Pretty much all of the top personalities at the Right Stuff, a neo-Nazi troll mecca, started off as conventional libertarians and Paul supporters, according to the site’s creator, an anonymous man who goes by the name “Mike Enoch.”
“We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this,” he said on an alt-right podcast last month. After Paul’s second campaign failed, Enoch completely disengaged from politics, he added.
Paul was also the favorite of Paul Gottfried and Richard Spencer, the two men who created the term “alternative right” and formed the annual conference where old-school right-wing racists met and mentored young and disaffected conservative intellectuals.
The Texas congressman was also the preferred candidate of Jared Taylor and the readers of his white nationalist website American Renaissance.
That feeling of admiration was apparently mutual. In the 1990s, Paul in his famously racist newsletters repeatedly promoted Taylor as part of a “paleolibertarian” strategy designed to attract racist white people. (Paul subsequently denied writing them, however.) Later on, American Renaissance wrote a featured article stating that “the race-realist section of the blogosphere is one of the most enthusiastic sources of support for Mr. Paul” and praised his “good instincts on race,” despite the fact that the author believed that Paul was no longer interested in catering to overt racists, as he formerly had.
Paul had nonracist supporters as well who would later become alt-right figures. (The self-described neo-Nazi types refer to them as “alt-lite.”) Libertarian radio host Alex Jones of InfoWars, a man famous for his belief in “lizard people” and his elaborate 9/11 conspiracy theories, dislikes being identified with the alt-right. But he is an important figure in the movement’s history and a key link from Ron Paul to Donald Trump. Today Jones is known today as an ardent Trump supporter but his affection for Ron Paul and his son, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, was even greater while they were running their respective presidential campaigns.
In the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, Ron Paul was also by far the preferred presidential candidate of the racist Politically Incorrect board known as /pol/ on 4chan. Throughout both of his unsuccessful runs, the forum served as a critical organizing portal and talent incubator for Ron Paul’s youthful, tech-savvy supporters to pull off fundraising and digital feats that many political observers incorrectly attributed to his official campaign staff.
