Sadly, it turns out that Ron Paul’s conspiracy-minded direct mail is only the tip of the iceberg. TNR’s Jamie Kirchick dug up a series of newsletters published under Paul’s name since the mid-1970s that were much, much worse:

[W]hoever actually wrote them, the newsletters I saw all had one thing in common: They were published under a banner containing Paul’s name, and the articles (except for one special edition of a newsletter that contained the byline of another writer) seem designed to create the impression that they were written by him–and reflected his views. What they reveal are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews, and gays. In short, they suggest that Ron Paul is not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing–but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.

Paul’s denials to have known what was being written under his name ring false, as Kirchick points out:

Paul’s campaign wants to depict its candidate as a naïve, absentee overseer, with minimal knowledge of what his underlings were doing on his behalf. This portrayal might be more believable if extremist views had cropped up in the newsletters only sporadically–or if the newsletters had just been published for a short time. But it is difficult to imagine how Paul could allow material consistently saturated in racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and conspiracy-mongering to be printed under his name for so long if he did not share these views. In that respect, whether or not Paul personally wrote the most offensive passages is almost beside the point. If he disagreed with what was being written under his name, you would think that at some point–over the course of decades–he would have done something about it.

Here’s a sample of the offending material. Can we please stop treating Ron Paul as a serious candidate now? He keeps saying absurd things in the GOP debates and the other candidates don’t challenge him because they don’t want to offend his supporters. Someone in the media and/or one of the candidates needs to step up.