(Above picture taken from White Nationalist website Stormfront)
The rap about Ron Paul is that a great deal of his support comes from white supremacists, so he must himself be one. Well, to my way of seeing things, this is pretty much like saying that since my favorite band of all time is The Beatles, I must be a British rock musician, or they must have all been pagans. Sure, Harrison was one in a sense, and Lennon in his last years might have been Wiccan, but the point is, that is all in fact irrelevant. The important thing about my attachment to them is the music. You can make a similar correlation with Ron Paul and his apparently large degree of support amongst White Nationalists folk such as Stormfront and Vanguard.
Undoubtedly, Paul has a great deal of support amongst these people, but it is due mainly to his stands on certain issues, mainly his beliefs pertaining to adherence to the principles of the Constitution, as well as agreement with his stated positions regarding belief in small government, and his policies in regards to taxes, foreign policy, trade, etc. Some of his stands, incidentally, I wholeheartedly agree with, while some of his other views are more open for debate. Still others are dubious at best. To the Stormfront people, however, his stated views on these and other matters seem to jibe with theirs to a very great extent.
They even have this forum topic up on the white power site Stormfront, which at last count numbered more than 850 replies over a half year period beginning around May, and still going to this day. The picture at the top of this post, by the way, was taken from that forum topic. It is very important, however, to note that some of the respondents are dissatisfied with Paul’s stands, because, in fact, he does not come right out and promote racialist or White Nationalist views.
Nevertheless, Paul did pose for a picture with Stormfront founder Don Black during the recent Values Voters Debate in Florida. In one picture, Paul signs an autograph for Black.
Then, there is this post, which insists that Paul met with members of a White Nationalist group at, of all places, a Thai restaurant in Virginia. Evidently, the person responsible for the rumor is a man named Bill White, a founder of both Vanguard and the National Socialists Workers Party, and who claims to have personally met Paul at an event there.
At the same time, he is a notorious troublemaker within the White Nationalist community. He is supposedly responsible for a violent confrontation that occurred at a recent Nordicfest event in Kentucky, in 2006, for example. He is openly promoting the rumor that Paul is a White Nationalist supporter, and some have suggested that he might be doing so in an attempt to gain publicity for himself. Promoting this story, as well as exaggerating his influence over Paul, or Ron Paul’s support for White Nationalist principles in general, might well be his way of getting it.
Of course, in the internet era, every rumor becomes indisputable fact in the minds of many readers, if not in fact most of them.
Still, there can be no denying that Ron Paul has evidently received some financial contributions from various members of these groups. Moreover, he refuses to send them back on the grounds they would just “spend it on more Stormfront stuff.” Well, it is hard to argue with that logic. Besides, if he pissed off the Stormfront crew, it might well be bad for his campaign. The hefty three percent or so he might win in the average primary might well diminish to a meager two percent or less.
