I realize this is now the third Ron Paul-related posting since I began this blog not two weeks ago. I’m sorry about all the Ron Paul spam, but if you still haven’t given him a serious look, I think you owe it to yourself and this country to do that much. Form your own conclusions by looking into what the man has actually said. This is the first time in years that I’ve found a political candidate to be excited about, and I am so glad to see Paul’s popularity rise that I want to do all I can to make it count on election day.

On that note, this is a really good editorial I found by a Florida pastor and radio host.

With that out of the way, I’d like to address something my mom heard on a conservative talk radio show about Ron Paul and white supremacy groups. My initial reaction was that it was untrue, but I wanted to make sure before I continued to support him. Here’s what I found:

Ron Paul’s “white supremacist” writings seem to be nonexistent, since not even his racist supporters can find them.

I did find a number of links to reprints of his columns in white supremacist papers, such as this piece of trash. But he didn’t write for the magazine, they just printed a column of his on the gold standard. They likely didn’t even ask permission, because Paul apparently allows anyone to reprint his material.

Also interesting is this thread on a sickeningly anti-semitic site. They’re debating whether Paul is their guy, and the people in favor don’t have anything to cite except the fact that he supports anti-globalization policies which they also support (Paul’s reason is national sovereignty, theirs is the “watering down” of our race – two totally different reasons to favor the same position). If they had any racist Ron Paul quotes, they would have mentioned them in that discussion. I saw none. They really support him for his border security position, because they apparently hate Mexicans too.

I found a really liberal blog post about Paul’s supposed racism, but the author just linked to the above reprints in racist publications and in conclusion had nothing to say about Paul that made him sound racist, except that he didn’t do enough to distance himself from racists. He basically said that because Paul doesn’t spend a lot of time clarifying this issue, he must agree with them. That’s BS. He’s a busy man working in Congress, fighting for what he believes in, and running for President. Addressing this issue only gives it attention and merit it doesn’t deserve. He simply favors certain policies that they apparently agree with for completely different reasons.

This guy says Paul is insane because he wants the people to have the power in America rather than the elites. His whole argument is that Paul’s tone sounds whacko. If you actually read what Paul’s saying, it’s nothing more than someone upset with big government and special interests running this country, and a policy that’s tending to let other countries have more say in what we do as a nation (NWO, UN, etc.)

And finally, this guy cites various “patriot” groups that support Paul as evidence that he’s a genocidal fascist, but the evidence he gives is that Pat Buchanan’s Christian Coalition (hardly what I’d consider a dangerous group) supports him, as do Confederate orgs (obviously because he’s pro-states rights) and “tax patriots” (he’s addressed this issue a number of times, and has made clear that he doesn’t support refusing to pay taxes since it’s the law, but that he sympathizes in principle with those who refuse to pay because it’s unconstitutional). They suggest that he’s okay with terrorizing blacks because of this quote about property rights and cross burning:

“Cross burning could be a crime if they were violating somebody’s property rights,” he said during his campaign. But if you go out on your farm some place and it’s on your property and you put two sticks together and you burn it, I am not going to send in the federal police.”

And they make him out to be a freak for having the support of drug-advocates (you think because he opposes the ridiculously costly and ineffectual war on drugs?).

The only racist-sounding writing I found after a lot of searching is a publication in a newsletter that Paul helped publish in the ’80s and early ’90s. It was a controversial issue in 1996 when his Congressional opponent brought them up, but has since been covered pretty thoroughly, such as on the wikipedia page and this excerpt from a New York Times Magazine article:

In the 1996 general election, Paul’s Democratic opponent Lefty Morris held a press conference to air several shocking quotes from a newsletter that Paul published during his decade away from Washington. Passages described the black male population of Washington as “semi-criminal or entirely criminal” and stated that “by far the most powerful lobby in Washington of the bad sort is the Israeli government.” Morris noted that a Canadian neo-Nazi Web site had listed Paul’s newsletter as a laudably “racialist” publication.

Paul survived these revelations. He later explained that he had not written the passages himself — quite believably, since the style diverges widely from his own. But his response to the accusations was not transparent. When Morris called on him to release the rest of his newsletters, he would not. He remains touchy about it. “Even the fact that you’re asking this question infers, ‘Oh, you’re an anti-Semite,’ ” he told me in June. Actually, it doesn’t. Paul was in Congress when Israel bombed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear plant in 1981 and — unlike the United Nations and the Reagan administration — defended its right to do so. He says Saudi Arabia has an influence on Washington equal to Israel’s. His votes against support for Israel follow quite naturally from his opposition to all foreign aid. There is no sign that they reflect any special animus against the Jewish state.

What is interesting is Paul’s idea that the identity of the person who did write those lines is “of no importance.” Paul never deals in disavowals or renunciations or distancings, as other politicians do. In his office one afternoon in June, I asked about his connections to the John Birch Society. “Oh, my goodness, the John Birch Society!” he said in mock horror. “Is that bad? I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution. I don’t know how many positions they would have that I don’t agree with. Because they’re real strict constitutionalists, they don’t like the war, they’re hard-money people. . . . ”

In short, yes, a newsletter Paul was involved in did publish several editorials out of hundreds which had some pretty out-there views. And yes, Paul should have distanced himself from them immediately. But it seems pretty clear that he didn’t write them (he hasn’t written anything similar before or since, and it doesn’t read like his other writings), and he apparently didn’t even know about them until they were brought up in the 1996 election. After finding out about them he has tried to make clear that he doesn’t stand by what they say. Could he have handled this situation better, or been better at monitoring what his publication distributed? Sure. But neither is this evidence that Paul is a racist. In fact, a recent poll showed him to be the highest-polling Republican among black voters.

In conclusion, the argument all these people characterizing Ron Paul as a racist seem to be making is that because certain extremist groups favor some of his positions, he must favor them for the same reasons. That’s clearly not a valid argument. If an atheist copied some of my photos and used them to point out evidence of evolution, that doesn’t make me an atheist or an evolutionist. Nor would I feel the need to ask them to stop, because I would stand by what I produced. I would just appreciate them for other reasons (such as an example of what I believe to be God’s beautiful creation…a topic for another post).

It bothers me that nationally-syndicated radio hosts are repeating these arguments when I think it’s clear that they just want to discredit Paul because they disagree with some of his positions, such as the war. They’re contorting the facts into something false, like the Democrats did when they painted Bush as a drunk who avoided military service. It’s a bunch of crap, and that’s proven by the fact that the racists themselves don’t mention or print anything about Paul except policies he’s been very public about.