COLUMN: Ron Paul unfit to be president
Most of you already know who Republican presidential hopeful (and long-shot) Ron Paul is. But too few of you know just how crazy he is. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Paul published his political newsletter, “The Ron Paul Survival Report,” which received a reading audience in the tens of thousands. Last week, The New Republic magazine procured dozens of these newsletters and was startled by what sentiments were expressed therein. Here are but a few disturbing excerpts from Ron Paul’s newsletters: On blacks: “I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in (Washington, D.C.,) are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” One newsletter defended the Rodney King beating on the grounds that he belonged to a naturally criminal race. “We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.”
Concerning the 1992 Los Angeles riots incited by the Rodney King beating, a newsletter argued order was not restored to L.A. until blacks went “to pick up their welfare checks.”
The newsletters routinely dismissed King as “a world-class adulterer” who “seduced underage girls and boys” and “replaced the evil of forced segregation with the evil of forced integration.” Broader swipes were made at the entire civil rights movement, which was viewed as little more than a communist concoction. Indeed, to this day, Paul vehemently opposes civil rights legislation.
Paul himself warned that there was an impending race war and advised whites to buy and know how to use guns because “the animals are coming.”
It was suggested in another newsletter that New York City be renamed “Lazyopolis,” “Dirtburg,” Rapetown” or “Zooville” because of its low-income black population.
A 1991 issue even fawned over David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “Our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.”
The gay community was another common target of “The Ron Paul Survival Report.” “I miss the closet,” one newsletter said nostalgically. “Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.”
The newsletters were manically obsessed with AIDS, “a politically protected disease thanks to payola and the influence of the homosexual lobby.” They sought quarantining gays under the pretext of the AIDS virus: “Homosexuals…should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals.”
About gays in San Francisco: “These men don’t really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners … They enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick (with AIDS).”
Astoundingly, it doesn’t end at racism and homophobia. The newsletters were also littered with latent anti-Semitism, militant anarchism and paranoid conspiracy theories. As if some of his political beliefs weren’t scary enough.
When confronted with the above quotes, Paul nervously denied he wrote or was aware of them. This, however, is a relatively new defense.
The first documented instance of Paul expressing remorse about the statements or denying authorship came in an October 2001 Texas Monthly magazine article. Before that, he actually defended his newsletters. Paul claimed full ownership of the controversial comments and instead insisted they were taken “out of context.”
So at best, Paul is so naive and incompetent that he could not oversee the production of, let alone read, his monthly newsletter. At worst (and most likely), he wrote/approved the hateful newsletters.
In either case, though, Paul is grossly unfit to be president.
By no means am I insinuating that Paul’s supporters are bigots. Most of his supporters are simply committed to a humble foreign policy, fiscal sanity and respect for the Constitution. That’s a noble cause and one that deserves far better than Paul.