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Saturday, January 7, 2012

Ron Paul vs The Turner Diaries: The Toughest Quiz You’ll Take Today « Student Activism

Ron Paul vs The Turner Diaries: The Toughest Quiz You’ll Take Today « Student Activism:

Ron Paul vs The Turner Diaries: The Toughest Quiz You’ll Take Today

Ron Paul’s various publications from the 1980s and 1990s have gotten a lot of attention recently, due to various bigoted statements that appeared in their pages. But it’s not until you sit down and read the originals at length, as I’ve done over the last few days, that the full scope of their ugliness becomes apparent.

The worldview of the Ron Paul newsletters is the worldview of the late 20th century American rightwing fringe — not merely racist, but paranoid, conspiracist, sexist, anti-Jewish. It is, in short, the worldview of The Turner Diaries, the apocalyptic novel that inspired Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City.

The Turner Diaries, a bizarre fantasy of race war, white supremacist revolution, and nuclear holocaust, is far