VICE: Ron Paul, Hacked to the White-Supremacist Bone

In the last two weeks, we've learned from Ron Paul's own former staffers that he was fully aware and in control of his own newsletter operation. That removes the desperate Paulestinian rationalization that somehow millions of dollars worth of racist newsletters were sold for decades without Ron Paul's awareness.

"But, that was in the 1990s!" counter Paul fans. And there another inapplicable, inapposite and unpersuasive argument might have lain, if it weren't for a recent hack by members of Anonymous, who exposed connections between Ron Paul and white-supremacist groups. Connections that exist today, rather than back in 2008. As if there were a freshness date on courting racism. As if there were a time-stamp on being worthless.

Click the wrinkled, lecturing, race-baiting goblin to read more at Vice:


For more on Ron Paul, in order:

• Ron Paul: Reactionary Racist Leprechaun

• The Ron Paul Political Report: Special Issue on Race Terrorism

• I'm Not Mad at Ron Paul, I'm Just Disappointed

• Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters

Ron Paul (Never) Made Money from and Used Hate

Today, thanks to an article in the Washington Post entitled "Ron Paul signed off on racist newsletters in the 1990s, associates say," people can finally affirm, with confidence, the exact same things most people have been claiming for months:

[People] close to Paul’s operations said he was deeply involved in the company that produced the [racist] newsletters, Ron Paul & Associates, and closely monitored its operations, signing off on articles and speaking to staff members virtually every day.

“It was his newsletter, and it was under his name, so he always got to see the final product. . . . He would proof it,’’ said Renae Hathway, a former secretary in Paul’s company and a supporter of the Texas congressman.

The Paulite rationalization has always been that he didn't mean these things published under his own name. And, more importantly, he didn't know.

Yet a review of his enterprises reveals a sharp-eyed businessman who for nearly two decades oversaw the company and a nonprofit foundation, intertwining them with his political career. The newsletters, which were launched in the mid-1980s and bore such names as the Ron Paul Survival Report, were produced by a company Paul dissolved in 2001.

The company shared offices with his campaigns and foundation at various points, according to those familiar with the operation. Public records show Paul’s wife and daughter were officers of the newsletter company and foundation; his daughter also served as his campaign treasurer.

Game Over: Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters

For a certain segment of the Ron Paul fanbase, no evidence of his disseminating hateful, paranoid material will ever be enough. Citing James Kirchick's piece in The New Republic wasn't sufficient, because Kirchick could have just been "making everything up." Then, when I and others posted copies of "The Ron Paul Political Report Special Issue on Race Terrorism," that too wasn't convincing.

"Proof that he said/endorsed racist things? Hardly. Doing it repeatedly in one document isn't enough to prove that he did it. Now, if there were many documents..."

Well, now there are many documents. Over fifty. Right here.

As I said in my rundown on the Paul platform over at Vice, reasonable fans of Dr. Paul now must accept that

there's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content [of] 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

• He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.
• He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate, but too obvious about it to win.
• He's actually a racist, which makes him unfit to be a human being.

Further, you can't dismiss this in the name of higher political or socioeconomic aspirations. Since Paul has no chance of winning — seriously, no chance at all — his only value is as a voice, a conduit for principles. And if your only hope is to change the discourse by amplifying ideas, you can do that via many voices and avenues. As I said in my Vice follow-up, acknowledging some of Paul's good ideas,

when you opt to support anti-imperialist and civil liberties ideals by supporting Paul the Candidate, you end up supporting everything else about him. That includes those newsletters and the unambiguous message to those who enjoy them: You can write these things and succeed; this works. The other good ideas to which he's signatory can't erase the fact that he put his name to those words printed above. The moral weight of those newsletters drags down even the most high-minded aspirations he has about civil liberties, and everything crashes down on all of us.

It's fine to have convictions about things he believes in. But when you voluntarily whitewash his record or choose to ignore it and champion him anyway, you are complicit in supporting the idea that racism and homophobia are morally inconsequential to the process of running for President of the United States. And, while many Paul supporters consider racism a social injury subordinate to extra-legal military conflict, there are just as many who disgustingly handwave at racism because it's an inconsequential burp on the way to more tax cuts, Free Markets, Free Money, Free Black Peop — stuff for me!

And still, for the faithful, this will not be enough.

Below, I've tried to give helpful general (bold) titles to each excerpt of the various Ron Paul newsletters available. These come courtesy of a zipfile of scans sent to me by reader Heresiarch, who, along with others, compiled it from various sources — although the lion's share, if not all, come from James Kirchick, who wrote the original, big Ron Paul story in The New Republic, in 2008. (You can see many of his highlights on the scans.) I have omitted the over 65 pages of scanned federal earmarks Ron Paul requested for his district, in a fit of States' Wants pique. I have also omitted the scans of Von Mises Institute brochures about a Secession Conference at which Paul spoke.

No attempt has been made to organize these via topic, since pages of each newsletter are apt to feature mini-articles on multiple topics, making organization futile. (My summaries don't indicate all that go on in the scans, so please click away.) Finally, below some of the scans, I've offered some comments in plain text. Those within quotation marks are direct quotes from the text appearing in the newsletter scans. Those without quotation marks are my own observations.

Ron Paul Is Dead, Miss Him Miss Him Miss Him

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: Mornacale, a serious journalist and Brusly High School and Louisiana Campaign for Liberty's 2011 Douchebag of the Year. Despite showing all outward signs of an intelligent human being, he's still a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He has yet to be seriously accused of killing anyone. You can follow him on Twitter.


How I Became Douchebag of the Year
by MORNACALE

Ron Paul died on the night of December 12, 2012. I know because I killed him.

I won't insult you by explaining who Ron Paul is, or detailing the extent of his fame/infamy across the internet. Nor will I expect that you aren't aware that Dr. Paul is (as far as I know) as healthy as ever; I understand he even gave an eerily good showing in the debate last night. This is a story about a hoax. Well, no. This is a memorial of a joke, a celebration of how a few bored strangers can unite the world in mourning over the tragic death of a living man.

Ron Paul was murdered by a Twitter hashtag. It was a nice, quiet one; its neighbors never suspected a thing. But in the evening of December 12, 2011, #MakeRacistJokesNotRacistAnymore began trending. Unable to think of any racist jokes of my own to respond to the amusing ones on my timeline, I chose to slightly re-interpret "joke" and tweeted, "Ron Paul died." (Note: all images below link back to the original tweet.)

VICE: Ron Paul, Part III: The Enpaulening

Today, on Vice, we have to deal with Ron Paul, Part III: The Enpaulening. There was the first version, and it was ugly and real, not like what we expected. It was like First Blood.

Then the replies made it all a vengeful, direct attack on something that was right. Like Rambo: First Blood Part II. We had to kill — even the made-up crap. We had to look the bad thing in the eye and say, "Aaauughhh!!!" Now, the third part, like Rambo III, it's about Afghanistan. We need to get the bad guys out. We need to fight them. Only the bad guys are us and Ron Paul is... right?

He is. Click the man who has delivered over 4,000 babies to be delivered to the Vice article that reconsiders Ron Paul:


One thing that couldn't be addressed in the Vice piece, for space constraints, is that Paul is the only major politician on the radar of the 24-hour news who rejects any premise for invading or interfering with Iran, which pairs the most sensible attitude on the matter with the most easily maligned candidate. The United States either has troops, drones or sympathetic regimes surrounding Iran, and American foreign policy wonks daily advocate either an invasion or terroristic strikes on sites within its borders.

Increasingly, our justification for striking at Iran is its angry opposition to the fact that we surround Iran, threaten to bomb it and may already be doing so via clandestine strikes and assassinations. We practice a bullying foreign policy, and then we act surprised when that policy backfires. Our only solution is to double down on that bellicosity and violently eradicate the same antipathy that we've directly engendered.

Lastly, while you're there, feel free to keep clicking the MORE button and dig on those comments. There's probably a 5-1 ratio of negative to positive responses, which is sort of entertaining when it's not a stone bummer.

Vote for Ron Paul or the Dog Will Be Angry

Well, that's it. I'm voting for Ron Paul because of graphics.

The Ron Paul campaign released a new ad recently, which features the kind of sick computer generated explosions, dogs on things and big truck metaphors that pretty much immediately win me over every time. Plus, the voiceover is performed by a guy who narrates trailers for horror films, so his inclusion here is totally appropriate. NEXT NOVEMBER, THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS WHEN YOU'RE DEAD.

The Ron Paul Political Report: Special Issue on Race Terrorism

One of the most entertaining aspects of yesterday's Ron Paul rundown is watching comments and Tweets roll in declaring that it contains no proof of Ron Paul's racism and everything of my perfidy or incompetence. In many cases, much of this outrage seems to be the product of a complete unfamiliarity with how links work. ("He didn't even prove that thing he said in blue words!") But most of it probably extenuates from the need to rationalize away all criticism of His Auric Eminence.


Thankfully, most of the rationalization is dumb. Let's take a look:

VICE: Ron Paul—Reactionary Racist Leprechaun

This week, the good people at Vice.com asked me to write about Ron Paul, because we both thought Newt was just too tiresome, and, "Please, God [we're] sick of Herman Cain. No more Herman Cain."

A lot of this Paul information isn't new. That's because Ron doesn't change. Time lumbers on, indifferently, into a bigger future, and he remains, hiding behind his 18th century battlements, picking lice off himself, rubbing coins fervidly and wearing a special kind of hat that says, "You can't force me to be a bowman if we fight France."

Unfortunately, Paul fans don't change much either. They see "no more War on Drugs" and "let's stop fighting in the Middle East," and everything else about the man goes unresearched or becomes a kind of meaningless hum. Which is why every now and again, you need to slap them. Hopefully this helps. Click the smilin' Ron Paul below to be taken to Vice:


By the way, the nice fella in the picture with him is Don Black, founder of Stormfront.org, America's #1 white supremacist site, which endorsed Ron Paul in 2008. (Even now you can find great information about him there, like, "All Republican candidates are Jew tools except for Ron Paul," which, perversely, is a fair reading of the GOP establishment's Israel policy.) The Paul campaign spent weeks pretending the endorsement and Stormfront's donation weren't an issue. That might have had something to do with not wanting to alienate supporters, like campaign coordinators who are Klansmen and neo-Nazis, or campaign volunteers like neo-Nazi Holocaust Museum shooter James van Brunn.

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: Yer Fracking Dead

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


Wake up to Five-Hour Energy from Glorious Leaders' Natural Gas Plan

of Explosive Prosperity
by IDI AMIN DADA

• Former Governor Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) desperately wants you to pay attention to him. Come on, he's doing all sorts of neat stuff! He's mangling history and likening the National Labor Relations Board to the Soviet Union. He's simultaneously calling Obama a "champion of class warfare" and advocating class warfare, by calling for the elimination of the capital gains tax, the estate tax, interest income taxes and dividend taxes.

That's not all. Pawlenty proposes a flat tax rate of 10% for everybody earning under $100,000 and 25% for everybody earning above that. He claims these tax cuts for the wealthy on an unprecedented scale would lead to 5% growth of the economy over ten years — despite the fact that 5% growth of the economy over ten years has never been done. Ever. Do you care about him yet? Really—no? You're still doing that thing where you stand alone in your driveway shooting free throws and saying to yourself, "If this goes in, it means that Melissa likes me"? Jeez—uh, okay, how about this: he casually mentions a "Google Test" that says if you can find a service being offered by the internet, it should be done by private industry and not government. Some astute people observe that this covers "everything ever."

That Pawlenty is thoroughly unexciting despite his best attempts has been satirized on The Daily Show and Colbert Report for the past few months. However, the media's portrait of him as a non-entity because of his boringness rather than as the sort of person who can destroy the social composition of America via his radical views allows the Republican narrative to slip even further to the right without consequence, so you probably should care about him.

Talking Points Memo Throws Down

It's been a busy week. It was bound to happen, the sweet flow of new content stanched at some point. This news week didn't need anyone here to weigh in anyway. The hysteria of American conservatism and the self-conscious nail-picking prose of liberals unsure whether to gloat about a victory or lament a lack of progressivism to the healthcare bill was enough on its own.

Some good stuff came out of the events of this week, stuff that nobody here need comment on. Posting new content only to direct people someplace else represents a losing gambit. If people should read something else, why do they need you? You become little more than a Burger King just off the highway: people are going to keep going to a destination, but maybe you can draw a few off the road and to your profit before sending them right back on their way.

Welcome, Massive Influx of New People

The bar graph of pageload activity on this blog for the last five days looks like four faint linoleum bubbles in a row standing next to a sequoia large enough to drive a car through. It's the inverse of Spud Webb in an NBA all-star lineup. It's a simile Dennis Miller would find himself incapable of making because he'd run out of hyphens.

I'm simultaneously very pleased while also grudgingly aware that that big traffic spike kinda reflects on all the preceding days of total obscurity in such a way as to make me look like a bit of a schmuck for all that solitary labor. It's things like this that remind me of a suggestion a friend made that I read one of those Dummies books on internet marketing, and it certainly seems like maybe he had a good point there. But any time I spent reading one of those Dummies books would only cut into my time doing anything other than reading them, so you can see the bind I'm in.

Youtube Doubler VI: Requiem for Alex Jones

A friend of mine sent me this.

You can listen to this on a loop endlessly. It actually gets funnier and more beautiful at the same time, due in no small part to the piano version of the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack.

Reminder that this person was an occasional commentator on Glenn Beck's show, appeared on FOX News on occasion, is a friend of Ron Paul and, like him, believes that we will be destroyed by human-computer hybrids controlled by David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Click the picture to play:

Previous YoutubeDoublers

An American Nazi and the Rhetoric That Welcomed Him

Shortly after one p.m. yesterday, Twitter became useful. I got a beep on my phone and, thinking it was another observation about how good lunches are, was surprised to see a condensed txt-spelled Web2.0 notice: "Shots at Holocaust Museum." From there, I went to a couple of websites and message boards and began compulsively refreshing, joining in Google searches and sending in email tips.

I'd like to tell you a story about that — about how a handful of Google searches and grassroots reporting pointed up the tacit complicity of the soi-disant liberal media in the creation of and reporting on an American Nazi, and how their toleration, inattention or cowardice creates a national discourse that increasingly imports militant fringe rhetoric that demonizes millions of Americans.

___________________

TIMELINE

1:00 p.m.
An 88-year-old American WWII veteran who styles himself James von Brunn tries to enter the Washington, DC, Holocaust Memorial Museum. When he's seen with a suspicious bag, he withdraws a .22-caliber rifle, shoots and kills an African-American security guard named Stephen T. Johns. Shortly thereafter, other security guards shoot and wound von Brunn.


1:00 - 2:00 p.m.
• FOX News begins its coverage with a crawl that suggests the event is an act of terrorism. On-air personalities speculate about whether the shooter is a radical muslim. Talk flows to liberal permissiveness and moral relativism.
• Von Brunn's name and evidence of his whiteness are released. Shortly thereafter, FOX's crawl re-brands the event as a "shooting" and on-air personalities drop discussion of domestic terrorism.
• Google searches turn up von Brunn's popularity (going back years) on Stormfront.org, the nation's largest white supremacy website.
• Searches of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine reveal hundreds of entries on a site called HolyWesternEmpire.org, to which von Brunn seemed to be the sole contributor.
• Von Brunn's website includes this brief biography (emphases mine):

In 1981 von Brunn attempted to place the treasonous Federal Reserve Board of Governors under legal, non-violent, citizens arrest. He was tried in a Washington, D.C. Superior Court; convicted by a Negro jury, Jew/Negro attorneys, and sentenced to prison for eleven years by a Jew judge. A Jew/Negro/White Court of Appeals denied his appeal.

The denial probably stemmed from the fact that von Brunn's legal, non-violent citizen's arrest involved his attempting to hold the Fed board hostage with a hunting knife, a revolver and a sawed-off shotgun. Even during his incarceration, he refused to temper his story, sending this racist and deranged appeal for a pardon to then Naval Secretary Jim Webb.

Come to Libertarian Paradise!

For a couple of weeks now, liberal bloggers have had numerous viral images at their disposal, lampooning The Nuge or Glenn Beck, which they've used in response to libertarian commentators shrieking about "socialism." But unfortunately, such tactics merely attack the messenger instead of the message. Even if both are equally noxious, focusing on the former gives the latter a free pass. Now, thankfully, there's just a Youtube video they can link to, that wraps everything up nicely.


What's more, libertarians probably shouldn't complain about the treatment. As the INFO section of this Youtube video provides, the whackjobs at the Von Mises institute — the nurturing ideological bosom for racist, insane and destructive shits like Ron Paul — have long advocated that there is truly a nation that dares to create on this earth the magical realm of Libertopia. They call it Somalia.

Poor political cartoonists: once again, with libertarians, they mistakenly assume that the most offensively stupid and lunatic thing they can imagine will satirize the libertarian perception of reality, instead of merely describing it.

Liveblogging White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part II: An Hour of Glenn Beck, Plus Pictures!

If you haven't read it, please click here for Part I.

This is the worst part. The actual transcription. I tune in early, so I catch the last half hour of Cavuto's show. I'm not sure what it's called. Body-Bag of Freedom, or All 50 States of the Entire World with Neil Cavuto or something. Sounds right. I don't know. The bit I see is revelatory, for three reasons.

One, Neil asks a pre-teen what he thinks about having his future mortgaged by the democratic party, without noticing that his mom's doing a perfectly good job of that already by yanking him out of school to learn lessons in Things That Bear No Resemblance to American History and, of course, How to Fuck Up A Protest. From where I sit, it looks like the kid would be happier scrolling the Facebook feed of all the girls he's in school with who've hit at least B-cups by now.

Racist, Homophobic Piece of Shit 'Dishonored'

Ron Paul is the gift that doesn't stop giving, in ways you never expect.

If you'd asked me two years ago if Sascha Baron Cohen could have followed up Borat's riff on American racism with anything like success, I'd have said no. Then I spent about a year trying to deprogram Paultards and another year trying to deprogram pro-McCain/pro-Palin Republicans suffering some sort of post-Bush Stockholm Syndrome. Basically I learned that there will always be enough people out there willing to believe almost anything and willing to go on the record with it. Which means that Bruno, Cohen's charming heartland tour of American homophobia, is bound to be incredible.

Pat Jordan and Gay Talese

If you read sports blogs or sports columns long enough, eventually someone will mention Pat Jordan. Usually, his name is accompanied by the name of his memoir, A False Spring, or by the words "The Garvey article" — the notion being that everyone who cares about sports will recognize these works or the ideas expressed by them immediately. Most people eventually mention Jordan's name in conjunction with the title of greatest living sportswriter, or even greatest ever. They're probably right.

The trouble with collections like The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan is that they usually fail to even approach the level of critical fawning their authors receive. Three factors typically explain this.

1. The authors indeed were exceptional twenty, thirty or forty years ago. However, in the intervening years, standards have changed such that their writing sounds dated or their technique toothless. Quite often, someone venerated as the first to do something is no longer remotely the best at doing it. Just imagine reading the best magazine interview of the 1930s and then reading the best magazine interview of the 1980s, after decades of Playboy interviews and Studs Turkel books, after an increase in the public's awareness of what spin and personal managers do to discourse and an intolerance of the same. It would be unbearable, wouldn't it?