For those who have followed the controversy over neo-Nazis contributing campaign dollars to the Ron Paul campaign but, only via Glenn Greenwald @ Salon or Andrew Sullivan @ The Atlantic blogs. And would never vote for a paleo-conservative, anti-choice (ironic for a libertarian, eh?), free-market capitalist ideologue, thank you. Want to send a message? Vote for UFO Kucinich!
   Neiwert, who grew up in Montana, as he says chock full of Aryan Nations racists, wrote a great book on the 90’s Militia Movement.
  The anti-fascist org. Center for a New Community, did a great report in 2000 on , “White Nationalism and the 2000 campaign, ” on the crew of Neo-Nazis who did fundraisers for Pat Buchanan. Available via the Internet Archive website as a pdf.
http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/11/dark-side-of-paul-phenomenon.html
 — by Dave

On Saturday, Ron Paul held a campaign rally in Philadelphia. As Atrios noticed, it attracted a large crowd, most of them quite vocal about ending the Iraq war. But if you looked carefully, there was also an element (most them also antiwar) that’s become something of a fixture at Ron Paul rallies: skinheads, neo-Nazis, militiamen, and various stripes of right-wing extremists.

The photographer Isis was there and captured some of this, including the shot above. That’s Keith Carney of the Keystone State Skinheads on the left, posing with an unidentified Stormfront friend. Meanwhile, over at Stormfront, the event sparked a flurry of posts urging nonstop Paul support. And as One People’s Project noticed, even one of the rally’s speakers, a woman named Debbie Hopper, has a distinguished background in far-right activism, including having helped organize a tribute to Sam Francis.

Mike Flugennock made a video about it all, featuring a revealing encounter between Darryl of One People’s Project and the skinheads, who were all toting Ron Paul signs and wearing his stickers and buttons:

What does this all mean? Does it mean Ron Paul is fronting for fascists? Does it mean he’s a racist? Or is it something more complex, but equally disturbing?

Every presidential candidate attracts cranks, racists, kooks, conspiracy theorists, radicals of various stripes, and assorted fringe actors to their campaigns — some more than others. Generally speaking, it’s not worth paying a lot of attention to, because their numbers typically are quite small, and most of those involved are idiosyncratic — that is, they only coincidentally reflect on the candidate themselves, if at all. They’re irrelevant.

But people who track the activities of the far right — the white supremacists, neo-Nazis, Patriots/militiamen, “Freemen”/”constitutionalists”, and anti-abortion, anti-tax, and anti-gay radicals — do pay attention to how they vote: where their money and support goes, and why. It’s important to track this because it’s about watching who they empower, and who’s empowering them, and to what extent this is occurring. (SNIP)