The dark side of the 'Paul Phenomenon'

-- by Dave

On Saturday, Ron Paul held a campaign rally in Philadelphia. As Atrios noticed, it attracted a large crowd, most of them quite vocal about ending the Iraq war. But if you looked carefully, there was also an element (most them also antiwar) that's become something of a fixture at Ron Paul rallies: skinheads, neo-Nazis, militiamen, and various stripes of right-wing extremists.

The photographer Isis was there and captured some of this, including the shot above. That's Keith Carney of the Keystone State Skinheads on the left, posing with an unidentified Stormfront friend. Meanwhile, over at Stormfront, the event sparked a flurry of posts urging nonstop Paul support. And as One People's Project noticed, even one of the rally's speakers, a woman named Debbie Hopper, has a distinguished background in far-right activism, including having helped organize a tribute to Sam Francis.

Mike Flugennock made a video about it all, featuring a revealing encounter between Darryl of One People's Project and the skinheads, who were all toting Ron Paul signs and wearing his stickers and buttons:



What does this all mean? Does it mean Ron Paul is fronting for fascists? Does it mean he's a racist? Or is it something more complex, but equally disturbing?

Every presidential candidate attracts cranks, racists, kooks, conspiracy theorists, radicals of various stripes, and assorted fringe actors to their campaigns -- some more than others. Generally speaking, it's not worth paying a lot of attention to, because their numbers typically are quite small, and most of those involved are idiosyncratic -- that is, they only coincidentally reflect on the candidate themselves, if at all. They're irrelevant.

But people who track the activities of the far right -- the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Patriots/militiamen, "Freemen"/"constitutionalists", and anti-abortion, anti-tax, and anti-gay radicals -- do pay attention to how they vote: where their money and support goes, and why. It's important to track this because it's about watching who they empower, and who's empowering them, and to what extent this is occurring.

In the 1980s and early '90s, they tended to divide their votes among a menu of various fringe candidates (David Duke, Bo Gritz), mostly under the banner of the Populist Party, and "mainstream" third-party candidates like Ross Perot and Patrick Buchanan. A lot of them, however, abandoned third parties altogether after the 2000 election, when Buchanan betrayed them by choosing a black woman as his running mate -- and many of them simply began voting Republican.

Of course, linking Bush -- who has never publicly appeared before, or expressly courted, such groups -- to their hateful activities would indeed be "guilt by association." Yet it's also dishonest to ignore the reality that movement conservativism made itself increasingly more hospitable to these blocs. As I noted in that piece, some of this had to do with gestures George W. Bush made throughout his campaign:

These failures were symptomatic of a campaign that made multiple gestures of conciliation to a variety of extreme right-wing groups. These ranged from the neo-Confederates to whom Bush's campaign made its most obvious appeals in the South Carolina primary to his speaking appearance at Bob Jones University. Bush and his GOP cohorts continued to make a whole host of other gestures to other extremist components: attacking affirmative action, kneecapping the United Nations, and gutting hate-crimes laws.

The result was that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists came to identify politically with George W. Bush more than any other mainstream Republican politician in memory. This was embodied by the endorsement of Bush's candidacy by a range of white supremacists, including David Duke, Don Black and Matthew Hale of the World Church of the Creator.

Of course, this support was so small as to be insignificant numerically speaking, though its influence and reach were another matter entirely. Still, in reality, far-right activists voted for Bush more as a desultory gesture than anything else. Which is why, of course, they have now fled him in large numbers, now that his presidency has proven to be such a manifest catastrophe.

Well, the far right has always been fond of tapping into threads of national discontent -- it's how they've survived all these years, really -- which is why they have made a living the past generation whipping up anti-government sentiment, exploiting the farm crisis, gun control, abortion, education, and a whole menu of other issues along the way. More recently, immigration has been their chief entree to the mainstream, and now they have jumped on the anti-Iraq war bandwagon.

Ron Paul's presidential candidacy has been the focal point for this, and it has been striking, not to mention disturbing, to observe the unanimity with which the far right has been coalescing behind Paul's candidacy. And the support (unlike that for either Buchanan or Perot) has not been merely avid, it's perfervid.

Virtually every far-right entity -- neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militias, constitutionalists, Minutemen, nativists, you name it -- that I've been monitoring for the past decade or more is lining up behind Paul. I've checked with other human-rights observers, and they're seeing the same thing. Ron Paul, rather quietly and under the radar, has managed to unite nearly the entire radical right behind him.

And it's not likely, even, that this is so much by design as by nature. It's a natural outgrowth of who Ron Paul is. Yet the scope of this coalescence of the far right is unprecedented. Certainly no other presidential candidate in my memory -- except perhaps the early George Wallace -- has energized and drawn the ardent support from the far right the way Ron Paui has.

Certainly, the Philadelphia event was far from unique. White supremacists from a variety of organizations -- the NSM, Stormfront, National Vanguard, WAR, Hammerskins -- have been outspoken and unapologetic supporters of Paul, and have come out to rally for him at a number of different campaign appearances. For example, at a Paul rally in August in New Jersey, a sizeable number of Stormfronters showed up. Indeed, a quick Google of Stormfront's site for "Ron Paul" gives you a clear idea just how involved they are: 789,000 links.

If you do a video Google for "Ron Paul" and "New World Order", you get 309 hits, including this one:



Carl Klang was a fixture on the militia K-ration-dinner circuit in the 1990s, being the guy who would come out onstage and sing a few "patriotic" songs like "Watch Out for Martial Law" and "Seventeen Little Children". Considering that Paul was once a fixture on the same circuit, they have even shared the stage back then.

And that, of course, is a large part of the reasons why talking about the radical-right bloc's support for Ron Paul's candidacy isn't "guilt by association," which by definition entails an irrelevant association.

Let's use the new neo-Nazi affinity for the antiwar movement as an illustrative example here. Smearing one by linking them to the other is in fact "guilt by association," because the association is irrelevant.

The skins' reasons for opposing the war are, in fact, wholly different from those of the much larger antiwar left, who are opposed largely on humanitarian grounds; the far right, however, opposes the war because it's perceived to be fought on behalf of Israel and the Jews -- which is why, when you hear them talk about "neocons", you know that they are in fact using it as a code word for "Jew." So the association, such as it is (it seems largely to occur at Paul events) is purely coincidental, accidental, a nonsequitur, and largely irrelevant (though it hopefully gives antiwar liberals pause about the way they talk about Israeli influence in the matter).

However, the fact that they do so in the name of supporting Ron Paul is neither merely accidental nor irrelevant. After all, Paul himself is inclined to rail against "the Israel lobby" and "the neocons". But that's only scratching the surface of his appeal to this sector. Unlike the antiwar left, there's more than an abundance of common ground between Ron Paul and the far right.

Paul's associations with the radical right, in fact, are fully relevant, on three levels:

1) He has a fully documented history of actively seeking their support.

2) His ideological framework -- fighting "the New World Order," eliminating the Fed, the IRS, and most federal agencies, getting us out of the U.N., ending all gun controls, reinstating the gold standard -- meshes neatly with theirs.

3) The organizations with whom he's associated are not benign, nor merely even "controversial", but are truly noxious elements that no responsible politician should be seen endorsing: racists, xenophobes, conspiracists, and frauds. This isn't the Rose Garden Society we're talking about here, or even the NRA.

As I recently pointed out:

[I]if you run through the broad array of kooky theories about the federal government promoted on the far right, you can find any number of Ron Paul's positions -- particularly regarding the gold standard, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the United Nations -- floating about there. Notably, Paul also played a significant role in Congress' ongoing failure to confront the growing problem of conspiracy-driven tax protests by diverting the blame to the IRS itself.

But that's who Ron Paul is -- a "constitutionalist" who deals in conspiracy theories and extremist anti-government beliefs. It's who he always has been, and who he is now. It isn't just an accident that Paul very recently spoke to a group with troubling racial ties, or that he attended a Patriot Network banquet in his honor in 2004, or that he gave an interview to a conspiracist magazine the same year. Hell, he's been operating within those same circles since 1985.

Here's a prime example of this:



These are the first two pages of a 35-page mini-book that Ron Paul published in 1988 titled "World Money, World Banking, and World Government: A Special Report from the Ron Paul Investment Letter". It looks at the "threat" of the Trilateral Commission and the "European Currency Unit", which happened to be the far right's big bogeyman of the time. (Ever notice how their dire warnings of imminent doom never quite pan out? Of course, Ron Paul also has a long history of associating with one of the preeminent promoters of the most spectacular case of right-conspiracy failure, namely, the Y2K hysteria: Gary North.)

And it's not as though he's changed a lot. Just three years ago, he gave a long, rambling interview to Conspiracy Planet discussing the "New World Order," which included (among many gems) the following exchange at the open:

First question: do you believe there are secret forces at work that are attempting to dismantle the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

Ron Paul: I don't know what the best word is, but secret is pretty good. They're certainly not known to a lot of people; it's actually what their doing. But then again, it's not absolute secrecy. If you look around you can usually get the information. There was a time when nobody even knew who was a member of the CFR or the Trilateral Commission. I think it's a bad sign that they're not as secret as they used to be. They're bolder now. But there is an agenda.

It's also worth remembering, of course, that the bulk of the rest of much of Paul's radical agenda, such as dismantling the Federal Reserve, is similarly founded in old-fashioned right-wing bunkum.

This is why, as Bruce Miller elegantly explains, anyone who's been exposed to these folks for any length of time understand clearly just who Ron Paul is and where he's coming from. His "libertarianism" is more of a malleable veneer over old-style Bircherite conservatism than anything genuine.

So this is why it's not only relevant, but important, to talk about the kind of supporters Ron Paul is gathering behind him. Andrew Sullivan gets this half right when he notes, "I tend to place greater emphasis on loons and hate-mongers that candidates actively seek out." But because he neglects to dig deeper and find out just to what extent Paul has in fact sought out the "loons and hate-mongers," he then blithely assumes that only example of this is Paul's refusal to return a $500 donation from Stormfront's Don Black and dismisses it as "guilt by association" and a "smear." (For a nastier take on all this, you can also check out Justin Raimondo's attack on me today.)

But even that example is more relevant than Sullivan and Paul's apologists will admit. As Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates put it when I chatted with him about this today: "Those neo-Nazis have a First Amendment right to endorse Ron Paul, but Ron Paul has a moral obligation to disavow that donation."

He added: "There's two issues: Why would anyone have to ask Ron Paul to disassociate himself from the endorsement of neo-Nazis? And the second is that when they did ask him, his silence spoke volumes about his values. You know, 'I don't enjoy the endorsement of neo-Nazis' -- how hard is that to say? And why hasn't he refunded it? It's not like this is a gray area."

So I can't help largely agreeing, but wondering if there isn't a certain naivete involved, when Glenn Greenwald writes, in defense of Paul:

As the debates of 2002 should have proved rather conclusively, the arguments that are deemed to be the province of the weirdos and losers may actually be the ideas that are right. They at least deserve an honest airing, especially in a presidential campaign with as much at stake as this one.

That's all very good and very true, but I think some well-informed discretion about what arguments we engage is also needed. There is, after all, a reason that the arguments from such sectors as the radical right are (fortunately) held by only a small number of people: They are either founded on false information and bizarre distortions, or they're simply hateful and vicious, and often both.

Otherwise, what you'll often find being woven into the national conversation -- besides truly fringe ideas like eliminating the Fed and abolishing the IRS, as well as "New World Order" theories -- is the kind of ideology that spews from the fringe of Ron Paul's more rabid right-wing followers. This happens not only in public view, but also on the ground.

Take, for example, the Stormfront thread discussing the Philly rally, wherein a poster named "CassandraAdams" discussed meeting a woman who fled the Brown Peril in Arizona and was at the Paul rally, but who apparently fled when Cassandra started talking about defending the white race. She concluded:

The reason I've written this is that I am actually despairing, this morning, over the Fate of my Race. How can we survive, when the millions of victims of other Races refuse to acknowledge the FACT of the onslaught against us?

A charmer named "Wolfsnarl" responded:

If we can get them to defend their race without them actively thinking they are doing so in those terms-through mainstream anti-immigration groups like NumbersUSA or Ron Paul activism for example. After all, how many foot soldiers of the jewish/communist takeover actively thought of themselves as communists or whatever?

This is why they're out in large numbers for Ron Paul: they see his candidacy as a real opportunity to advance their agenda -- and they have very good reasons for believing that. It's a fertile ground for them, and they know it.

Which should be reason for the rest of us -- even those who appreciate Paul's ardent antiwar position, or who see him as potentially a GOP stalking horse -- to pause before applauding his rise.

The clearing view of Ron Paul

-- by Dave

Well, we've been saying all along that Ron Paul's presidential campaign -- which is charged up enough with very public xenophobia as it is -- is attracting white supremacists and other extremists in large droves because, largely, that's who Ron Paul is.

Clearly, more people are coming to realize this, thanks in no small part to Jamie Kirchick's superb reporting in The New Republic last week on Paul's long history of publishing newletters riddled with racism, homophobia, and conspiracy-mongering. Kirchick has a follow-up this week with even more newsletters, and as he observes at the TNR blog:

At this point, it seems that the only people still defending Ron Paul are the openly bigoted or the comically credulous. For the former, the revelation that Paul had (at best, negligent at worst, complicit) involvement in the publishing of and profiting from paranoid and bigoted newsletters for over two decades neatly confirms the reasons why they had chosen to support the Texas Congressman presidential campaign in the first place. For the latter, no amount of evidence will ever convince them that “Dr. No” is anything less than some saintly, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” caricature.

Now comes the revelation that one of Paul's organizers in Michigan -- a man he's seen posing with in the photo below, located on the michigan4ronpaul.com site -- is also a notorious neo-Nazi and Klan organizer in that neck of the woods.

Phenry at DailyKos (who has been doing a bang-up job tracking Paul all along) has the details:

As voters in Michigan go to the polls to vote in today's primary, volunteer coordinators for the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are working hard across the state. One of these is Randy Gray, a 29-year-old resident of Midland, Michigan whom the Ron Paul 2008 Michigan Campaign Web site lists as the Midland County coordinator for the Ron Paul campaign. Gray's campaign profile page, a cached version of which can be seen here, doesn't go into much detail; there's a picture of Gray with the candidate, along with Gray's statement that "I support Ron Paul because he is in the fight for freedom." The page contains no mention of one of Gray's other roles: organizer with the Knight's Party faction of the Ku Klux Klan.

Modest Mouse goes on to detail this:

Randy Gray is referenced in our Far Right in West Michigan Database due to a speech he delivered at the fiftieth anniversary of the Knight's Party faction of the Ku Klux Klan.... Since 2005, Gray has filed the paperwork necessary to air the program "This is the Klan" on Midland Community Television. The program, hosted by Thomas Robb and Rachel Pendergraft, is a thirty minute program designed primarily for viewing on the Internet....

Gray has attended various racist events with and without the Ku Klux Klan in recent years as well. He is quoted in a May 2004 article in the Tennessean in which the Ku Klux Klan planned a rally against a "Gay Day" event at the "Dollywood" theme park.... Gray was twice (1, 2) kicked out of city council meetings for protesting the city's permitting process in relation to a Klan protest against the Martin Luther King holiday.

There's also a video of Gray speaking at that white-power rally in Tennessee:



Transcript:

... [S]o many of these savages, according to our statistics, they're murdering our people, on a daily basis, and there's nobody in our legal system that would dare say, "Bring back the rope! Bring back the electric chair!" Instead, they take our tax dollars and they feed these animals at the cost of our race!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you have been lied to about diversity and multiculturalism. The immigration crisis that's being pushed upon us by the race traitors of Washington, D.C. -- they don't care about our people, they're too concerned about the homosexual rights! They're too worred about protecting the rights of the Highlander communist school in New Market, Tennessee, that pushes this immigration, this race problem in our nation today -- comes right out of the communist school. It was closed down originally in 1960 by the state of Tennessee, but they are in New Market, Tennessee, and we were up there yesterday taking photo pictures.

One of the interesting aspects of Kirchick's follow-up is that it makes clear how much Paul's newsletters were relying on the work of the "academic" white supremacist Jared Taylor of American Renaissance,, something we had pointed out earlier in relation to the newsletters.

Even more revealing, perhaps, is the reportage from Julian Sanchez and David Weigel of Reason regarding the chief authorship of the newsletters. as was hinted at earlier, it was none other than Lew Rockwell:

[I]n interviews with Reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Paul—all named the same man as Paul's chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.

Financial records from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in 2001. During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul—accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman's recent writings and audio recordings.

Rockwell has denied responsibility for the newsletters' contents to The New Republic's Jamie Kirchick. Rockwell twice declined to discuss the matter with reason, maintaining this week that he had "nothing to say." He has characterized discussion of the newsletters as "hysterical smears aimed at political enemies" of The New Republic. Paul himself called the controversy "old news" and "ancient history" when we reached him last week, and he has not responded to further request for comment.

But a source close to the Paul presidential campaign told reason that Rockwell authored much of the content of the Political Report and Survival Report. "If Rockwell had any honor he'd come out and I say, ‘I wrote this stuff,'" said the source, who asked not to be named because Paul remains friendly with Rockwell and is reluctant to assign responsibility for the letters. "He should have done it 10 years ago."

Rockwell was publicly named as Paul's ghostwriter as far back as a 1988 issue of the now-defunct movement monthly American Libertarian. "This was based on my understanding at the time that Lew would write things that appeared in Ron's various newsletters," former AL editor Mike Holmes told reason. "Neither Ron nor Lew ever told me that, but other people close to them such as Murray Rothbard suggested that Lew was involved, and it was a common belief in libertarian circles."

And they also uncover the point that this was not a penny-ante operation:

The publishing operation was lucrative. A tax document from June 1993—wrapping up the year in which the Political Report had published the "welfare checks" comment on the L.A. riots—reported an annual income of $940,000 for Ron Paul & Associates, listing four employees in Texas (Paul's family and Rockwell) and seven more employees around the country. If Paul didn't know who was writing his newsletters, he knew they were a crucial source of income and a successful tool for building his fundraising base for a political comeback.

As Kirchick observes:

To believe that Ron Paul had no knowledge of what was being written in his own name, in his own office, for 20 years -- and that he didn't even read his own monthly publication -- not only “stretches credulity to the breaking point,” it actually requires believing bald-faced lies.

Moreover, the whole picture is now emerging into public view of Ron Paul, not just regarding his integrity and honesty on these matters, but of what his politics really are.

He has successfully sold himself to many people -- including many thoughtful, smart people who believe in his decency -- as a libertarian.

But what he really always has been is a far-right Bircherite who has successfully adapted the language of libertarianism to fit an extremist agenda -- which is why he has so many neo-Nazis hanging out in his woodshed.

And now people can see that clearly -- if they can find it within themselves to shed their emotional attachments.

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

--by Sara

Ron Paul's been explaining away a decade of anti-black/anti-semitic/patriot whackadoodle writings by simply saying, "A ghostwriter did it." This excuse has been popping up everywhere, courtesy of his addled minions who seem to accept it as a reasonable excuse that lets their man off the hook for statements no American politician should ever make in public (or private either, for that matter).

As someone who once made a good living ghost-writing national award-winning newsletters for three different entities, I want to explain a little bit about how that works -- and why this explanation is beyond bogus.

Back in the day (which corresponds closely to the heyday of The Ron Paul Survival Report), newsletter clients retained my services as a writer under a work-for-hire contract. That means that -- unlike other writing work, to which I retain all legal rights -- the client ordered me to produce work carefully-tailored to their own needs, bought that work outright, owned all rights to it, and put their own names on it. (That’s what makes it ghosted. My name might have appeared in a masthead, or nowhere.) My job was to take their ideas, make them sound pretty, and organize the whole into a coherent, readable newsletter. Legally and ethically, it was just as though they'd produced the piece themselves.

Paul's apologists may need to hear that again. Once they paid my fee, all legal rights to it belonged to them outright. It was their intellectual property -- noun, verb, and preposition. They had absolute freedom to add to it, cut it, or change it around any way they chose. (This is one reason I didn't mind keeping my name off the pieces.) Because they bought the right to put their name on my work and represent it as their own -- a right that Ron Paul evidently also exercised at The Ron Paul Survival Report -- they paid me a nice premium over and above what I'd have made writing the same pieces for a magazine.

If one of those clients stood up years later and insisted that no, they didn't say that -- "she put words in my mouth that I never knew about!" -- I'd be very very quick to point out that they bought it...and they own it. When they put their names over my words, they claimed full responsibility for them. Once their check cleared, it was theirs. They can't go around blaming me for any problems that might result, because they had full control and ownership from the get.

So Paul's facile assertion that somewhere, somehow, a nasty, scheming ghostwriter slipped all those hateful words in under his name is just ridiculous. To swallow this line, you'd have to be as daft as the White Queen, perfectly willing to believe half a dozen impossible things before breakfast:

1. That the ghostwriter who wrote The Ron Paul Survival Report was never really under Ron Paul's control

2. That somebody other than Ron Paul put their money on the line to pay the writer (these things don't come cheap -- I charged a minimum of $1K per page for my copy, and his was eight pages per issue).

3. And, by extension: that somebody other than Ron Paul owns the resulting intellectual property. (It'd be interesting to see what would happen if some other right wingnut started plagarizing those articles.)

4. That Ron Paul never read, commented on, or approved what was written for the newsletter that bore his name -- and was so critical to building his early political base

5. That The Ron Paul Survival Report was written, laid out, published, and shipped during the night by elves, with no input from Paul at all

6. That Ron Paul actually had nothing whatsoever to do with the Survival Report Apparently, his name ended up in the title as some kind of perverse coincidence. He was out of town that day. All those days.

As I said below: Either the man is a straight talker who means what he says, and says what he means -- in which case, he stands by all his words, and is willing to defend them as his own. He started the newsletter, he hired the writer, he approved the copy, he paid for the words to be printed and mailed under his name. Through those actions, he took full legal and moral ownership of those words. They are, then and now, his intellectual property.

Or else he's just another weasely politician, using "straight talk" to wow the crowds when it suits his purposes, but equally quick to tell lies to disassociate himself from decades of unsavory "straight talk" that now threatens to keep him off the national stage.

It's one or the other, Ron. You cannot have this one both ways -- at least, not without talking out of both sides of your mouth.

Moral Responsibility

Ron Paul with Don and Derek Black.

[Cross-posted at Firedoglake.]
 
Unsurprisingly, Ron Paul’s defense regarding the revelations in The New Republic about his newsletters was of a piece with his previous dubious defenses regarding this subject. As we noted, all the newsletters really do is confirm what we already know about Paul: that he built his political career around making appeals to the most noxious far-right elements in American society.

Here’s the press release he issued in response:

"The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

"In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person’s character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’

"This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It’s once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

"When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."

Well, we have two choices here:

– Paul allowed racists and homophobes to publish material under his name for over a decade and did nothing about it until called on it, at which point he in fact denied any responsibility for its publication (his response at the time: "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren’t really written by me. It wasn’t my language at all."); or

– Paul is lying, and these newsletters really do reflect his longtime views.

Either choice, as it happens, should disqualify the man from the presidency.

The first makes clear that he operates as a kind of "absentee overseer" when it comes to the views he promotes in the public sphere and elsewhere — in a way that makes the current holder of the White House look downright responsible. Indeed, Paul’s version of "taking responsibility" in this matter looks a lot like Bush’s: say you’ll "take responsibility" but then blame everything on underlings.

The second — well, that’s fairly obvious. And there’s reason to believe it might be the case. Ed Brayton has a post with commentary from Paul’s former staffer Eric Dondero, who writes that Paul indeed was intimately involved — and that his cohort was Lew Rockwell:

Lew Rockwell was 80% the Ghost writer for Ron Paul’s Newsletters. Again, key word "Ghost writer."

I’d say Ron himself authored about half the Newsletter.

He’d have a yellow pad, and every time we traveled by car, he’d break it out while I was driving and scribble on it for hours.

When we got back from Houston, he’d either giver it to his daughter Lori in Clute, or Jean McCiver in Houston. They were the only two who could interpret his hand-writing.

If it was Lori, she’d fax the draft to Marc Elam at his office on Fuqua in south Houston.
Jean McCiver worked out of that office directly for Elam.

She was the one who edited and put the Newsletter together. She would gather all the various items faxed from Rockwell, and faxed from Ron to input into the word processing program.

As Nick Baumann at Mother Jones observed:

After all, the newsletters have names like "Paul’s Freedom Report," "Ron Paul Political Report," and "The Ron Paul Survival Report," and a lot of them are written in the first person, which, as Kirchick points out, implies authorship. Kirchick’s best point is that, whatever the source, the publications "seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views."

You can see some of the newsletters here, here, here, here, and here.

If Ron Paul were serious about assuming "moral responsibility" for more than a decade’s worth of allowing vile xenophobic hate and conspiracy-mongering to be published under his name, he’d be doing his utmost to decry the racists and xenophobes who have been supporting his campaign. He would have avoided, during the "decade" of "taking moral responsibility" he now claims, appearing before (and accepting money from) white-nationalist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Patriot Network. And he would return that $500 donation from Stormfront’s Don Black.

Instead, he’s refused. Instead, he happily poses for pictures with Don Black and his son at the January 10, 2007, "Values Voters" Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as he does in the photo atop this post. [Source: Stormfront. For those interested in seeing the URL, feel free to e-mail me, but only go there if you must. I've had the photo examined for authenticity and it appears to be genuine.]
As Chip Berlet observed: "Those neo-Nazis have a First Amendment right to endorse Ron Paul, but Ron Paul has a moral obligation to disavow that donation.

"There’s two issues: Why would anyone have to ask Ron Paul to disassociate himself from the endorsement of neo-Nazis? And the second is that when they did ask him, his silence spoke volumes about his values. You know, ‘I don’t enjoy the endorsement of neo-Nazis’ — how hard is that to say? And why hasn’t he refunded it? It’s not like this is a gray area."

Somehow, his followers seem to think it is. And so does Ron Paul.

Not that it’s likely to make any difference at this point: Paul’s poll numbers are in free-fall. A thrid-party run is very likely, which should make Democrats happy. But the rest of us should be fully aware of what the man represents, especially in terms of the mainstreaming of extremist ideas from the fringe right.

Ron Paul's Friends -- in Black and White

Bill White at the 2005 Toledo rally
Photo by Isis

-- by Sara

Well, don't say we didn't warn you about Ron Paul's friends.

Here's American National Socialist Workers Party leader Bill White, coming out big for Paul on the far-right Vanguard News Network site on December 20:

Comrades:

I have kept quiet about the Ron Paul campaign for a while, because I didn't see any need to say anything that would cause any trouble. However, reading the latest release from his campaign spokesman, I am compelled to tell the truth about Ron Paul's extensive involvement in white nationalism.

Both Congressman Paul and his aides regularly meet with members of the Stormfront set, American Renaissance, the Institute for Historic Review, and others at the Tara Thai restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, usually on Wednesdays. This is part of a dinner that was originally organized by Pat Buchanan, Sam Francis and Joe Sobran, and has since been mostly taken over by the Council of Conservative Citizens.

I have attended these dinners, seen Paul and his aides there, and been invited to his offices in Washington to discuss policy.

For his spokesman to call white racialism a "small ideology" and claim white activists are "wasting their money" trying to influence Paul is ridiculous. Paul is a white nationalist of the Stormfront type who has always kept his racial views and his views about world Judaism quiet because of his political position.

I don't know that it is necessarily good for Paul to "expose" this. However, he really is someone with extensive ties to white nationalism and for him to deny that in the belief he will be more respectable by denying it is outrageous -- and I hate seeing people in the press who denounce racialism merely because they think it is not fashionable.

Bill White, Commander
American National Socialist Workers Party

Obviously, this isn't what Paul's supporters want to hear. (The reactions from the VNN commentors ranged from "Some one ban this piece of shit for the no outing rule" to "I know alot of white supremacist involved in the Ron Paul campaign. I wish he would not shun away from his true supporters. I will stick with him till the ened but he shouldn't act like a typical politiician" to "This motherfucker needs a special bullet." Yes, the unique spelling is all their very own; follow the link above and read the threads for more holiday joy in this vein.) While White is hardly the most reliable reporter on any subject, his testament to Paul's racist credentials does tend to corroborate what Dave and I have been telling you all along: Paul's got longstanding connections to the looniest loonies on the loony right. You may not be able to hear the dog-whistle code in his speeches, but they sure as hell hear it loud and clear.

We've also been telling you that it's not just that Paul shows up for their events: he also takes their money. There's an old saying in politics that ya gotta dance with them what brung ya -- and guys like Bill White are the ones that brung Paul to Congress in the first place. On December 19, the day before White's helpful VNN endoresment, the AP caught Paul in mid-tango, this time with Stormfront.org founder Don Black:

Paul keeps donation from white supremacist
Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul has received a $500 campaign donation from a white supremacist, and the Texas congressman doesn't plan to return it, an aide said Wednesday.

Don Black, of West Palm Beach, recently made the donation, according to campaign filings. He runs a Web site called Stormfront with the motto, "White Pride World Wide." The site welcomes postings to the "Stormfront White Nationalist Community."

"Dr. Paul stands for freedom, peace, prosperity and inalienable rights. If someone with small ideologies happens to contribute money to Ron, thinking he can influence Ron in any way, he's wasted his money," Paul spokesman Jesse Benton said. "Ron is going to take the money and try to spread the message of freedom."

"And that's $500 less that this guy has to do whatever it is that he does," Benton added.

Black said he supports Paul's stance on ending the war in Iraq, securing U.S. borders and his opposition to amnesty for illegal immigrants.

"We know that he's not a white nationalist. He says he isn't and we believe him, but on the issues, there's only one choice," Black said Wednesday. "We like his stand on tight borders and opposition to a police state," Black told The Palm Beach Post earlier.

On his Web site, Black says he has been involved in "the White patriot movement for 30 years."

Evidently, when it comes to Paul's status as a white nationalist, Mr. Black and Mr. White need to get their stories straight. But anyone on the left who continues to deny that Paul has maintained long, significant, and productive relationships with racists and anti-democratic "patriots" is, at this point, living in a denial zone worthy of Donald Rumsfeld.

An update, courtesy of Brad DeLong, for the benefit of visiting commenters who are even now tuning up for another chorus of "It's not like he's a racist or anything...":

The Freedom To Oppress: Why Ron Paul's Old Racist Newsletters Matter

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Let's face it -- Ron Paul's lame denials about his repulsively racist and homophobic newsletters of the '80s and '90s on CNN should permanently lay to rest everyone's favorite myth about the man, i.e., that he's a "straight shooter" and an "honest man". No he's not. He's a liar.

Anyone who can make millions of dollars for years off a notorious newsletter with their name on it and then later look into a camera and claim with a straight face: "I didn't write them. I didn't read them at the time. I disavow them. That's it" -- that man is a liar, pure and simple. Especially when you can find videos as recent as the above 1995 interview on C-SPAN in which he clearly embraces the content of those newsletters.

That alone should tell us everything we need to know about the man. The facts: Ron Paul had a significant role in determining the editorial direction of his newsletters, which were edited and largely written by Lew Rockwell and a staff under his direction. And yes, those newsletters were ugly, racist, homophobic, and bizarre excursions in right-wing extremism, extraordinarily popular with militiamen and other far-right "Patriots". But then, that would be because Paul built his political career in pandering to such extremists.

Conor Friedersdorf, who is inclined to libertarianism and thus has a soft spot for Paul, has a thoughtful and nuanced take on the matter, but he also makes excuses for the inexcusable:

Do I think that Paul wrote the offending newsletters? I do not. Their style and racially bigoted philosophy is so starkly different from anything he has publicly espoused during his long career in public life -- and he is so forthright and uncensored in his pronouncements, even when they depart from mainstream or politically correct opinion -- that I'd wager substantially against his authorship if Las Vegas took such bets.

That's probably a safe bet, but it's beside the point: whether or not Paul did the actual writing, the newsletters were produced at Paul's behest and written deliberately in a way to make it sound as if it were Paul himself addressing the readers. More to the point, we also know that he had a significant role in the editorial decisions, and was responsible for the newsletters' larger thrust which -- from my reading of them at the time, picked up at various militia meeting tables in the 1990s -- was largely about "New World Order" conspiracy theories, as well as various other themes tailored to the far-right militia audience: Eliminating the IRS and the Fed, returning to the gold standard, and the usual fearmongering about minorities, crime, and immigration.

And all you have to do is examine Paul's record in Congress to realize that his newsletters reflected his actual politics at the time, since (by way of example), at the time he was viciously attacking the MLK holiday on his newsletter's pages, he was simultaneously opposing it on the floor of the House.

Likewise, the newsletters' extremist content was similar in nature to the bills he proposed -- for example, his newsletters' paranoid theorizing about the United Nations and the "New World Order" was reflected in his actual attempts to withdraw the United States from the United Nations.

This same paranoid worldview came up not merely in the newsletters, but in Paul's other publications, such as his 1988 tract World Money, World Banking, and World Government: A Special Report from the Ron Paul Investment Letter". The first two pages of this tract give you the flavor:

Paul has never repudiated his conspiracy-mongering ways. After all, he continues to appear on Alex Jones' "Conspiracy Planet" radio show and expound on the evils of the New World Order. This is all of a piece with Ron Paul's longtime embrace of right-wing extremism, of which the racist elements are only a component.

Indeed, these kinds of things are going to keep cropping up. Now Paul is denying having written a fundraising letter warning of "race war" that was sent out with his signature on it.

These revelations are significant beyond the merely tawdry and embarrassing aspects they present. Because they also tell us a great deal about the kind of president a man like Ron Paul would be.
Friedersrdorf, to his great credit, acknowledges this, but nonetheless concludes:

Should Paul continue to perform well in the polls, or even win the Iowa caucuses, national media attention is going to focus intensely on his newsletters as never before, and it won't represent a double-standard: published racism under any candidate's name would rightly attract press attention! Paul ought to stop acting aggrieved. He is not a victim here. Voters ought to do their best to understand the controversy, gauge Paul's character, and render judgment about his likely behavior were he elected to the presidency, relative to his competitors.

The racist newsletters should in fact be part of the calculus.

So should the uncomfortable fact that bygone complicity in racist newsletters doesn't necessarily make Paul the candidate most complicit in human depravity (sad as that is), or tell us whose policies, which candidate, would do the most to square American government with the highest ideals of our polity. Support for Paul is grounded for many in the judgment that he is that candidate. That his policies, the ones he would champion in general election debates and pursue if elected, are the most moral on offer among the GOP contenders. I remain sympathetic to that argument.

Well then, let us consider whether or not Paul's policies would be moral ones. And we know, as he has expressed over many years on many occasions, what the outline of his policies would look like: eliminating the income tax, dismantling the IRS, dismantling the Fed, returning to the gold standard, and radically gutting the federal government and its power, notably including its power to enforce civil-rights laws and to protect minorities. It was only recently, after all, that Paul reaffirmed that he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

That agenda, as it happens, matches up with the agenda that has long been promoted by the most racist elements in American politics of the past two generations and more -- the Posse Comitatus, the Aryan Nations, the Klan -- as well as by a variety of extremists with deep roots in far-right anti-Semitism, such as the John Birch Society (with whom Paul has enjoyed a long association).

And while they may employ vicious racism and bizarre extremism in their rhetoric supporting this agenda -- something largely absent from Paul's -- their reasons for pursuing an agenda identical to Paul's supposed "freedom" agenda have to do with the way they define "freedom" -- that is, as the freedom to oppress other people.

The roots of this lie in the Civil War, which was fought on one side by people who were willing to take up arms to defend their freedom to enslave other people. They clothed it in the language of "states' rights," but in the end the right in question was essentially the right to deprive other people of their rights. It should go without saying, at least in this day and age, that the very concept is not only laughably illogical but profoundly immoral as well -- not to mention fundamentally anti-democratic.
The whole panoply of subsequent court rulings (think Plessy v. Ferguson) and legislative miscreancies that created and supported the system of Jim Crow in the South and the Sundown Town phenomenon in the rest of the country, as well as the many failures of Congress to enact anti-lynching legislation -- the roots of institutionalized racism, as it were -- were likewise couched in the language of preserving "freedom" and "states rights". The America that Ron Paul's long-enunciated agenda would return us to, as it happens, would closely resemble the America of 1900. If Americans really understood what America looked like then, they would realize that this would not be a good thing at all.

As Bruce Bartlett sagely observed when the same issue arose regarding Ron Paul's son, Rand:

As we know from history, the free market did not lead to a breakdown of segregation. Indeed, it got much worse, not just because it was enforced by law but because it was mandated by self-reinforcing societal pressure. Any store owner in the South who chose to serve blacks would certainly have lost far more business among whites than he gained. There is no reason to believe that this system wouldn't have perpetuated itself absent outside pressure for change.

In short, the libertarian philosophy of Rand Paul and the Supreme Court of the 1880s and 1890s gave us almost 100 years of segregation, white supremacy, lynchings, chain gangs, the KKK, and discrimination of African Americans for no other reason except their skin color. The gains made by the former slaves in the years after the Civil War were completely reversed once the Supreme Court effectively prevented the federal government from protecting them. Thus we have a perfect test of the libertarian philosophy and an indisputable conclusion: it didn't work. Freedom did not lead to a decline in racism; it only got worse.

The handwringing over whether Paul is a racist or not really is beside the point. Labels really become inconsequential when the real issue is how their politics would play out on the ground if they achieved power. And in the end, there is a reason racists support Ron Paul's agenda: It would be a dream come true, a return to the days when the freedom to oppress others was protected by the American legal system.

To the extent that Paul's agenda really reflects a libertarian agenda, then this same problem reflects on the great shortcoming of libertarianism as a political philosophy. Friedersdorf objects to this strenuously, but he does not provide us with an adequate explanation for what amounts to a monstrous blind spot in libertarianism -- namely, their apparent belief that the only element of American political life capable of depriving Americans of their rights is the government, while pretending away the long and ugly history of Americans being deprived of their rights (including the simple right to live) not by the government, but by their fellow Americans.

What is utterly missing from libertarianism -- and particularly the libertarianism of Ron Paul -- is a recognition that their love of freedom is easily perverted into the freedom to deprive other people of their freedoms. When confronted with it, they simply try to shrug it off as a problem that freedom itself will eventually overcome -- when history, of course, has proven them wrong time and time again.

As we observed back then:

Ron Paul and Rand Paul both like to present radical ideas in reasonable clothing. But the consequences of their ideas have outcomes that we have seen proven in our own history as toxic and destructive to our democratic ideals. Their ideas were long ago discredited, and simply fluffing them up in new language will not make their real-life consequences any less horrific.

There is, after all, a simple reason the Pauls attract racists to their campaigns: Their ideologies would make racist discrimination legal again. You can call it a matter of deep intellectual consistency if you like. I call it selling cheap rationalizations for real evil in the world.

Surviving Ron Paul

-- by Dave

I've got a post up tonight at Firedoglake about Ron Paul, titled "Moral Responsibility":

Unsurprisingly, Ron Paul's defense regarding the revelations in The New Republic about his newsletters was of a piece with his previous dubious defenses regarding this subject. As we noted, all the newsletters really do is confirm what we already know about Paul: that he built his political career around making appeals to the most noxious far-right elements in American society.

Here's the press release he issued in response:

"The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.

"In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: 'I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.'

"This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It's once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.

"When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name."

Well, we have two choices here:

-- Paul allowed racists and homophobes to publish material under his name for over a decade and did nothing about it until called on it, at which point he in fact denied any responsibility for its publication (his response at the time: "I could never say this in the campaign, but those words weren't really written by me. It wasn't my language at all."); or

-- Paul is lying, and these newsletters really do reflect his longtime views.

Either choice, as it happens, should disqualify the man from the presidency.

Meanwhile, the folks at the Ron Paul Survival Report are doing great work. Ron Lawl's post on Paul's attempts to claim he's now the anti-racist candidate by holding a fund-raiser on Martin Luther King Day is a must-read:

In today's interview with Wolf Blitzer, Ron Paul claims that he's the "anti-racist," and denies the allegations against him involving the recent newsletter. As proof of this fact, he lists the upcoming freeatlast2008, where he plans to hold his next "money bomb" on Martin Luther King Day. This is an event that's so tasteless that even a large group of Paultards from the ronpaulforums thought that it was a bad idea, although mostly because they didn't want to sully Dr. Paul's reputation by associating him with a filthy communist. I haven't written much about this in the past, because a) it didn't seem to be getting much publicity, and b) the Paultards could deny it by insisting that it wasn't part of the official campaign. Guess what? Not anymore. Check 1:50 into the video.

As it happens, this complements the point I made at Firedoglake:

If Ron Paul were serious about assuming "moral responsibility" for more than a decade's worth of allowing vile xenophobic hate and conspiracy-mongering to be published under his name, he'd be doing his utmost to decry the racists and xenophobes who have been supporting his campaign. He would have avoided, during the "decade" of "taking moral responsibility" he now claims, appearing before (and accepting money from) white-nationalist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Patriot Network. And he would return that $500 donation from Stormfront's Don Black.

Instead, he's refused. Instead, he happily poses for pictures with Don Black and his son at the January 10, 2007, "Values Voters" Conference in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., as he does in the photo atop this post. ...

As Chip Berlet observed: "Those neo-Nazis have a First Amendment right to endorse Ron Paul, but Ron Paul has a moral obligation to disavow that donation.

"There's two issues: Why would anyone have to ask Ron Paul to disassociate himself from the endorsement of neo-Nazis? And the second is that when they did ask him, his silence spoke volumes about his values. You know, 'I don't enjoy the endorsement of neo-Nazis' -- how hard is that to say? And why hasn't he refunded it? It's not like this is a gray area."

But I'm sure we'll keep hearing how straight a shooter Ron Paul really is.

Of smears and facts

-- by Dave and Sara

So it appears that Glenn Greenwald (someone both of us very much admire) thinks we've "smeared" Ron Paul.

Now, someone correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that a smear by definition is false. And I'm having difficulty fathoming how a post comprised almost solely of links to legislation Paul has sponsored -- 161 of them, in fact -- could constitute a smear. In the world of the blogosphere, the posts don't get much more fact-oriented.

[Secondarily, a minor corrective note: I didn't write the passage that Greenwald quotes. It was written by our regular commenter Trefayne, as I tried to explain in the intro. Minor carelessness, but indicative, I'm afraid, of Greenwald's approach in general here. Certainly I published it, and continue to stand behind Trefayne's reportage and his remarks.]

Greenwald points out, quite accurately, that two of the bills described in the post in question -- a laundry list of legislation sponsored by Paul -- dealing with flag burning were actually indicative of Paul's opposition to flag-burning legislation:

Indeed, he only introduced those flag-burning amendments in order to dare his colleagues who wanted to pass a law banning flag burning to do it that way -- i.e., the constitutional way. When introducing his amendments, he delivered an eloquent and impassioned speech on the floor of the House explaining why he considered anti-flag-burning measures to be "very unnecessary and very dangerous."

I'd zeroed in on the flag-burning issue in my own followup work on the post, and was baffled by the facts of the case -- namely, that Paul had sponsored a bill in 1997 proposing a bill to amend the Constitution to allow for flag burning prohibitions, but then turned around and voted against a measure with nearly identical wording.

So Greenwald does seemingly help fill in the essential facts -- namely, that Paul had offered up the measure as an attempt to highlight the wrongness of what it proposed. Or was it?

As Bolo points out in my comments:

This is a very subtle misreading of Ron Paul's position. He's largely right, but at the beginning Glenn states that Ron Paul is "vehemently against any and all laws to criminalize flag burning." Then I guess he missed this quote from Ron Paul's speech on the issue (Glenn quotes Ron Paul at length, but doesn't include this line):

"Under the Constitutional principle of federalism, questions such as whether or not Texas should prohibit flag burning are strictly up to the people of Texas, not the United States Supreme Court. Thus, if this amendment simply restored the state's authority to ban flag burning, I would enthusiastically support it."

So, actually, yes... Ron Paul is for prohibiting flag burning. He's just against amending the Constitution to do it. But if your state wants to criminalize it, then that's mighty fine by him. Once again, his complete and utter commitment to states' rights overshadows anything.

In any event, it is not exactly an ordinary legislative tactic to sponsor legislation that proposes to enact something you oppose, but it is known to happen, and may have in this case, though the evidence is dubious at best. If that is the case, then we were wrong -- but we invite Greenwald to demonstrate that Paul isn't in fact a supporter of state prohibitions on flag burning.

Moreover, to read Greenwald's post, one would come away with the impression that this was the similar case for a significant portion, if not a majority or perhaps even the entirety, of the bills cited in the post.

After all, we're talking about a post with 161 links to bills that Paul not merely voted upon, but sponsored. Out of them, two arguably were misrepresentative of the thrust of the post (namely, that Paul's legislative record reflects his extremist orientation and background) -- but after further review, it becomes clear that the remaining 159 pieces of legislation were almost certainly sincere attempts at lawmaking.

It's clear, after all, that Paul is an advocate of returning to the gold standard, of disbanding the Federal Reserve, the IRS, the Education Department, and a host of other federal agencies, and of withdrawing the United States from the United Nations. He not only has sponsored bills to do so, he's publicly advocated for them.

But if you were to only read Greenwald's post, you'd have a hard time telling that this is the case. Indeed, there's nary an effort to address the actual radicalism of Paul's positions raised in the many posts we've written here detailing them (there's a pretty complete list at the bottom of this post).

Instead, we get this:

This raises a broader point. It has become fashionable among certain commentators to hurl insults at Ron Paul such as "huge weirdo," "fruitcake," and the like. Interestingly, the same thing was done to another anti-war medical doctor/politician, Howard Dean, back in 2003, as Charles Krauthammer infamously pronounced with regard to Dean that "it's time to check on thorazine supplies." Krauthammer subsequently said that "[i]t looks as if Al Gore has gone off his lithium again."

Note: This is an analogy akin to the very kind that I know have driven Greenwald crazy in the past -- wherein we compare the scribblings of bloggers to nationally syndicated pundits appearing on national television. What gives?

That notwithstanding, you'll note that Greenwald doesn't link here when issuing that complaint -- because we haven't talked about Paul in terms anything like that. The closest I've come to doing so was when I referred to some of the organizations from whom Paul has received financial and ideological support over the years as "nutcases" and said "he's one of them":

After all, what this comes down to is not so much beliefs and values but judgment. One expects, after all, a congressman to display better judgment than to appear before a group of nutcases. Ron Paul didn't, and hasn't, for a simple reason -- he's one of them.

What I've consistently said about Ron Paul is that the agenda he advocates is, by nearly any measure, that of a far-right extremist. I haven't ventured any armchair psychology into his motivations -- I've been simply reporting reportable facts. If Glenn has facts to prove me wrong, he needs to present them. I know I observed (usually from afar, but once in person) Paul's avid presence at many a "Patriot" gathering in the 1990s, rubbing shoulders with Bo Gritz and John Trochmann, enough times to feel confident that I'm not bending the reality.

I wrote and asked Sara for her thoughts on this, and she responded (thus the dual byline):

1) Much of Glenn's screed is against people who call Paul a "weirdo" and a "fruitcake." Nowhere in your missive did you use either word. In fact, you have avoided ad hominems entirely in your recent posts [note the exception above]. But there's a strong implication throughout the post that somehow it was YOU who engaged in this name-calling -- and if that's false, you need to strenuously object to that association. In fact, he probably owes you an apology for implying that that you did this, and a clarification that you did not.

2) Much of the rest of it is about how bizarre Hillary and our mainstream discourse in general is. I think you and I would both agree with him on this point (and, in fact, our agreement that the system is screwed is why we blog in the first place) [ed: Indeed we do] --- but we're not talking about Hillary, we're talking about Paul. Glenn is trying to change the subject in a very lawyerly way. Nice attempt at diversion there, Glenn -- but let's stay on the subject, which is not Hillary or the mainstream, but rather Paul.

And suggesting that we've got some kind of either-or choice here is simply false. Glenn is usually a more subtle thinker than that, but he's slipped a gear here. The enemy of our enemy is not always (or even usually) our friend.

3) You may want to reiterate that you've spent 20 years tracking the right wing, and have written several well-regarded books on the subject. In fact, you're the left-wing blogosphere's point man on this subject -- so it's rather surprising to find these kinds of attacks on your credibility on this subject coming from inside our own quarters.

The fact is that you know the players in this end of the field a hell of a lot better than anyone else does. You're not saying these things in the service of an agenda or just to be mean -- even though many of Glenn's commentors on this post seem to think so. (Lawyers may do that. Professional journalists do not.) You are calling it like you see it -- and you are a credible witness who is seeing things other people are not in a position to notice, let alone interpret properly. A little trust in your good reputation and long familiarity with the beat would be in order here, and it's a shame that it's not forthcoming.

4) Nowhere does Glenn refute our central argument, which is that Paul has a 25-year history of getting strong financial and voter support from the farthest fringes of the right wing. In fact, he is largely a creation of the extremist fringe, though he's doing his very best to obscure that fact now. If Glenn has contrary information that proves these people are not who we say they are, he needs to provide it.

5) And I just loved this: "And I read every day that corporations and their lobbyists are the bane of our country, responsible for most of its ills. What does it say about her that her campaign is fueled in large part by support from exactly those factions? Are she and all of her supporters nonetheless squarely within the realm of the sane and normal? And none of this is to say anything of the Giulianis and Podhoretzs and Romneys and Krauthammers and Kristols with ideas so extreme and dangerous, yet still deemed "serious."

So it's OK to demonize Hillary for the people who are funding her campaign and supporting her candidacy -- but we're not allowed to judge Paul by the same criteria? Glenn keeps coming back over and over to how we're not supposed to engage in guilt by association -- but he just did it himself here. Furthermore (as I said before, and think bears repeating), don't we wish we'd understood just a heck of a lot more about the people who were supporting George Bush before we elected him? And isn't our willingness to ask those questions one of the essential things that we do that differentiates us from the MSM, who have repeatedly failed to give us the full background on the people we're supporting? In an age of corporate cronyism, is Glenn honestly arguing that this kind of stuff doesn't matter?

I won't try to argue, actually, that my extensive background (discussed in some detail here, for those interested) in dealing with the far right gives me any particularly overwhelming authority on this subject -- I've been wrong before and could be again. But I have been tracking Ron Paul and his activities for so long that I'd be criminally remiss not to report what I know about his background and his agenda. Moreover, I would like emphasize the underlying point: I'm not doing this in service of anyone's agenda, but simply out of respect for my craft.

Besides, appeals to authority are fairly clear logical fallacies. The problem with Greenwald's argument, conversely, is that it's founded on a kind of logical fallacy as well, or at least fallacious reasoning -- namely, that my arguments about Ron Paul constitute "guilt by association." It is in fact a misapprehension of what comprises such "guilt." In one of his updates, he writes:

On another note, I wrote in my prior post concerning Paul that I found the efforts (by Neiwert and others) to smear him by linking him to some of his extremist and hate-mongering supporters to be unfair (for reasons I explained here). Neiwert responded and compiled what he thinks is the best evidence to justify this linkage here.

For reasons I'll detail at another time, I found virtually all of that to be unpersuasive, relying almost entirely on lame guilt-by-association arguments that could sink most if not all candidates (the only arguably disturbing evidence in this regard is this 1996 Houston Chronicle article, which Neiwert didn't mention, and the pro-Paul response is here). Everyone can review the evidence -- all of which is quite old and very little of which relies on any of Paul's own statements -- and make up their own minds.

[Actually, FWIW, we have mentioned the Houston Chronicle piece a couple of times, had Greenwald bothered to explore the links in that piece with any care.]

Well, what is "guilt by association"? It's considered part of the association fallacy:

An association fallacy is an inductive formal fallacy of the type hasty generalization or red herring which asserts that qualities of one thing are inherently qualities of another, merely by an irrelevant association. [my emphasis]

The problem with Ron Paul isn't that he has irrelevant associations with far-right extremists -- it's that he seeks out their support, openly advocates their agenda, and receives financial and ideological support from them. (Correct me if I'm wrong, but I read somewhere awhile back -- though I can't find it now -- that Paul has historically received an unusually high percentage of his financial support for his congressional campaigns from outside his district.) Those grim realities make his associations all too relevant, especially for a public official in the position of a serving congressman, and now, presidential candidate.

As I explained in that piece:

[T]his isn't "guilt by association" -- first, the argument isn't that Paul is a racist per se, but that he is an extremist who shares a belief system held not just by racists but other anti-government zealots as well. Paul is identified with their causes not simply because he speaks to them, but because he elucidates ideas and positions -- especially regarding the IRS, the UN, the gold standard, and education -- identical to theirs. This is why he has their rabid support. There is an underlying reason, after all, that Paul attracts backers like David Duke and the Stormfront gang: he talks like them.

Second and perhaps most importantly, there are legitimate reasons for anyone to raise objections to Paul's associations, speaking before the Patriot Network, the CofCC, and similar groups -- he's a public official, and he is lending the power of his public office to legitimizing radical-right organizations like this. Think of why it would be wrong to appear before the Klan, or the CofCC, as Trent Lott and Hayley Barbour have done in the latter case.

It's not merely what it implies about your own beliefs and standards -- it's that you've lent the power of your public office to empowering and raising the stature of racists and extremists. You of course have the right to do so -- but the public has every right to criticize you for it as well, as it should. After all, what this comes down to is not so much beliefs and values but judgment. One expects, after all, a congressman to display better judgment than to appear before a group of nutcases. Ron Paul didn't, and hasn't, for a simple reason -- he's one of them.

And just as his associations with far-right extremists have empowered those groups -- a favor now being returned in the form of their avid support for him even as he attempts to strategically distance himself from them -- his recent stunning successes mean the further empowerment of these groups. And that is why, over the long term, we ought take much greater pause in considering the value of his success.

His supporters are fond of talking about Ron Paul's integrity and honesty and forthrightness, but the stark truth is that, so far, he has been incredibly disingenuous about his beliefs and his background, as well as his supporters.

I mean, it's one thing to claim that you want nothing to do with white supremacists. People in my line of work hear that a lot from people for whom the evidence suggests otherwise (see, e.g., Trent Lott). But the fact is that Ron Paul gladly accepts not just their support but their money. Given the opportunity to disavow them -- especially, say, by refusing their donations -- he politely declines. Actions, after all, speak louder than words.

But even Paul's words, moreover, are somewhat less than forthcoming. The most thorough disavowal of his support from overt racists I've seen so far has been along the lines of, "Well, they'll be disappointed if that's why they're supporting me." Hello? (Perhaps Glenn can find better, but I haven't yet.)

Of course, it's not just Paul who's being disingenuous here. It's his supporters -- and his apologists.

I'm still having trouble, I'll admit, recovering from my astonishment that Glenn Greenwald is one of them.

NOTE: I edited this briefly after posting it, adding Bolo's comment.

Ron Paul and his followers

-- by Dave

I think Atrios, Markos, and Glenn Greenwald are quite right about Ron Paul's recent fund-raising prowess -- it's truly a remarkable feat, and it shows once again the real power of the Internet. As Markos puts it:

This is the single biggest example of people-power this cycle. And as annoying as it is that we're seeing it from a Republican -- and a crazy one at that -- it's nevertheless a beautiful thing to behold.

I think all of us have been wondering when Republicans were going to figure out this netroots fund-raising thing. A lot of it has to do with conservative top-down politics, which is very hierarchical and all about message control -- which is the kind of organizing you see on the right blogosphere. But the Web works best as a free-flowing information medium that taps into individuals' creativity and energy, and the left blogosphere has that trait in spades, which means they've proven much more capable of tapping into the Web's fund-raising potential.

Still, someone from the right was bound to figure this out, and it was almost certainly going to have to be someone from outside the Republican establishment. So Ron Paul it is.

Of course, I can't say I'm too surprised. Anyone who has been critical of Paul online has become well aware just how organized online he and his followers are. Mention his extremist background and the flying monkeys descend en masse.

But unlike, at least, Greenwald in his post, I'm not so sure that this is a largely positive development. In fact, taking in the longer-term picture of where the Republican right is heading, it seems to me a genuinely ominous development with dangerous ramifications.

Let me note, first, that I'm a great admirer of Greenwald's work, and I think the initial thrust of this post was essentially correct -- the Paul story is being absurdly overlooked. But when he writes:

Regardless of one's ideology, there is simply no denying certain attributes of Paul's campaign which are highly laudable. There have been few serious campaigns that are more substantive -- just purely focused on analyzing and solving the most vital political issues. There have been few candidates who more steadfastly avoid superficial gimmicks, cynical stunts, and manipulative tactics. There have been few candidates who espouse a more coherent, thoughtful, consistent ideology of politics, grounded in genuine convictions and crystal clear political values.

Well, we have to part company. Because as I've been explaining in some detail (along with Sara), Paul has so far managed to pull off something of a neat trick: Appearing thoughtful and principled, even though his beliefs and principles are largely derived from the extremist far right -- a fact that he's wisely muted in the campaign. You don't hear Ron Paul talking about the New World Order a lot in the press, largely because no one is asking him about it -- but in reality, he hasn't changed his beliefs appreciably since the days he was touring the militia K-ration banquet circuit.

That is to say, Greenwald is right, so far as it goes: Paul is consistent and coherent within the realm of his belief system, but those beliefs aren't simply the benign libertarianism that Paul has erected as his chief public image, and which Greenwald appears to have absorbed. Paul's beliefs, in fact, originate with the conspiracy-theory-driven far right of the John Birch Society and Posse Comitatus. He's just been careful not to draw too much attention to that reality, even though he has occasionally let the curtain slip.

I would say the vast majority of "Patriot" movement followers and similar far-right extremists, in fact, are actually very wonkish in the same fashion as Ron Paul about their beliefs, and construct arcane and fairly rigorous rationalizations for them, very consistent within their universes, many of them to an impressive degree. But that overlooks, of course, that their founding premises are almost entirely bogus.

Greenwald is hardly alone in missing this element: I think a large number of voters have managed to do so as well.

In one of his updates, Greenwald notes:

I want to clarify what I think is one critically important point in response to some of the comments. Paul's opposition to having the Federal Government involved in things such as education and health care is constitutional in nature. His argument is that the Constitution only permits the Federal Government to exercise explicitly enumerated powers in Articles I and II and, pursuant to the Tenth Amendment of the Bill of Rights, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution . . . are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Thus, his argument, at least on this level, has nothing to do with whether there would be good or bad results from having the Federal Government exercise powers in these areas. His argument is that the Constitution does not allow the Federal Government to do so, regardless of whether it's desirable. If one wants the Federal Government to exercise specific powers which the Constitution prohibits, then the solution is to amend the Constitution, not to violate it because of the good results it produces.

While there are certainly arguments to dispute Paul's constitutional view (the Supreme Court, for instance, has had to reach to Congress' Article I authority to "regulate Commerce . . . among the several States" in order to "justify" many of these Federal Government activities), the argument that there are "good results" from having the Federal Government do these things -- or that there would be "bad results" if it didn't -- isn't a coherent or responsive reply to Paul's position.

First, it should be pointed out that Paul's positions regarding public education aren't simply relegated to federal concerns -- Paul's position is that there should be no publicly funded education at all. He is, after all, a leading supporter and associate of the Alliance for the Separation of School and State, and is one of the signers of their petition proclaiming, "I favor ending government involvement in education."

More importantly, it needs to be pointed out that the reasons for accepting the courts' reasoning regarding Commerce Clause-based federal oversight of various matters are not simply that the outcome is desirable, but that the government's interest under the clause is quite real. It's frankly hard not to see that there is a real interstate interest in federal involvement in civil-rights, labor, and environmental law. Moreover, revoking that involvement in fact would be a genuinely radical step that would overturn years of established law and practice regarding such matters as civil rights.

The far right has been railing about the expansion of government powers under the Commerce Clause since the days of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, when the Clause was used to uphold the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (though there was an animus toward this reasoning dating back to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938). As such, it has been a constant target of various far-right conspiracy theories regarding the structure of American government for many years.

Mostly, so-called "constitutionalists" -- embodied originally by the old Posse Comitatus and various tax-protest groups led by such anti-Semites as Martin "Red" Beckman, and in later years by such "Patriot" groups as the Montana Freemen and various militias scattered around the country -- have been whipping on every example of Commerce Clause-based regulation and federal involvement, because they understand that schackling the federal government's powers is a fundamental part of their larger strategy of returning all political powers to localities, allowing for a return to the "organic" Constitution -- you know, the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which conveniently omits the prohibition of slavery and the equal-protection clause and the federal income tax and women's suffrage.

At least, that's what a lot of "constitutionalists" think, though it's not clear to what extent Paul concurs with them -- he seems to accept, at least, the legitimacy of the 14th amendment. But if you run through the broad array of kooky theories about the federal government promoted on the far right, you can find any number of Ron Paul's positions -- particularly regarding the gold standard, the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and the United Nations -- floating about there. Notably, Paul also played a significant role in Congress' ongoing failure to confront the growing problem of conspiracy-driven tax protests by diverting the blame to the IRS itself.

But that's who Ron Paul is -- a "constitutionalist" who deals in conspiracy theories and extremist anti-government beliefs. It's who he always has been, and who he is now. It isn't just an accident that Paul very recently spoke to a group with troubling racial ties, or that he attended a Patriot Network banquet in his honor in 2004, or that he gave an interview to a conspiracist magazine the same year. Hell, he's been operating within those same circles since 1985.

The real problem with the success of Paul's candidacy is not only that it helps to legitimize and mainstream his extremist beliefs, but that it also dramatically empowers the very extremist elements that Greenwald dismisses as an insignificant faction of his support.

Glenn writes:

The most illegitimate argument against Paul is the attempt to tie him to the views of some of his extremist and hateful supporters. I referenced that fallacy above, and elaborated on it in this comment.

Therein he writes:

I'm really uncomfortable with judging someone by the support they attract. When The NY Sun wanted to discredit Walt/Measheimer, they did it by asking David Duke if he agreed with their book, and when he said that he did, they published a big article about it, implying that Duke's agreement must mean the argument is racist.

And, of course, a lot of the money that has been donated to Clinton and Obama -- A LOT -- is from the largest corporations that many of their supporters blame for most of the nation's ills. Should Clinton or Obama be responsible for the actions of their corporate donors?

Paul is out there arguing against worldwide organizations as well as clearly oppposing our unbending support for Israel. That is going to attract some anti-semites and other assorted crazies and haters, but that is most assuredly not the same as saying that Paul himself is anti-semitic or hateful.

Connecting a candidate to the views of some of his supporters without more smacks a little of guilt by association (not say you're doing that), and I doubt any candidate is really immune to that sort of thing.

But this isn't "guilt by association" -- first, the argument isn't that Paul is a racist per se, but that he is an extremist who shares a belief system held not just by racists but other anti-government zealots as well. Paul is identified with their causes not simply because he speaks to them, but because he elucidates ideas and positions -- especially regarding the IRS, the UN, the gold standard, and education -- identical to theirs. This is why he has their rabid support. There is an underlying reason, after all, that Paul attracts backers like David Duke and the Stormfront gang: he talks like them.

Second and perhaps most importantly, there are legitimate reasons for anyone to raise objections to Paul's associations, speaking before the Patriot Network, the CofCC, and similar groups -- he's a public official, and he is lending the power of his public office to legitimizing radical-right organizations like this. Think of why it would be wrong to appear before the Klan, or the CofCC, as Trent Lott and Hayley Barbour have done in the latter case.

It's not merely what it implies about your own beliefs and standards -- it's that you've lent the power of your public office to empowering and raising the stature of racists. You of course have the right to do so -- but the public has every right to criticize you for it as well, as it should. After all, what this comes down to is not so much beliefs and values but judgment. One expects, after all, a congressman to display better judgment than to appear before a group of nutcases. Ron Paul didn't, and hasn't, for a simple reason -- he's one of them.

And just as his associations with far-right extremists have empowered those groups -- a favor now being returned in the form of their avid support for him even as he attempts to strategically distance himself from them -- his recent stunning successes mean the further empowerment of these groups. And that is why, over the long term, we ought take much greater pause in considering the value of his success.

So far, Ron Paul has been cagey about his larger agenda and his core belief system, and I think that's helped him tremendously in deflecting talk, in large part because most of the questions have been about racism, which he can readily deflect. I do wonder when someone is going to ask him about the New World Order, though. The response might help open people's eyes to the Ron Paul Reality.

___

Here are links to our previous reportage on Paul:

The trouble with Ron

Ron Paul vs. the New World Order

Man of the Hour

Six impossible things before breakfast

Return of the New World Order

The real Ron Paul surfaces

No fault of his own