RON PAUL: THE SCRUTINY HAS BEGUN!

It wasn’t so much that the public was getting tired of Ron Paul and his cultlike fan base that would try to intimidate anyone that was critical of him. It was that he and that fan base scared the living hell out of folks. So everyone did their level best to avoid them. That would be much harder to do if he wins Iowa. So the people are giving Ron Paul and his people the fight they wanted. And they don’t like it.

One People’s Project

In 1996, when white nationalist political commentator Pat Buchanan won the Republican primary in New Hampshire he was a little prophetic about those who opposed his campaign. “All the forces of the old order are going to rally against us,” he said. “The establishment is coming together, you can hear them right now. The fax machines and phones are buzzing in Washington D.C. We’ve got to get together, somebody’s got to get out and take on this guy, we gotta have one guy take him on.”

Indeed that was the case. Buchanan and his far right/racist views, which are normally given a pass among the mainstream right, if not an outright defense, became a concern when it meant such views were going to cost them an election. So a campaign against those views was launched, calling attention to Buchanan’s dubious associations and writings that in the past were not a big deal to the same people. Before long, Buchanan’s campaign was scuttled, and Kansas Senator Bob Dole became the Republican nominee that took on President Bill Clinton, who eventually became successful in his bid for reelection. A few weeks ago, Buchanan was on the white supremacist radio program “The Political Cesspool” where he discussed the experience with its host, Council of Conservative Citizens board member James Edwards. “It was awful,” he said. “They come down on you with both feet.”

Today, the mantle that Buchanan once had has been passed on to Texas Rep. Ron Paul, and just like Buchanan, Paul’s past racist writings found in his newsletter the Ron Paul Political Report are coming back to haunt him as he rises in prominence in this season’s GOP primary. Unlike Buchanan, however Paul has denied writing the articles found in the newsletter that was published from 1985 until about 1993. In fact, when they came to light during his first presidential campaign in 2007, first they tried to dismiss them but when it got too hot, Rep. Paul went on Wolf Blitzer’s CNN program in early 2008 to refute them personally, saying, “(E)verybody knows in my district that I didn’t write them and I don’t speak like that, nobody has ever heard me say anything like that, and I have been reelected time and time again so everybody knows that I don’t participate in that kind of language.”

That was enough back then, especially for those who didn’t want to be constantly hassled by Ron Paul’s fan base which has a penchant for mounting campaigns against those who would dare speak ill of their leader. In the past week however, all of that has changed dramatically because in this season of revolving frontrunners in the GOP Presidential primary, Paul was poised to be the one who might win in Iowa on Jan. 3, the first vote that actually matters. Just like all the other frontrunners Paul’s past is being scrutinized, and he doesn’t like it. Unlike all the other frontrunners, however, the scrutiny began with conservatives in the GOP who now view such ascension as a threat just as Buchanan was – and for the same reason. But even that scrutiny was limited, only focusing on the newsletters and questioning the congressman’s denials of his involvement, and he really pissed people off when he refused to say any more about them than he already had, insisting that his explanation should and will suffice.

It didn’t. Now the public felt Rep. Paul had something to hide and the public began to dig, and found more and more evidence of Paul promoting his newsletters and even defending the more racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic rants found in them. And his rabid fan base has worn out their welcome as well. They do their usual bellowing on various discussion boards, but no one cares. If Ron Paul has a shot at attaining the presidency, this is going to be an issue, and it was only a matter of time before the discussion moves on from just solely the newsletters, but the associations Paul have made with the paleoconservative crowd.

On Friday, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs noted that in 2006, Paul appeared on the Political Cesspool, an announcement touting him as “one of the only truly conservative Congressmen in office today”. But he and another blogger named Adam Holland have come across a problem with confirming this. “If true, this would be the most direct connection yet between Ron Paul and the kind of people who cheer for David Duke,” Johnson wrote. “But as Adam Holland and I both discovered, the archives of The Political Cesspool radio show have apparently been scrubbed of this episode.”

While that may indeed be the case, there are other things that would indeed point to Paul associating with such crowds. Take for example, his October 2007 speaking engagement at a meeting of the Robert A. Taft Club. This was an organization that was put together by four prominent young persons in the paleoconservative scene, and needless to say this would be the kind of crowd that would come out. Other notable conservatives have spoken at Taft Club-sponsored events, such as propagandist Richard Viguerie and Human Events editor Terry Jeffries, but they have made no bones about where they stood on issues. The most notable event that the Taft Club sponsored was a 2006 forum titled “Race and Conservatism” with featured American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor, John Derbyshire of National Review Online, both of whom promote the notion that blacks were genetically inferior to whites, and Kevin Martin of the black conservative organization Project 21. While the conference was controversial at the time, it wasn’t until 2010 that it was even talked about and that was because it was learned that an up-and-coming conservative activist named James O’Keefe attended this particular forum.

Later the Taft Club would fizzle out but the four founders would find themselves in other roles. Daniel McCarthy would later go on to edit Pat Buchanan’s magazine The American Conservative. Dick Spencer is now the editor of the Alternative Right blog, Executive Director of the white supremacist “think tank” National Policy Institute and works closely with Political Cesspool’s James Edwards, American Renaissance’s Jared Taylor and National Review’s John Derbyshire. Marcus Epstein was Executive Director of Buchanan’s organization American Cause, and was thanked by Buchanan for his assistance with his most recent book, but he saw some notoriety from his drunken assault five months before Paul spoke before the Taft Club on a black woman while hurling racial slurs in Washington DC. He would eventually submi
t an Alford plea in order to avoid prosecution. Kevin DeAnna is a co-founder of the white nationalist college student group Youth for Western Civilization, an organization promoted by the Leadership Institute, which for a while listed his old college buddy Epstein as a Vice-President. All of them still emphatically support Ron Paul.

Paul’s connections to the white supremacist crowd have gone further than this. There are also those who directly work for him, such as Richmond, VA tea party member Amy Strawser Strong, a coordinator for Paul’s Campaign for Liberty and a longtime associate of violent neo-Nazi groups whose husband Rob currently sits in an Arizona prison on charges related to the murder of a colleague, and even his Legislative Director Norman Kirk Singleton who was also an associate of the late anti-Semitic writer Joseph Sobran. There are also the campaign donations he has received from white supremacists like Don Black of Stormfront, a practice that seems to have bled over to his son Rand who has received donations from Virginia Abernethy of the Council of Conservative Citizens in his successful run for Kentucky’s Senate seat. Although these are things that have been out there for years, just like the newsletters they can come to the forefront just as quickly.

And that is scaring that particular base. Writing for the white nationalist anti-immigration website VDARE, a writer using the name of a Confederate Army General named Patrick Cleburne was particularly incensed about how onetime frontrunner Newt Gingrich is demanding that Paul explain the newsletters. “Why has Gingrich shown interest in joining this particular lynch mob?” Cleburne wrote. “It will enrage the Paul supporters and please only the MSM. Because he is the bought-and-paid-for creature of the Post-White-America crowd –and has been for many years, including on immigration.” Taking it further Cleburne opined, “Annoying Blacks two decades ago is insignificant compared to being subservient to the most aggressive elements of Israeli society now – especially as Israel is (although it seems to be often forgotten) not America.”

On March 16-18, the American Renaissance Conference will be held in an undisclosed location somewhere near Nashville Tennessee. It is undisclosed because outrage towards the venues hosting it has led the conference to be canceled two years in a row. Each year that it has taken place it has attracted the paleoconservatives, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists to attend. One of the speakers this year will be the Political Cesspool’s James Edwards, and today he wrote in response to the inquiry about the 2006 Ron Paul appearance of Ron Paul saying it never happened due to the congressman needing to take an unexpected flight, but was willing to reschedule. “So, there you have it, media lefties,” Edwards wrote. “Feel free to spin it however you wish, but be sure to make this clear: The Political Cesspool Radio Program proudly endorses Ron Paul for President of the United States.”

And that would make what he says about Ron Paul’s near-inevitable defeat all the more interesting.