Zeal For Truth

We’ve discussed, at length, the racist newsletters with Ron Paul’s name on the front. However, Reason magazine, in a true show of journalistic zeal, has continued to prod the issue and discovered the very real possibility that the newsletters in question were written by none other than Lew Rockwell.

[Paul] told CNN last week that he still has “no idea” who might have written inflammatory comments such as “Order was only restored in L.A. when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks”—statements he now repudiates. Yet in interviews with Reason, a half-dozen longtime libertarian activists—including some still close to Paul—all named the same man as Paul’s chief ghostwriter: Ludwig von Mises Institute founder Llewellyn Rockwell, Jr.

This would be a double-edged sword for Paul. On the one hand, it would demonstrate quite clearly that he had no hand in writing the letters at all. However, Rockwell is well known to Paul, and it demonstrates a potential lack in oversight on behalf of Paul. It is still very realistic that Rockwell was doing much of this unknown to Paul, as part of his own agenda:

The newsletters’ obsession with blacks and gays was of a piece with a conscious political strategy adopted at that same time by Lew Rockwell and Murray Rothbard. After breaking with the Libertarian Party following the 1988 presidential election, Rockwell and Rothbard formed a schismatic “paleolibertarian” movement, which rejected what they saw as the social libertinism and leftist tendencies of mainstream libertarians. In 1990, they launched the Rothbard-Rockwell Report, where they crafted a plan they hoped would midwife a broad new “paleo” coalition.

Reason also obtained the following statement from Tom Lizardo, Paul’s chief of staff during much of his congressional campaigns:

Last week, a statement was prepared by Ron Paul’s press secretary Jesse Benton, and approved by Ron Paul, acknowledging Lew Rockwell as having a role in the newsletters. The statement was squashed by campaign chairman Kent Snyder.

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