But If You Want Money for People With Minds That Hate…
Back in January there was a split, among friends of Ron Paul, about how to respond to criticisms of weird and bigoted passages in old issues of his (now defunct) newsletter. Some in his circle, like his congressional Chief of Staff Tom Lizardo, wanted Paul to cut bait and name the paleos (including Lew Rockwell) who'd ghostwritten the most offensive and non-Paul sounding sections of the letters. (Yes, I'm aware of the argument that there was nothing controversial in the newsletters unless you're a namby-pamby cosmotarian. If the people making that argument are interested, I hear Jeremiah Wright is hiring in his PR shop.) Paul never did, and the controversy faded.
What's Paul think about this today? From his just-released book, The Revolution: A Manifesto:
I urge those who agree with this important message to educate themselves in the scholarship of liberty. Read some of the books I recommend in my reading list. Learn from the Mises Institute and Mises.org, the most heavily trafficked economics Web site in the world. Visit LewRockwell.com, an outstanding and crucially important Web site I visit every day.
The heterodox reading list includes a few Mises scholars and LR.com authors (Rockwell, Tom DiLorenzo, Paul Craig Roberts) among less controversial stuff by John Mueller, Andrew Napolitano, and Boris Pasternak. The Revolution is the best-selling book at Amazon.com today. I've read the book, though, and anyone expecting another bigot blow-up is going to be disappointed.
UPDATE: By way of explanation, here's Paul on racism:
In the long run, the only way racism can be overcome is through the philosophy of individualism, which I have promoted throughout my life… racism is a particularly odious form of collectivism whereby individuals are treated not on their merits but on the basis of group identity. Nothing in my political philosophy, which is the exact opposite of the racial totalitarianism of the twentieth century, gives aid or comfort to such thinking. To the contrary, my philosophy of individualism is the most radical intellectual challenge to racism ever posed.
Again, I'm flabbergasted by the attitude that there was nothing wrong about the newsletters. Paul clearly doesn't share it.