Remember how Ron Paul said he only wrote the economic parts of his newsletters and the racist bits were written by someone else? Except then when the newsletters were challenged because they also had whacko conspiracy truther theories in them he also blamed that on other people even though the newsletters went out under his name? Remember that?
No thinking person bought that crap. Ron Paul is a loony racist truther. He has been and always will be, and now he has his very own think tank with a board of lunatics to back him up.
On April 17, Paul announced the creation of a new think tank, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, which, according to its website, “continues and expands Dr. Paul’s lifetime of public advocacy for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home.” Sitting on the advisory board is none other than [Lew] Rockwell.
Lew Rockwell is widely credited as the person who authored those offensive newsletters. Here's a little taste of Lew's flavor of crazy.
Laughland is joined in this venture by fellow Ron Paul Institute board member and Oxford historian Mark Almond. The two are trustees of a sinister and deceptively named organization, the British Helsinki Human Rights Group (BHHRG), which trades on the good name of the international civil liberties monitoring organizations founded as a result of the 1975 Helsinki accords.
The person referred to as Laughland is John Laughland, apologist for the genocidal Slobodan Milosevic.
Next on the list of Paul Institute board members are the 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Most prominent among them is Judge Andrew Napolitano, a legal analyst for Fox News who has said that “It’s hard for me to believe that [7 World Trade Center] came down by itself” and that the 9/11 attacks “couldn’t possibly have been done the way the government told us.”
He is joined by Eric Margolis, who, despite an apparent lack of a Ph.D. or appointment at an institution of higher learning, is listed as a member of the organization’s “academic board.” Margolis says that “conclusive proof still lacks” connecting Osama bin Laden to the 9/11 attacks and has speculated that the events could have been “a plot by America’s far right or by Israel or a giant cover-up.”
The name of this crazy place? The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, and I seriously doubt it's being funded by small Internet contributions like he claims his campaign was. No, this one sounds far more appealing for whacknut libertarians to fund. On the website, it says it is a special project of Ron Paul's Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, or FREE, which seems to have remained relatively dormant (or underground) since its founding.
According to the "About" page, one of the primary functions of the "Institute" will be to send...newsletters! To educate, of course. Always to educate.
First and foremost a resource for supporters, the Institute provides timely news and provocative analysis through its engaging website. Features such as “Congress Alert” and “Neo-Con Watch” bring to life the latest threats to our liberties at home and abroad in a capsule format. Longer features and press analysis, as well as blog posts, regularly appear, giving the Institute the character of an online magazine.
The Institute places special emphasis on education and on the next generations, with a foreign policy summer school for university students studying international affairs and journalism.
It will aggressively promote student writing on foreign affairs on its website and will launch a student writing award program to recognize the best of college journalism.
Oh, cool! Sort of a formal FreedomWorks Muckrake-In-Europe kind of arrangement! Neat. Imagine all the kids learning about John Birch Society principles and of course, liberty! Other advisory and academic board figures include Fox News contributor and former Democratic Representative Dennis Kucinich, as well as the wonderful ex-CIA Islamophobe bigot Michael Scheuer.
Viva liberty!
