Ron Paul And Racism

I've been meaning to post about this for a while now, but kept forgetting. Then today I saw this article and was reminded.

The gist of it is the controversy surrounding Ron Paul, one of the US Presidential candidates, who it emerged recently had, for many years, had obscenely racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and downright nasty things published in newsletters under his name. Paul claims that he did not write or edit these newsletters, and that those who did were not acting according to any of his own wishes or beliefs. He claims to utterly repudiate all of this. But questions have been raised as to how he could go so long without ever realising what was being published under his name. So it seems that at the very least he has been unbelievably dysfunctional to allow these kinds of things to be published in his name.

What the above article doesn't pick up on, however, is that there is some evidence that Ron Paul DID contribute to the newsletter. For example, the December 1990 newsletter calls Martin Luther King a child molester; in the same issue, we suddenly read this:

Now, Ron Paul's wife is named Carol, and research confirms that in 1990 he did indeed have grandchildren. Other personal details of Ron Paul emerge in other newsletters also. So it appears that Ron Paul contributed to the newsletter, and yet failed to actually read or show concern about the contents of that same newsletter, or express any repudiation of its views at all until he was called out on it recently. Which seems...unlikely.

Could these entries in the newsletter have been forgeries? Perhaps. But if they were, the personal details - at a time when Paul was not very well known and the Internet was a less wonderful thing than it is now - suggest that the writer of the entries had close connections with Ron Paul.

Basically, whatever way you look at this, it works out bad for Ron Paul.