Wigger Lover

And Vice President David Duke?

It is amazing how many people say that "Ron Paul is the real hip-hop candidate in '08." A music video on youtube even raps that he'll "let you keep yo' guns!" In a way that makes sense as Paul--like some extremely successful mainstream hip hop artists--is void of any real commentary, promotes materialism over all else, and gets a good source of funding from white racists.

Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect commented on the recent controversy involving Paul accepting donations from fascists:

RON PAUL ROUND 2: THE DEFINITIVE (I HOPE) TAKEDOWN.

Dear Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald,

I don't have a problem when people with whom I sometimes agree laud Ron Paul's original opposition to the Iraq War (a position he shares with Barack Obama, of course) or his long-running stance against American imperialism (Dennis Kucinich, too, has been there, done that). What does disturb me, though, is the rather uncritical idolatry of Paul that has flowered, even among self-described moderates and liberals. Andrew, your "endorsement" of Paul lends credibility to his entire agenda, not just those parts of it you highlighted in your post. And Glenn, I am not a pro-choice essentialist who believes no other issue, including the disastrous war in Iraq, should inform one's choice of a candidate. Rather, I situate Ron Paul's anti-choice extremism -- he believes a fetus has all the rights of an individual from the moment of conception -- within his illiberal, race-baiting, anti-gay, and corporatist history. I will document this characterization, but first, bear with me while I share a personal anecdote.

Earlier this fall, after I published an article on white male voters' decreasing significance within the Democratic electorate, I was hit with several weeks' worth of anti-Semitic email and comment-thread attacks from American white supremacist groups, who posted my photograph and contact information on several neo-Nazi websites, including Stormfront. The content of those attacks is far too disgusting to post here, but suffice to say, they featured the very crudest sort of racism and sexism, as well as physical threats against me. About a dozen of the hundred odd emails I received referenced support for Ron Paul, which at the time, I brushed off as a curiosity, a case of the white supremacists wrongly seeing an ally in Paul because of his wacky ideas about monetary policy and the threat of a North American Union. I still believe Paul's ideology departs significantly from that of his white supremacist supporters. But I no longer believe his record on race can be ignored.

Though Paul has long railed against the supposed "victim mentality" of American women and people of color, he's guilty himself of rank fear-mongering among white Americans, convincing them that they are the true "victims" of "the blacks." Check out Paul's analysis of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, from an old newsletter mailed out to his supporters. Paul has since claimed that a staffer wrote this report, but it's safe to assume the newsletters accurately reflect his own views at the time. "We now know that we are under assault from thugs and revolutionaries who hate Euro-American civilization and everything it stands for: private property, material success for those who earn it, and Christian morality," he writes. In the same 1992 newsletter, Paul outlined his ideas for a separate justice system for African American children: We don't think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That's true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.

And Paul isn't a changed man. This past October, he gave a speech to the Taft Club in Virginia, a group with close ties to the white nationalist movement. But wait, there's much more -- more history that shouldn't be ignored by any person concerned with the individual liberty of women or gay people.

In his 1988 book Freedom Under Seige (you can read the whole thing online), Paul railed against sexual harassment victims. He wrote, "Why don't they quit once the so-called harassment starts? Obviously the morals of the harasser cannot be defended, but how can the harassee escape some responsibility for the problem? Seeking protection under civil rights legislation is hardily acceptable." What if a victim needs to keep working because he or she feeds their children and pays their rent paycheck to paycheck? What if quitting just isn't a viable option? For Paul, the rights of the employer not to be sued simply trump the rights of the individual. Corporations are people, too!

And Paul was no less compassionate when it came to HIV/AIDS patients. He wrote in his book that insurance companies should be free to deny care to HIV-positive individuals since, "The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim -- frequently a victim of his own lifestyle -- but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care."

Andrew and Glenn, I hope you'll respond to this post. We can't let Paul's history on these important civil rights issues be papered over by his opposition to the Iraq war -- opposition that other presidential candidates offer as well.

Sincerely,

--Dana Goldstein

Bill Clinton: "as black as Obama."

TownHall.com. Always good for a laugh:

Suffice for it to say that American "liberals" have some very strange ideas about race and gender.

For example, when civil-rights activist and former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who is black, can argue that Sen. Hillary Clinton, who is white, is more qualified for president than Sen. Barack Obama, who is black, on the basis that her husband, former president Bill Clinton, who is white, is "as black as Obama," and this entire exercise in race equivocation is taken by his audience as a compelling argument in favor of a candidate for president – well, this was already bizarre enough before Young made his crack about Clinton (Bill, that is) probably having "gone with" (in the beyond-intern sense) "more black women than Obama." At that point a marker was laid down in American racial-politics silliness.

One hopes it was the nadir, the point of terminal battiness beyond which things can do nothing but improve. But so far every time it seems we've finally reached the bottom, we haven't.

So even if this isn't race-silliness rock bottom, what are we to make of the idea of the black man who isn't blacker than the white wife of the white man who's "gone with" some black women? This notion seems to be a (pardon the expression) whitewashing of the old anti-miscegenation "one-drop rule" such that now one rumored tryst makes a white person black, an idea that is then imbued with transitive properties.

It seems so, but is that actually the case? Would Young also have joked that the Duke lacrosse players accused in the infamous hoax were "as black as" Obama, or nearly so, given that they had hired a black stripper? Because last year, Duke visiting professor and author Timothy B. Tyson wrote in The News & Observer of Raleigh, N.C., that "regardless of the truth of the most serious charges," the "spirit of the lynch mob" had lived in the house of the notorious party – that being "rich white boys hiring black 'exotic dancers'," the lacrosse players were upholding a "racial caste system" just like when "white men kept black concubines and mistresses and raped black women at will."

No, surely not — no one would say the lacrosse players were "as black as" Obama, let alone that Clinton harbored "the spirit of the lynch mob." Instead, a shifting standard seems to be operative, which must have mutated out of the Left's racial politics over the past few decades, which is derided by the well-known term "the race card." As we all know, nothing can trump the race card, which is usually just fine to liberals playing games with other people's lives and careers, but what to do when their political opponents hold it?

Initially that proved no problem. A black person who wasn't a political liberal was simply disqualified from being black. Feminists adopted the same practice to disqualify conservative women.

This approach colored American liberals' view of diversity — race, gender, etc. as proxies for political liberalism — which they began enforcing across the nation everywhere they held power. Anyone who opposed the quota mentality this approach fostered was accused of racism, sexism, ad nauseam (that is, hit with the respective trump cards). It was tidily done, disposing of their criticisms without even having to touch on the challenge that diversity ought to include diverse ideas.

It worked until this campaign season. Both parties field arrays of candidates exhibiting their approaches to diversity. Republican candidates differ on the proper roles of government, differ widely in religious belief (frontrunners include a Catholic, a Mormon, and a Baptist), but they all happen to be white men. Democrats have nearly indistinguishable philosophies of government but are a mix of races and genders.

Of the Democrat frontrunners, Obama holds the race card, Clinton the gender card, while John Edwards is left trying to play a class card. Supporters of each are struggling against the new reality that the favored old disqualification tack doesn't work, since they're all liberals. Trying to navigate this awkward political reality without dashing the diversity canards has led to moments of high comedy: Young arguing for Clinton being "as black as Obama," Michelle Obama touting her husband as a better candidate for women than Clinton because he's "a man comfortable with strong women in his life," and John Edwards' supporters touting him as potentially the "first woman president."

A revelation of Edwards' bona fides as a black woman seems inevitable. In the meantime, suffice for it to say that American liberals have some very strange ideas about race and gender.

Jon Sanders is a policy analyst and research editor at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, N.C.