Matt Welch, the editor-in-chief of "Reason" magazine who shares some of Paul's beliefs on big government, says he has never heard the congressman make racist comments like those in the newsletters.
Ron Paul's been agaisnt eh drug war from the beginning. What was the drug's wars purpose in the first place?
hint: control certain populations. Listen to the Nixon tapes.
The Freedom Report's online archives only go back to 1999, but I was curious to see older editions of Paul's newsletters,in part because of a controversy dating to 1996, when Charles "Lefty" Morris, a Democrat running against Paul for a House seat, released excerptsstating that "opinion polls consistently show only about 5% of blacks have sensible political opinions," that "if you have ever been robbed by ablack teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be," and that black representative Barbara Jordan is "the archetypicalhalf-educated victimologist" whose "race and sex protect her from criticism." At the time, Paul's campaign said that Morris had quoted thenewsletter out of context. Later, in 2001, Paul would claim that someone else had written the controversial passages. (Few of the newsletters contain actualbylines.) Caldwell, writing in the Times Magazine last year, said he found Paul's explanation believable, "since the style diverges widely from hisown."
Finding the pre-1999 newsletters was no easy task, but I was able to track many of them down at the libraries of the University of Kansas and the WisconsinHistorical Society. Of course, with few bylines, it is difficult to know whether any particular article was written by Paul himself. Some of the earliernewsletters are signed by him, though the vast majority of the editions I saw contain no bylines at all. Complicating matters, many of the unbylinednewsletters were written in the first person, implying that Paul was the author.
But, whoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul's name, and thearticles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they werewritten by him--and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, anddeeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist hissupporters believe they are backing--but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.