Ron Paul Praised Anti-Semitic Magazine On Congressional Letterhead

When Ron Paul is photographed smiling with a well-known white supremacists, when Ron Paul is described as having frequent meetings with neo-Nazis, when Ron Paul refuses to return money sent to him by Aryan Nation lawyers, when Ron Paul speaks before the Robert A. Taft club – a group with ties to white supremacists, and when Ron Paul either supervised or wrote consistently racist political newsletters from which he earned financial profits, Ron Paul supporters have an quick explanation: Ron Paul didn’t actually know anything about any of these activities. They claim that, over the course of several decades, Ron Paul just kept on accidentally hiring people (people whose names he says he cannot remember) who wrote racist articles that then Ron Paul falsely claimed to be his own. They claim that it’s just an accident that Ron Paul has been keeping money sent to him by white supremacists for years. They say that neo-Nazis who say that they have seen Ron Paul at many neo-Nazi meetings over the years are just a bunch of liars.

Ron Paul supporters have no explanation for the fact that no other presidential candidates have such a long and rich history of contact with radical Nazi sympathizers.

Yesterday, The New Republic revealed a new set of documents from Ron Paul that ought to settle the matter among people of open minds. The documents are newsletters, letters, and other documents than span the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, and contain support for crazy conspiracy theories such as the Trilateral Commission, extreme sexism, homophobia and radical racism. The documents gathered by The New Republic also make it clear that Ron Paul talked to people about his newsletters quite often, and that he read the newsletters, in direct contradiction to his recent assertions. It strains credulity for Ron Paul to claim that rogue individuals were inserting bigotry into Paul’s publications, under Paul’s own name, without his knowledge, for such a long period of time.

One particular document among those newly release by The New Republic caught my attention. This document is a letter written by Ron Paul, signed by Ron Paul, on Ron Paul’s official congressional letterhead. The document is no form letter. It is written in direct response to the specific points of a previous correspondence, with Ron Paul expressing personal opinions from his own experience. In the article, Ron Paul thanks a constituent, Amos R. Bruce, for sending him a copy of The American Mercury magazine.

The American Mercury is an extreme right wing publication that has for years included frequent expressions of racism, sexism, and holocaust denial. An article currently featured by The American Mercury calls the idea that six million Jews were killed by the Nazis a “Zionist Fraud”. The publisher of The American Mercury at the time of Ron Paul’s praise of the magazine was Willis Carto, a proponent of anti-Jew conspiracy theories who once declared, “If Satan himself, with all of his super-human genius and diabolical ingenuity at his command, had tried to create a permanent disintegration and force for the destruction of the nations, he could have done no better than to invent the Jews.”

Ron Paul supporters may struggle now to come up with elaborate explanations of this letter, saying that it’s just a coincidence, or that it isn’t genuine, or that Ron Paul didn’t mean to praise antisemitism, but just to praise particular ideas expressed by antisemitic publications. Even if they succeed in these particular efforts to defend Ron Paul, they have failed to grapple with the immense size and scope of the growing pile of evidence that Ron Paul has had consistent ties with racism and other forms of bigotry for almost his entire political career.