-By Warner Todd Huston
The folks at the New Republic struck gold with a great article on the racist, sexist, and homophobic content of decades of Ron Paul’s newsletters. This should be a needle in the Ron Paul balloon… but it is doubtful it will dissuade too many Paullynuts. After all, the racist, nutbar content of his past newsletters fits the great majority of his follower’s ideology.
The piece by James Kirchick is very long, but it is well worth the read. go on over and pick it up at Angry White Man.
I won’t bother repeating the dreck in these newsletters, but here is the salient bit close to the end of Kirchick’s piece:
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.
It is out of the question to believe that Ron Paul could be separated from the newsletter that bore his name for decades!
Certainly, Paul may not believe every racist sentiment in these past newsletters, but he allowed his name to be associated with it for many, many issues and this puts his seal of approval on the whole mess.
As a Republican that has libertarian tendencies, I demand that Ron Paul remove himself from contention for the presidency. Further I demand that he resign from his seat in Congress. He is a disgrace to all Republicans and Libertarians everywhere. For a while I just felt Paul was a goofy, oddity. Now I see that he is a racist, nutball and a man like this is far more dangerous than I thought.
Continue reading “Ron Paul’s Racist Newsletters”