Taking Ron Paul Seriously

Jeffrey Lord has this at The American Spectator, "The Ron Paul Newsletters" (via Memeorandum). And from Dan Riehl as well, "Ron Paul Can't Withstand the Scrutiny of Being a Frontrunner."

But don't miss especially Ace of Spades HQ, "Only Ron Paul Can Restore America to Its Former Greatness*." Check that link for what follows after the asterisk. The post is a devastating indictment of what looks like a blatantly racist newsletter program of pandering ggressively to paleoconservatives and "libertarians and old-time neoconfederates and former Klanners."

And according to Ace, "it wasn't just the newsletters." Here's the block quote from the post:

Paul is closely con­nected to the Lud­wig Von Mises Insti­tute, founded by the lib­er­tar­ian con­ser­v­a­tive Mur­ray Roth­bard and cur­rently run by Lew Rock­well. Rock­well was for­merly Paul’s chief of staff.
...

For Roth­bard, free­dom was best when it wore pants: he blamed the “ori­gins of the Wel­fare State” on “the legion of Yan­kee women, in par­tic­u­lar those of mid­dle– or upper-class back­ground, and espe­cially spin­sters whose busy­body incli­na­tions were not fet­tered by the respon­si­bil­i­ties of home and hearth.” He regret­ted the Con­sti­tu­tional amend­ment that had “imposed” women’s suf­frage on the nation.

In 1963, for exam­ple, at the height of the Civil Right move­ment, Roth­bard warned about “the negro cri­sis as a rev­o­lu­tion.” “Demon­strat­ing Negroes,” he said, “have taken to a favorite chant: ‘What do we want? Free­dom! When do we want it? Now!’” One might expect a lib­er­tar­ian to like such a chant, but Roth­bard found the idea of free­dom for negroes alarm­ing: they did not under­stand it prop­erly. Free­dom was a “hope­lessly ambigu­ous word as used by the Negro move­ment,” and “the very fuzzi­ness of the goal per­mits the Negroes to accel­er­ate and increase their own demands with­out limit… it is the very sweep and vague­ness of the demands that make the move­ment insatiable.”

An insa­tiable desire for free­dom usu­ally stands in lib­er­tar­ian accounts as the most praise-worthy of human attrib­utes, but Roth­bard found the African Amer­i­can free­dom strug­gle alarm­ing. Roth­bard wor­ried not just about “insa­tiable” negroes, but also about King and his non-violent protests against “pri­vate cit­i­zens as store-keepers or own­ers of golf courses; their rights are already invaded, in a “non-violent” man­ner, by the estab­lished Negro ‘Cen­ter’.” Roth­bard explored ways to stop “the negro rev­o­lu­tion:” his words are worth quot­ing in full.

There are two ways by which it might be crip­pled and defeated. First, the retal­ia­tory cre­ation of a white counter-revolutionary mass move­ment, equally deter­mined and mil­i­tant. In short, by the re-creation of the kind of Ku Klux Klan that smashed Recon­struc­tion and the Negro move­ment in the late 19th cen­tury. Since whites are in the major­ity, they have the capac­ity to do this if they have the will. But the will, in my opin­ion, is gone; this is not the 19th cen­tury, nor even the 1920’s. White opin­ion, as we have seen, has dras­ti­cally shifted from racism to egal­i­tar­i­an­ism; even the South­ern whites, par­tic­u­larly the edu­cated lead­er­ship, con­cede the broad merit of the Negro cause; and, finally, mob action no longer has respectabil­ity in our soci­ety. There have been attempts, to be sure, at mass counter-revolutionary white action: the Ku Klux leader in Geor­gia told a rally that “we must fight poi­son with poi­son,” armed con­flict between white and Negro mobs has bro­ken out in Cam­bridge, Mary­land, and white hood­lums have repeat­edly assaulted Negro pick­ets in the Bronx. But all this is a fee­ble replica of the kind of white action that would be nec­es­sary to defeat the rev­o­lu­tion; and it seems almost impos­si­ble for action to be gen­er­ated on the required scale.
...

Not sur­pris­ingly, the Von Mises Insti­tute he founded and ran is allied with the “League of the South,” which views the Civil War as a cri­sis over state’s rights and calls for an inde­pen­dent south­ern repub­lic and wants, yes, “to return to a sound cur­rency” based in gold. The League of the South laments the fact that “aliens” now gov­ern the for­mer Con­fed­er­acy. It wants to return rule to the heirs of the “Anglo-Celtic tra­di­tion.” Roth­bard and the Von Mises Insti­tute sim­i­larly describe the Civil War as an unjust inter­ven­tion, and claim slav­ery would have van­ished on its own. The North, they argue, cre­ated racism in what had been a benign nat­ural hier­ar­chy

That sounds pretty nasty.

But Ace has lots more. For example, to quote Ace himself:

Another thing I don't believe is that Ron Paul's thick-as-thieves relationship with fringe lunatic crank and Truther Alex Jones is just some kind of coincidence, given that Paul can't seem to stay away from the ghastly paranoid Here's Alex Jones following around Michele Malkin, shouting at her for being a "neocon" (he has referred to her as a "monster" and "Marxist"). One of his little goon squad there shouts "Kill Michelle Malkin!"

When I say Alex Jones is Truther, I don't mean he flirts with it. I mean he says the United States government loaded the buildings with explosives and detonated them.

And that's not even the craziest thing he believes. He happens to believe that this is just one of many attacks on citizens by the global cabal that runs the world.

But continue at the link.

It's pretty devastating all around, and it needed to be said.

And some bonus video: