Ron Paul Was Reaching Out To Rednecks

An outreach effort that really didn't work, so it was abandoned:

So why were Ron Paul or his ghostwriters engaged in racism and conspiracy theories? And why did Ron Paul allow this?

...[I]n the 1990s and 1980s, anti-government sentiment was much less mainstream. It seemed contained to the racist right-wing, people who supported militia movements, who obsessed over political correctness, who were suspicious of free-trade deals like NAFTA.

At that time a libertarian theorist, Murray Rothbard argued that libertarians ought to engage in "Outreach to the Rednecks" in order to insert their libertarian theories into the middle of the nation's political passions.

Rothbard had tremendous influence on Lew Rockwell, and the whole slice of the libertarian movement that adored Ron Paul.

But Rothbard and Rockwell never stuck with their alliances with angry white men on the far right. They have been willing to shift alliances from left to right and back again. Before this "outreach" to racists, Rothbard aligned himself with anti-Vietnam war protestors in the 1960s. In the 2000s, after the "outreach" had failed, Rockwell complained bitterly about "Red-State fascists" who supported George Bush and his war. So much for the "Rednecks." The anti-government theories stay the same, the political strategy shifts in odd and extreme directions.

As crazy as it sounds, Ron Paul's newsletter writers may not have been sincerely racist at all. They actually thought appearing to be racist was a good political strategy in the 1990s. After that strategy yielded almost nothing -- it was abandoned by Paul's admirers.

...Undoubtedly the movement that Paul inspired has moved far beyond the race-baiting it engaged in two decades ago. Young people from college campuses aren't lining up to hear him speak because of what appeared in those newsletter about the 1992 L.A. riots. Rand Paul tried his hardest to place Paul-style libertarianism into the context of the Tea Party. And he will likely carry on the movement without this 1990s baggage.

But the questions remain. If Ron Paul is so libertarian that he won't even police people who use his name, if his movement is filled with incompetents and opportunists, then what kind of a president would he make? Would he even check in to see if his ideas are being implemented? Who would he appoint to Cabinet positions?

These are all legitimate questions. And the media is going to start asking them now. If there isn't already a "ceiling" on Ron Paul's support, widespread knowledge of the newsletters could build one quickly.