Letter Reveals How Ron Paul Cashed in on Paranoia
Tim Murphy
Mother Jones, 23 December 2011
Even as he’s climbed to the top of the polls in Iowa and gone so far as to preemptively claim victory in New Hampshire, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) has spent much of the last week distancing himself from racist and homophobic articles that appeared in his eponymous newsletter in the 1980s and early 1990s. In part, that’s because anxious conservatives have decided to make an issue of it—last week, the Weekly Standard dispatched James Kirchik to rehash his original 2008 bombshell on the newsletters. It’s also because, as Dave Weigel explains, Paul has failed to put together a coherent response. On Wednesday, Paul walked out of an interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger when she pressed him on his role in publishing them.
The story hasn’t gone away, and now Reuters has the latest: A newly unearthed subscription pitch circa 1993, this time bearing the signature of Paul himself. It reads like a caricature of the conspiratorial, unhinged, early ’90s militia movement, the kind of thing that would make the John Birch Society blush. Written in the first person, it warns of threats from the “demonic fraternity” we know of as Yale’s Skull and Bones society, the Trilateral Commission, the “perverted, pagan” rituals at Bohemian Grove, a global government, “the coming race war,” the Council on Foreign Relation, and FEMA. Paul (or his ghostwriter, at least) carefully explains that you can trust his view that the federal government is behind AIDS, because he’s a doctor:
BigBatUSA: The race war is over the top but real in the sense that Texas anticipated the illegal immigrant waves decades before Arizona, everything else solid including the threat to the public health of federally-mandated vaccinations. On balance we give Ron Paul an A+ for seeing threats to the Republic decades in advance, a C- for not anticipating that political correctness (from Mother Jones of all places) might try to undermine him at some distant date when most–not all–of his fears have been validated by the passage of time and the exposure of the massive financial crime syndicate that Matt Taibbi, from Rolling Stone, and John Bogle of Vanguard, say is every bit as bad as Ron Paul anticipated.
See Also:
Gary North: Ron Paul EXPOSED — Real Reason Two-Party Tyranny is Terrified He Might Win in 2012
