James Kirchick has a long article delving deeper into the archives of Ron Paul’s newsletters and finds a lot of racist and neoconfederate stuff, plus some serious homophobia. Some of this has been seen before, and Chris Hayes’ article on the gap between the Ron Paul / Von Mises Institute school of libertarianism and the urbane cosmopolitans of Cato prefigured the general thrust of the thing, but Kirchick has a lot of the goods.
On the other hand, I think Ron Paul’s responses as given to Dave Weigel and now issued in a press release are reasonably reasonable. If you’re a pro-life, anti-war, anti-immigration, libertarian I don’t really see anything here that would make you suddenly embrace John McCain as a preferable presidential candidate. Meanwhile, it shouldn’t really be surprising to see a link between a libertarian politician and white supremacists. The main constituency for Barry Goldwater’s message was white supremacists, after all.
UPDATE: This, though, is really outrageous.
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