." North is perhaps best known for Gary North's Remnant
Review, a "Christian and pro free-market" newsletter. In a 1983
letter Paul wrote on behalf of an organization called the
Committee to Stop the Bail-Out of Multinational Banks (known by
the acronym CSBOMB), he bragged, "Perhaps you already read in
Gary North's Remnant Review about my exposes of government
abuse."
Ron Paul is not going to be president. But, as his campaign has
gathered steam, he has found himself increasingly permitted
inside the boundaries of respectable debate. He sat for an
extensive interview with Tim Russert recently. He has raised
almost $20 million in just three months, much of it online. And
he received nearly three times as many votes as erstwhile
front-runner Rudy Giuliani in last week's Iowa caucus. All the
while he has generally been portrayed by the media as principled
and serious, while garnering praise for being a
"straight-talker."
From his newsletters, however, a different picture of Paul
emerges--that of someone who is either himself deeply embittered
or, for a long time, allowed others to write bitterly on his
behalf. His adversaries are often described in harsh terms:
Barbara Jordan is called "Barbara Morondon," Eleanor Holmes
Norton is a "black pinko," Donna Shalala is a "short lesbian,"
Ron Brown is a "racial victimologist," and Roberta Achtenberg,
the first openly gay public official confirmed by the United
States Senate, is a "far-left, normal-hating lesbian activist."
Maybe such outbursts mean Ron Paul really is a straight-talker.
Or maybe they just mean he is a man filled with hate.
Corrections: This article originally misidentified ABC's Jake
Tapper as Jack. In addition, Paul was a surgeon in the Air
Force, not the Army, as the piece originally stated. It also
stated that David Duke competed in the 1990 Louisiana Republican
Senate primary. In fact, he was a Republican candidate in an
open primary. The article has been corrected.
Please see Ron Paul's Reply Here
James Kirchick is an assistant editor at The New Republic.
© The New Republic 2008
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