TNR’s Jamie Kirchik summarizes the collapse of elite support for Ron Paul in the wake of his story documenting the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, and conspiratorial content contained in decades of newsletters put out under Paul’s name.

Most devastating to Paul, though, is this post from Matt Welch, the editor-in-chief of Reason magazine (the flagship libertarian publication). While Paul has claimed that he did not write the articles in his newsletter and that the controversy is “old news and has been rehashed for over a decade,” Welch shows via a basic Nexis search that Paul took direct responsibility for the content of the newsletters in a series of 1996 articles in Texas newspapers.

What I don’t understand is how so many libertarians fell in love with this guy — and gave him tens of millions of dollars — without knowing anything about him. This stuff is in the public record. Did they not know, or did they just choose to ignore it? The pro-Paul journalists, in particular, have almost no excuse.

Update 1/16 11:28 AM: Reason has a new story up attributing the newsletters to Lew Rockwell, a Paul associate who remains close to the candidate.