Beginning in 1978, for more than two decades, Ron Paul – American physician, libertarian activist, congressman, and presidential candidate – published a variety of political and investment-oriented newsletters bearing his name.
[5] When Paul began working toward returning to Congress in 1995, he gave an interview to C-SPAN in which he described the newsletters as "business-financial", talking about "monetary matters and the gold standard.
[2] The newsletters drew attention for controversial content when raised as a campaign issue by Paul's opponent in the 1996 Congressional election, Charles "Lefty" Morris.
"[2] A number of the newsletters criticized civil rights movement activist Martin Luther King Jr., calling him a pedophile and "lying socialist satyr".
[18][19][20] In a January 2008 article in The New Republic, James Kirchick, who studied hundreds of Paul's newsletters held at the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas, and at the Wisconsin Historical Society, wrote that the newsletters "reveal decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays".
One investment letter called Israel "an aggressive, national socialist state"; a 1990 newsletter discussed the "tens of thousands of well-placed friends of Israel in all countries who are willing to work for the Mossad in their area of expertise"; one quoted a "Jewish friend" who said the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was a "setup by the Israeli Mossad".
[2] During the 1996 reelection campaign Paul did not deny writing the newsletters,[22] and defended their content, saying that he opposed racism and his remarks about blacks had been taken out of context.
[8][9][23] In March 2001, Paul said he did not write the commentaries, but stopped short of denying authorship in 1996 because his campaign advisers had thought it would be too confusing and that he had to live with the material published under his name.
[26] Numerous sources said Lew Rockwell, who co-founded the firm that published the newsletters and remained an officer throughout its existence,[5] had written the racially charged content.
However, in a Washington Post piece that argued that, "[on] the topic of Ron Paul's racist, homophobic and creepy-cum-conspiratorial newsletters, Swann allows his affection for constitutionalist politics to corrupt his judgment," Kirchick said that Swann's story on Powell consisted of no original reporting and had been previously documented in Kirchick's earlier pieces on the scandal.