Dave Weigel, Ron Paul and the Fringe Right

posted at 4:27 pm on December 6, 2011 by Karl

Slate’s resident JournoLister, Dave Weigel, salutes Ron Paul’s attack on Newt Gingrich but has a concern:

I really wonder what will happen to Paul if another candidate gets torqued off and slaps back at him. I voted for Paul in the 2008 primary, and expect to vote for him or for Gary Johnson this time, but I did/do so with the knowledge that he’s an ally of the John Birch Society who, in the 1980s, lent his name to newsletters with really nasty stuff in them. Both of these stories would dog candidates in competitive races. But Paul has remained in a bubble of his own creation, a candidate with supporters no one thinks they can steal.

Weigel’s comment that he voted for Paul in 2008 reminded me of his statement to Stephen Gutkowski when he was hired by the Washington Post:

I come out of the conservative movement, believe it or not. I edited a conservative newspaper in college (the Northwestern Chronicle); I worked for Reason; I voted for Ron Paul in the 2008 primaries. And frankly, I like how the conservative movement and the GOP work. While the Democratic Party is a collection of interest groups, the GOP is an ideological coalition, composed of people proud to tell you what they believe and why. At the same time, there are elements out there that are clear threats to a sensible GOP and a strong conservative movement — the birther nuts, scam artists who profit off of the-government-is-collapsing paranoia — and I relish in exposing those people.

Indeed, Weigel made his journalistic rep — at both the WaPo and the Soros-funded Washington Independent — obsessing over such nuts and scam artists to the point where a casual reader would think it representative of the right in general.

Yet Weigel voted for Ron Paul and announces he may again in 2012. Weigel’s reference to the “nasty stuff” in Paul’s old newsletters is interesting because it links to a Reason piece Weigel co-wrote which avoids the details of the racist, anti-gay, conspiratorial screeds that often appeared in them, accepts Paul’s claim he did not know what was in them, and claims they were ghostwritten by Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr. During the week prior to Weigel’s piece, his collegaue Matt Welch catalogued Paul’s responses to the controversy in the 1990s, which apparently did not contain a denial, either of knowledge or authorship of the offensive material. Rather, Paul and his people suggested they were being taken out of context. Even assuming for the sake of argument that Paul did not author the bigoted screeds, Paul was in a position to publicly identify and condemn the author(s) — but apparently never has.

As Weigel avoids the icky details, it’s worth quoting James Kirchick’s seminal TNR piece on Paul’s newsletters at some length:

[W]hoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views.

What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

***

Take, for instance, a special issue of the Ron Paul Political Report, published in June 1992, dedicated to explaining the Los Angeles riots of that year. “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,” read one typical passage. According to the newsletter, the looting was a natural byproduct of government indulging the black community with “‘civil rights,’ quotas, mandated hiring preferences, set-asides for government contracts, gerrymandered voting districts, black bureaucracies, black mayors, black curricula in schools, black tv shows, black tv anchors, hate crime laws, and public humiliation for anyone who dares question the black agenda.” It also denounced “the media” for believing that “America’s number one need is an unlimited white checking account for underclass blacks.” To be fair, the newsletter did praise Asian merchants in Los Angeles, but only because they had the gumption to resist political correctness and fight back. Koreans were “the only people to act like real Americans,” it explained, “mainly because they have not yet been assimilated into our rotten liberal culture, which admonishes whites faced by raging blacks to lie back and think of England.”

***

Like blacks, gays earn plenty of animus in Paul’s newsletters. They frequently quoted Paul’s “old colleague,” Representative William Dannemeyer–who advocated quarantining people with AIDS–praising him for “speak[ing] out fearlessly despite the organized power of the gay lobby.” In 1990, one newsletter mentioned a reporter from a gay magazine “who certainly had an axe to grind, and that’s not easy with a limp wrist.” In an item titled, “The Pink House?” the author of a newsletter–again, presumably Paul–complained about President George H.W. Bush’s decision to sign a hate crimes bill and invite “the heads of homosexual lobbying groups to the White House for the ceremony,” adding, “I miss the closet.” “Homosexuals,” it said, “not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities.” When Marvin Liebman, a founder of the conservative Young Americans for Freedom and a longtime political activist, announced that he was gay in the pages of National Review, a Paul newsletter implored, “Bring Back the Closet!” Surprisingly, one item expressed ambivalence about the contentious issue of gays in the military, but ultimately concluded, “Homosexuals, if admitted, should be put in a special category and not allowed in close physical contact with heterosexuals.”

***

The rhetoric when it came to Jews was little better. The newsletters display an obsession with Israel; no other country is mentioned more often in the editions I saw, or with more vitriol. A 1987 issue of Paul’s Investment Letter called Israel “an aggressive, national socialist state,” and a 1990 newsletter discussed the “tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to wok [sic] for the Mossad in their area of expertise.” Of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a newsletter said, “Whether it was a setup by the Israeli Mossad, as a Jewish friend of mine suspects, or was truly a retaliation by the Islamic fundamentalists, matters little.”

Paul’s newsletters didn’t just contain bigotry. They also contained paranoia–specifically, the brand of anti-government paranoia that festered among right-wing militia groups during the 1980s and ’90s. Indeed, the newsletters seemed to hint that armed revolution against the federal government would be justified. In January 1995, three months before right-wing militants bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, a newsletter listed “Ten Militia Commandments,” describing “the 1,500 local militias now training to defend liberty” as “one of the most encouraging developments in America.” It warned militia members that they were “possibly under BATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] or other totalitarian federal surveillance” and printed bits of advice from the Sons of Liberty, an anti-government militia based in Alabama–among them, “You can’t kill a Hydra by cutting off its head,” “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 newsletters are chock-full of shopworn conspiracies, reflecting Paul’s obsession with the “industrial-banking-political elite” and promoting his distrust of a federally regulated monetary system utilizing paper bills. They contain frequent and bristling references to the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and the Council on Foreign Relations–organizations that conspiracy theorists have long accused of seeking world domination…

You would think someone who enjoys casually flinging the race card at Fox News and FoxNation wouldn’t vote for a candidate with a long history of disseminating racist, anti-gay and crypto-anti-Semitic tracts. You would think someone who preened about exposing “scam artists who profit off of the-government-is-collapsing paranoia” would recognize Ron Paul fits that description exactly. Who is in Ron Paul’s bubble? Dave Weigel, apparently. Next time you read some piece where Weigel is riding around on a high horse, crusading against the fringe right, just remember that’s a show for his left-leaning bosses; he dismounts to get into the voting booth.

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