{"id":39711,"date":"2012-01-11T18:56:16","date_gmt":"2012-01-12T02:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=39711"},"modified":"2012-01-11T19:20:32","modified_gmt":"2012-01-12T03:20:32","slug":"ron-paul-attracts-a-bad-crowd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=39711","title":{"rendered":"Ron Paul Attracts A Bad Crowd"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m fine with Ron Paul. I love his domestic program. I don&#8217;t agree with his foreign policy but I don&#8217;t have a problem with it. He wants America to withdraw from the world. Fine. That&#8217;s a legitimate position.<\/p>\n<p>One thing that is not legitimate is the frequently anti-Semitic, bigoted, racist, hateful nature of many of Ron Paul&#8217;s supporters. Check out their comments on YouTube and other places. Check out the emails that they send people. <\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s something different and frightening about many of Ron Paul&#8217;s supporters.<\/p>\n<p>As I research Ron Paul, I see that he is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. You can be a good person and support the abolition of America&#8217;s foreign aid, but to support a barbaric police state (Palestine Authority) over a democracy (Israel) shows deeply warped values.<\/p>\n<p>On Feb. 17, 2011, <A HREF=\"http:\/\/rightwingnews.com\/foreign-affairs\/ron-paul-is-a-vicious-anti-semite-and-anti-american-and-conservatives-need-to-wash-their-hands-of-him\/\">David Horowitz wrote<\/a>: &#8220;Long ago Bill Buckley drummed the anti-Semites out of the conservative movement, and the movement thrived as a result. But the Jew-haters have returned. For years the Texas crackpot, Ron Paul, has been attacking America and Israel as imperialist powers \u2014 the Great Satan and the Little Satan, and calling for America\u2019s retreat from the battle against our totalitarian enemies. At the recent CPAC conference Paul\u2019s Jew-hating storm-troopers swarmed the Freedom Center\u2019s table to vent their spleen against Israel as a Nazi state. Now Paul is making a priority of withdrawing aid for Israel \u2014 the only democracy in the Middle East and the only reliable ally of the United States.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.chicagonow.com\/publius-forum\/2011\/12\/ron-paul-conspiracy-nut-anti-semite\/\">Warner Todd Huston writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Last year Ron Paul said that the CIA perpetrated a coup over the United States. \u201cThere\u2019s been a coup, have you heard? It\u2019s the CIA coup. They\u2019re in businesses, in drug businesses.&#8221; That fits in as just another part of the wacky world of Ron Paul that has spanned decades of denigrating blacks, assigning all sorts of crazy conspiracies to the US government, and above all hatred for Israel. It is a disgusting sin that this man is a political candidate for anything much less for the GOP nomination for President of the United States.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of the credit for exposing the worst of Paul&#8217;s outrages belongs to James Kirchick who in 2008 wrote a short piece for The New Republic detailing what he found in an archive of Ron Paul&#8217;s racist newsletters.<\/p>\n<p>Also back in 2008, then Fox News host John Gibson had a must hear interview with Kirchick asking why so many white supremacists and racists were in such slavish support of Ron Paul when he ran for president in 2008.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/rightwingnews.com\/election-2012\/statement-from-fmr-ron-paul-staffer-on-newsletters-anti-semitism\/\">Former Ron Paul assistant Eric Dondero writes<\/a>: <\/p>\n<p>Is Ron Paul an Anti-Semite? Absolutely No. As a Jew, (half on my mother\u2019s side), I can categorically say that I never heard anything out of his mouth, in hundreds of speeches I listened too over the years, or in my personal presence that could be called, \u201cAnti-Semite.\u201d No slurs. No derogatory remarks.<\/p>\n<p>He is however, most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general. He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.<\/p>\n<p>Again, American Jews, Ron Paul has no problem with. In fact, there were a few Jews in our congressional district, and Ron befriended them with the specific intent of winning their support for our campaign. (One synagogue in Victoria, and tiny one in Wharton headed by a well-known Jewish lawyer).<\/p>\n<p>On the incident that\u2019s being talked about in some blog media about the campaign manager directing me to a press conference of our opponent Lefty Morris in Victoria to push back on Anti-Jewish charges from the Morris campaign, yes, that did happen. The Victoria Advocate described the press conference very accurately. Yes, I was asked (not forced), to attend the conference dressed in a Jewish yarlmuke, and other Jewish adornments.<\/p>\n<p>There was another incident when Ron finally agreed to a meeting with Houston Jewish Young Republicans at the Freeport office. He berated them, and even shouted at one point, over their un-flinching support for Israel. So, much so, that the 6 of them walked out of the office. I was left chasing them down the hallway apologizing for my boss.<\/p>\n<p><iframe width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pOV0qCW7nBA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><A HREF=\"http:\/\/www.weeklystandard.com\/articles\/company-ron-paul-keeps_613474.html?nopager=1\">The Weekly Standard publishes Dec. 26, 2011<\/a>:<\/p>\n<p>The Republican Jewish Coalition announced this month that congressman Ron Paul would not be among the six guests invited to participate in its Republican Presidential Candidates Forum. \u201cHe\u2019s just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organization,\u201d said Matt Brooks, executive director of the RJC, adding that the group \u201crejects his misguided and extreme views.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>Paul\u2019s exclusion caused an uproar, with critics alleging that his stand on Israel had earned the RJC\u2019s ire; an absolutist libertarian, Paul opposes foreign aid to all countries, including the Jewish state. \u201cThis seems to me more of an attempt to draw boundaries around acceptable policy discourse than any active concern that President Dr. Ron Paul would be actively anti-Israel or anti-Semitic,\u201d wrote Reason editor Matt Welch. Chris McGreal of the Guardian reported that Paul \u201cwas barred because of his views on Israel.\u201d Even Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun and a valiant defender of Israel (and friend and mentor of this writer), opined, \u201cThe whole idea of an organization of Jewish Republicans worrying about the mainstream strikes me as a bit contradictory.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>While Paul\u2019s views on Israel certainly place him outside the American, never mind Republican, mainstream, there is an even more elementary reason the RJC was right to exclude him from its event. It is Paul\u2019s lucrative and decades-long promotion of bigotry and conspiracy theories, for which he has yet to account fully, and his continuing espousal of extremist views, that should make him unwelcome at any respectable forum, not only those hosted by Jewish organizations. <\/p>\n<p>In January 2008, the New Republic ran my story reporting the contents of monthly newsletters that Paul published throughout the 1980s and 1990s. While a handful of controversial passages from these bulletins had been quoted previously, I was able to track down nearly the entire archive, scattered between the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society (both of which housed the newsletters in collections of extreme right-wing American political literature). Though particular articles rarely carried a byline, the vast majority were written in the first person, while the title of the newsletter, in its various iterations, always featured Paul\u2019s name: Ron Paul\u2019s Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Political Report, the Ron Paul Survival Report, and the Ron Paul Investment Letter. What I found was unpleasant.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOrder was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks,\u201d read a typical article from the June 1992 \u201cSpecial Issue on Racial Terrorism,\u201d a supplement to the Ron Paul Political Report. Racial apocalypse was the most persistent theme of the newsletters; a 1990 issue warned of \u201cThe Coming Race War,\u201d and an article the following year about disturbances in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was entitled \u201cAnimals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.\u201d Paul alleged that Martin Luther King Jr., \u201cthe world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours,\u201d had also \u201cseduced underage girls and boys.\u201d The man who would later proclaim King a \u201chero\u201d attacked Ronald Reagan for signing legislation creating the federal holiday in his name, complaining, \u201cWe can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>No conspiracy theory was too outlandish for Paul\u2019s endorsement. One newsletter reported on the heretofore unknown phenomenon of \u201cNeedlin\u2019,\u201d in which \u201cgangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14\u201d roamed the streets of New York and injected white women with possibly HIV-infected syringes. Another newsletter warned that \u201cthe AIDS patient\u201d should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because \u201cAIDS can be transmitted by saliva,\u201d a strange claim for a physician to make. <\/p>\n<p>Paul gave credence to the theory, later shown to have been the product of a Soviet disinformation effort, that AIDS had been created in a U.S. government laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Three months before far-right extremists killed 168 Americans in Oklahoma City, Paul\u2019s newsletter praised the \u201c1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty\u201d as \u201cone of the most encouraging developments in America.\u201d And he offered specific advice to antigovernment militia members, such as, \u201cKeep the group size down,\u201d \u201cKeep quiet and you\u2019re harder to find,\u201d \u201cLeave no clues,\u201d \u201cAvoid the phone as much as possible,\u201d and \u201cDon\u2019t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>If the above were not enough to place Paul beyond the pale for the RJC, what the congressman had to say about Jews and Israel would probably be a deal-breaker. No foreign country was mentioned in the newsletters more often than Israel. A 1987 newsletter termed it \u201can aggressive, national socialist state,\u201d and another missive, on the subject of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, concluded, \u201cWhether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.\u201d In 1990, the newsletter cast aspersions on the \u201ctens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This is just a sample of the hateful and conspiratorial nonsense that Paul promoted for decades under his own name. His response to the revelations was nothing short of unbelievable. \u201cThe quotations in the New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen 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 publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.\u201d In an interview with CNN\u2019s Wolf Blitzer two days after the article appeared, Paul waved away accusations of racism by saying that he was \u201cgaining ground with the blacks\u201d and \u201cgetting more votes right now and more support from the blacks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Yet a subsequent report by Reason found that Ron Paul &#038; Associates, the defunct company that published the newsletters and which counted Paul and his wife as officers, reported an income of nearly $1 million in 1993 alone. If this figure is reliable, Paul must have earned multiple millions of dollars over the two decades plus of the newsletters\u2019 existence. It is incredible that he had less than an active interest in what was being printed as part of a subscription newsletter enterprise that earned him and his family millions of dollars. Ed Crane, the president of the Cato Institute, said Paul told him that \u201chis best source of congressional campaign donations was the mailing list for the Spotlight, the conspiracy-mongering, anti-Semitic tabloid run by the Holocaust denier Willis Carto.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This sordid history would not bear repeating but for the fact that the media love to portray Paul as a truth-telling, antiwar Republican standing up to the \u201chawkish\u201d conservative establishment. Otherwise, the newsletters, and Paul\u2019s continued failure to name their author, would be mentioned in every story about him, and he would be relegated to the fringe where he belongs. But Paul has escaped the sort of media scrutiny that would bury other political figures. A December 15 profile of Paul in the Washington Post, for instance, affectionately described his love of gardening and The Sound of Music and judged that \u201cworld events have conspired to make him look increasingly on point\u201d\u2014all without any mention of the newsletter controversy. Though present at nearly every Republican debate, he has yet to be asked about the newsletters. Had Paul\u2019s persona and views changed significantly since 2008, this oversight might be understandable. But he continues to say and do things suggesting that, far from disowning the statements he has claimed \u201cdo not represent what I believe or have ever believed,\u201d he still believes them.<\/p>\n<p>In the four years since my article appeared, Paul has gone right on appearing regularly on the radio program of Alex Jones, the most popular conspiracy theorist in America (unless that distinction belongs to Paul himself). To understand Jones\u2019s paranoid worldview, it helps to watch a recent documentary he produced, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, which reveals the secret plot of George Pataki, David Rockefeller, and Queen Beatrix, among other luminaries, to exterminate humanity and transform themselves into \u201csuperhuman\u201d computer hybrids able to \u201ctravel throughout the cosmos.\u201d There is nothing Jones believes the American government isn\u2019t capable of, from \u201c[encouraging] homosexuality with chemicals so that people don\u2019t have children\u201d to blowing up the Space Shuttle Columbia, a \u201ctextbook psychological warfare operation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In a March 2009 interview, Paul entertained Jones\u2019s claim that NORTHCOM, the U.S. military\u2019s combatant command for North America, is \u201ctaking over\u201d the country. \u201cThe average member of Congress probably isn\u2019t a participant in the grand conspiracy,\u201d Paul reassured the fevered host, essentially acknowledging that such a conspiracy exists. \u201cWe need to take out the CIA.\u201d On Paul\u2019s latest appearance on the Jones show, just last week, he called allegations that Iran had attempted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the United States a \u201cpropaganda stunt\u201d of the Obama administration. In a January 2010 speech, Paul announced, \u201cThere\u2019s been a coup, have you heard? It\u2019s the CIA coup\u201d against the American government. \u201cThey\u2019re in businesses, in drug businesses,\u201d the congressman added. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m fine with Ron Paul. I love his domestic program. I don&#8217;t agree with his foreign policy but I don&#8217;t have a problem with it. He wants America to withdraw from the world. Fine. That&#8217;s a legitimate position. One thing &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=39711\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[605,37,29,24],"tags":[7699,29855,28690,28684,28686,28687,1894,28689,22847,28688,28685],"class_list":["post-39711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anti-semitism","category-israel","category-jews","category-politics","tag-american-jews","tag-david-horowitz","tag-democracy-in-the-middle-east","tag-eric-dondero","tag-hateful-nature","tag-imperialist-powers","tag-jewish-lawyer","tag-palestine-authority","tag-private-conversations","tag-todd-huston","tag-victoria-advocate"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=39711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39718,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39711\/revisions\/39718"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=39711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=39711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=39711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}