Ron Paul’s supporters are “passionate” — and that’s a euphemism for cultish and crazed.
This isn’t, of course, a categorical statement. It’s a general one. I have friends who support Ron Paul, not all of whom are nuts. It also isn’t to say that all of what Paul is advocating is crazy. Some of it is certainly not.
But it is an objective assessment of the emails I have gotten from Paul supporters in response to op-eds I have written criticizing him as compared to the emails I have received from supporters of other presidential contenders after penning op-eds critical of those candidates. There is just no comparison. Paul supporters win in a lunatic landslide.
Let’s run the tape.
In a November column calling the Republican field “truly unimpressive,” I approvingly quoted conservative columnist George Will lambasting Mitt Romney by noting, “Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor.”
I also said that Romney “seems so willing to change his positions on any given issue to suit the political zeitgeist” and that he is “arguably the architect of President Obama’s most derided policy initiative — his health care law.”
Yet, despite the stern critique, I received not a single deranged email from a Romney fanatic, if such a creature exists.
In a column entitled “Newt Gingrich’s blabbering problem,” I called the former House speaker a “blabbermouth” and noted his tendency to engage in “verbal diarrhea,” which I don’t think can be construed as a compliment.
In my writings since November, I have noted the former speaker’s ample personal baggage, his flacking for Freddie Mac and his — in the words of Charles Krauthammer — “socialist” attack on Mitt Romney’s business experience.
I did not receive even a single deranged email from a Gingrich fan in response.
Before former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain dropped out of the presidential race, I said he was “often incomprehensible, simultaneously taking stands on both sides of an issue while steadfastly insisting he is making sense.” I then enumerated several instances where he did just that.
I received precisely zero deranged emails from Cainiacs.
I chided the rest of the GOP field as either not yet meriting mention or not meeting (Rick Perry) the intelligence threshold necessary to be president.
No crazy emails as a result.
But right before Christmas I took on Paul’s foreign policy prescriptions in a provocatively titled column “Ron Paul and the Nazi century.” The article didn’t call Paul a racist or so much as insinuate that he had affinity to Nazi ideology. (Though Paul likes to use language to suggest that Israel is acting like Nazis to the Palestinians, on Iranian-sponsored television no less.)
My column merely pointed out that Ron Paul’s foreign policy would have been utterly disastrous if followed during crucial moments of crises in recent American history, including in the lead-up to World War II where it is far from a stretch to suggest that if implemented it would have led to a Nazi German takeover of Europe.
Unlike with the other critiques of GOP contenders I penned, I received quite of few what we can generously call interesting emails from Paul supporters. I can’t say it was unexpected. I had been on the receiving end of emails of the Paul brigade before. And to be clear, I am not complaining about the missives. I actually rather enjoyed them. But I do think it tells us something.
The deranged emails I received in response to my latest Paul article ranged from being openly hostile to me because of my Jewish last name, to plagiarizing (I received several of these) a bizarre and completely irrelevant counter article that appeared on a fringe-conspiracy website, to someone informing me that “Hitler would envy the way the U.S. Government for decades has been killing its own people from using fluoride in the water.”
For sport, I would occasionally reply, sometimes counseling the emailer to stop listening to conspirator-in-chief radio host Alex Jones for their own sanity. Invariably they would write back telling me Jones is the only one speaking the truth or, as Mr. Fluoride put it, “Alex Jones has forgot more than you will ever know.”
Incidentally, if you think Alex Jones is a stable person, I encourage you to read Jon Ronson’s “Them: Adventures with Extremists,” an excellent and entertaining tome which should disabuse you of that notion.
Paul supporters are in some ways like President Obama’s supporters in 2008 insofar as they are utterly infatuated with their chosen candidate and project messiah-like qualities upon him. Every time he speaks or so much as makes a funny face during a GOP debate, they surely get the full Chris Matthews experience — a sexual shiver riding up their leg.
It’s one thing to like a presidential candidate; it’s another thing to slobber over him. And there’s a lot of slobber on Paul, a significant amount of which comes from those who should seriously consider psychiatric help.
Here’s the hard truth Ron Paul’s fanatical fans don’t want to hear. Far from ignoring Paul, the media has been unduly fair to him. In the over dozen GOP debates he participated in, he has not received one question about the racist and conspiratorial newsletters put out under his name.
If Rick Perry published the Rick Perry Survival Guide for a decade with the same stuff Paul had in his newsletters, he wouldn’t be in the race. The same is true of Mitt Romney. The same is true of Newt Gingrich. The same is true of [insert any other GOP contender].
Yet, not only is Paul alive and kicking in the race for the GOP nomination, the allegedly Paul-biased media has not asked Paul a single question about the newsletters in any of the over a dozen debates Paul has participated in.
Now that he actually has a chance to win primary contests, this will change. He will be forced to explain them in more detail than he has to date, as he should and must.
Let the emails roll.
Jamie Weinstein is a senior editor at The Daily Caller.