Who Wrote Ron Paul's Newsletters? (Throw Rockwell Under the Bus Time)

Libertarian movement veterans, and a Paul campaign staffer, say it was "paleolibertarian" strategist Lew Rockwell

Ron Paul doesn't seem to know much about his own newsletters. The libertarian-leaning presidential candidate says he was unaware, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, of the bigoted rhetoric about African Americans and gays that was appearing under his name. He told CNN last week that he still has "no idea" who might have written inflammatory comments such as "Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks"—statements he now repudiates. Yet in interviews with reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Paul—all named the same man as Paul's chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.

Tax filings from 1985 and 2001 show that Rockwell, Paul's congressional chief of staff from 1978 to 1982, was a vice president of Ron Paul & Associates, the corporation that published the Ron Paul Political Report and the Ron Paul Survival Report. The company was dissolved in 2001. During the period when the most incendiary items appeared—roughly 1989 to 1994—Rockwell and the prominent libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard championed an open strategy of exploiting racial and class resentment to build a coalition with populist "paleoconservatives," producing a flurry of articles and manifestos whose racially charged talking points and vocabulary mirrored the controversial Paul newsletters recently unearthed by The New Republic. To this day Rockwell remains a friend and advisor to Paul—accompanying him to major media appearances; promoting his candidacy on the LewRockwell.com blog; publishing his books; and peddling an array of the avuncular Texas congressman's recent writings and audio recordings.

Rockwell has denied responsibility for the newsletters' contents to The New Republic's Jamie Kirchick. Rockwell twice declined to discuss the matter with reason, maintaining this week that he had "nothing to say." He has characterized discussion of the newsletters as "hysterical smears aimed at political enemies" of The New Republic. Paul himself called the controversy "old news," and "ancient history" when we reached him last week, and he has not responded to further request for comment.

But a source close to the Paul presidential campaign told reason that Rockwell authored much of the content of the Political Report and Survival Report. "If Rockwell had any honor he'd come out and I say, ‘I wrote this stuff,'" said the source, who asked not to be named because Paul remains friendly with Rockwell and is reluctant to assign responsibility for the letters. "He should have done it 10 years ago."

Rockwell was publicly named as Paul's ghostwriter as far back as a 1988 issue of the now-defunct movement monthly American Libertarian. "This was based on my understanding at the time that Lew would write things that appeared in Ron's various newsletters," former AL editor Mike Holmes told reason. "Neither Ron nor Lew ever told me that, but other people close to them such as Murray Rothbard suggested that Lew was involved, and it was a common belief in libertarian circles."

..more at Reason.com

Not sure it matters, even if he excuses are true, the level of negligence involved is a disqualifier. If this happened to the supervisor of a middle school newspaper, that teacher would be out of a job. I admit that if it's Rockwell, that makes it worse. In that case he clearly tolerates racists in the circle of those closest to him.

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Paul's Apology: Say it Ain't So, Dr. No
by Jacob Sullum
Human Events

Ron Paul is not just a rare politician. The Texas Republican's combination of principle and plainspokenness, which has helped his presidential campaign break fund-raising records while attracting a strikingly diverse and enthusiastic crowd of supporters, makes him unique in recent U.S. history.

Since 1997, as during his terms in the 1970s and '80s, Paul has been the only member of Congress who has consistently taken seriously his oath to "support and defend the Constitution," earning the sobriquet Dr. No by voting against unconstitutional bills his colleagues were eager to support. More than any politician I can recall, Paul seems to say what he believes and believe what he says. That's why it's so disappointing to see his defensive, evasive responses to questions about racially inflammatory articles in newsletters that were published under his name in the '80s and '90s.

Not everything you may have heard about the newsletters is true. Contrary to what James Kirchick claims in The New Republic, the newsletters did not offer "kind words for the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke." And although various media outlets have described parts of the newsletters as "anti-Semitic," there's little evidence to back up that description in the passages Kirchick cites.

But the truth is bad enough. In addition to anti-gay comments that pine for the days of the closet, the newsletters include gratuitous swipes at Martin Luther King, discussions of crime that emphasize the perpetrators' skin color, and dark warnings of coming "race riots." None of it is explicitly racist, and some of it could be written off as deliberately provocative political commentary. Taken together, however, these passages clearly cater to the prejudices of angry white guys who hate gay people and fear blacks.

When Paul's opponent in his 1996 congressional campaign pointed to some of this ugly stuff, Paul accused him of taking the quotes "out of context." It was not until a 2001 interview with the Texas Monthly that Paul said his campaign advisers had discouraged him from telling the complete, "confusing" truth about the newsletters: that the most outrageous material had been written by someone else.

That is Paul's defense today, and I'm inclined to believe him. The race-baiting newsletter passages do not sound like anything else Paul has said or written in his public life. People who were familiar with the newsletters' production confirm that they were largely ghostwritten and that Paul often did not review them prior to publication.

Yet, the fact remains that Paul earned money and built his fund-raising list with newsletters that seemed to be aimed at bigots. Given his association with "paleolibertarians" such as Lew Rockwell who sought to construct an anti-statist coalition partly by appealing to racial resentments, he owes his supporters more than accepting "moral responsibility" for inadequately overseeing the newsletters to which he lent his name.

In a CNN interview, Paul alternated between acknowledging the legitimacy of this issue and dismissing it as old news dredged up "for political reasons." I'm sure most of his supporters were not familiar with the content of his newsletters. I've been working at the country's leading libertarian magazine on and off since 1989, and it was news to me.

If I thought Ron Paul might be president in 2009, I'd have to admit that his newsletter negligence raises questions about his judgment and about the people he'd choose to advise him. But since the value of the Paul campaign lies in promoting the libertarian ideals of limited government, individual freedom and tolerance, the real problem is that the newsletters contradict this message.

On CNN, Paul emphasized that "racist libertarian" is an oxymoron since libertarians judge people as individuals. He should follow through on that point by identifying the author(s) of the race-baiting material and repudiating not just the sentiments it represents but the poisonous, self-defeating strategy of building an anti-collectivist movement on group hatred.

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Mr. Sullum, a nationally syndicated columnist, is a senior editor at Reason magazine, and his work appears in the new Reason anthology "Choice" (BenBella Books).

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