The Top 8 Reasons Ron Paul Is an Abomination Who Should Be Cast Out of Decent Society
4. A Crackpot’s Best Friend
Every large group of people is going to have a few bad apples. Good people might occasionally accept donations from someone who turns out to be seedy. And well-meaning politicians might even mistakenly sit down with a TV or radio personality they shouldn’t. For most politicians, these things tend to be isolated incidents, and it would be unfair to associate them with the fringe.
Ron Paul is different. As extensively documented here and here, radical associations aren’t an isolated incident or two, but a long, disturbing pattern. He pals around with 9/11 Truther Alex Jones, invites Truthers like Jesse Ventura to speak at his events, and on numerous occasions calls for a new investigation into what “really” happened on September 11. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists have worked for his campaign. He speaks to the John Birch Society. David Duke supports him, and the racists at Stormfront fundraise for him. He endorses books edited by anti-Semites and featuring the writings of former PLO gun-runners. His work has been published in Holocaust-denial newsletters.
He infamously had his own series of newsletters that frequently ventured into prejudice and conspiracy-theories. It’s that newsletter scandal—or rather, Reason Magazine’s reporting on it—that has revealed the likely key to Paul’s endless flirtation with extremism:
The newsletters’ obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic “paleolibertarian” movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new “paleo” coalition.
Rockwell explained the thrust of the idea in a 1990 Liberty essay entitled “The Case for Paleo-Libertarianism.” To Rockwell, the LP was a “party of the stoned,” a halfway house for libertines that had to be “de-loused.” To grow, the movement had to embrace older conservative values. “State-enforced segregation,” Rockwell wrote, “was wrong, but so is State-enforced integration. State-enforced segregation was not wrong because separateness is wrong, however. Wishing to associate with members of one’s own race, nationality, religion, class, sex, or even political party is a natural and normal human impulse.”
The most detailed description of the strategy came in an essay Rothbard wrote for the January 1992 Rothbard-Rockwell Report, titled “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement.” Lamenting that mainstream intellectuals and opinion leaders were too invested in the status quo to be brought around to a libertarian view, Rothbard pointed to David Duke and Joseph McCarthy as models for an “Outreach to the Rednecks,” which would fashion a broad libertarian/paleoconservative coalition by targeting the disaffected working and middle classes. (Duke, a former Klansman, was discussed in strikingly similar terms in a 1990 Ron Paul Political Report.) These groups could be mobilized to oppose an expansive state, Rothbard posited, by exposing an “unholy alliance of ‘corporate liberal’ Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of the middle and working classes in America.”
In that light, Paul’s record makes perfect sense: it’s a strategy to prop himself up with a coalition of the paranoid, prejudiced, and conspiratorial. And so far, it’s worked out pretty well for him. For rational, principled political discourse? Not so much.
