Ron Paul loves to brag about being a straight-talker who doesn't change his positions. He says he would have voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (on property rights grounds, not to defend racism natch.) He wants to legalize all drugs, including heroin, withdraw all US troops from other countries immediately, end government flood control efforts and return to the gold standard.

And speaking as someone who has been researching candidate scandals for many years now, he's pretty darn squeaky clean. Sorry to disappoint you haters, but (like Obama) Ron Paul shows no sign of screwing around on his wife (unlike Newt or Bill Clinton), or doing favors for special interests who then put money in his pocket (unlike Newt or Rick Santorum). That's admirable. He's also one of the few politicians who did not evade the draft (unlike Gingrich and Romney. Santorum and Obama were too young to be drafted, and did not volunteer.)

But Congressman Paul does has a paranoid, fringey side that he does NOT like to admit. Paul has written and spoken a lot about hidden conspiracies of bankers, diplomats, the Trilateral Commission, secret plans to merge the US with Mexico and Canada, etc. (He calls it the North American Union.) If that sounds like the kind of stuff that John Birchers and right-wing militia racists say, well, he's very popular in that crowd too. (Read the Stormfront and other neo-Nazi websites if you dare, and you'll see.)

Ever since he began running for Congress again in 1996, Ron Paul has tried to downplay or deny responsibility for some incredibly racist newsletters he sold to that conspiracy crowd. But it's hard for him to deny responsibility for a publication called "The Ron Paul Survival Report", edited by Ron Paul, when it says stuff like "When I was in Congress....." He had no problem cashing the checks certainly. And if it wasn't paranoid militia conspiracy, why was it called the Survival Report?

The sad truth is that Ron Paul is a consummate politician. He's just better at tailoring his message to his different audiences than, say, Mitt Romney, whose adjustments are painfully obvious. Ron Paul is the cool grandpa pothead to college kids, the prophet of racial fear to neo-Nazis, an opponent of public schools to Christian home-schoolers, and a crusader against the coming One World Government to the anti-flouride conspiracy crowd. And each group thinks he's their own, special warrior.

"illegal immigrants enter the country for the express purpose of giving birth. But illegal immigrants also use emergency rooms, public roads, and public schools. In many cases they are able to obtain Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, and even unemployment benefits. ... We must end the perverse incentives that encourage immigrants to come here illegally, including the anchor baby incentive." - Ron Paul, (on his congressional website, not the infamous newsletters)

"You know, the greatest hoax I think that has been around in many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming. You notice they don't call it global warming anymore. It's weather control." - Ron Paul, on Fox

"The public school now is a propaganda machine. They start with our kids even in kindergarten, teaching them about family values, sexual education, gun rights, environmentalism, and they condition them to believe in so much that is totally un-American.” - Ron Paul, to Christian home-schoolers, March 2011

"The ultimate goal is not simply a superhighway, but an integrated North American Union--complete with a currency, a cross-national bureaucracy, and virtually borderless travel within the Union. Like the European Union, a North American Union would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether." - Ron Paul, 2006 (on his congressional website, not the infamous newsletters)

"Critics of NAFTA and CAFTA warned at the time that the agreements were actually a move toward ... an eventual merging of North America into a border-free area. Proponents of these agreements dismissed this as preposterous and conspiratorial. Now we see that the criticisms appear to be justified." - Ron Paul, 2006 (on his congressional website, not the infamous newsletters)

"This new [UN Peackeeping] commission will create the beginning of a global UN army. It will claim the right to intervene in any conflict anywhere on the globe, bringing the World Bank and the IMF formally into the picture as well. It is a complete new world order..." Ron Paul, 2006 (on his congressional website, not the infamous newsletters)

-- Quote Sources

Racist Newsletter

Starting in 1984, Ron Paul published a series of related newsletters, called the Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul Freedom Report, Ron Paul Survival Report, etc. He had over 100,000 subscribers at one point and is said to have made over a million dollars a year. (Subscriptions cost $100 a year for a magazine usually 8 pages long.)

Over nearly 20 years, the newsletters published a bunch of hateful and inflammatory racist, anti-gay and conspiratorial columns. You can read 50 of the originals on this website. Warning -- it's pretty raw stuff.

One article said Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced underage girls and boys” and “replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.” Another offers this strategy against "urban youth":

"If you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example).”

Speaking of AIDS, one article said homosexuals “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick,” and another said “I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.” -- A June, 1990 article

In 2001, as Paul moved to the mainstream and rejoined the Republican party, he disavowed these comments and blamed them on an unnamed ghostwriter. He said he didn't know about them until ten years later -- a statement easily proved false -- and that he had lied in 1996 when he didn't say he didn't write them.

You see, when Paul ran for Congress in 1996, as a Libertarian, his opponent brought these newsletters up to show that Paul had fringe ideas. At that time, they were still being published, and Paul didn't deny writing them. He said that the inflammatory quotes his opponent gave were taken out of context, and that his commentaries about blacks came in the context of "current events and statistical reports of the time." (You can check the context of the inflammatory quotes yourself on the link above, but they look pretty representative to me.)

In fact, Dr. Paul defended some of these racist statements in an interview with the Dallas Morning News in 1996. One newsletter said that young Black men are "unbelievably fleet of foot." Dr. Paul confirmed this opinion by telling the newspaper "If you try to catch someone that has stolen a purse from you, there is no chance to catch them." Another article in the newsletter (from 1992, just 4 years before this controversy first erupted) said:

"Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal."

When the Dallas reporter asked Ron Paul about that quote, he said "These aren't my figures. That is the assumption you can gather from" the report.

Paul and his supporters claim that he moved to Texas, the newsletters stayed in Washington, and he was too busy to even look at the 8 page newsletter that earned him a million dollars a years. (So much for Texas straight talk.) We have direct evidence that he's lying. Renae Hathaway, Paul's former secretary who still supports him, says that Paul was a very hands-on owner of the newsletters: "He always got to see the final product. He would proof it." (Another longtimeemployee, Eric Rittberg, confirms that he saw Ron Paul proofing, editing and signing off on the newsletters.) Hathaway said the newsletter company had an office in Houston and another one in Clute, very near Paul's house, and that he came to Houston -- 50 miles from his home -- at least weekly.

Ed Crane, the longtime head of the Cato Institute, recalls meeting Paul in the 1980s and discussing mail solicitation lists for the newsletters. Paul agreed that “people who have extreme views” responded best, and said he got his best response from the mailing list for the conspiratorial, anti-Semitic newspaper "The Spotlight." Rittberg says that Paul put the racist material in the newsletters simply to make money -- "the real big money came from some of that racially tinged stuff -- and it seems to have worked very well.

The President manages millions of people. Even if you take Ron Paul at his word, he couldn't manage a staff of 10 without them suddenly printing extreme racist progaganda FOR TEN YEARS. I just don't believe him, but if you do, he's a piss-poor manager. More likely he happily trafficked in the racist material to make money. And it worked. In 1984, Paul reported dept of up to $765,000; by 1995, most of the debt was gone and his net worth was up to $3.3 million. The question remains, does he believe any of this stuff himself?

The thing is, Ron Paul has published a lot of similar (but milder) material since then, and much of it is still on his congressional website, under his name. (Read any of his "Texas Straight Talk" columns from 2005 or 2006, and you'll see what I mean.) He rails against "anchor babies," warns of conspiracies to impose a "North American United Nations," complains about secret cartels of international bankers -- all big parts of the racist right-wing's world-view. (See quotes, above.) So far he hasn't claimed that someone else wrote these "Texas Straight Talk" columns, but I haven't seen any reporters ask him about them, either.

But there's plenty more. Ron Paul defenders claim Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero of his, but Paul voted against the Martin Luther King Day holiday -- both times - and it fell 5 votes short the first time. (It passed the second time despite his opposition.)

He said on MSNBC that the Civil War was not necessary, and gave a rave review to a pro-Confederacy revisionist book called "The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History" by Thomas E. Woods. Ron Paul said Wood's book "heroically rescues real history from the politically correct memory hole.” Woods, who founded the secessionist group "League of the South," and Ron Paul both teach at the Ludwig Van Mises Institute in Alabama, which was founded by Lew Rockwell -- Ron Paul's former chief of staff. In fact, many Paul supporters claim Lew Rockwell wrote the racist newsletter columns under Ron Paul's name, but Rockwell denies that.

The fact is, Ron Paul has said a lot of things similar to (but milder than) the shocking newsletter quotes, things he does not dispute. In 2007, Dr. Paul republished his 1987 book "Freedom Under Siege" which has a lot of choice passages, such as calling the AIDS sufferer "a victim of his own lifestyle [who] victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care"; saying sexual harassment victims bear some responsibility because they didn't quit their jobs; and complaining that whites would be called bigots if they formed a white caucus in Congress, but minority caucuses are OK.

Ron Paul is firmly enmeshed in the right-wing, conspiracy subculture. He has appeared on the Alex Jones radio show 40 times over 12 years, and given extensive interviews to the John Birch Society newsletter. So whether or not he wrote any one particularly nasty racist sentence of a given issue, he is behind all of it. He has been living in that world for years, building connections with the people in it, spreading its ideas, and making money off of doing so. It's cowardly of him to deny it all now.

-- Sources

Sources

Quote Sources -- Back

evolution - Updated:Ron Paul Doesn’t “Accept Evolution as a Theory” by Jon Winsor, Discover Magazine, August 29, 2011

climate change -- Ron Paul Interview`, by David Asman, Fox Business Channel, November 4, 2009

home school - "Trio of presidential contenders woo evangelicals over home schooling," by Shannon Travis, CNN, March 23, 2011

college loans - Ron Paul on MSNBC, Cenk Uygur interview, March 3, 2011

NAFTA superhighway - "The NAFTA Super Highway," by Ron Paul, Texas Straight Talk, October 31, 2006

North American Union conspiracy - "A North American United Nations?" by Ron Paul, Texas Straight Talk, August 28, 2006

Anchor babies - Rethinking Birthright Citizenship, by Ron Paul, Texas Straight Talk, October 2, 2006

UN New World Order - NeoCon Global Government, by Ron Paul, Texas Straight Talk, June 13, 2005

Racist Newsletter Sources -- Back

Game Over: Scans of Over than 50 Ron Paul Newsletters, Et Tu Mr. Destructo (blog), December 21, 2011 (this source has actual scans of many of the newsletters.)

Ron Paul signed off on racist newsletters in the 1990s, associates say, By Jerry Markon and Alice Crites, Washington Post, January 27

1996 Ron Paul interview - Candidate's comments on blacks questioned, by Catalina Camia, Dallas Morning News, May 22, 1996

Angry White Man: The Bigoted Past of Ron Paul by James Kirchick, The New Republic, January 8, 2008

"A Collection of Ron Paul’s Most Incendiary Newsletters", The New Republic, December 23, 2011

More Selections From Ron Paul’s Newsletters, The New Republic, January 17, 2012

Ron Paul's Texas Straight Talk (archive), on his Congressional Web site.

"In Book, Ron Paul Opposed Workplace Harassment Protections," by Pema Levy, Talking Points Memo, December 30, 2011

MLK Day Fact Check, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic, January 8, 2012

"Congress > Roll Call Votes > 98th Congress >House Vote #289 (Aug 2, 1983)" (Martin Luther King Day holiday), GovTrack.US website

"Congress > Roll Call Votes > 98th Congress >House Vote #578 (November 13, 1979)" (Martin Luther King Day holiday), GovTrack.US website

Ron Paul and the racist newsletters (Fact Checker biography), by Josh Hicks, The Washington Post, 12/27/2011

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Copyright 2012 Mark Saltveit. Photo of Ron Paul by By Gage Skidmore licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic, via Wikimedia Commons