Ron Paul, the libertarian former Texas congressman whose hard-line
views are widely admired on the radical right but who claims to reject
racism, has started a new organization stacked with a hodgepodge of
far-right extremists.
As
The Daily Beast reported
yesterday,
the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity is ostensibly designed
to promote a discourse about U.S. foreign policy. But its advisory board
is stacked with what writer James Kirchik characterized as “a bevy of
conspiracy theorists, cranks, and apologists for some of the worst
regimes on the planet.”
And just who are the far-right luminaries helping guide Paul’s new endeavor?
One
is Lew Rockwell, Paul’s former congressional chief of staff who now
heads the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an Auburn, Ala., think tank with
deep ties to the
neo-Confederate movement.
There’s Judge Andrew Napolitano of Fox News and journalist Eric
Margolis, both 9/11 “truthers” who suspect that the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks may have been orchestrated by the government.
And
alongside them sits Butler Shaffer, a Southwestern Law School professor
who similarly once asked: “In light of the lies, forgeries, cover-ups,
and other deceptions leading to a ‘war’ in Iraq, how can any
intellectually honest person categorically deny the possibility of the
involvement of American political interest in 9/11?”
But that’s not the worst of it, according to
The Daily Beast.
“Also
on Paul’s board are prominent former government officials who claim
that American Jews constitute a ‘fifth column’ aimed at subverting
American foreign policy in the interests of Israel,” Kirchick reported.
One of those is Michael Scheuer, a former CIA intelligence officer who
has accused a long list of individuals and organizations of “being
intent on involving 300 million Americans in other people’s religious
wars,”
The Daily Beast said.
Still another board member is Walter Bloch, a fellow at the Mises institute who
The Daily Beast said
“believes the wrong side won the ‘war against Southern secession’ and
blames most of America’s current problems on ‘the monster Lincoln.’”
Yesterday’s article wasn’t the first to note the affinity many extremists have for Paul. An article in
The New York Times in
2011, when Paul was running for president, noted that while white
supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists had allied behind Paul’s
campaign, he had not disavowed their support. Paul told the newspaper:
“If they want to endorse me, they’re endorsing what I do or say –– it
has nothing to do with me endorsing what they say.”
The
controversy surrounding Paul’s new organization is reminiscent of past
revelations. Paul has been accused of authoring a series of newsletters,
written under his name, that Kirchik says “reveal decades worth of
obsession and conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia
movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews and gays.” When
Kirchik first detailed those newsletters in 2008, Paul claimed that he
had not written them and he had no idea who had. Kirchik says in his
latest article that the newsletters, which ostensibly gave supporters
“political news and investment advice,” “netted his family over $1
million per year.”
The November 1990 issue of the Paul’s “Political Report,” for example, praised neo-Nazi and former Klan leader
David Duke.
A month later, an issue described the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a
“world-class adulterer” who “replaced the evil of forced segregation
with the evil of forced integration.” Also that year, as the Rev. Al
Sharpton led efforts to rename New York City after King, Paul’s
newsletter suggested possible alternatives including “Welfaria” and
“Zooville.”
The vitriol ostensibly coming from Paul also targeted
the LGBT community. A 1994 issue of the “Ron Paul Survival Report”
asserted that people “who don’t get a blood transfusion, and who don’t
swap needles, are virtually assured of not getting AIDS unless they are
deliberately infected by a malicious gay.”
The stated mission of
the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity is to provide “the tools
and the education to chart a new course with the understanding that
only through a peaceful foreign policy can we hope for a prosperous
tomorrow.” But with the revelation of who its principals really are, one
can only wonder what that means.
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