Did Ron Paul appear on white supremacist radio show?

According to a contemporaneous blog post by a Ron Paul supporter, Ron Paul appeared on the nation's most popular white supremacist radio program, The Political Cesspool. That program is associated with the Council of Conservative Citizens (formerly known as the White Citizens Councils) and had been supportive of David Duke and others of that ilk. It's sponsors include the Institute for Historical Review, the nation's largest organization devoted to Holocaust denial.

The blog post announcing Ron Paul's appearance on the show (which can be read here) reads as follows:

One of the only truly conservative Congressmen in office today, Ron Paul, will be doing a live interview on The Political Cesspool www.thepoliticalcesspool.org tonight. The show is from 7-8 PM Central time and can be heard locally (Memphis) on 1380 AM WLRM or the live stream or archives if you miss it live will be at www.thepoliticalcesspool.org. No matter what your opinion of the Cesspool is you will not want to miss this interview. I have heard that No Child Left Behind and possible Bush impeachment will be discussed, but I am not 100% sure on that. Tune in to find out.

Oddly, the recording of that day's interview does not appear in the show's otherwise meticulous archives. Searching the August 2006 archives (here: The Political Cesspool Radio Program), reveals the one day gap in their records. Could it be that the people at Political Cesspool scrubbed Ron Paul from their archives because they understand that an appearance on their show might damage his reputation?


UPDATE: (12/23/2011 3:00 PM):

It turns out that the blogger who listed Ron Paul as a guest on Political Cesspool was Austin Farley, the program's co-creator and original co-host.  (Read here: http://www.thepoliticalcesspool.org/about.php) This lends considerable credence to his post.

UPDATE (12/24/2011 11:00 AM):

 I've found conflicting evidence concerning whether Ron Paul appeared on the Political Cesspool show. First, confirmation that he was scheduled to appear on the program has been found in a notice written by the program's host posted on the neo-Nazi Stormfront website. A screenshot of the notice can be seen below. For those who want to see the original, click here.

Don Black, who runs Stormfront, has claimed in a post on the website that Ron Paul was scheduled to be interviewed on Political Cesspool, but that his campaign cancelled the interview at the last minute. (A screenshot of that post is below. The original can be read here.)

Eli Roth tweets link to Adam Holland Blog

Read here: Twitter / Eli Roth: Gibson's father is a guest on white supremacist radio shows.

Eli Roth (aka "Bear Jew" of Inglorious Basterds) has tweeted a link to my post concerning Hutton Gibson's interview with the racist radio program Political Cesspool. (Read that post here.)

 The Political Cesspool program is broadcast on a number of local radio stations and via webstreams, links to which can be found on countless racist websites. Its host has been associated with Pat Buchanan's Reform Party (for which he was a delegate and candidate) and is currently associated with two racist political organizations: the Council of Conservative Citizens -- formerly known as the White Citizens Council -- (read here) and the newly formed American Third Position Party (read  here and here). The program has provided a media forum for David Duke and others of his ilk, as well as allegedly mainstream right-wing political figures such as Pat Buchanan and his sister Bay Buchanan, and Ron Paul aides Lew Rockwell and Walter Block. According to one blog post (read here), Ron Paul himself appeared on Political Cesspool as well, although that program has been scrubbed from the archive.  (A list of the show's guests is available here. My posts concerning the Political Cesspool program can be read here.)

Hutton Gibson used his Political Cesspool interview to expound at length on his belief that "the Antichrist" controls a world-dominating conspiracy (read "Jews and Freemasons") which has taken over every national government in the world and the leadership of the Catholic Church. Gibson also used to interview to advocate the formation of militias in reaction to the election of Barack Obama as president, and expressed his endorsement of Ron Paul as the "only candidate worth supporting".

It seems that Hutton Gibson's son Mel is on Bear Jew's fighting side as the result of his repeated racist, anti-Semitic and misogynist statements.

 I noticed that, while the Inglorious Basterds did attend the last Academy Awards ceremony, Mel Gibson did not. Coincidence?

Buchanan's friend the Jew-hater now claims to be a "liberal" hater

Ever wonder what Pat Buchanan's friends say about Jews in private? No need to wonder. Here's what Buchanan friend James Edwards says in public:

"Vile Jew" here.

"Classic piece of Jewish garbage" here.

On Sarah Palin: "great for Jews and Mexican, horrible for white folks" (Read here.)

"Rep. Jane Harman: another Jewish traitor for Israel". (Read here.)

The Holocaust Museum shooting and Dr. Tiller assassination were only covered by the media because "a white man, a right-winger, did it". (Read here.)

"Jews and their lackeys (are) demanding that the Pope do something about a couple priests who’ve committed the blasphemous sin of questioning the MSM (mainstream media) spin on World War 2" (i.e. that the Holocaust occurred). (Read here.)

"Jews and free speech don't mix". (Read here.)

"Jewish homosexual to head Chicago Public Schools". (Read here.)

Jews are responsible for the gay rights movement (which he objects to, of course). (Read here.)

Holocaust denier David Irving is a "survivor of the Jewish holocaust against free speech". (Read here.)

KKK and neo-Nazi leader David Duke is "the most outspoken voice for white Americans, (who was) arrested (in Prague) for saying things Jews don't approve of." (Read here.)

Of course, James Edwards has been writing this way for years, so these comments don't come as a surprise. What comes as a surprise is this, posted on his website yesterday:

"Sometimes when I run across certain stories, and I blog about them, I let my emotions get the best of me, and in my anger I use phrases and words I later regret. That’s happened a lot lately, so I've gone through and edited some recent posts. New readers shouldn't get the wrong idea from a couple of posts out of over a thousand…stick around, check the site out, and give the blog and radio show a chance."

For some reason, Edwards now claims to have seen the light. He's gone back to edit two recent posts to change references to "Jews" to "liberals". That "vile Jew" referred to above became a "liberal". Another post titled Why are Jews despised all over the world? was edited to read Why are liberals despised all over the world? . The lead of the latter article originally read "To Jewish advertising agencies, white women are nothing but whores." Now it reads "To liberal advertising agencies, white women are nothing but whores."


Edwards forgot, however, to change the categories that post is filed under. He still has it filed under the tags "Hatred of White People" and "Jews".

Edward now claims that he wrote those two bigoted posts because he got all worked up over the issue he was writing about and lost his head. Those posts dealt with sexually suggestive advertisements for Burger King and Sprite. I can see how something like suggestive advertising can cause someone to lose their head and suddenly turn into a Nazi.

[UPDATE (7/24/09 8 pm): Edward's reformation didn't last long. Read here.]

Edwards, who hosts a radio program called the Political Cesspool, is associated with the racist organization Council of Conservative Citizens, originally known as the White Citizens' Councils. He has cited neo-Nazi David Duke as his hero and inspiration, and worked with Duke to organize a conference of the racist group EURO in Memphis in November, 2008. (Read here.)

More about Edwards here and here and here. Video here. Read here and here for background on the CCC. Here is the CCC's webpage commemorating Black History Month, which they devote to promoting the idea that Martin Luther King was a communist.

Here is a cesspool webpage honoring the cop who arrested Rosa Parks, neo-Nazi Holocaust denier Mark Weber, and Pat Buchanan. According to that page, Pat Buchanan's website also posted his Political Cesspool interview. Edwards has ungrammatically stated about his radio program that "their confirmation as a powerhouse in the movement was cemented" when Pat Buchanan appeared on the show in 2006. Read here. In 2000, Edwards was a Buchanan delegate at the Reform Party's national convention, and was a national committee member for that party. In 2002, Edwards ran for the Tennessee State Assembly on the ticket of a breakaway faction of the Reform Party associated with Buchanan called the America First Party. (Read here.)

By the way, the Political Cesspool program promotes something called the Luftwaffe Aircrew Re-enactors Association.

My previous posts about Edwards are available here and here and here and here and here. The Southern Policy Law Center has called Edwards "the nexus of hate in America". (Read here.) Read the cesspool's guest list here.

James Edwards is pictured below with Pat Buchanan, a baseball bat (wrong grip for playing baseball -- right grip for threatening a racially-motivated beating), and a Confederate battle flag.

























Here's some more of what Buchanan's friend has been saying about Jews.

Anti-Obama smear author on racist radio

Swiftboat smear monger Jerome Corsi is flogging his scurrilous anti-Obama screed in such friendly forums as the Sean Hannity radio show and the Sean Hannity TV show, where he accused Obama of supporting infanticide. More about that in a future post, but chew on this for now: Corsi's had a friendly interview on the overtly racist, anti-Semitic show Political Cesspool, previously a forum for neo-Nazis, neo-confederates and the Klan. He fits right in. In fact, he's scheduled another interview for Sunday, Aug. 17.

Read the following and then tell me what Mary Matalin is doing promoting and publishing this guy and even touting his "scholarship". I saw a Republican flack on the Larry King show going so far as to claim that Corsi wasn't associated with the Republicans. He's not? They're just publishing and promoting him as they did with the 2004 swfitboating book.

The Republicans must clearly and emphatically disavow the racist anti-Semitic Corsi and stop using neo-Nazi radio shows to promote their views. More on this to come.

, from Hatewatch | Southern Poverty Law Center:

Perhaps Corsi’s most telling appearance, however, has been on The Political Cesspool, an overtly racist, anti-Semitic radio show hosted by self-avowed white nationalist James Edwards. Corsi was interviewed on the Cesspool on July 20 and is scheduled to appear again this Sunday, August 17, joining a recent guest roster that has included Christian Identity pastor Pete Peters, Holocaust denier Mark Weber and former Klan boss David Duke.

Along with promoting Corsi’s appearances, Edwards is boasting on his website that the three-hour weekly show will join the Republic Broadcasting Network in September. This conspiracy-minded network, heard via satellite and the web, features talk about a sinister “New World Order” and wild theories about the causes of 9/11. Shows that air on the network include The Piper Report, named after host Michael Collins Piper, who has contributed to the holocaust denial magazine The Barnes Review, and Mark Dankof’s America, which has interviewed Weber, director of the Institute for Historical Review, a leading Holocaust denial group.

Florida: Republican Party's racist email campaign

I've recently written about Pennsylvania Republicans' evoking the threat of another Holocaust should Barack Obama be elected president (read here). That email was sent to 75,000 Jewish voters. One signer of that email, a former judge involved in the Pennsylvania Republicans voter suppression efforts, has subsequently apologized, claiming that she hadn't read it closely before signing it (read here.)

Now, from Hillsborough County on Florida's Gulf coast, comes another story about Republicans sending racist anti-Obama email. This time the appeal seems more pro-Nazi than anti.

from tampabays10.com (Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Fla.): Local GOP Chairman distributes racist e-mail

The head of the Hillsborough GOP, David Storck, distributed an email from a Republican Party volunteer saying (that African-Amercian) voters are a threat.

That's because, as the volunteer says in the email, he sees "car loads of black Obama supporters coming from the inner city to cast their votes for Obama."

It goes on to say, "This is their chance to get a black president and they seem to care little the he is at minimum a socialist and probably Marxist in his core beliefs." The Republican volunteer says that is because, "After all he is black- no experience or accomplishments but he is black."

Hillsborough Commissioner Kevin White says, "There's no place in our community for those types of views." White, who can't believe the email was distributed, says Storck should resign.

White says when he reads emails like this, he realizes hatred and racism is still alive and well.

Storck says he didn't pay enough attention to the email before he sent it out. "Now I know that was a mistake. I never should have done it. I do not agree with the statement or anything else. That's not what we're all about."

Despite Storck's apology, Curtis Stokes, an African American Republican who is also the head of the Tampa NAACP chapter, echoes White's call for Storck to resign.

A pdf of the entire email is available here. The website of the county Republicans is available here. Below is the main part of the email, unedited, capital letters intact:

I SEE CARLOADS OF BLACK OBAMA SUPPORTERS COMING FROM THE INNER CITY TO CAST THEIR VOTES FOR OBAMA. THIS IS THEIR CHANCE TO GET A BLACK PRESIDENT AND THEY SEEM TO CARE LITTLE THAT HE IS AT MINIMUM, SOCIALIST, AND PROBABLY MARXIST IN HIS CORE BELIEFS. AFTER ALL, HE IS BLACK--NO EXPERIENCE OR ACCOMPLISHMENTS--BUT HE IS BLACK.

I ALSO SEE YOUNG COLLEGE STUDENTS AND THEIR PROFESSORS FROM USF PARKING THEIR CARS WITH THE PROMINENT 'OBAMA' BUMPER STICKERS. THE STUDENTS ARE ENTHUSIASTIC TO BE VOTING IN A HISTORIC ELECTION WHERE THERE MAY BE THE FIRST
BLACK PRESIDENT.

THE COLLEGE PROFESSORS, PARTICULARLY IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, FOR THE MOST PART HAVE LITTLE OR NO EXPERIENCE IN THE WORK-A-DAY WORLD. THEIR LIFE EXPERIENCE HAS BEEN MOSTLY ACADEMIC UNDER THE TUTELAGE OF LIBERAL COLLEGE PROFESSORS. FOR THEM, A LITTLE SOCIALISM AND ANTIAMERICANISM IS A GOOD THING. AFTER ALL, IF TERRORISTS ATTACK US, WE MUST HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO PROVOKE THEM.

YOU AND I UNDERSTAND THE DANGERS THE POTENTIAL OBAMA PRESIDENCY PRESENTS TO OUR WAY OF LIFE. THE SUPPRESSION OF FREE SPEECH, INTRODUCING UNION INTIMIDATION IN THE WORKPLACE, INCREASED DANGERS TO OUR NATION BY TERRORISTS, CUTTING OUR DEFENSE BUDGET BY 25%, TURNING OUR TAX
SYSTEM INTO A NATIONAL WELFARE SYSTEM AND ECONOMIC POLICIES THAT COULD DRIVE US INTO A DEPRESSION.

The reading skills of these Republicans must be pretty poor, considering the blatant racism which Storck claims not to have noticed. This excuse is also entirely implausable considering that Storck initially defended the email (read here).

This appeal to the racist right, a message which is not only anti-black, but red-baiting, anti-labor and anti-intellectual, is largely consistent with the message of the Republicans' 2008 campaign. Storck made the mistake, as did Representative Michele Bachmann (read here: "Minnesota's smiley-faced Joseph McCarthy"), of spelling out what the Republicans have preferred to imply with code words like "welfare" and "terrorist". Although unsubtle, their rhetoric flies just below the racial radar of the mainstream media while sending a clearly fear-mongering message to insecure white Americans. (Note: in fairness to the Florida Republican party and McCain campaign, they have both, when asked about it, condemned the email -- read here.)

Storck's email has received the unqualified support of the nation's top neo-Nazi radio broadcast, the aptly-named Political Cesspool (read here), which called Storck's comments "the truth". Concerning his apology, the Cesspool folks write on their blog:

Storck is now apologizing and groveling as only a white man can, and I hope the spineless wimp does resign, or is forced out.

Political Cesspool host and blogger James Edwards is associated with the Pat Buchanan wing of the Republican Party.

UPDATE: McCAIN CAMPAIGN SPREADING 'OBAMA IS NOT A CITIZEN' RUMOR IN FLORIDA 'ATLAS SHRUGS' BLOGGER HOLDS ANTI-OBAMA RALLY.

from The Daily Beast: Waaay Off-Message (by Benjamin Sarlin)

In the battleground state of Florida, one McCain official wonders if the man leading in the polls is actually Indonesian.

In Florida, volunteers for John McCain’s campaign have been buzzing about a discredited rumor that Barack Obama is not a natural born United States citizen, but either Kenyan or Indonesian. That’s not surprising—the rumor has enjoyed a long life on the Internet. But now a McCain campaign official in Broward County, Fla., is indulging in the same fantasizing. Tim McClellan, the Northeast Broward County regional manager for the McCain campaign, told me on Friday that he has doubts about Obama’s citizenship.

“I have strong concerns that Obama is not a citizen,” McClellan said. “Did he go to Indonesia and become an Indonesian citizen? And if so, did he take steps to regain his citizenship?”

According to McClellan, Obama’s birth certificate—a copy of which has been independently verified by news organizations—is a forgery. McClellan pointed to a recently dismissed lawsuit by Pennsylvania resident and 9/11 truth advocate Philip J. Berg alleging that Obama is really a Kenyan citizen as evidence that the Democratic nominee will eventually be removed from office when the truth comes out.

“I suspect the U.S. Supreme Court will prove that Obama’s not a citizen,” McClellan said.

I asked McClellan if he was frustrated that McCain was not making the case that Obama is not a genuine American.

“Yes, and I think that’s true of a good majority of Republicans,” McClellan said, “You have to look at why more of it isn’t getting attention, though. The mainstream media is very liberal and the word doesn’t get out.”

Broward County, of course, was the battleground of the 2000 recount. But if McClellan was off-message in his campaign duties, he was hardly alone. Several volunteers at rallies this week mentioned the birth certificate issue, among other Obama conspiracy theories. Pamela Geller, author of the popular conservative blog Atlas Shrugs, even held a rally in Sunrise, Fla., on Friday to call on the Federal Election Commission to bar Obama from further campaign spending on the basis that he is not a natural born US citizen. Geller made news earlier in the week when she argued in a rambling 12,000-word essay that Malcolm X may be Barack Obama’s biological father. Politico reporter Ben Smith described the piece as the “frontiers of craziness.”

What was most fascinating about McClellan and other conspiracy-minded Republicans in Broward was that they did not seem to believe there was any conflict between their theories and the McCain campaign’s own claims. McCain himself walks a fine line when raising questions about Obama’s past (“Who is the real Barack Obama?”). His staff, it seems, is working overtime to fill in the blanks.

Geller's blog posts about her counter-shlep start here. (I'm getting whiplash from clicking between blogs claiming Obama is too pro-Jewish, like this one, to those claiming he's anti-Jewish. At least they can agree that Obama is bad and the Jews are involved in some way.)

Poster for Pamela Geller's Florida anti-Obama rally: "Obama Lethal for the Jews"

Hutton Gibson: John Paul II was Soviet agent, Vatican and world governments are controlled by the Antichrist

Mel Gibson's father Hutton Gibson has given an interview on the white supremacist radio program "Political Cesspool" in which he accused Pope John Paul II of being a Soviet agent, and charged that the Catholic Church is under the control of a conspiracy led by the Antichrist. He went on to state that the same conspiracy had taken over

"every legitimate government in the world from the top. It's the same plot. Why would they vary the method? It seems to work."

When asked to assess the current pope, Benedict XVI, Gibson said:

The whole bunch at the top, if they're not queer, they're supportive of it.

With respect to the current political situation in the United States, Gibson charged that the Obama administration

"does not have the country's welfare at heart -- or any part of it. They're out to destroy it, the same as the people in Rome are out to destroy the church."

Gibson went on to express support for Ron Paul, saying that he was the "only (candidate) worth voting for" in the 2008 presidential election.

When asked what the average American can do to prevent the Obama administration from destroying the country, Gibson said that there isn't much they can do, stating:

"It gets harder and harder all the time. One thing they shouldn't do is give up their guns."

He went on to advocate that citizens create "alarm systems" to notify the public in the event of a federal government crackdown on gun ownership.

The Political Cesspool program is devoted to racist, anti-Semitic and far right propaganda, and is said to be the most popular white supremacist radio show in the United States. The hourlong interview with Gibson took place on Saturday, January 9 and was broadcast on a network of local stations and via the internet.

An archived version of the interview is available here (click on the 1/9/2010, hour two link): Liberty News Radio - Show Archives; direct link to mp3 here.

Colorado Sheriff threatens to arrest federal employees. Claims U.S. gov't intends to give forest resources to China as "collateral on debt".

Last November's election brought a number of Tea Party candidates to office, among them Dennis Spruell, a longtime police officer who was elected Sheriff of Montezuma County, a rural county in the Four Corners area of southwest Colorado ("2,000 square miles of canyons, national forest, mountains and high altitude desert").

Last Saturday evening, Sheriff Spruell gave a live interview to the Political Cesspool, the radio program of the far-right racist organization Council of Conservative Citizens. Spruell's presence on that program, which backs David Duke for president in 2012, is troubling enough. According to the most recent census, 25% of the residents of Spruell's county are American Indian or Hispanic. Those citizens can hardly be reassured that the man they depend on to enforce the law in their county thinks it appropriate to appear on the nation's most popular explicitly racist program -- one that touts "free speech for White Americans", promotes racist organizations like American Renaissance and individuals like David Duke and promotes racist depictions of African-Americans, Jews and Hispanics.

What Spruell had to say on that radio program was more troubling still. Spruell revealed that he believes that federal employees working on roads in the federal forest and park land in his county may be secretly conspiring to give natural resources to China "as collateral for (the national) debt". Although he offered no evidence for this odd belief, he made a very real and very troubling threat to counter this purported conspiracy. He announced that he would arrest any federal employee who attempted to close a road on federal land in his county. He said that he intended to do this out of his deep, abiding love for the constitution.

The interview is available at about 1:00 of the mp3 at this link. The conspiracy theory mongering begins at about 10:30.  (Link goes directly to mp3 file. The interview can also be heard at link #2 of the 2/5/2011 program here.



Sheriff Spruell may think that his constituents want him to protect national forests from the Chinese by arresting Forestry Service employees, but he'd be wrong.  About 1/3 of Montezuma County is federal forest  which is administered by three federal agencies, and many local residents object to a recently announced plan to end public access to some Forest Service land (read here).  Spruell is now using that controversy as a springboard for his broader agenda of opposition to federal authority and promotion of conspiracy theories.  When asked by a reporter for the local paper what issues they wanted him to deal with, they universally said crime related to local production of crystal meth, which is endemic in the area.  (Read here.)  Interestingly, not one of them cited countering the threat of Chinese encroachment on U.S. forests as a concern.

Spruell was brought to the attention of  the Cesspool radio show by a supporter, Montezuma County resident Mike Gaddy, who actually conducted the interview.  Gaddy is a former leader of the anti-immigrant Minutemen vigilante group and a blogger at the Lew Rockwell website.   There, you can read his many columns advocating gun ownership, predicting a civil war in which federal agents will soon confiscate guns and place gun owners in concentration camps (read here) , claiming that U.S. gun control laws are taken word for word from those of Nazi Germany (read here), supporting the Confederacy as opposing a "one world government" (read here), and implying that Pearl Harbor, the TWA 800 crash, the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 were done by the federal government (read here).   He also claims that the Tucson massacre was a "false flag" undertaken by the federal government to justify further restrictions on gun ownership (read here).

(Nice stuff they publish at Lew Rockwell.  Say, wasn't he Ron Paul's top advisor for several decades?  Just saying...)


                                                            Mike Gaddy

Think about the following quote from Gaddy as you picture Sheriff Spruell and his deputies attempting to arrest U.S. Forest Service employees in Montezuma County:

What will be the reaction of the soldier from Colorado who is confiscating guns and placing so-called domestic terrorists in detention camps in Ohio when he gets word other soldiers are doing the same to his family and friends back home? Who will soldiers and law enforcement officers side with ... If military and law enforcement personnel begin to side with the citizens, will the fedgov [sic] call in United Nations forces to subdue those who cherish personal freedom and will fight to retain it?  Regardless of which series of events occur, Americans will be the losers. Brace yourselves and prepare, this is going to get real ugly.

Gaddy and Spruell deliberately characterize a run of the mill conflict between local and federal interests in extremely heightened, militaristic and conspiratorial terms, creating a hostile environment which may endanger federal employees.  They should be deeply ashamed.

Sheriff Spruell should renounce his bizarre conspiracy theory and apologize to the innocent federal employees he has threatened to arrest.  Moreover, he should make clear to the public that they should take no vigilante action against federal employees.   Spruell needs to make clear to Park Service, Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management workers that they should not fear to do their jobs.  For him to do otherwise would compound his already grossly irresponsible behavior.  What Spruell advocated in his radio interview is merely vigilantism masquerading as law enforcement.  Like many on the Tea Party right, he is all too anxious for local authorities to use force against the federal government in order to prevent illusory conspiracies.  In that respect, for them, the means justifies the ends.

UPDATE (2/10/2011): 

1) The interview was touted on the "White Pride" website: http://white-pride.org/2011/02/political-cesspool-tonight/.

2) The chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, Dick Wadhams, has announced that he will step down, ending his bid for another term.  (Read here and here.)  He's quoted as saying:

I have tired of those who are obsessed with seeing conspiracies around every corner and who have terribly misguided notions of what the role of the state party is.

While that comment on the Colorado GOP in the Tea Party era was targeted more at Tom Tancredo and other statewide politicians than at Sheriff Spruill, it certainly applies.

Hate radio some Republicans love

You most likely have never heard of a radio program called "The Political Cesspool" or its host James Edwards. Edwards describes himself as a "white separatist" and unabashed racist (read here and here). His program works with and promotes one of the country's largest racist organizations, the "Council of Conservative Citizens". That's what they renamed the "White Citizens Council" after too many church bombings and police beatings of women and children gave segregation a bad name. (Read here and here and here.) But Edwards is a throwback to simpler times. He promotes bigotry against African-Americans and Jews without subtlety or apology. When writing about someone who's Jewish, Edwards tends to use the Goebbels locutions "the Jew so-and-so" or just "Jew so-and-so" (read here). If the target of his hate speech is gay, he'll say "that homosexual so-and-so" (read here). When he provides a forum for David Duke, he doesn't say "neo-Nazi Klan leader David Duke". For him, it's "author and former Louisiana state representative", "a Christian man above reproach" and his "favorite radio patriot".

Besides David Duke, Edwards also promotes the views of people such as Nick Griffin of the British National Party, Professor David Ray Griffin of the "9/11 truth" movement and Professor Walter Block of Jews for Ron Paul (don't ask). (Here's the complete rogues gallery: a list of guests on The Political Cesspool.) While listening to these "esteemed guests", you may hear ads for the Holcaust denial outfit "Institute for Historical Review" which sponsors Edwards' broadcasts (read here).

Edwards also provides a forum for Republican authors like respected television pundit and Nazi apologist author Patrick J. Buchanan (on whose 2000 presidential campaign Edwards worked). Now he's promoting anti-Obama swiftboat smear monger Jerome Corsi. In case you can't pick up Edwards' broadcast where you live and would have missed the Jerome Corsi interview, the neo-Nazi website Stormfront kindly presented the show live via internet stream (read here). Republican bigwig Mary Matalin, who publishes and promotes Corsi's abominable book about Obama (read here), has not revealed whether she listened to the interview on the radio or the neo-Nazi webstream.

Matalin might be interested to see what else is being promoted alongside her star author. Edwards recently posted on his blog a bizarre musical video tribute to Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel (viewable here, but don't bother). Now he's promoting a speech by David Irving, who has been conducting a speaking tour of sorts around the U.S. Edwards calls his promo "Your chance to hear a real Holocaust survivor":

from JAMES EDWARDS:

If you’re anywhere near Alabama, and you want the chance to meet a real hero, mark August 26th on your calendar. That’s the day David Irving, a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust against free speech, will be speaking at the Prattville Holiday Inn. There will be a dinner, followed by a lecture by Mr. Irving. The cost is $20 at the door, but it’s only $16 if you pre-register online here [link deleted] . He’ll be speaking in other places on different dates, so by all means check his schedule at that link and see if he’ll be near you.

What Pat Buchanan's friends are saying about Dr. Tiller's assassination

James Edwards, a staffer in Buchanan's 2000 presidential campaign who has a racist radio show appropriately called "Political Cesspool" (read here), has the following to say about the assassination of Dr. Tiller (read here):

I’m sure most Americans were shocked to hear that an abortionist was shot to death this weekend. The really shocking part was that it happened at his church - most abortionists attend synagogues.

Buchanan is a frequent friendly guest on Edwards' radio show (read here and here), a fact touted on Buchanan's website (read here), as well as neo-Nazi websites such as podblanc, Stormfront and David Duke's blog.  (Buchanan and Duke seem to be at the top of Edwards' cesspool pantheon.)  

Here, for your consideration, are three photos of the host of the cesspool program. First, with his inspiration, Patrick J. Buchanan, for whose presidential campaign he worked in 2000.

Next, posing with an anonymous friend apparently threatening to use baseball bats for something other than baseball.



Last, a formal occasion with a confederate battle flag.

Here's some more of what Buchanan's friend is saying about Jews.

Coulter accuses Rev. Barry Lynn of being secretly Jewish

Republican columnist Ann Coulter has accused First Amendment activist Rev. Barry Lynn of being secretly Jewish. Coulter, who not coincidentally is touting a new book, recently wrote in a column that she would provide a free copy of it to anyone who could produce Lynn's bar mitzvah photos or birth announcement. She threw in a "mazel tov!" for good measure. (Read here.) Read her column to get the context. If you do, you'll understand that, to Coulter, activism on behalf of the separation of church and state equals opposition to Christianity; and opposition to Christianity equals Judaism.

Lynn has responded, writing at beliefnet.com (read here):

"You see, I have been attacked by Ann Coulter...again. This one deserves an immediate response.

"She has now claimed that I'm not a real minister -- and not a real Christian -- and has told readers that she would send a free copy of her newest book (sure to become another New York Times bestseller) to the first person who can send her a "copy of my bar mitzvah photos or birth announcement."

"I wonder why my lineage would matter. After all, there are some of Jewish converts to Christianity ... Maybe she is convinced that I am the Antichrist. Many fundamentalists concerned about this matter (including the late Jerry Falwell) believe he is already among us and claim the said figure must be Jewish. Hence, to Ann, I must have been born Jewish."

Lynn, with characteristic good humor, accompanies this with images of his Cameroonian birth certificate (courtesy of Orly Taitz) and a snapshot of him as a baby with his two alien parents.

Fredrick Carlson has an excellent column on Coulter's latest calculatedly offensive remarks. In a column at the Talk2Action blog (which is always a good read), Carlson expresses outrage at Coulter's bigoted smear and diagnoses it perfectly.

"Of course, Rev. Barry Lynn, as executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State (and a former director of the Washington, DC office of the ACLU) is a proponent of religious freedom and is unopposed to religious expression... But he is routinely smeared by elements of the Religious Right because he and AU are vigorous and effective opponents of theocratic creep and the hijacking of government resources for unconstitutional religious purposes... Coulter gets very specific and suggests that Lynn is so opposed to public religious expression that he is opposed to Christian religious expression by children -- therefore he must be Jewish."

True to form, Wikipedia is already right on the case. Someone has already added Lynn's invented heritage to the article about him there. No source for this information is given. (Read here.)

And the racist community is promoting Coulter's anti-Semitic disinformation. Pat Buchanan's pal James Edwards of the white supremicist group Council of Conservative Citizens and the radio show Political Cesspool has picked up Coulter's theme (read here), writing:

"The vast majority of attacks on public displays of Christianity come from Jewish groups like the American Jewish Committee, the ACLU, the ADL, the SPLC, etc. But there is one fairly prominent organization headed by a Christian which does the same sort of thing. It’s Americans United for Separation of Church and State. It’s run by Rev. Barry Lynn. But Ann Coulter’s not buying it. She believes Barry Lynn is secretly a Jew who’s only pretending to be a Christian in order to attack Christianity."

By the way, contrary to Edwards' comment, the ACLU is not a Jewish organization, it's a front for the international communist conspiracy to fluoridate our water.

To clarify the extremely obvious fact to which I alluded in the lead paragraph, Coulter deliberately creates controversy with an offensive comment whenever she has a book to sell. Her attack on the widows of those killed on 9/11, her pronouncements on God's views concerning the shortcomings of the Jewish religion, and her "raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences" spring immediately to mind. And then there was the time during the 2008 presidential campaign when she called candidate John Edwards a "faggot". I'd call her a shock jock, but they work a lot harder than she does and are sometimes funny. Let's just call her mean as a snake, lazy and opportunistic.

Fox News trying to reach the far-right?

They've already got Glenn Beck and Andrew Napolitano, now they're giving air time to Jerome Corsi.

from Little Green Footballs - Jerome Corsi: Very Bad Craziness on Fox News

He’s a Birther, he promotes insane conspiracy theories at World Net Daily, he appears frequently on Alex Jones’s whacked out radio show, he’s appeared more than once on the white supremacist radio show Political Cesspool — and last night he got two whole segments on Fox News’s Sean Hannity show to promote the black helicopter New World Order bad craziness in his new semi-literate book.

This really is a new low for Fox News.

Vermont Secessionists work with racist 'League of the South': Far Right / Left Convergence

Heidi Beirich writes in the Southern Policy Law Center Intelligence Report that the Second Vermont Republic, a secessionist group with a leftist constituency, has made common cause with a racist, far-right secessionist group League of the South.

from the Southern Policy Law Center Intelligence Report (via AlterNet): "Vermont Secessionists Meet with Racist League of the South"

In 2003, the Second Vermont Republic (SVR) sprang up to push for the independence of Vermont, a tiny, idyllic Northeastern state with fewer than 630,000 residents. In its seemingly quixotic quest, SVR took up the mantra that small is beautiful, arguing that secession would lead to sustainability, ecological balance, an end to military entanglements overseas, and a better life. SVR activists designed a new green flag for Vermont and started selling T-shirts, particularly popular with the state's many tourists, that read, "U.S. OUT OF VT!"

But in recent months and years, SVR's actions have gone from way out to worrying. Starting in 2005, SVR leader Thomas H. Naylor -- along with SVR's very close ally, the Cold Spring, N.Y.-based Middlebury Institute that is headed by longtime leftist Kirkpatrick Sale -- began openly collaborating with a collection of Southern extremists to build a national secession movement.

SVR's disturbing new partner is the white supremacist League of the South. The Alabama-based group is against interracial marriage, believes the old Confederacy never surrendered, and wants to reestablish "the cultural dominance of the Anglo-Celtic people and their institutions" in a newly seceded South. It seeks to accord different classes of people differing legal rights in what sounds very much like a medieval theocracy of lords, serfs and clerics. League intellectuals have defended both slavery (which was "God-ordained") and segregation, a policy described as protecting the genetic "integrity" of both blacks and whites. Right after Hurricane Katrina, league members put up "whites only" housing offers, including one from Alabama offering a trailer to a "white family of three or four," and another from Tennessee offering to temporarily house a "White Christian family."

Many Vermonters have been shocked by this alliance. After all, the Green Mountain State was the first to abolish slavery in 1777, and its men fought fiercely to preserve the union in battles during the Civil War, some of which are proudly commemorated in paintings displayed inside the gold-domed State House. But Naylor isn't worried about his fellow Vermonters' concerns, hotly defending as critical his newfound alliance with members of the radical right.

"For the last 30 years, people have been speculating on the idea of far left meets far right, and I saw the possibility for that not to be fantasy but to be real," Naylor told the Intelligence Report. "The objective is to bring down the Empire." The League of the South, Naylor added, though "not perfect," is "not racist."

Birthing a movement

Talk of secession has been heating up in Vermont since the early 1990s and even before. In 1991, then-Lt. Gov. Howard Dean moderated debates in seven towns that then voted for secession. That same year, University of Vermont professor and current SVR advisor Frank Bryan argued for secession in a series of well-publicized debates with Vermont Supreme Court Justice John Dooley. With the election of George Bush and the onset of the increasingly unpopular Iraq war, secessionist sentiment in traditionally liberal Vermont picked up, with a 2006 University of Vermont poll showing 8% of residents interested in the idea.

It was Naylor who turned that sentiment into a movement, founding SVR after self-publishing The Vermont Manifesto in 2003. Naylor was spurred to create SVR by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which he does not believe were organized by Osama bin Laden, a "fundamentalist living in a remote cave," but rather were the ultimate result of American arrogance. In his manifesto's preface, Naylor writes: "Our nation has truly lost its way. America is no longer a sustainable nation-state economically, politically, socially, militarily or environmentally. The Empire has no clothes." A perennial curmudgeon, Naylor regularly berates government officials. He calls Vermont's elected officials "enemies of the state" and has labeled six-term Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, "a world-class prostitute."

To most Vermonters, SVR was originally seen as a far-out outfit that engaged in publicity stunts to push secession. At least in the beginning, its most enthusiastic supporters seemed to be the Glover, Vt.-based Bread and Puppet Theater troupe, a merry band dedicated to "cheap art" whose building hosted SVR's first statewide meeting in October 2003. One SVR attention-grabber was a "memorial service" held on March 4, 2005, commemorating the day in 1791 that Vermont joined the union. The service included everything from a reading from Ecclesiastes to the strains of Chopin's "Funeral March." A funeral procession with a New Orleans-style jazz band carried a flag-draped coffin containing the "deceased First Vermont Republic" to the State House in Montpelier, where it was placed at the feet of Vermont Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen's statue. SVR even achieved a symbolic political success, persuading the legislature to designate Jan. 16 as Vermont Independence Day to commemorate the establishment of the First Vermont Republic in 1777.

Naylor's leftist credentials were enhanced greatly by his close friendship with Kirkpatrick Sale, whose Middlebury Institute he helped found in 2005. Sale, a contributing editor at the left-wing journal The Nation and a chronicler of the militant, 1960s-era Students for a Democratic Society, is best known as the author of The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, a 1991 history that was the first to denounce Columbus for "founding" the New World and ushering in the destruction of its native peoples. Between 1965 and 1968, he was editor of The New York Times Magazine. Thirty years later, in 1995, Sale was named as a "visionary" by the Utne Reader, a liberal journal. Sale also is known for his hatred of technology, once famously smashing a computer to bits on a New York stage.

In 2005, the Vermont secessionist movement also spawned a popular independent newspaper, Vermont Commons, that the SVR describes as a "sister organization." The newspaper promotes nonviolent secession and a "more sustainable Vermont future." Both SVR and Vermont Commons argue that the United States has become an unsustainable "empire" in need of dismantling.

From Mississippi to Montpelier

The image of SVR as a quixotic band of idealistic Vermontophiles fighting for an independent Green Mountain State has taken a public beating since 2006, when Naylor and Sale began openly working with the League of the South and other neo-Confederates. But the fact is that from the beginning, the SVR has been in many ways a Southern import that pushes 19th-century claims about states' rights and a revisionist take on Lincoln and the Civil War.

Naylor, the SVR's 71-year-old founder, is a born-and-bred child of the Deep South. He apparently developed his secessionist ideas under the guidance of former League of the South member and Emory University philosopher Donald Livingston -- a man Naylor told the Intelligence Report is the "philosophical guru of the Second Vermont Republic" and who is also published in Vermont Commons. Livingston -- who told the Report in a 2001 interview that "the North created segregation" and that Southerners fought during the Civil War only "because they were invaded" -- has attended most of SVR's events. Livingston is also featured in the SVR video, "U.S. Empire and Vermont Independence," alongside SVR stalwarts Frank Bryan and Jim Hogue, who is an Ethan Allen reenactor.

Naylor is a native of Jackson, Miss. Some of his father T. H. Naylor Jr.'s correspondence is found in the archives of the infamous Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, a secret state spy agency that was formed to battle integration. The elder Naylor was even featured in the notorious film, "Message From Mississippi," which promoted the joys of segregation. Now retired, Naylor taught economics at Duke University in Durham, N.C., for 30 years, and has written 30 books, ranging from tomes on computer simulations to political works on Gorbachev. In the early 1990s, he worked as a consultant for companies in the USSR. During that time, he became convinced that the break-up of the Soviet Union was a harbinger of America's future.

Although the younger Naylor told the Intelligence Report that while in college he refused to stand when "Dixie" was played at the University of Mississippi's football games, his ideology is now rife with neo-Confederate ideas. By 1997, Naylor, in his book Downsizing the U.S.A. -- co-authored by William Willimon, the dean of chapel and a professor of Christian ministry at Duke University in North Carolina -- was calling the Civil War the "War Between the States." Parroting the neo-Confederate anti-Lincoln line, Naylor calls Lincoln "arguably the worst" president in American history. "Lincoln invaded the Confederate States without the consent of congress," he wrote in his Manifesto, adding that Lincoln "may have also been the father of American internal imperialism."

And he adopted a revisionist view of the causes of the Civil War that has been roundly rejected by most serious historians. "Most Americans think the Civil War was fought about freeing the slaves, but rather it was fought to preserve the union and build an empire," Naylor told The (U.K) Independent last October.

Naylor also is down on desegregation. In a 2007 essay, "Minority States NOT Minority Rights," Naylor criticizes segregation but also "forced racial integration," complaining that the federal government was in the 1950s and 1960s "ordering me to associate with minorities whether I like it or not." Overall, Naylor can't abide by the idea that since civil rights legislation was passed in the 1960s, "minority rights always trump states' rights." He asks if integration "disempowered minorities, diluting their influence over their communities and implying that every solution to their problems always lies in the hands of the majority-backed government?"

New Friends

Naylor's reasons for moving to Vermont are explained in Downsizing the U.S.A. He portrays his then-hometown of Richmond, Va., as overcome by crime and angry African Americans, saying it was in a "death spiral." When he moved to Vermont in 1993, Naylor almost immediately started calling for an independent state. He pines for a separate Vermont, perhaps allied with other Atlantic maritime entities, that would resemble Switzerland or Luxembourg -- countries Naylor considers as close to perfect as possible. In Downsizing the U.S.A., Naylor sounds a theme similar to that of many white supremacists, suggesting that some parts of the country could be broken up according to ethnicity. "If Palestine could be divided into a Jewish state and an Arab state, why can't independent African American, Hispanic, and Native American states be carved out of the United States?"

In Vermont, Naylor grew close to an unlikely secessionist, the renowned diplomat George Kennan, described by Naylor as "the godfather of the movement." In his 1994 autobiography Around the Cragged Hill, Kennan had suggested breaking the U.S. into "a dozen constituent republics" for reasons that don't sound that different than Naylor's. In a letter to Naylor quoted in The American Conservative, Kennan wrote of "unmistakable evidences of a growing differentiation between the cultures, respectively, of large southern and southwestern regions of this country" and worried that "the very culture of the bulk of the population of these regions will tend to be primarily Latin-American in nature." Kennan questioned whether American society should be "recklessly trashed" for what he called "a polyglot mix-mash."

Though he has spent his entire life in the New York region and been a regular on the progressive intellectual scene in New York City, Kirkpatrick Sale, too, has sounded very Confederate of late. When addressing the League of the South's convention last fall in Chattanooga, Tenn., Sale came off like a newly minted neo-Confederate. Describing himself as a "Northerner but with the blood of the South running through my veins," Sale told the cheering audience that he was descended from the Sale clan of Virginia and Kentucky and that one of his ancestors, Charles "Chic" Sale, wrote a popular story in Southern vernacular on building outhouses called The Specialist. At the end of the league conference, the audience stood and sang "Dixie" together. In a more recent essay, Sale described his view of what happened when the South seceded the first time: "They were ruthlessly attacked and their society eventually destroyed."

Early last October, Sale's institute co-hosted with the league the Second Annual North American Secession Conference in the same Chattanooga venue. With about 60 attendees, most of the conference's speakers were members of the league or prominent neo-Confederate activists. The event also attracted interest in white supremacist circles outside of the South. For example, publisher Bill Regnery, backer of the white supremacist National Policy Institute, which issues reports on such things as "The State of White America" and "Conservatives and Race," was on hand. For a movement supposedly led out of Vermont and New York, Southerners seem now to be at least co-driving the bus.

Left meets right

Four years earlier, in November 2004, SVR held its first serious conference in Middlebury, Vt., in conjunction with Fourth World, a left-wing British secessionist group supported by Sale. That was the beginning of the close partnership between Sale and Naylor.

Attended by 35 people, the conference produced "The Middlebury Declaration," named for the place where it was signed, the Middlebury Inn. The original signers were Naylor, Sale and Donald Livingston, the former league leader. The declaration asserts that "[t]he American empire, now imposing its military might on 153 countries around the world, is as fragile as empires historically tend to be, and that it might well implode upon itself in the near future." Hence the need for a "new politics" based on separation.

Secessionists with League of the South connections were soon involved. Naylor said they approached SVR "as a role model."

Speaking at a Vermont Independence rally that same year was John Remington Graham, an expert on the Francophone independence movement in Quebec, Canada, and an affiliated scholar at the League of the South's Institute for the Study of Southern Culture and History. The main outcome of the meeting was a decision to create a think tank to explore secession around the world. That idea came to fruition with the establishment of Sale's Middlebury Institute in 2005 as a sort of secessionist gathering point that posts material on its website about secessionist groups around the world. The institute also holds conferences on secession, two of which have prominently featured league members as well as other neo-Confederates.

In November 2006, SVR and the Middlebury Institute co-hosted the First North American Separatist Convention in the Montpelier State House (which, ironically, is graced by a large statue of Lincoln). The secessionists-only conference brought together several groups, including the Free Hawaii movement and members of the Alaskan Independence Party. But the bulk of the crowd even then was made up of Southern groups including the racist League of the South; Christian Exodus, a theocracy-minded outfit headed by a former league leader from Texas; and the Abbeville Institute, which was established by Donald Livingston in 2003 after he finally left the League of the South due to its "political baggage." Livingston's institute is devoted to the "Southern tradition," including what it describes as the ignored "achievements of white people in the South."

In October 2007, the league, Naylor and Sale met again in Chattanooga for the Second Annual North American Secession conference, an event organized by the Middlebury Institute and this time officially co-hosted by the league. The conference issued the "Chattanooga Declaration" -- a document that pronounced the "old left-right split meaningless and dead" and called for "diversity among human societies." It was while in Chattanooga that Sale spoke so fondly of his Southern roots.

Sale defended the league to reporters, telling The (U.K.) Independent that fall that he wanted to show the "folks up north" that league members are "legitimate colleagues" who have been wrongly declared "racists." (Sale declined to discuss the league, its history or anything else with the Report, saying by E-mail that he did not trust it "for one instant to be fair or truthful.") Sale has hotly contested the SPLC designation of the league as a hate group, telling The Associated Press in 2007 that the league -- whose leader, former university professor Michael Hill, has engaged in such activities as sending out E-mails mocking the names of his African-American students -- "has not done or said anything racist in its 14 years of existence."

AND THEN THERE'S THIS:

Besides speaking at league conferences, Sale's speeches are for sale at Georgia League of the South leader Ray McBerry's Dixie Broadcasting, where Sale is described as a "social liberal who supports the Constitutional concept of the right of secession." The league advertises on its website that it will participate in the Third Annual North American Secessionist Convention, to be put on by Sale's Middlebury Institute next fall.

In the last two years, Sale and Naylor even signed on as guests for the now-defunct Tennessee-based hate radio program "The Political Cesspool," run by white supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens board member and David Duke pal James Edwards. (Note: I understand that this radio program is now returning -- A.H.) Naylor, who has been a guest twice on the program whose guest line-up reads like a Who's Who of the racist radical right, appeared during its celebration of "Confederate History Month" in April 2007.

In the case of Israel, Sale has views that are common to the far left and the far right. In a 2003 article for the left-wing journal Counterpunch called "An End to the Israel Experiment? Unmaking a Grievous Error," Sale asks "[w]hether the 50-year-old experiment known as the state of Israel has proven to be a failure and should be abandoned." He points out that "[t]he [Jewish] diaspora, after all, has existed since 70 A.D., far longer than the state has, and might even be thought of as the natural or historic role of Jewry."

Naylor sees it similarly. "We have a government that is unconditionally allied with the state of Israel, which is an apartheid terrorist state," he told the Report. He complained that the entire congressional delegation of Vermont "supports Israel."

read the rest here...

Ron Paul: The Radical Right's Man in Washington

from Daily Kos:

posted last May:


THE STRANGE CASE OF LARRY PRATT

In 1996, presidential candidate Pat Buchanan got in hot water when the Center for Public Integrity revealed connections between Buchanan's campaign co-chairman Larry Pratt and Pastor Pete Peters, a leader of the white supremacist Christian Identity movement. Pratt, the executive director of Gun Owners of America, had been a frequent guest at meetings and on radio and television programs hosted by Peters, who inveighed against "Talmudic filth" as Pratt looked on. On February 15, 1996, Pratt took a leave of absence from the Buchanan campaign, so as to avoid causing a "distraction."

The very next day, reported the San Antonio Express-News on February 18, Ron Paul distributed a press release touting Pratt's endorsement of Paul's candidacy for the U.S. Congress. Pratt's endorsement of Paul was anything but pro forma; the February 22, 1996 issue of Roll Call noted that Paul and Mike Gunn, a Republican candidate for Congress in Mississippi who had done some work for David Duke in the latter's 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial campaign, were the only two candidates formally endorsed for office that year by Pratt's organization. Paul's opponent in the Republican primary, Rep. Greg Laughlin, called upon Paul to repudiate Pratt; Paul declined to do so, with his spokesman saying that Paul opposed racism but that "nothing has been proven against Mr. Pratt. He has denied it." (Pratt's enthusiasm for Paul continues to this day, as this quasi-endorsement of Paul's 2008 presidential campaign makes clear.)

THE COMPANY RON PAUL KEEPS

Paul's disinclination to separate himself from the Larry Pratts of the world is part of a pattern that over the last 20 years has seen him snuggling up to some extremely questionable characters on the far right fringe. Like, for example, secessionists, who gathered at a conference in April of 1995 to hear Paul speak about the "once and future Republic of Texas." Or the beady-eyed listeners of The Political Cesspool. It's the unofficial radio program of the Council of Conservative Citizens--you know, the repainted White Citizens Council that got Trent Lott into a bit of trouble a few years ago. (Tune in tonight for their special program on "the disastrous Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education decision, one which ushered in an era of radical leftist ideology upon the American citizenry.") Paul has been a guest on the program; you'll find him listed under P, right above Prussian Blue, the white supremacist teenage singing duo.

Or the crazy-as-fuck John Birch Society, to which Paul is more than happy to grant the occasional interview and even speak at their dinners (the podcast, I am sorry to report, no longer seems to be available). In fact, Paul is the only member of Congress to receive a perfect 100 from the John Birch Society in its most recent member ratings.

THE KLAN'S MAN IN WASHINGTON

Like many members of Congress, the prolific Paul posts his speeches, columns, and statements on his House Web site. He allows anyone to republish and distribute them, and many do. For example, our old friends the Council of Conservative Citizens occasionally publish Paul in its newsletter, the Citizens Informer (warning: PDF). And then there's David Duke, who can't get enough of Ron Paul; you can find his columns on davidduke.com here and here and here and here and here. If you're more of a dead-tree fan, you can find Paul's thoughts on foreign policy reprinted in the January 2007 issue of the National Times, a white supremacist newspaper that apparently gets distributed through the time-honored neo-Nazi method of throwing the thing onto unsuspecting people's porches in the middle of the night and scurrying away.

For a real look inside the tiny, demented mind of the neo-Nazi, though, we need to go to Stormfront. Stormfront is the oldest and largest white supremacist site on the World Wide Web; its discussion boards provide an unequaled opportunity for eavesdropping on the thoughts and plans of the racist underground in America and around the world. And you don't have to visit for very long before one thing jumps out at you: they positively adore Ron Paul. (Please note that links in this paragraph go to a hate site and should probably be considered NSFW.) An "Is Ron Paul the One?" topic is currently stickied in Stormfront's Newslinks & Articles forum; another active topic on Paul's candidacy has received 446 posts and 12,040 pageviews since late March. A topic called "Ron Paul's Race Problem" (hey, Wonkette musta read my diary!) was just started today and already has 17 replies. They're busy little racists over there.

DOES ANY OF THIS STUFF REALLY MATTER?

Politicians can't choose their supporters, after all. Isn't it a bit unfair to tar Paul by association to these lunatics? No, it isn't. This stuff matters because Paul makes so little effort to disassociate himself from the racist, anti-Semitic, crackpot groups that support him. Whether he shares these groups' beliefs or not, the fact that he doesn't care enough to do anything about them speaks volumes. I'll wrap up by turning the floor over to Eric Dondero, a senior aid to Paul from 1997 to 2003, who had this to say in a blog comment in May:

Ron Paul has had some ties that are nothing to be proud of in the past to far-right groups. My former boss IS NOT AN ANTI-SEMITE. However, he is grossly inattentive in dealing with groups who are blatantly anti-Semitic.

...Whether they are using him to gain in credibility, or whether it’s just coincidence doesn’t matter much. It’s the image that counts. No doubt this will all come to haunt him in his race for the Presidency.


MORE FROM LAST MAY'S DAILY KOS:

RON PAUL HATES YOU!

Let's have a look at some of the many, many issues on which Ron Paul places himself squarely in opposition to me and, presumably, you:

Abortion: Ron Paul's "libertarianism" famously does not extend to the right of a woman to control her body. In February he introduced H.R. 1094, "[t]o provide that human life shall be deemed to exist from conception." He voted against overriding Bush's veto of the stem cell bill.

The Environment: Ron Paul may be a Republican, but he's certainly not a Republican for Environmental Protection. That fine organization gave Paul a shameful 17 percent rating on its most recent Congressional Scorecard (warning: PDF). He doesn't fare much better in the eyes of the American Wilderness Coalition or the League of Conservation Voters. Paul's abysmal record on the environment is driven in large measure by his love of sweet, sweet oil: in the 109th Congress alone, he voted to voted allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to shield oil companies from MTBE contamination lawsuits, against increasing gas mileage standards, to allow new offshore drilling, and to stop making oil companies pay royalties to the government for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Par for the course for a man who called the Kyoto accords "bad science, bad economics and bad domestic policy" and "anti-Americanism masquerading as environmentalism."

Immigration: Paul marches in lock-step with the xenophobic right wing on immigration, calling last month's compromise immigration bill "a compromise of our laws, a compromise of our sovereignty, and a compromise of the Second Amendment." Yet even the hardcore nativists in the immigration debate have been hesitant to support repealing birthright citizenship as enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment, as Paul has done. His proposed Constitutional amendment, introduced as H. J. Res 46 on April 28, 2005, reads: "Any person born after the date of the ratification of this article to a mother and father, neither of whom is a citizen of the United States nor a person who owes permanent allegiance to the United States, shall not be a citizen of the United States or of any State solely by reason of birth in the United States." Only four other Representatives, all Republicans, were willing to cosponsor this proposed amendment.

Civil Rights: Paul doesn't much care for ensuring your right to vote. Like when he voted with just 32 other members of Congress against reauthorizing the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Or when he voted for the bogus "Federal Election Integrity Act" voter suppression bill.

But at least Ron Paul knows who's responsible for racism in America: you are. "By encouraging Americans to adopt a group mentality," he writes, "the advocates of so-called 'diversity' actually perpetuate racism. Their intense focus on race is inherently racist, because it views individuals only as members of racial groups." So now you know. (Apparently, saying that "[i]f you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be" is not racist, as long as it's said with a proper appreciation for free-market economics.)

Gay Rights: Paul's rigid, uncompromising libertarianism leads him to take a number of positions that liberals find objectionable or even reprehensible but which should not in themselves be taken as ipso facto evidence of bigotry. His reflexive opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, is consistent with libertarian positions on federalism and the right of the individual to be free from government "coercion," even if that means limiting the ability of minorities to seek employment and housing free from discrimination.

Still, libertarian orthodoxy can't fully explain Paul's hostility to gay rights, and indeed to gay people in general. The Libertarian Party, which nominated Paul as its presidential candidate in 1988, has strongly opposed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act from the beginning; Paul supports it. While he opposed the "Federal Marriage Amendment" that would have outlawed gay marriage everywhere, he actually cosponsored the odious "Marriage Protection Act," which would nonsensically bar federal courts from considering challenges to the Defense of Marriage Act, which is a federal law. "The definition of marriage--a union between a man and a woman--can be found in any dictionary," he writes condescendingly. Despite Paul's disingenuous claims that he is a "strict constitutionalist," most legal scholars agree that the so-called Marriage Protection Act would be unconstitutional.

You also will not find Paul listed among the 124 co-sponsors of the Military Readiness Enhancement Act of 2007, which would repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" policy barring gays and lesbians from serving in the military. Maybe he's worried that they'll take their "gay agenda" to far-flung corners of the world. He also doesn't want gay people adopting children while they're not serving in the military, either.

On a personal level, we have this 1993 quote wherein Paul equates homosexuality with "sexual deviance." And let's not forget his wink-wink characterization of Hillary Clinton as "a far leftist with very close female friends".

Church-State Separation: From keeping "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance to co-sponsoring the school prayer amendment to keeping the Ten Commandments on a courthouse lawn, this "strict constitutionalist" isn't a big fan of the Constitutionally-mandated separation of church and state. "Religious morality will always inform the voting choices of Americans of all faiths," he writes. "...The collectivist left" --that's you!-- "is threatened by strong religious institutions, because it wants an ever-growing federal government to serve as the unchallenged authority in our society.... So the real motivation behind the insistence on a separation of church and state is not based on respect for the First amendment, but rather on a desire to diminish the influence of religious conservatives at the ballot box."

And just in case the dirty liberals in the federal court system might take it into their heads to enforce the Establishment Clause, Mr. Strict Constitutionalist introduced a bill to bar the federal courts from hearing any such cases. No wonder James Dobson's Family Research Council gave Paul a 75 percent rating on their 2005 scorecard.

International Relations: Like crackpot paleoconservatives everywhere, Paul wants us out of the United Nations, which is just a bunch of un-American non-Americans out to destroy America. Darfur is also filled with non-Americans, so you certainly won't find Ron Paul lifting a finger to stop the genocide, or even acknowledge that genocide is taking place. I guess that's why he's one of only four members of Congress to receive an "F" rating on Darfur from the Genocide Intervention Network.

Peace and Military Issues: With all the hooting and hollering about Paul's opposition to the Iraq war, it sure seems like he should have been able to get better than 58 percent from PeacePAC, doesn't it? Even Joe Lieberman managed to get 63 percent. (Still, it beats the 45 percent Paul got from them in the previous Congress.) He did a little better from Peace Action, managing 67 percent--easily the top score for a Republican, but a below-average score for Democrats. (Still, it beats the 40 percent he got from them in 2004.)

And while Paul may oppose the Iraq war, he doesn't seem to have much use for the men and women who have to fight it. Paul received an "F" rating from the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. It's not easy to get an F from the IAVA; Paul shares this distinction with only six other members of the House.

Taxes: Do we even need to go into this one? If you audaciously believe that we need a progressive system of taxation in this country, here's what Ron Paul thinks of you:

* "[W]e have exactly the kind of steeply progressive tax system championed by Karl Marx. One might expect the left to be happy with such an arrangement. At its core, however, the collectivist left in this country simply doesn’t believe in tax cuts. Deep down, they believe all wealth belongs to the state, which should redistribute it via tax and welfare policies to achieve some mythical 'social justice.'... The class war tactic highlights what the left does best: divide Americans into groups. Collectivists see all issues of wealth and taxation as a zero-sum game played between competing groups. If one group gets a tax break, other groups must be rallied against it- even if such a cut would ultimately benefit them.... Upward mobility is possible only in a free-market capitalist system, whereas collectivism dooms the poor to remain exactly where they are."
* "Collectivist politicians forget that the American dream of becoming wealthy is alive and well. They seek to encourage resentment of the wealthy, when in truth most Americans admire successful people. They forget that upward mobility, the chance to start from humble beginnings and achieve wealth and position, is virtually impossible in high-tax socialist societies. Most of all, however, the pro-tax politicians forget that your money belongs to you. As a society, we should not forget their dishonesty when we go to the polls."

Screw this; this diary's way too long already. Worker rights: Voted to defund OSHA's ergonomics rules. Voted against increasing mine safety standards. Hates unions. Campaign finance reform: Opposes. Social Security and Medicare: Repeats the Republicans' lies about the programs' solvency. Consumer protection: Voted for the bankruptcy bill. Voted to make it harder to file class-action lawsuits. Universal health care: don't make me laugh. Privatizing everything: the Internets are not large enough to hold all the citations.

"But he's against the war!" Yes, he is. So is Pat Buchanan. So is David Duke. If either of them were on the stage in New Hampshire today, full of sweet words about the war, would you be as quick to praise their "independence," to gush about how well of course I wouldn't vote for him myself but he sure is awesome anyway? Do you truly require nothing from a political candidate other than that he oppose the war?

Think about it.