It's been easier for me to find the figures on the New Hampshire primaries in El Mundo than in the Washington Post. But according to El Mundo's version, Paul pulled only 7% of the Republican vote. It looks like even Benito Giuliani edged Paul out with 8%. Unless he has some kind of surge in New Hampshire, this certainly doesn't help his ability to run a third party campaign in the fall to pull antiwar votes from the Democrats. But a good showing for him in South Carolina certainly isn't out of the question; his neosegregationists positions could endear him to many South Carolina Republican voters.
But Paul's campaign has given the public a chance to take a closer look at the white supremacist/nativist rightwing and at the ways in which their views are exerting an increasing influence on today's authoritarian Republican Party. Unfortunately, even some liberals have focused instead on his opposition to the Iraq War, closing their ideas to his suggestion that he would treat any hostile act by any nation like the Cuban Missile Crisis. And to his past suggestion that we take over the Panama Canal, and to his rigid hostility to the United Nations and to nuclear nonproliferations treaties. And, as Kirchick makes clear, looking the other way from his promotion of racial hatred and other favorite themes of the far right. Kirchick's article is largely based on his research into Ron Paul's various newsletters over the years. Here are some of his findings he reached:
... Paul's campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings [at the newsletter] were doing on his behalf [in publishing some of the most inflammatory material]. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically - or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point - over the course of decades - he would have done something about it.
What's more, Paul's connections to extremism go beyond the newsletters. He has given extensive interviews to the magazine of the John Birch Society, and has frequently been a guest of Alex Jones, a radio host and perhaps the most famous conspiracy theorist in America. Jones--whose recent documentary, Endgame: Blueprint for Global Enslavement, details the plans of George Pataki, David Rockefeller, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, among others, to exterminate most of humanity and develop themselves into "superhuman" computer hybrids able to "travel throughout the cosmos"--estimates that Paul has appeared on his radio program about 40 times over the past twelve years.
Then there is Gary North, who has worked on Paul's congressional staff. North is a central figure in Christian Reconstructionism, which advocates the implementation of Biblical law in modern society. Christian Reconstructionists share common ground with libertarians, since both groups dislike the central government. North has advocated the execution of women who have abortions and people who curse their parents. In a 1986 book, North argued for stoning as a form of capital punishment -because "the implements of execution are available to everyone at virtually no cost." North is perhaps best known for Gary North's Remnant Review, a "Christian and pro free-market" newsletter. In a 1983 letter Paul wrote on behalf of an organization called the Committee to Stop the Bail-Out of Multinational Banks (known by the acronym CSBOMB), he bragged, "Perhaps you already read in Gary North's Remnant Review about my exposes of government abuse." (my emphasis in bold)
Kirchick isn't talking here about people whose ideas bear some superficial resemblance to his. Paul has courted the hardcore, white-supremacist rightwing for basically his whole active political career.
The New Republic has generally been a firm supporter of the neoconservative position on foreign policy, including, as Eric Alterman has noted, faithfully following a hardline, Likudnik position on Israel. So, at the particular moment, TNR's editors may well be more interested in discrediting Paul as a spoiler in the Republican primaries than in anything else. But that doesn't detract from the value of the reporting it has done here on Paul's background.
