Why the new Ron Paul Institute is terrible news for Rand Paul

The nascent libertarian think tank has brought on some colorful characters that could complicate Rand Paul's attempts to mainstream Paulism

Last week, while most of the U.S. was focusing on the bombings in Boston and fertilizer plant explosionin West, Texas, recently retired Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) launched his own think tank, the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. The stated goal of the the institute is to continue and expand "Paul's lifetime of public advocacy for a peaceful foreign policy and the protection of civil liberties at home."

On Thursday, columnist James Kirchick trashed the new institute atThe Daily Beast. "There is nothing inherently wrong with noninterventionism," the cornerstone of Paul's foreign policy, says Kirchick.But when you look at who's on the institute's advisory board and academic board, he points out, it becomes clear that Paul has "decisively thrown in his lot with a bevy of conspiracy theorists, cranks, and apologists for some of the worst regimes on the planet."

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The advisory board, Kirchick says, includes Lew Rockwell, Paul's former chief of staff and the man most probably responsible for the "toxic stew of racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, sympathy for right-wing militia movements, and support for a litany of conspiracy theories" in Ron Paul's branded newsletters in the 1990s; and Fox News legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano, a 9/11 skeptic.

The Paul Institute's academic board is even kookier, says Kirchick. The "nuttiest" member is probably John Laughland, "a British writer who has never met a Central or Eastern European autocrat he didn't like" and is a noted apologist for the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Then there are the full-out 9/11 conspiracy theorists like Eric Magolis and Butler Shaffer. "And what would an enterprise featuring Ron Paul be without a little Civil War revisionism?" Kirchickasks. For that, Paul tapped the "neo-Confederate" Loyola University professor Walter Block, who "blames most of America's current problems on 'the monster Lincoln.'"

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Paul disavowed the fringe views of Rockwell and his other supporters when he was running for president, Kirchick adds, but now that he has formally associated these cranks with his institute, it is "impossible to extricate Paul from the extremist views of his hangers-on."

Affiliating himself with some "unsavory wack jobs on the fringes of American politics" won't really hurt Paul, says Walter Russell Mead at The American Interest. "Having retired from Congress and never gotten far in Republican presidential politics, the elder Mr. Paul can safely hang out with all the Confederate apologists, truthers, and Putin sympathizers he wants." But this is disastrous for the political ambitions of his son.

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Why the new Ron Paul Institute is terrible news for Rand Paul