Ron Paul knows who wrote his newsletters. If he needs to jog his memory as to who wrote each issue, he can check to see who he was paying to write for him at the time.

Stop speculating. If Ron Paul does not want to be associated with the content of his newsletters, then let Ron Paul tell us who wrote them.

(Why he didn’t denounce them, fire them, or sue them at the time is another legitimate question, but let’s keep that separate.)

The racist garbage sounds like Lew. The antigay hate sounds like Gary North. The Isreali-conspiracy stuff sounds like Paul.

Overall, the articles don’t show a real racist inclination but a cynical attempt to pander to racists and bigots in order to get their money into the coffers of the newsletter. The rhetoric is unconvincing and over-the-top, although perhaps indicative of the authors’ prejudice. Seems more like it was based on mass-mailing analysis — like they noticed that 35% of subscribers were from white nationalist mailing lists, and then calculated how much racist language they needed to toss in each month. My guess is that most of the money went to the editor.

Could it have been Samuel Francis?

It reads like stuff one saw in the 90s on the LRC site and in the front pages of Chronicles. In particular, Chronicles writers made a big, big deal about the King plagiarism scandals – except for John Shelton Reed, who kept some perspective and declared that everyone owed King a debt for his part in ending segregation. There was a slightly more downmarket variation of the same stuff that Borders used to sell – a true newsletter, saddle-stapled on manila paper. Sobran’s? Something else?

Well, now it’s also talking about vile racialism, and for that you can thank – apparantly – the Confederacy-suckers at Lew Rockwell.com.

But you know what? It doesn’t matter. This campaign was never (for me) about actually winning the Presidency, which as Radley said was never going to happen. It’s about getting people to talk about liberty, and I have no problem continuing to support Dr. Paul’s campaign as long as he does that. His actual executive competence has never been a concern for me.

Ron Paul is running as a Republican, and has been elected and re-elected as a Republican, never as Libertarian, so if you are a Republican rather than a Libertarian (meaning the party, not simply an adherent to libertarianism), then his bagggage is your baggage. Republicans and Democrats already have plenty of ugliness in their past, so seen in that light it’s not much of a big deal.

I did go and read the first PDF file on the tnr.com web site, the one from around the time of the LA riots. While I did find it ugly, I think it’s worth pointing out that it doesn’t sound like Ron Paul’s “voice”, and also that the overall message of the article doesn’t so much espouse the racist idea that blacks are inferior and dangerous, but that the welfare system is harming blacks by teaching them a sense of entitlement. The tone is offensive, maybe inflammatory, though, and it’s very easy to pull out chunks of it and use them as damning quotes.

If it were just the derranged writings of Ron Paul, then you could sacrifice him at the altar of your precious ideology, saying that it’s his fault and his own responsibility. Instead of that, however, you have numerous ghost writers who everyone in the libertarian movement seems to know about, not only writing the most vile garbage imaginable, but using those rants to raise money from the readers! That makes it a far bigger problem than just one man.

We could get some serious mileage out of this metaphor.

LMAO Not NEARLY as much as either of the 2 major parties. We just have a few carry ons…you guys have filled up the cargo hold and STILL have to leave some bags behind due to lack of space…

To accept the premise that Paul was just benignly ignorant of the stuff with his name on it implies a level of naivete unacceptable in a presidential candidate.

Paul’s press release quotes him as saying: “For over a decade, I have
publically taken moral responsibility for not paying closer attention
to what went out under my name.”

What’s the evidence that Paul has done so?

You guys have some serious baggage. You couldn’t pay me to be called a libertarian.

~Jon

I would love to run Eric’s writing through one of those prose complexity algorithms. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was writing at or below a 9th grade level. Those articles were written at closer to a 12th grade level. So no, it wasn’t Eric who penned those articles.

I think that Eric and Paul disagreed strongly on the War on Some Terror, and each was glad to be rid of the other.

My money is still on Gary North. Incidentally, I strongly urge everyone to email Gary North, Lew Rockwell, and any other people whom you think would know who penned those articles, and ask politely for them to relay a message on your behalf to the the authors, requesting that the authors do the right thing and come forward and explain how much editorial control Ron Paul had.

If the authors want Ron Paul’s candidacy to continue and not implode, they need to do the right thing and rescue Ron Paul from the bind he’s in. otherwise while preserving their reputations they will put back the cause of freedom another half generation easily.

Or if Dondero himself was the writer. His firing was never really explained, and it would also explain the start of the bad blood between him and Paul.