Even though Ron Paul’s racist newsletters were published with Ron Paul’s name on them and written in the first person, and even though Ron Paul has been filmed discussing his newsletters (which were terribly racist, anti-Semitic, and weird) in an interview, the GOP Presidential hopeful has disavowed knowledge of the its contents. But now, former employees are claiming that he was perfectly fine with what the newsletters said… and not for the reasons you might think.

The Washington Post is reporting that people closely associated with Ron Paul & Associates, the organization that published the infamous newsletters, have said that not only was Paul totally aware of what was being written under his byline, he was far from ignorant to the newsletters’ contents and would actually sign off on every article.

Oopsie-daisy.

His former associates were careful to point out that Paul himself didn’t seem to personally espouse the racism expressed in the newsletters, but he noticed that racist, tin foil hat-y stuff tended to do better with the newsletter-by-mail subscribing set than more libertarian, economy-focused material. He signed off on what he thought would sell best. Attempts to flirt with motifs of white power or rant about a coming race war weren’t done for the love of the game, then, but for profit. Even if Ron Paul does not have a racist bone in his body, he likes money more than he dislikes racism and intolerance, which is a pretty damning character flaw in an elected official. And if what his former associates say is true, not only is Ron Paul okay with signing off on racism, he’s a blatant panderer to the worst base of voters in the country— white supremacists who think Martin Luther King Jr was a pedophile.

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, you can find nice, bite sized hunks of Ron Paul newsletter whackadoodlery at the Ron Paul Newsletters Twitter account, which tweets direct quotes from the publication. The quotes range from innocuous, possibly, depending on the context — “I can now give up my medical practice and dedicate every fiber of my being to saving the country”— to “what about the whites-style racism— “I’m sick of anti-Germanism, which is not— needless to say— a ‘hate crime’”— to full on cuckoo bananas— “MLK was a flagrant plagiarist with a phony doctorate” and “People say the government should do more to stop AIDS. Actually it should do less and thereby help more.”

Despite the fact that Paul’s newsletters spit some pretty racist sounding game, it seems a little hollow now that we know that it was all an act designed to get attention. Ron Paul’s a racist poseur, a mercenary hateboy. The Katy Perry of paranoia. But that doesn’t make the Ron Paul Survival Report, or his association with it, any less fucked up.

http://jezebel.com/5880016/ron-paul-actually-thought-those-racist-newsletters-were-ok-after-all

The real Ron Paul: Links to fringe never severed.

The latest evidence of simmering racial resentment on the American political fringe showed up Monday in a Facebook post by a California man who urged the assassination of the president and his two daughters in obscene, racist language. Aside from the Secret Service, there was little reason for most of us to pay attention to this sick boob — except that he was identified as a local political leader of the Tea Party and an avid supporter of Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas Republican who now seems likely to place first in the Iowa presidential caucuses.

To those who have followed Paul’s long career as a failed presidential candidate — these campaigns have become a family business — the appearance of yet another racist nutjob in his orbit is scarcely news. The newsletters that earned millions of dollars for him from gullible subscribers over the decades were often soiled with vile invectives against blacks and other minorities. He is a perennial favorite of the John Birch Society and kindred extremists on the right. He once refused to return a donation from a leader of the Nazi-worshipping skinheads in the Stormfront movement.

What is it about the kindly old doctor that attracts some of the most violent and reactionary elements in society to his banner?

For many years, Paul was merely an outlying crank in the ranks of the Republican Party — a “libertarian” who courted the paranoid bigots in the John Birch Society, whose monthly magazine featured his name on its masthead as a “contributing editor.” More than a decade ago, during his 1996 campaign for Congress, the racist ravings in his newsletters were first exposed — the same series of articles that besmirched Martin Luther King and Barbara Jordan and encouraged every racist stereotype about African Americans as criminals and welfare dependents. He disowns those words now, but back then a spokesman defended them as merely “taken out of context.”

Back then, his rhetorical flirtations with the White Citizens Councils hardly mattered. Almost nobody bothered to listen seriously to his urgings that America return to the gold standard, repeal the income tax and the direct election of U.S. senators and erase all of the advances of the past century in protecting the public from cyclical depressions, poisonous food, water, air and drugs, and the insecurities of poverty, old age and ill health. Most Americans still could remember when this Darwinian ideology influenced policy and knew that the nation was not better off — except for a few robber barons — back in the days before Theodore Roosevelt inaugurated the Progressive Era, beginning a century of reform.

On the far right, including wealthy figures such as the Koch family that once supported the Birch Society and now backs the Tea Party, there are many who share Paul’s brand of political nostalgia. Kindly and gentle as he appears, Paul has always known how to sound the dog whistle that excites them, whether it was in the race-baiting that adorned his newsletters for years, the claims that medicine served us better before Medicare and Medicaid or the campaign against the Federal Reserve. Although Paul has occasionally disavowed his supporters on the ultra-right when political expediency demanded it, they have never abandoned him — and they won’t, because whether or not he is actually a racial bigot, he shares their disdain for the 20th century.

There is little reason to worry about the policies of a Paul administration, despite his current lead in the Iowa polls. But the rise of the Tea Party and the vacuum of leadership in the Republican Party have created a space for Paul’s lethal fantasies, which if enacted would return us to the bad old days of mass poverty, rampant pollution, racial supremacy and all the other ills that characterized the America of the robber barons.

 http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2011/12/the_real_ron_paul_links_to_fri.html

Ron Paul has tried to make it easier for racial and ethnic discrimination in our society:

H.R.3863:
A bill to provide that the Internal Revenue Service may not implement certain proposed rules relating to the determination of whether private schools have discriminatory policies.

H.R.5842:
A bill to make all Iranian Students in the United States ineligible for any form of federal aid.

- He would propose an amendment to the Constitution to gut the Fourteenth Amendment by denying citizenship to people born here whose parents aren’t already citizens “nor persons who owe permanent allegiance to the United States”. That latter part could produce some serious political discrimination, especially if radicals can have their citizenship revoked:

H.J.RES.46:
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to deny United States citizenship to individuals born in the United States to parents who are neither United States citizens nor persons who owe permanent allegiance to the United States.

H.J.RES.42:
Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to deny United States citizenship to individuals born in the United States to parents who are neither United States citizens nor persons who owe permanent allegiance to the United States.