@RyanNewYork

Ryan J. Davis is the 30 year-old Executive Director of Social Innovation at Blue State Digital.

He's also a director/producer, who lives in Brooklyn, NY and created the musical White Noise. Ryan writes about politics for The Huffington Post & The Hill. He has been a guest editor for Queerty and is the host of the podcast Gay History: Uncut.


Here Ryan blogs about politics, film, TV, history, religion, science, books, theater, digital media, LGBT issues, Bushwick & Williamsburg, New York City, and anything else he's interested in at the moment. Oh, and he'll probably talk a lot about himself.


This is a personal blog. Any opinions expressed here and on my Twitter represent my own and not those of my employer or clients.

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rtnt:

Ron Paul’s Racist Past

With Ron Paul taking the lead in Iowa just weeks before the caucuses, it is worth reminding ourselves of his troubling history. Writing for The New Republic in 2008, James Kirchick details the extensive archive of racist, homophobic and anti-Semitic newsletters published under Paul’s name:

As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled “What To Expect for the 1990s,” predicted that “Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities” because “mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white ‘haves.’” Two months later, a newsletter warned of “The Coming Race War,” and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, “If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it.” In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, “Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.” “This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s,” the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter’s author—presumably Paul—wrote, “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.” 

Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically—or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point—over the course of decades—he would have done something about it.

Read the full article here.

Every time Ron Paul runs for President we get to rediscover his bizarre racist newsletter past. 

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    Every time Ron Paul runs for President we get to rediscover his bizarre racist newsletter past.
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