Category: John Birch Society Crazies

The Crazy, Paranoid World of Ron Paul

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in John Birch Society Crazies, John Birch Society Cult, Ron Paul Conspiracy Nut

Ron Paul’s World

By JAMES KIRCHICK

Earlier this week, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, said that he would not vote for his fellow presidential candidate Ron Paul should Paul become the Republican nominee. The immediate cause of this dissension – highly unusual in a party primary – was the repugnant newsletters that Paul published from the late 1970s until the mid-1990s, which contain a raft of bigoted statements. Paul has denied authorship and implausibly claims not to know who wrote them.

The story of the newsletters is not new. In 1996, Lefty Morris, Paul’s Democratic Congressional opponent, publicized a handful, and in January 2008, I published a long piece in The New Republic based on my discovery of batches of the newsletters held at the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society. Yet Paul’s popularity in the prelude to the Iowa caucuses, where many polls put him in first place, has renewed attention to their revolting contents.

Recent media reports have tended to focus on the newsletters’ bigotry, which was primarily aimed at blacks, and to a smaller extent at gay people and Jews. The newsletters have complicated the situation for writers who have defended Paul, who point out that there is no trace of such prejudice in his public statements. Andrew Sullivan of the Daily Beast, for instance, writing last week about “rethinking” his original endorsement of Paul, suggests that

A fringe protest candidate need not fully address issues two decades ago that do not in any way reflect the campaign he has run or the issues on which he has made an appeal. But a man who could win the Iowa caucuses and is now third in national polls has to have a plausible answer for this.

In a long, anguished post on the Web site of The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf wrote that “the question is complicated by facts not in evidence and inherently subjective judgments about politics, race and the norms that govern how much a candidate’s bygone associations matter.” As long as one accepts the most charitable explanation for Paul’s opposition to the 1964 Civil Rights Act (it infringes on private property rights) or re-litigation of the Civil War (the government should have bought and released the slaves instead), perhaps there’s something to that argument. Though Paul’s penchant for promoting the cause of secession puts these stances in a dubious context.

But there is one major aspect of the newsletters, no less disturbing than their racist content, that has always been present in Paul’s rhetoric, in every forum: a penchant for conspiracy theories.

Ron Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Feb. 11, 2011.
Jonathan Ernst/ReutersRon Paul at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington on Feb. 11, 2011.

In a 1990 C-Span appearance, taped between Congressional stints, Paul was asked by a caller to comment on the “treasonous, Marxist, alcoholic dictators that pull the strings in our country.” Rather than roll his eyes, Paul responded,“there’s pretty good evidence that those who are involved in the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations usually end up in positions of power. And I believe this is true.”

Paul then went on to stress the negligible differences between various “Rockefeller Trilateralists.” The notion that these three specific groups — the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Rockefeller family — run the world has been at the center of far-right conspiracy theorizing for a long time, promoted especially by the extremist John Birch Society, whose 50th anniversary gala dinner Paul keynoted in 2008.

Paul is proud of his association with the society, telling the Times Magazine in 2007, “I have a lot of friends in the John Birch Society. They’re generally well educated, and they understand the Constitution.” In 1998, Paul appeared in a Birch Society documentary which lauded a bill he had introduced to force American withdrawal from the United Nations. With ominous music in the background and images of United Nations peacekeepers patrolling deserted streets, the film warned that the world body would destroy American private property rights, replace the Constitution with the United Nations Charter and burn churches to the ground.

Paul has frequently attacked the alleged New World Order that “elitist” cabals, like the Trilateral Commission and the Rockefeller family, in conjunction with “globalist” organizations, like the United Nations and the World Bank, wish to foist on Americans. In a 2006 column published on the Web site of Lew Rockwell (his former Congressional chief of staff and the man widely suspected of being the ghostwriter of the newsletters, although he denied it to me), Paul addressed the alleged “Nafta Superhighway.” This is a system of pre-existing and proposed roads from Mexico to Canada that conspiracy theorists claim is part of a nefarious transnational attempt to open America’s borders and merge the United States with its neighbors into a supra-national entity. Paul wrote that the ultimate goal of the project was an “integrated North American Union” — yet one more bugbear of conspiracy theorists — which “would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.”

In his newsletters, Paul expressed support for far-right militia movements, which at the time saw validation for their extreme, anti-government beliefs in events like the F.B.I. assault on the Branch Davidians and at Ruby Ridge. Paul was eager to fan their paranoia and portray himself as the one man capable of doing anything about it politically. Three months before the Oklahoma City bombing, in an item for the Ron Paul Survival Report titled, “10 Militia Commandments,” he offered advice to militia members, including that they, “Keep the group size down,” “Keep quiet and you’re harder to find,” “Leave no clues,” “Avoid the phone as much as possible,” and “Don’t fire unless fired upon, but if they mean to have a war, let it begin here.”

The closest Paul has come in his public statements to endorsing violence against the government was during an interview in 2007, when he was asked about Ed and Elaine Brown, a New Hampshire couple who had refused to pay federal income taxes. In the summer of that year, they instigated a five-month armed standoff with United States marshals, whom Ed Brown accused of being part of a “Zionist, Illuminati, Freemason movement.” Echoing a speech he had just delivered on the House floor, Paul praised the pair as “heroic” “true patriots,” likened them to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and compared them favorably to “zombies,” that is, those of us who “just go along” and pay income tax.

Finally, there’s Paul’s stance on the most pervasive conspiracy theory in America today, the idea that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were perpetrated not by Al Qaeda, but by the federal government or some other shadowy force. While Paul has never explicitly endorsed this claim, there is a reason so many 9/11 “truthers” flock to his campaign. In a recent YouTube video posted by a leading 9/11 conspiracy group, “We Are Change,” Paul is asked, “Why won’t you come out about the truth about 9/11?”

Rather than answer, say, that the “9/11 Commission already investigated the attacks,” or ask the questioner what particular element of “the truth” remained unknown, Paul knowingly replied, “Because I can’t handle the controversy, I have the I.M.F., the Federal Reserve to deal with, the I.R.S. to deal with, no because I just have more, too many things on my plate. Because I just have too much to do.”

Paul knows where his bread is buttered. He regularly appears on the radio program of Alex Jones, a vocal 9/11 and New World Order conspiracy theorist based in his home state of Texas. On Jones’s show earlier this month, Paul alleged that the Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador on United States soil was a “propaganda stunt” perpetrated by the Obama administration.

In light of the newsletters and his current rhetoric, it is no wonder that Paul has attracted not just prominent racists, but seemingly every conspiracy theorist in America. The title of one of Paul’s newsletter series – the Ron Paul Survival Report – was a conscious appeal to followers of the “survivalist” movement of the 1990s, whose ideology blended white supremacy and anti-government militancy in preparation for what Paul himself termed the “coming race war.”

As Paul told The Times last week, he has no interest in dissuading the various extremists from backing his campaign, which is hardly surprising considering he’s spent three decades cultivating their support. Paul’s shady associations are hardly “bygone” and the “facts” of his dangerous conspiracy-mongering are very much “in evidence.” Paul has not just marinated in a stew of far-right paranoia; he is one of the chefs.

Of course, it is impossible to know what Ron Paul truly thinks about black or gay people or the other groups so viciously disparaged in his newsletters. What we do know with absolute certainty, however, is that Ron Paul is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who regularly imputes the worst possible motives to the very government he wants to lead.

James Kirchick is a contributing editor for The New Republic and a fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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Treat Ron Paul With Extreme Caution

by The Age of Blasphemy, posted in American Godnuts, John Birch Society Crazies, Right Wing Nuts, Ron Paul is a Kook, Ron Paul Theocratic Fascist

Ron Paul is more than just anti-war, he's the anti-Civil-Rights-Act Republican. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Ron Paul is more than just anti-war, he’s the anti-Civil-Rights-Act Republican. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)

Treat Ron Paul With Extreme Caution

By Adele M. Stan

‘Cuddly’ Libertarian has some very dark politics. He’s anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-senior-citizen, anti-equality and anti-education, and that’s just the start.

here are few things as maddening in a maddening political season as the warm and fuzzy feelings some progressives evince for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas, the Republican presidential candidate. “The anti-war Republican,” people say, as if that’s good enough.

But Ron Paul is much, much more than that. He’s the anti-Civil-Rights-Act Republican. He’s an anti-reproductive-rights Republican. He’s a gay-demonizing Republican. He’s an anti-public education Republican and an anti-Social Security Republican. He’s the John Birch Society‘s favorite congressman. And he’s a booster of the Constitution Party, which has a Christian Reconstructionist platform. So, if you’re a member of the anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-senior-citizen, anti-equality, anti-education, pro-communist-witch-hunt wing of the progressive movement, I can see how he’d be your guy.

Paul first drew the attention of progressives with his vocal opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Coupled with the Texan’s famous call to end the Federal Reserve, that somehow rendered him, in the eyes of the single-minded, the GOP‘s very own Dennis Kucinich. Throw in Paul’s opposition to the drug war and his belief that marriage rights should be determined by the states, and Paul seemed suitable enough to an emotionally immature segment of the progressive movement, a wing populated by people with privilege adequate enough to insulate them from the nasty bits of the Paul agenda. (Tough on you, blacks! And you, women! And you, queers! And you, old people without money.)

Ron Paul’s anti-war stance, you see, comes not from a cry for peace, but from the deeply held isolationism of the far right. Some may say that, when it comes to ending the slaughter of innocents, the ends justify the means. But, in the case of Ron Paul, the ends involve trading the rights and security of a great many Americans for the promise of non-intervention.

Here’s a list – by no means comprehensive – of Ron Paul positions and associates that should explain, once and for all, why no self-respecting progressive could possibly sidle up to Paul.

1) Ron Paul on Race

Based on his religious adherence to his purportedly libertarian principles, Ron Paul opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Unlike his son, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., Ron Paul has not even tried to walk back from this position. In fact, he wears it proudly. Here’s an excerpt from Ron Paul’s 2004 floor speech about the Civil Rights Act, in which he explains why he voted against a House resolution honoring the 40th anniversary of the law:

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society. Federal bureaucrats and judges cannot read minds to see if actions are motivated by racism. Therefore, the only way the federal government could ensure an employer was not violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to ensure that the racial composition of a business’s workforce matched the racial composition of a bureaucrat or judge’s defined body of potential employees. Thus, bureaucrats began forcing employers to hire by racial quota. Racial quotas have not contributed to racial harmony or advanced the goal of a color-blind society. Instead, these quotas encouraged racial balkanization, and fostered racial strife.

He also said this: “[T]he forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.”

Ron Paul also occasionally appears at events sponsored by the John Birch Society, the segregationist right-wing organization that is closely aligned with the Christian Reconstructionist wing of the religious right.

In 2008, James Kirchick brought to light in the pages of the New Republic a number of newsletters with Paul’s name in the title – Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, The Ron Paul Survival Report, and The Ron Paul Investment Letter – that contained baldly racist material, which Paul denied writing.

At NewsOne, Casey Gane-McCalla reported a number of these vitriolic diatribes, including this, on the L.A. riots after the Rodney King verdict: “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks three days after rioting began.”

In a related piece, Jon C. Hopwood of Yahoo!’s Associated Content cites a Reuters report on Paul’s response to the TNR story, which came in the form of a written statement:

The quotations in The New Republic article are not mine and do not represent what I believe or have ever believed. I have never uttered such words and denounce such small-minded thoughts…. I have publicly taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention to what went out under my name.

2) Ron Paul on Reproductive Rights

The sponsor of a bill to overturn Roe v. Wade, Ron Paul’s libertarianism does not apply to women, though it does apply to zygotes. His is a no-exceptions anti-abortion position, essentially empowering a rapist to sire a child with a woman of his choosing. Although Paul attributes his stance on abortion to his background as an ob-gyn physician, it should be noted that most ob-gyns are pro-choice, and that Paul’s draconian position tracks exactly with that of his Christian Reconstructionist friends.

While mainstream media, when they’re not busy ignoring his presidential campaign in favor of the badly trailing former Utah Gov. John Huntsman, invariably focus on Paul’s economic libertarianism, Sarah Posner, writing for the Nation, noted that during his appearances leading up to the Iowa straw poll (in which Paul finished second only to Rep. Michele Bachmann, Minn., by a 200-vote margin), “launched into gruesome descriptions of abortion, a departure from his stump speech focused on cutting taxes, shutting down the Federal Reserve, getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and repealing the Patriot Act.”

3) Ron Paul on LGBT People

While it’s true that Paul advocates leaving it to the states to determine whether same-sex marriages should be legally recognized, it’s not because he’s a friend to LGBT people. Paul’s position on same-sex marriage stems from his beliefs about the limits of the federal government’s role vis-a-vis his novel interpretation of the Constitution.

In fact, a newsletter called the Ron Paul Poltiical Report, unearthed by Kirchick, shows Paul on a rant against a range of foes and conspiracies, including “the federal-homosexual cover-up on AIDS,” to which Paul parenthetically adds, “my training as a physician helps me see through this one.” The passage, which also portends a “coming race war in our big cities,” complains of the “perverted” and “pagan” annual romp for the rich and powerful known as Bohemian Grove, and takes aim at the “demonic” Skull and Bones Society at Yale, not to mention the “Israeli lobby,” begins with the paranoid claim, “I’ve been told not to talk, but these stooges don’t scare me.”

While Paul denied, in 2001, writing most of the scurrilous material that ran, without attribution, in newsletters that bore his name in the title, this passage, according to Jon Hopwood, bears Paul’s byline.

4) Ron Paul Calls Social Security Unconstitutional, Compares It to Slavery

Earlier this year, in an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Paul declared both Social Security and Medicare to be unconstitutional, essentially saying they should be abolished for the great evil that they are – just like slavery. Here’s the transcript, via ThinkProgress:

[“FOX NEWS SUNDAY” HOST CHRIS] WALLACE: You talk a lot about the Constitution. You say Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid are all unconstitutional.

PAUL: Technically, they are…. There’s no authority [in the Constitution]. Article I, Section 8 doesn’t say I can set up an insurance program for people. What part of the Constitution are you getting it from? The liberals are the ones who use this General Welfare Clause…. That is such an extreme liberal viewpoint that has been mistaught in our schools for so long and that’s what we have to reverse – that very notion that you’re presenting.

WALLACE: Congressman, it’s not just a liberal view. It was the decision of the Supreme Court in 1937 when they said that Social Security was constitutional under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

PAUL: And the Constitution and the courts said slavery was legal, too, and we had to reverse that.

5) Ron Paul, Christian Reconstructionists and the John Birch Society

The year 2008 was a telling one in the annals of Ron Paul’s ideology. For starters, it was the year in which he delivered the keynote address at the 50th anniversary gala of the John Birch Society, the famous anti-communist, anti-civil-rights organization hatched in the 1950s by North Carolina candy magnate Robert Welch, with the help of Fred Koch, founder of what is now Koch Industries, and a handful of well-heeled friends. The JBS is also remembered for its role in helping to launch the 1964 presidential candidacy of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., and for later backing the segregationist Alabama Gov. George Wallace in his 1968 third-party presidential bid.

The semi-secular ideology of the John Birch Society – libertarian market and fiscal theory laced with flourishes of cultural supremacy – finds its religious counterpart, as Fred Clarkson noted, in the theonomy of Christian Reconstructionism, the right-wing religious-political school of thought founded by Rousas John Rushdoony. The ultimate goal of Christian Reconstructionists is to reconstitute the law of the Hebrew Bible – which calls for the execution of adulterers and men who have sex with other men – as the law of the land. The Constitution Party constitutes the political wing of Reconstructionism, and the CP has found a good friend in Ron Paul.

When Paul launched his second presidential quest in 2008, he won the endorsement of Rev. Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist pastor who travels in Christian Reconstructionist circles, though he is not precisely a Reconstructionist himself (for reasons having to do with his interpretation of how the end times will go down). When Paul dropped out of the race, instead of endorsing Republican nominee John McCain, or even Libertarian Party nominee Bob Barr, Paul endorsed Constitution Party nominee Chuck Baldwin (who promised, in his acceptance speech, to uphold the Constitution Party platform, which looks curiously similar to the Ron Paul agenda, right down to the no-exceptions abortion proscription and ending the Fed).

At his shadow rally that year in Minneapolis, held on the eve of the Republican National Convention, Paul invited Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips, a Christian Reconstructionist, to address the crowd of end-the-Fed-cheering post-pubescents. (In his early congressional career, Julie Ingersoll writes in Religion Dispatches, Paul hired as a staffer Gary North, a Christian Reconstructionist leader and Rushdoony’s son-in-law.)

At a “Pastor’s Forum” at Baldwin’s Baptist church in Pensacola, Florida, Paul was asked by a congregant about his lack of support for Israel, which many right-wing Christians support because of the role Israel plays in what is known as premillennialist end-times theology. “Premillennialist” refers to the belief that after Jesus returns, according to conditions on the ground in Israel, the righteous will rule. But Christian Reconstructionists have a different view, believing the righteous must first rule for 1,000 years before Jesus will return.

They also believe, according to Clarkson, “that ‘the Christians’ are the ‘new chosen people of God,’ commanded to do what ‘Adam in Eden and Israel in Canaan failed to do … create the society that God requires.’ Further, Jews, once the ‘chosen people,’ failed to live up to God’s covenant and therefore are no longer God’s chosen. Christians, of the correct sort, now are.”

Responding to Baldwin’s congregant, Paul explained, “I may see it slightly differently than others because I think of the Israeli government as different than what I read about in the Bible. I mean, the Israeli government doesn’t happen to be reflecting God’s views. Some of them are atheist, and their form of government is not what I would support … And there are some people who interpret the chosen people as not being so narrowly defined as only the Jews – that maybe there’s a broader definition of that.”

At the John Birch Society 50th anniversary gala, Ron Paul spoke to another favorite theme of the Reconstructionists and others in the religious right: that of the “remnant” left behind after evil has swept the land. (Gary North’s publication is called The Remnant Review.) In a dispatch on Paul’s keynote address, The New American, the publication of the John Birch Society, explained, “He claimed that the important role the JBS has played was to nurture that remnant and added, ‘The remnant holds the truth together, both the religious truth and the political truth.'”

Is there a progressive willing to join that fold?

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