text: While Paul’s views on Israel certainly place him outside the American, never mind Republican, mainstream, there is an even more elementary reason the RJC was right to exclude him from its event. It is Paul’s lucrative and decades-long promotion of bigotry and conspiracy theories, for which he has yet to account fully, and his continuing espousal of extremist views, that should make him unwelcome at any respectable forum, not only those hosted by Jewish organizations. 
   
   Paul’s exclusion caused an uproar, with critics alleging that his stand on Israel had earned the RJC’s ire; an absolutist libertarian, Paul opposes foreign aid to all countries, including the Jewish state. “This seems to me more of an attempt to draw boundaries around acceptable policy discourse than any active concern that President Dr. Ron Paul would be actively anti-Israel or anti-Semitic,” wrote Reason editor Matt Welch. Chris McGreal of the Guardian reported that Paul “was barred because of his views on Israel.” Even Seth Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun and a valiant defender of Israel (and friend and mentor of this writer), opined, “The whole idea of an organization of Jewish Republicans worrying about the mainstream strikes me as a bit contradictory.” 
   
   The Republican Jewish Coalition announced this month that congressman Ron Paul would not be among the six guests invited to participate in its Republican Presidential Candidates Forum. “He’s just so far outside of the mainstream of the Republican party and this organization,” said Matt Brooks, executive director of the RJC, adding that the group “rejects his misguided and extreme views.” 
   
   In January 2008, the New Republic ran my story reporting the contents of monthly newsletters that Paul published throughout the 1980s and 1990s. While a handful of controversial passages from these bulletins had been quoted previously, I was able to track down nearly the entire archive, scattered between the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society (both of which housed the newsletters in collections of extreme right-wing American political literature). Though particular articles rarely carried a byline, the vast majority were written in the first person, while the title of the newsletter, in its various iterations, always featured Paul’s name: Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Political Report, the Ron Paul Survival Report, and the Ron Paul Investment Letter. What I found was unpleasant. 
   
   “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks,” read a typical article from the June 1992 “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism,” a supplement to the Ron Paul Political Report. Racial apocalypse was the most persistent theme of the newsletters; a 1990 issue warned of “The Coming Race War,” and an article the following year about disturbances in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C., was entitled “Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.” Paul alleged that Martin Luther King Jr., “the world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours,” had also “seduced underage girls and boys.” The man who would later proclaim King a “hero” attacked Ronald Reagan for signing legislation creating the federal holiday in his name, complaining, “We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.” 
   
   No conspiracy theory was too outlandish for Paul’s endorsement. One newsletter reported on the heretofore unknown phenomenon of “Needlin’,” in which “gangs of black girls between the ages of 12 and 14” roamed the streets of New York and injected white women with possibly HIV-infected syringes. Another newsletter warned that “the AIDS patient” should not be allowed to eat in restaurants because “AIDS can be transmitted by saliva,” a strange claim for a physician to make. 
   
   Paul gave credence to the theory, later shown to have been the product of a Soviet disinformation effort, that AIDS had been created in a U.S. government laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Three months before far-right extremists killed 168 Americans in Oklahoma City, Paul’s newsletter praised the “1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty” as “one of the most encouraging developments in America.” And he offered specific advice to antigovernment militia members, such as, “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.” ||||| So as Ron Paul is on track to win the Iowa caucuses, he is getting a new dose of press scrutiny. 
   
   And the press is focusing on the newsletters that went out under his name in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They were called the Ron Paul's Political Report, Ron Paul's Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Survival Report and the Ron Paul Investment Letter. 
   
   There is no doubt that the newsletters contained utterly racist statements. 
   
   Some choice quotes: 
   
   "Given the inefficiencies of what DC laughingly calls the criminal justice system, I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal." 
   
   "We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational." 
   
   After the Los Angeles riots, one article in a newsletter claimed, "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks." 
   
   One referred to Martin Luther King Jr. as "the world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours" and who "seduced underage girls and boys." 
   
   Another referred to Barbara Jordan, a civil rights activist and congresswoman as "Barbara Morondon," the "archetypical half-educated victimologist." 
   
   Other newsletters had strange conspiracy theories about homosexuals, the CIA, and AIDS. 
   
   In 1996 when the Texas Monthly investigated the newsletters, Paul took responsibility for them and said that certain things were taken out of context. (It's hard to imagine a context that would make the above quotes defensible.) 
   
   When the newsletter controversy came up again during the 2008 campaign, Paul explained that he didn't actually write the newsletters but because they carried his name he was morally responsible for their content. Further, he didn't know exactly who wrote the offensive things and they didn't represent his views. 
   
   But it is still a serious issue. Journalists at the libertarian-leaning Reason reported that Paul made nearly one million dollars in just one year from publishing the newsletters. Could Paul really not understand the working of such a profitable operation? They were told by a source close to the Paul campaign that the author was likely longtime Paul-friend and combative polemicist Lew Rockwell. 
   
   Even though many of the newsletters are written in a first person, conversational style, many observers don't believe that Ron Paul actually wrote them. 
   
   There aren't any videos on YouTube with Paul speaking in incendiary terms about minorities. The newsletters don't "sound" like Ron Paul - he doesn't do wordplay like "Morondon" or use prefixes like "semi-criminal" or "half-educated" in his speech or his recent writings. Further, most newsletter and direct-mail operations in politics employ ghostwriters. 
   
   So why were Ron Paul or his ghostwriters engaged in racism and conspiracy theories? And why did Ron Paul allow this? 
   
   The first answer is simply that marginal causes attract marginal people. 
   
   The Gold Standard and non-interventionism have long been pushed to the fringe of our politics, and ambitious people tend to dive into the mainstream. That means that some of the 'talent' that marginalized ideas attract will be odd and unstable. 
   
   There are two strategies for dealing with this problem. You purge your movement of cranks to preserve credibility and risk alienating a chunk of supporters. Or you let everyone in your movement fly their freak flag and live with the consequences. Ron Paul, being a libertarian, has always done the latter. 
   
   The second answer to this question: These newsletters were published before a decade of war that has exhausted many Americans, before the financial crisis, and before the Tea Party. 
   
   All three made Ron Paul's ideas seem more relevant to our politics. They made anti-government libertarianism seem (to some) like a sensible corrective. 
   
   But in the 1990s and 1980s, anti-government sentiment was much less mainstream. It seemed contained to the racist right-wing, people who supported militia movements, who obsessed over political correctness, who were suspicious of free-trade deals like NAFTA. 
   
   At that time a libertarian theorist, Murray Rothbard argued that libertarians ought to engage in "Outreach to the Rednecks" in order to insert their libertarian theories into the middle of the nation's political passions. 
   
   Rothbard had tremendous influence on Lew Rockwell, and the whole slice of the libertarian movement that adored Ron Paul. 
   
   But Rothbard and Rockwell never stuck with their alliances with angry white men on the far right. They have been willing to shift alliances from left to right and back again. Before this "outreach" to racists, Rothbard aligned himself with anti-Vietnam war protestors in the 1960s. In the 2000s, after the "outreach" had failed, Rockwell complained bitterly about "Red-State fascists" who supported George Bush and his war. So much for the "Rednecks." The anti-government theories stay the same, the political strategy shifts in odd and extreme directions. 
   
   As crazy as it sounds, Ron Paul's newsletter writers may not have been sincerely racist at all. They actually thought appearing to be racist was a good political strategy in the 1990s. After that strategy yielded almost nothing - it was abandoned by Paul's admirers. 
   
   You can attribute their "redneck strategy" to the most malignant kind of cynicism or to a political desperation that made them insane. Neither is particularly flattering. 
   
   Phil Klein of the Washington Examiner is correct when he writes: 
   
   Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have both attacked each other for what was written in their respective books. If either of those books had included a number of overtly racist statements, their candidacies would be over before they started. 
   
   This is undoubtedly true. The media seems to simply accept that Ron Paul has some oddities in his past and in his inner circle. They take his grandfatherly demeanor at face-value. In part this is because they believe he is not a serious candidate. 
   
   Winning the Iowa caucuses would change all that instantly. Undoubtedly the movement that Paul inspired has moved far beyond the race-baiting it engaged in two decades ago. Young people from college campuses aren't lining up to hear him speak because of what appeared in those newsletter about the 1992 L.A. riots. Rand Paul tried his hardest to place Paul-style libertarianism into the context of the Tea Party. And he will likely carry on the movement without this 1990s baggage. 
   
   But the questions remain. If Ron Paul is so libertarian that he won't even police people who use his name, if his movement is filled with incompetents and opportunists, then what kind of a president would he make? Would he even check in to see if his ideas are being implemented? Who would he appoint to Cabinet positions? 
   
   These are all legitimate questions. And the media is going to start asking them now. 
   
   If there isn't already a "ceiling" on Ron Paul's support, widespread knowledge of the newsletters could build one quickly. ||||| Mr. Paul, who is a physician, had said his political persuasion as a libertarian precluded him from harboring such biased views because “I don’t see people in collective groups.” 
   
   On Monday, his deputy campaign manager, Dimitri Kesari, reiterated that Mr. Paul “did not write, edit or authorize” the language. 
   
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   “He totally disavows what was said and disagrees with it totally,” Mr. Kesari said. “The only responsibility he takes is for not paying closer attention.” 
   
   Mr. Paul is the latest in a series of candidates whose quick improvement in polls has drawn new scrutiny of the more problematic portions of their résumés. The focus on his newsletters comes as he seeks to seize momentum in polls by raising questions about his opponents. 
   
   During an appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno ” on Friday, Mr. Paul joked that Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota , a Republican rival for the nomination, “hates Muslims, she wants to go get them.” He also concurred with Mr. Leno that former Senator Rick Santorum speaks about “gay people” almost exclusively, adding, “And Muslims.” 
   
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   Though Mr. Kesari said those comments were intended to be “lighthearted,” they drew criticism from some commentators, including the Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, who on Monday pointed to Mr. Paul’s newsletters as evidence that he was being hypocritical. 
   
   Mr. Paul has survived previous questions about his newsletters. During his 1996 race for the House, Democrats publicized issues of his newsletter that called Barbara Jordan , the African-American Texas congresswoman, a “half-educated victimologist” and said of crime in Washington, D.C., “I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” 
   
   He defended the statements to The Dallas Morning News at the time, saying they were taken out of context. He also told the newspaper he did not know that his newsletter — with 7,000 to 8,000 subscribers — was listed by a neo-Nazi group called Heritage Front, apparently as recommended reading, under the Internet heading “Racialists and Freedom Fighters.” 
   
   But in an interview in 2001 with Texas Monthly, Mr. Paul said he regretted that he had not admitted that he had not written the newsletters. “They were never my words, but I had some moral responsibility for them,” Mr. Paul said. He said that he had “actually really wanted to try to explain that it doesn’t come from me directly,” but that his campaign aides had told him, “Your name was on that letter and therefore you have to live with it.” 
   
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target: – Ron Paul had a testy interview with CNN today that he ended by unclipping his microphone and saying, "Goodbye" as Gloria Borger continued to pepper him with questions, reports Mediaite. The source of the friction was questions about political newsletters that went out under Paul's name about 20 years ago that had racist and homophobic sentiments. The issue has come up before, including during his 2008 run, and Paul seemed fed up with giving the same general response: "I didn’t write them. I didn’t read them at the time and I disavow them. That is your answer.” The issue surfaced anew when the Weekly Standard wrote about the newsletters in its latest issue, notes the New York Times. (One of the more controversial quotes is from a 1992 newsletter about the Los Angeles riots: "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks.”) Paul contends that the newsletters went out under his name but that others did the writing and he didn't pay much attention to them. He reportedly made money off the publications, however, and that has kept the questions coming. Business Insider has a backgrounder on the whole issue here.