Way back in 2007, when Ron Paul was first picking up some marginal attention in the GOP presidential race, people began to notice something peculiar about the man and the folks he attracted. There were the anti-war, isolationist conservatives who felt marginalized in the post-9/11 era, of course. Then there were the 9/11 Truthers, driven to Paul by his association with arch-crank Alex Jones. Finally, reporters started looking back at Paul’s empire of newsletter and found a disturbing pattern of racist gobbledygook.
Matt Welch has a pretty definitive round-up and timeline of the whole controversy. If you’re interested in some choice quotes, Michael Brendan Dougherty has some here. My favorite tidbit? “After the Los Angeles riots, one article in a newsletter claimed, ‘Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.'” Classy!
The best part of Dougherty’s post, though, is his thinking on why Ron Paul would allow that and other similar statements to be published under his name. “As crazy as it sounds, Ron Paul’s newsletter writers may not have been sincerely racist at all. They actually thought appearing to be racist was a good political strategy in the 1990s. After that strategy yielded almost nothing – it was abandoned by Paul’s admirers.” [Emphasis his]
So there you have it: The most charitable explanation for the awesomely racist nonsense in Ron Paul’s newsletters is that Paul isn’t actually a racist. He and/or his ghostwriters were just pretending to be racist to attract votes from racists! TOTALLY reasonable, when you put it that way.
