Ron Paul, In His Own Words
by phenry
Tue May 15, 2007 at 06:57:29 PM PST
As tonight's Republican presidential debate winds down, I expect to see the diaries humming with praise for Texas Rep. Ron Paul, whose forceful, eloquent anti-war rhetoric sticks out like a sore thumb from the undifferentiated conservative yammerings of the other candidates. The Simi Valley debate earlier this month was many Kossacks' first exposure to Paul, and many of them liked what they saw. Before any other well-meaning liberals decide that we and Ron Paul were made for each other, I think it's important that we dig a bit deeper and learn more about exactly who, and what, he is: a vicious, contemptible racist who comforts the radical right wing like no presidential candidate since David Duke.
We need jump to no conclusion to arrive at this judgment. His own words convict him.
* phenry's diary :: ::
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THE RON PAUL EXPERIENCE - A Diary Series
1. Ron Paul, In His Own Words
2. Ron Paul: The Radical Right's Man in Washington
3. Ron Paul: Dude is Wack
4. Ron Paul Hates You
After his 1979-85 service in Congress as a Republican and his 1988 campaign for the presidency as the nominee of the Libertarian Party, Ron Paul returned home to Surfside, Texas and devoted himself to a variety of pursuits, one of which was his self-published newsletter, The Ron Paul Political Report. Founded in 1985, the eight-page newsletter featured Paul's extreme libertarian perspective on a number of different issues, notably crackpot theories about the Federal Reserve and the money system and a tireless advocacy of a return to the gold standard—a longtime Ron Paul hobby horse. The Ron Paul Political Report would come to feature in the stable of "underground" publications and photocopied "zines" that fed the nascent "patriot movement" that arose in the early 1990s, spurred by anger over federal government actions in Waco, Texas and Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and by fear of a supposed "New World Order." Indeed, Paul changed the name of the newsletter to the Ron Paul Survival Report around 1993 in what we may presume to be an effort to tap into the survivalist sentiments then peaking among the radical right wing.
It is extremely difficult to track down content from the Ron Political/Survival Report today. The Report only had about 7,000 subscribers, and Paul has—unsurprisingly—refused to release copies to the media. Lexis/Nexis is of no help, as the obscure publication largely escaped the notice of major media publications during Paul's hiatus from electoral politics. What remains to us today comes almost entirely from secondary sources, such as quasi-samizdat publications and contemporaneous Usenet postings from sources like Google Groups. These few fragments of a much larger body of work—almost all of which have been preserved by Paul's supporters, not his opponents—give us an illuminating and frightening look into his demented, racist worldview.
The only complete article from the Ron Paul Political Report on the Internet that I am aware of is a 1992 piece titled "LOS ANGELES RACIAL TERRORISM," on the subject of the so-called Rodney King riots in South Central Los Angeles in 1991. It is available to us today because it was posted to the talk.politics.misc newsgroup on July 30, 1993 by Dan Gannon, a notorious white supremacist and Holocaust denier, and archived by the Nizkor Project, an anti-revisionism organization that was active in cataloging hate speech on the early public Internet. You can read Nizkor's copy of the article here, and see a reposted version on Google Groups here. Some relevant passages from the article (emphasis mine):
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