Well, I guess someone had to defend Rand Paul against the charge that he’s a racist. But, as DougJ points out, a Paul campaign spokesman had to resign after this:
In December, Chris Hightower, the spokesman for Paul’s senate campaign, was forced to resign after a liberal Kentucky blog discovered that his MySpace page had a comment posted around Martin Luther King Day that read: “HAPPY N***ER DAY” above what appears to be a historical photo of the lynching of a black man.
So, you know, maybe that was a clue about how the Paulists view black people. It’s all fine and dandy to say the Civil War need not have been fought or that the Civil Rights Act erred in barring segregation in restaurants but you are not a racist. Asking the rest of us to believe you is kind of insulting, however. You try to hide behind some stupid ideology. But we can see right through your ideology.
Or we can just check with Dave Neiwart:
[Ron] Paul in fact has a long history not just of associating with the extreme populist right, but of promoting their beliefs in the public square:
— He has been proclaiming that Obama is installing a “New World Order” regime for months now.
— This reflected his long record of public associations with the far-right Patriot movement in the 1990s.
— These views were manifested in his 1990s newsletters.
— They were also reflected in his radical-right record in Congress.
— This included a horrendous record on the Martin Luther King holiday.
More on that record here and here.
— As a result of all this, he also has attracted a powerful bloc of militiamen and white supremacists.
— This turned up especially in his recent presidential campaign. More on that here and here.
So, is it any wonder that Rand Paul is surrounded by people who celebrate Martin Luther King Day by posting lynching photos on their MySpace page? Are we shocked that Rand doesn’t want the federal government desegregating lunch counters? Please.
Ron Paul also opposed awarding Rosa Parks the Congressional Gold Medal on the basis that “taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for it.” The irony here is that it’s my understanding that the taxpayers weren’t going to pay for it in the first place. I can’t find the link that shows this, though.
Does/Did Paul oppose all Congressional Gold Medals?
I think he did, but my point is that for Rosa’s medal, it wasn’t on the taxpayer docket. Grrr, I wish I could find the source of these claims. Not sure if it was C&L or somewhere else.
I want to know how Weigel could be so misguided. Is it his attempt to stay in the good graces of GOP’ers, since that is who he covers.
the guy’s a racist looney, and the overt lying by he and his campaign vis-a-vis his gaffe on maddow’s show, expose it, and him, as hypocrites of the first order.
for how easily he’s debunked, see steve benen today:
even his ally and main supporter demint is backing away as fast as he can; via dave neiwert latest at c&l:
and to keep his ‘victory’ in perspective, the rude one yesterday:
he’ll probably get the 20-30% racist redneck vote, but do you honestly believe he’ll ever set foot in the senate chambers as anything but a visitor? the only way he wins is if the democrats in kentucky stay home in droves, and right now, even before the shit really hits the fan, l don’t see that as very likely .
l’m really tired of asshats like rand, newt, palin, rubio, etal, being treated by the msm and the inside the beltway cronies as if they’re serious candidates/pundits and representative of anything than the unhinged zealots and lunatic fringe of the extreme reichwing.
Thanks for this post, Booman. I was over at balloon juice and quite a lot of folks who call themselves “liberal” are making excuses for this clown. They insist that he’s not racist. I can’t say that I’m surprised but it’s still disgusting.
I have always been annoyed by the welcome mat that liberals offered Ron Paul & his son (I’m looking at you Rachel Maddow) going back to the 2008 election cycle. It seems the Pauls were treated as a kind of anti-war fellow travelers, and perhaps as a curisity or intellectial sparrinig partners. So it is not surprising that Rand Paul announced his run for the senate on Maddow’s show last year.
No one had bothered to lay bare their near anarchist beliefs, so we saw them as quirky and cute. Now here we are. I guess in a way it also made Rand comfortable enough to show up on Rachel’s show, only it did not go the way he thought it would.
Near anarchist? Please. They’re not even libertarians, just far-right Republicans masquerading around as libertarians. They’re the closest thing to national power as a libertarian will get, barring Gary Johnson.
racism bothers me. and i agree it should be called out when it rears its head.
but let me also be clear: i don’t see the inherent connection between anger at the nwo and racism. the two things are not inseparable.
when people express paranoia or fear about a “new world order,” often they are expressing their disapproval of global governance. i, for one, see global governance as both inevitable and desirable. we are trending towards global government. we’re all one planet, our actions affect one another, and our systems of government, disparate as they may currently be, will one day reflect that. so i don’t deny there is a “new world order,” it just doesn’t particularly bother me.
but some people feel extremely threatened by this reality. they refuse to accept it. they feel it will destroy their local culture, subsume it into some metaculture that enforces its mores and thought conventions upon the South. maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong. we’ll see.
to the extent that they are correct about the effects of “nwo” on their own culture, one can have a degree of sympathy (limited though it is) for their fears. but when mixed with the poison of racism, sympathy evaporates rather quickly. i just hope that we on the “left” can distinguish between the two.
Apparently you don’t know dog whistles? NWO = Jewish Zionist takeover. Same thing with bankers.
I should say that this is when the people who are afraid of it are saying. “The Free Masons!” Same thing.
i realize this is a bit too much nuance for most people, but you seem like a sharp cookie so let’s go: some of the people who use/hear the phrase ‘nwo’ doubtless fall into the ‘dog whistle’ category. but does that really account for all of them? i guarantee you it does not.
like kennedy responding to khruschev’s sunnier letter instead of the darker one, i think we would be best served by responding to the most reasonable of our political opponents’ fears, instead of the most wacky. this helps to separate the extremists, the ‘dog whistle’ people, from those we could actually work with despite some differences.
and isn’t this important right now? to separate the racist, disingenuous elements on the right from the people we could actually govern with? it ain’t going to happen by reacting with perpetual shock and indignation to the words/actions of people we should be marginalizing into oblivion.
the closer you look at the Paulists the more you will realize that the distinction you know exists really doesn’t. Sure, there are people who are concerned about some New World Order out there who don’t care about race. But they’re exceptions. The Patriot movement and the white supremacy movement are completely overlapped. And that’s what Paulism is all about.
Fair point, and I’d ask you to see my response to Tarheel below. I’m curious then, for some good statistics that could illuminate this issue further. I’ll poke around, but I doubt I’ll find them.
I’ll admit, during the Presidential election I think I misread Ron Paul and his movement. It’s very tempting, on a superficial level, in a lot of ways. But I’ve been coming around increasingly to what you’re saying here, that the face of their movement itself is just a canard for something more sinister. I wanted to take a lot of his statements at face value, but after being clued in to a lot of his connections and past statements I feel differently. His son is also apparently a Grade-A douchebag.
(As an aside, I think the civil rights flap brings into perfect focus the problem with extreme libertarianism: the government as they envision it wouldn’t be able to do a goddamn thing to address such injustices. If state power always overrode federal power, those lunch counters would still be segregated).
I stand by my exhortation, however, that we need to keep separating the cream from the chaff in terms of the right. Exasperating as it may be, we need to keep our patience and keep reaching out in discourse to the people on that side who have reasonable concerns.
This doesn’t mean centrism, please don’t mistake it for that. It just means that we remember that there IS a distinction between those on the right with justifiable fears about globalization and government power, and those on the right who are paranoid/violent/racist/xenophobic/etc.
If we forget that distinction, it will be as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
What those afraid of the New World Order don’t realize is that the origins of the phrase and the motivations for action were the key pillars of Bushevism.
Poppy Bush talked about the New World Order after the fall of the Soviet Union. It was nothing more than US-dominated internationalism using Europe and Japan as junior partners.
It’s key to this issue that different people have different reactions to, or conceptions of, what “New World Order” means to them. You define it here in narrow, history buff terms. Which is fine, that’s one definition. I don’t factually disagree with anything you’ve said here, but this isn’t my point.
My point is that many people fall into the ‘NWO fear’ mindset not because they fear that the “Jewish Bankers” are taking over, but rather because they want to maintain US cultural, economic, and military exceptionalism. They might not use those words, but I believe that’s the main issue for otherwise rational folks who fear an NWO. The sense of exceptionalism isn’t entirely about racism and xenophobia, though that’s how it is for too many people.
One triggering issue is that many people don’t like seeing the US subject to international law. Despite being signatories to various conventions/treaties/etc, we actually haven’t been much constrained by international law up until now. We pretty much do what we want, and have become particularly good at keeping it from the light of day. In the last ten years however, as our military adventurism has upticked sharply, we have begun to run afoul (more publicly) of international law.
The possibility that we could be held accountable for our adventurism scares the crap out of a lot of people in this country, which I personally believe is because on some level they grasp the massive crimes and horrors we are responsible for and are in abject denial. It’s part of the same psychological mechanism as the fear of hell: accountability to others for that from which we have already absolved ourselves of responsibility.
Another triggering issue is the ill effects, perceived and real, of various international trade agreements. Many of the folks who are wary of what they perceive as a “new world order” simply don’t trust an international order to protect their livelihoods. I get that. See NAFTA etc.
So all I’m saying is that we need to recognize why some of Rand Paul’s statements are so resonant with so many people. We don’t have to like his statements, I don’t, but it’s important to recognize why they resonate. And I think it’s the height of intellectual snobbery to dismiss all people with anti-nwo beliefs as ignorant and xenophobic (not accusing you of this). Many of them know history quite well, and have entirely rational reasons for being suspicious of globalization.
there’s a difference between detailing understandable anxiety and fear of change (including demographic change) and apologizing for completely irrational or hate-filled responses to that change.
I entirely agree.
I am Black.
certain things are non-negotiable for me.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is one of those things.
if you’re against it, you’re against me. and my ancestors who lived under the foot of Jim Crow in the South for nearly a century.
and yes, you’re a RACIST, plain and simple.
I think that Rand Paul just solved any problem that Conway might have had in motivating African-American GOTV in November’s election.
And Rand Paul did it while bobbing and weaving trying not to appear to be doing what he was doing.