Ron Paul "Disappears" Evidence of KKK Coordinator
Thu Jan 17, 2008 at 01:11:27 PM PDT
For the past couple of days I've been following the case of Randy Gray, the Midland County, Michigan coordinator for the Ron Paul campaign who is also a longstanding active and vocal organizer for the Knight's Party faction of the Ku Klux Klan. I called the campaign's press office on Tuesday and again yesterday, asking if they were aware of the situation and if they would like to release a statement. Both times the spokesman I talked to said he'd look into it and get back to me. I never received a call back.
Today, at last, we know what the Paul campaign's response is: they don't have one.
Yesterday, I linked to a list of Michigan county contacts on the official site of the Ron Paul campaign at http://people.ronpaul2008.com/.... Today, that page is gone, with no indication that it was ever there in the first place. The list of county coordinators at michigan4ronpaul.com, which claims to be an independent site not affiliated with the official campaign, remains online, but Midland County has mysteriously disappeared from its former location between Menominee and Missaukee counties. (You can see Google's cached version of the latter page here; I've also preserved copies of both that cached page and the page from ronpaul2008.com. For good measure, here's Google's cached version of Gray's profile page at the Michigan site.)
So it seems that Ron Paul is not particularly eager to be associated with the guy who delivered this harangue at a white power rally last June, which is good to see. Still, that Gray's sudden disappearance from the campaign came without any statement to me or to anyone else is a little curious. For more information we turn, a bit surprisingly perhaps, to Adam De Angeli, field coordinator for the Ron Paul campaign and webmaster of michigan4ronpaul.com, who posts as "a2planet2" at ronpaulforums.com. De Angeli, who appears not to understand how a coverup is supposed to work, writes:
As the Michigan web guy I deleted all of Gray's stuff from our site, and readied a full explanation, containing the obvious (how were we supposed to know; we don't dig through every supporter's record) and the retaliatory (obviously this is a political sting) response. But the campaign said "no response" which I guess makes sense. No feeding trolls.
(Emphasis mine.) De Angeli goes on to explain how Gray had been appointed a county coordinator by a previous Michigan state coordinator who was subsequently fired for apparently unrelated reasons, and emphasizes that Gray never gave any indication at michigan4ronpaul.com as to his double life as a KKK organizer (which appears to be true, from what I can tell). And it's worth reiterating that there's no indication that anyone at the national or Michigan campaigns were familiar with Gray's affiliations; nor is it reasonable, as De Angeli states, to expect that the campaign perform background checks on every volunteer coordinator for each of 83 counties. And if we were talking about any other candidate, it would probably be appropriate to end the matter at that.
But we are not talking about just another candidate. This is a candidate who has longstanding ties to the radical right wing; who refused to return a donation from a well-known white supremacist; who for years published sickening racist articles purporting to be written by him, in his personal newsletter, under his name. And who, lest we forget, is hugely, almost unimaginably popular at the single largest online gathering point for white supremacists and neo-Nazis worldwide. Given all this, it's more than reasonable to suppose that there may yet be other avowed white supremacists in official positions with the Paul campaign around the country. With the Randy Gray matter, Ron Paul had an opportunity to stand up and state forcefully for the record that racists have no place in his campaign. Instead, he has chosen to sweep the matter under the rug.
We are left to wonder what the real problem with Gray was: that he's a vicious white supremacist, or that he got caught.
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