back in may of 2007, when charles first became annoyed with ron paul's internet swarm spamming his site's straw polls, he was still pretty cool with racism. he was writing paranoid screeds about how the mexican border should be policed like the israeli-palestinian border. he was playing the reverend wright tune and the obama is a secret muslim tune and even the obama's grandmother confessed she was a muslim to the kenyan media and then lied about being a christian to the american media tune. he had defended ann coulter's remarks about the need for jews to be "perfected" by conversion, and when progressive bloggers quoted him saying things like "I guess they wouldn’t be Arabs without the ability to hold dozens of contradictory opinions simultaneously" he would dismiss it all as a smear and post something about how islam is a "Cult of Blood and Death". these were the storied days when johnson never wrote the word "racist" but enclosed in scare quotes.
charles' annoyance with paulnuts spamming his polls rapidly developed into an unabiding resentment of the man himself. the line of attack he chose was to lump him in with the antiwar left. oddly, the first mention of the infamous newsletters emerged in this period. however, the quotes charles took stern objection to weren't the ones about martin luther king's secret paedophilia, but the ones in which paul detailed his foreign policy isolationism. in the meantime, it wasn't that charles was unwilling to sling around charges of racism and antisemitism. it's that he was only willing to sling them at progressives.
it wasn't until october that charles found a new line on paul. quite by accident, while tracking some poll spammers back to their lair, he ended up at the white supremacist website, stormfront, where he discovered that nazis like ron paul.
yadda yadda yadda. you get the picture. the bolded part of what i wrote is what i wanted to get across. i lost interest when i started digging through the archive because, well, there's an overwhelming load of objectionable stuff in what could be analogized as "the charles johnson political report".
another irony in all of this new scrutiny coming from the left of paul's cranky associations is that the first people raising hackles about this were the opposing schism of the libertarian movement - the dreaded "kochtipus" the left has spent the last 18 months trying to destroy with conspiracy theories and violent demonstrations. in fact, pretty much the whole of the conservative movement and the republican party have been stalwartly and stridently against ron paul since he first appeared as a gop candidate in 2004. the most recent discussion of paul's cranky-racist-fringy newsletters was prompted by a piece written in the conservative publication, the weekly standard.
and it was this period from 2004 to recent months that the same progressives - the ones who were engaged in destroying the cato-koch schism of the libertarian movement - were starstruck with paul and trying to enfold him into their own milieu. now, despite that 87% of paul's supporters identify themselves as democrats or independents (not to speculate on what portion of the remaining 13% are monkey-wrenchers falsely identifying themselves as republicans) progressives want to use paul's newsletters to paint the entire republican party with their content.
a final thing to note of charles johnson's role in this is that this is yet another example of charles receiving credit for lifting something which emerged from freerepublic, the site which was his source for both his ron paul newsletters "scoop" and his rathergate "scoop", and also a site he now smears as a bastion of hate-speech that he never liked.
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