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Ron Paul Newsletters

The New York Times

January 1, 2012

New York Times Columnist Ross Douthat writes:

Thus marginalized by the public, the former congressman proceeded to marginalize himself. Through the various newsletters that bore his name — most notably the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report — he spent the early 1990s as a peddler of far-right paranoia.In an exhaustive 2008 piece for Reason magazine, Dave Weigel and Julian Sanchez argued that the most abhorrent language in Paul’s eponymous newsletters — the claims that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “seduced under-age girls and boys,” that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity,” and so on — weren’t actually written by the man himself. But the fact that they had Paul’s imprimatur suggests that the former congressman had grown comfortable way out on the xenophobic fringe.

That fringe is like the Hotel California: When public figures hang out there for a while, they usually find that it’s easier to check out than to leave. Yet in 1997, Paul was back in Congress, representing the same Republican Party that he’d previously abandoned. In 2008, after a decade as a marginal figure on the Hill, his long-shot campaign for the presidency suddenly gained him one of American politics’ most devoted followings. 

Full column here.

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