thinkprogress.org— ?...decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays.?
Jan 9, 2008View in Crawl 4
This has been posted and debunked a million times at digg. But the racists keep trying to paint Paul as one of them.The worse of people come out at election day. Including those who smear. They wait until the days of the election and attempt to take a politician out of the race. Truth means nothing to these types of people.The enemies of freedom and liberty know no bounds to the depths they will go.Do some research and learn for yourself that the claims these people are making could not possibly be from Ron Paul. The writing is not his style and his voting record, speeches on the House floor and videos have never even given a hint of racism. Also, no one has ever come forward to back up the allegations.There is abundant information out there for you to learn that Ron Paul could not have been the one to write these letters. A publishing company paid him for the use of his name. His only crime was to not follow through to be sure what was being done fits his own principles.From the Paul campaign:January 8, 2008 5:28 am ESTARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – In response to an article published by The New Republic, Ron Paul issued the following statement:“The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.“In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’“This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It's once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.“When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publically taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.”###On TNRThe New Republic was founded by Herbert Croly, a "Progressive" who believed that the Constitution should be abolished in favor of the will of governing elites. Here is what Virginia Postrel wrote about him several years ago:Crolyism overturned the ideal of limited government in favor of a combination of elite power — commissions to regulate and plan — and mass democracy.... Frustrated with constitutional limits, Croly wrote, “It remains ... true ... that every popular government should in the end, and after a necessarily prolonged deliberation, possess the power of taking any action, which, in the opinion of a decisive majority of the people, is demanded by the public welfare.” This statement, while extreme, pretty much sums up today’s governing philosophy.So, keep in mind that this is the philosophy behind TNR. It is a view that the political elite need to tell everyone else what to do, and use lethal force against people who resist.###TNR has a long and checkered history of pro-fascism, pro-communism, and pro-new dealism. Founded to promote the rotten progessive movement of militarism, central banking, income taxation, centralization, and regulation of business, it naturally hates and fears the Ron Paul Revolution. The mag is also famous for having published a slew of entirely made-up articles by Stephen Glass, which it passed off as non-fiction. Through the 1950s it was an important magazine, of sigificant if baleful influence, but it long ago declined in circulation and significance, like all DC deadtree ops. Long close to Beltway libertarians, for whom its politically correct left-neoconism is fine and dandy, TNR once published a cover story literally comparing Ross Perot to Adolf Hitler when he was running for president. That is the publication's style--hysterical smears aimed at political enemies.<a class="user" href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018420.html">http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018 ...</a>###On the slander by KirchickAn emailer informed me this morning that a young kid whom he called a "grossly uneducated, pimply-faced youth" slandered both Ron Paul and myself on the Tucker Carlson show last night. The pimply-faced youth (PFY) is one Jamie Kirchick, who writes for the left-wing, pro-war New Republic magazine. In the YouTube video of the conversation the PFY asserts over and over that Ron Paul is a "racist." When Carlson asks him if he ever heard Ron make a racist remark he says "No." But then, with a Gotcha! look on his face, the PFY announces: "BUT," he DID attend a conference on secession in 1995!! Aha! Gotcha!This ignorant little kid posing as a "journalist" then informed everyone that the conference was sponsored by a "neo-Confederate" group and that Ron Paul speaks to "the neo-Confederate community," whatever that is, "in code language. (I knew that Ron was in touch with the Martian community, and with the residents of the planet Remulak, home of the supposedly "fictional" Coneheads of Saturday Night Live fame, but not the "Neo-Confederate Community" as well).Well, I was at that secession conference and presented a paper there. It was sponsored by the Mises Institute, which has nothing to do with Confederates, neo or otherwise, as anyone who surveyed the Institute's programs on its web site (www.mises.org) would know. The PFY did not bother because he is only interested in slandering Ron Paul, not in being a serious journalist.My paper was about the Northern secessionist tradition prior to the War between the States, including the Hartford, Ct. secession convention of 1814, and the secession movements of the mid-Atlantic states that existed prior to the war (see the book, The Secession Movement in the Middle States by William Wright). The famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a Northern secessionist whose credo was "No Covenant with Death," the "covenant" being the U.S. Constitition, and "death" being slavery. Other papers had to do with the Quebec secession movement, European secession movements, federalism in general, how the U.S. was created by a war of secession from the British empire, and even "How to Secede in Business" by substituting arbitration for litigation.But don't take my word for it. The proceedings of the conference, which the PFY is obviously ignorant of, were published as a book: Secession, State and Liberty, edited by Dr. David Gordon, whose Ph.D. from UCLA is in the field of intellectual history. It includes essays by scholars and professors from Emory University, Florida State University, UNLV, University of Montreal, University of South Carolina, and even a lawyer from Buffalo, New York. It was published a few years after the Soviet empire imploded as the result of eleven separate acts of peaceful secession, which made it especially relevant to social scientists.In fact, secession remains a lively topic of academic discourse, something that the PFY is obviously unfamiliar with. A few weeks ago a secession conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities was held in Chrleston, South Carolina, featuring some thirty historians and legal scholars. In little Jamie Kirchick's empty mind, the NEH must necessarily be a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment. (A friend in academe tells me that the participants in this conference spanned the ideological spectrum from left/liberal to Marxist).Only an ignorant conspiracy theorist like Jamie Kirchick would assume that anyone who studies secession in a scholarly way is necessarily some kind of KKK-sympathizing kook. He knows that Ron Paul will not sue him for defamation because he is a public figure. I, however, am not a public figure.<a class="user" href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018418.html">http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018 ...</a>And a little more on this scumJamie Kirchick: "I don’t think Ron Paul is a homophobe; I'm just cynical"<a class="user" href="http://gays-for-ron.blogspot.com/2008/01/jamie-kirchick-i-dont-think-ron-paul-is.html">http://gays-for-ron.blogspot.com/2008/01/jamie-kir ...</a>Reason talked with Paul about this:Ron Paul: All it is--it's old stuff. It's all been rehashed. It's all political stuff.reason: Why don't you release all the old letters?Paul: I don't even have copies of them, because it's ancient history.reason: Do you stand by what appears in the letters? Did you write these...?Paul: No. I've discussed all of that in the past. It's just old news.reason: Did the New Republic talk to you before they ran it?Paul: No, I never talked to them.reason: What do you think of Martin Luther King?Paul: Martin Luther King is one of my heroes because he believed in nonviolence and that's a libertarian principle. Rosa Parks is the same way. Gandhi, I admire. Because they're willing to take on the government, they were willing to take on bad laws. So I believe in civil disobedience if you understand the consequences. Martin Luther King was a great person because he did that and he changed America for the better because of that.reason: You didn't write the derogatory things about him in the letter?Paul: No.<a class="user" href="http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124281.html">http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124281.html</a>"Internet information claiming that presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) is a racist – and made derogatory comments about African Americans – has been making the rounds within the blogosphere. But sources close to the editorial group that published the newsletter (or newsletters) that supposedly carried the comments claim that Ron Paul never had anything to do with them, and wasn’t even aware of them.These sources say that editorial operation in question was a fairly large one, and profitable for its time - focused in large part on measures that one could take to generate a lifestyle independent of government influence and intervention.The publication, or publications, comprised a business venture to which Ron Paul lent his name. Headquarters were “60 miles away” from Ron Paul’s personal Texas offices. At the time that the publications were being disseminated, primarily in the 1980s, Ron Paul was involved in numerous activities including Libertarian politics. He eventually ran for U.S. president as a Libertarian."<a class="user" href="http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=41822">http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=41 ...</a>
This ThinkProgress article is just a summary of a New Republic article...<a class="user" href="http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397">http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397</a> ...From the original article...Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a na?ve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically - or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point - over the course of decades - he would have done something about it.
Closed AccountJan 9, 2008
This has been posted and debunked a million times at digg. But the racists keep trying to paint Paul as one of them.The worse of people come out at election day. Including those who smear. They wait until the days of the election and attempt to take a politician out of the race. Truth means nothing to these types of people.The enemies of freedom and liberty know no bounds to the depths they will go.Do some research and learn for yourself that the claims these people are making could not possibly be from Ron Paul. The writing is not his style and his voting record, speeches on the House floor and videos have never even given a hint of racism. Also, no one has ever come forward to back up the allegations.There is abundant information out there for you to learn that Ron Paul could not have been the one to write these letters. A publishing company paid him for the use of his name. His only crime was to not follow through to be sure what was being done fits his own principles.From the Paul campaign:January 8, 2008 5:28 am ESTARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – In response to an article published by The New Republic, Ron Paul issued the following statement:“The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts.“In fact, I have always agreed with Martin Luther King, Jr. that we should only be concerned with the content of a person's character, not the color of their skin. As I stated on the floor of the U.S. House on April 20, 1999: ‘I rise in great respect for the courage and high ideals of Rosa Parks who stood steadfastly for the rights of individuals against unjust laws and oppressive governmental policies.’“This story is old news and has been rehashed for over a decade. It's once again being resurrected for obvious political reasons on the day of the New Hampshire primary.“When I was out of Congress and practicing medicine full-time, a newsletter was published under my name that I did not edit. Several writers contributed to the product. For over a decade, I have publically taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.”###On TNRThe New Republic was founded by Herbert Croly, a "Progressive" who believed that the Constitution should be abolished in favor of the will of governing elites. Here is what Virginia Postrel wrote about him several years ago:Crolyism overturned the ideal of limited government in favor of a combination of elite power — commissions to regulate and plan — and mass democracy.... Frustrated with constitutional limits, Croly wrote, “It remains ... true ... that every popular government should in the end, and after a necessarily prolonged deliberation, possess the power of taking any action, which, in the opinion of a decisive majority of the people, is demanded by the public welfare.” This statement, while extreme, pretty much sums up today’s governing philosophy.So, keep in mind that this is the philosophy behind TNR. It is a view that the political elite need to tell everyone else what to do, and use lethal force against people who resist.###TNR has a long and checkered history of pro-fascism, pro-communism, and pro-new dealism. Founded to promote the rotten progessive movement of militarism, central banking, income taxation, centralization, and regulation of business, it naturally hates and fears the Ron Paul Revolution. The mag is also famous for having published a slew of entirely made-up articles by Stephen Glass, which it passed off as non-fiction. Through the 1950s it was an important magazine, of sigificant if baleful influence, but it long ago declined in circulation and significance, like all DC deadtree ops. Long close to Beltway libertarians, for whom its politically correct left-neoconism is fine and dandy, TNR once published a cover story literally comparing Ross Perot to Adolf Hitler when he was running for president. That is the publication's style--hysterical smears aimed at political enemies.<a class="user" href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018420.html">http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018 ...</a>###On the slander by KirchickAn emailer informed me this morning that a young kid whom he called a "grossly uneducated, pimply-faced youth" slandered both Ron Paul and myself on the Tucker Carlson show last night. The pimply-faced youth (PFY) is one Jamie Kirchick, who writes for the left-wing, pro-war New Republic magazine. In the YouTube video of the conversation the PFY asserts over and over that Ron Paul is a "racist." When Carlson asks him if he ever heard Ron make a racist remark he says "No." But then, with a Gotcha! look on his face, the PFY announces: "BUT," he DID attend a conference on secession in 1995!! Aha! Gotcha!This ignorant little kid posing as a "journalist" then informed everyone that the conference was sponsored by a "neo-Confederate" group and that Ron Paul speaks to "the neo-Confederate community," whatever that is, "in code language. (I knew that Ron was in touch with the Martian community, and with the residents of the planet Remulak, home of the supposedly "fictional" Coneheads of Saturday Night Live fame, but not the "Neo-Confederate Community" as well).Well, I was at that secession conference and presented a paper there. It was sponsored by the Mises Institute, which has nothing to do with Confederates, neo or otherwise, as anyone who surveyed the Institute's programs on its web site (www.mises.org) would know. The PFY did not bother because he is only interested in slandering Ron Paul, not in being a serious journalist.My paper was about the Northern secessionist tradition prior to the War between the States, including the Hartford, Ct. secession convention of 1814, and the secession movements of the mid-Atlantic states that existed prior to the war (see the book, The Secession Movement in the Middle States by William Wright). The famous abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a Northern secessionist whose credo was "No Covenant with Death," the "covenant" being the U.S. Constitition, and "death" being slavery. Other papers had to do with the Quebec secession movement, European secession movements, federalism in general, how the U.S. was created by a war of secession from the British empire, and even "How to Secede in Business" by substituting arbitration for litigation.But don't take my word for it. The proceedings of the conference, which the PFY is obviously ignorant of, were published as a book: Secession, State and Liberty, edited by Dr. David Gordon, whose Ph.D. from UCLA is in the field of intellectual history. It includes essays by scholars and professors from Emory University, Florida State University, UNLV, University of Montreal, University of South Carolina, and even a lawyer from Buffalo, New York. It was published a few years after the Soviet empire imploded as the result of eleven separate acts of peaceful secession, which made it especially relevant to social scientists.In fact, secession remains a lively topic of academic discourse, something that the PFY is obviously unfamiliar with. A few weeks ago a secession conference sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities was held in Chrleston, South Carolina, featuring some thirty historians and legal scholars. In little Jamie Kirchick's empty mind, the NEH must necessarily be a hotbed of pro-slavery sentiment. (A friend in academe tells me that the participants in this conference spanned the ideological spectrum from left/liberal to Marxist).Only an ignorant conspiracy theorist like Jamie Kirchick would assume that anyone who studies secession in a scholarly way is necessarily some kind of KKK-sympathizing kook. He knows that Ron Paul will not sue him for defamation because he is a public figure. I, however, am not a public figure.<a class="user" href="http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018418.html">http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/018 ...</a>And a little more on this scumJamie Kirchick: "I don’t think Ron Paul is a homophobe; I'm just cynical"<a class="user" href="http://gays-for-ron.blogspot.com/2008/01/jamie-kirchick-i-dont-think-ron-paul-is.html">http://gays-for-ron.blogspot.com/2008/01/jamie-kir ...</a>Reason talked with Paul about this:Ron Paul: All it is--it's old stuff. It's all been rehashed. It's all political stuff.reason: Why don't you release all the old letters?Paul: I don't even have copies of them, because it's ancient history.reason: Do you stand by what appears in the letters? Did you write these...?Paul: No. I've discussed all of that in the past. It's just old news.reason: Did the New Republic talk to you before they ran it?Paul: No, I never talked to them.reason: What do you think of Martin Luther King?Paul: Martin Luther King is one of my heroes because he believed in nonviolence and that's a libertarian principle. Rosa Parks is the same way. Gandhi, I admire. Because they're willing to take on the government, they were willing to take on bad laws. So I believe in civil disobedience if you understand the consequences. Martin Luther King was a great person because he did that and he changed America for the better because of that.reason: You didn't write the derogatory things about him in the letter?Paul: No.<a class="user" href="http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124281.html">http://www.reason.com/blog/show/124281.html</a>"Internet information claiming that presidential candidate Ron Paul (R-TX) is a racist – and made derogatory comments about African Americans – has been making the rounds within the blogosphere. But sources close to the editorial group that published the newsletter (or newsletters) that supposedly carried the comments claim that Ron Paul never had anything to do with them, and wasn’t even aware of them.These sources say that editorial operation in question was a fairly large one, and profitable for its time - focused in large part on measures that one could take to generate a lifestyle independent of government influence and intervention.The publication, or publications, comprised a business venture to which Ron Paul lent his name. Headquarters were “60 miles away” from Ron Paul’s personal Texas offices. At the time that the publications were being disseminated, primarily in the 1980s, Ron Paul was involved in numerous activities including Libertarian politics. He eventually ran for U.S. president as a Libertarian."<a class="user" href="http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=41822">http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=41 ...</a>
sultanknishJan 9, 2008
<a class="user" href="http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2008/01/proof-ron-paul-lied-about-not-being.html">http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2008/01/proof-ron- ...</a>The January 1991 newsletter features the author mentioning another congressman as "my successor" and talking about his experience as "a flight surgeon in the air force" and then afterward launching into another tirade about Martin Luther King. Again this is Ron Paul's record, not someone else. The author is clearly Ron PaulIn that same newsletter the author writes about his time running for President in 1988 on the Libertarian Party ticket. Ron Paul ran for President in 1988 on the Libertarian Party ticket. Here it is completely unambiguous that the author is Ron Paul and that he is expressing his own views about Martin Luther King.<a class="user" href="http://www.tnr.com/downloads/January91.pdf">http://www.tnr.com/downloads/January91.pdf</a>
spectre74Jan 9, 2008
I agree about Lew Rockwell. And just because he denies it doesn't make what he says false.
fdtateJan 9, 2008
This ThinkProgress article is just a summary of a New Republic article...<a class="user" href="http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397">http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=e2f15397</a> ...From the original article...Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a na?ve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically - or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point - over the course of decades - he would have done something about it.