of many Paul appearances with Beck.
Paul also drew some of his most vocal support from a voting bloc whose presence in the Paul camp also went almost completely ignored by the mainstream media: the extremists of the radical right. It was striking to observe the unanimity with which the far right had coalesced behind Paul’s candidacy.
Rather quietly and under the radar, Paul managed to unite nearly the entire radical right behind himself, more than any presidential candidate since George Wallace in 1968. The two main populist presidential candidates before Paul—Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 and Pat Buchanan in 2000—had not achieved this level of unanimous and intense far-right support. Virtually every far-right grouping—neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militias, constitutionalists, Minutemen, nativists—in the American political landscape lined up behind Paul. White supremacists from the Nationalist Socialist Movement (NSM), the neo-Nazi website Stormfront, National Vanguard, White Aryan Resistance (WAR), and Hammerskins became outspoken supporters of Paul and turned out to rally for him at a number of different campaign appearances. At a Paul rally in August 2007 in New Jersey, a sizable number of Stormfronters showed up. Paul made no bones about welcoming this source of support. Paul made headlines by declining to return a donation from Stormfront’s proprietor, Don Black, and later posed with Black and his son Derek at a Paul event in Florida.
Paul’s appeal to the extreme right was a natural outgrowth of his identity. Much of his popular image was predicated on the idea that he was a libertarian Republican—he was the 1988 presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party. The libertarian political label was understood to revolve around the promotion of individual liberties in the mold of Ayn Rand and other philosophers. But a closer examination of Paul’s brand of politics showed that he had a closer affinity to the John Birch Society than any genuinely libertarian entity. His declared goals of fighting the New World Order; eliminating the Federal Reserve, the IRS, and most other federal agencies; getting us out of the UN; ending all gun controls; reinstating the gold standard—all were classic elements of far-right populism. Even though Paul’s candidacy received no institutional support from within the GOP, it reflected not just a resurgence of right-wing populism but a dramatic weaving of extremist beliefs into the national conversation. Paul’s multiple appearances on Alex Jones’s radio programs were the best evidence of his close relationship with the conspiracist right.
Paul’s history as a right-wing extremist eventually caught up with him. It had been known among political researchers that, during the 1990s, Paul had produced a steady stream of newsletters filled with vile race-baiting, anti-Semitism, and Patriot-style conspiracy theories about the New World Order and its minions running the Federal Reserve. Finally, in January 2008, The New Republic got ahold of the newsletters and ran extensive excerpts from them, establishing clearly that Paul had sponsored the distribution of some genuinely vile material. His reputation never fully recovered.
But throughout 2007, that side of the candidate had largely remained hidden. Instead, Paul was seen as a genial if eccentric libertarian who wanted to reconfigure the monetary system and international political alignments, but otherwise seemed like an ordinary enough fellow. The people who called him an extremist seemed extreme themselves.
Political observers sat up and took notice after the first of Paul’s fund-raising “money bombs”—a gimmick event that encouraged, through astute use of the Internet as an organizing tool, his supporters to donate small individual sums all within a short, twenty-hour time span. Paul supporters chose December 16, 2007, the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, to kick off the fund-raising campaign for their candidate. Michael Levenson, reporting for the Boston Globe, described how by 7 p.m., the campaign collected a one-day record of $4.3 million in contributions from some 33,000 donors. The kickoff also featured a march through the snowy streets of Boston that culminated with a reenactment of the Colonial rebels dumping tea into Boston Harbor. They replaced the crates of tea with banners reading “Tyranny” and “No Taxation Without Representation,” which were tossed into boxes placed before an image of the harbor.
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