I quote it in full below, Blast ‘Em?:

If you live in a major city, you’ve probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. The youth simply walk up to a car they like, pull a gun, tell the family to get out, steal their jewelry and wallets, and take the car to wreck. Such actions have ballooned in the recent months. In the old days, average people could avoid such youth by staying out of bad neighborhoods. Empowered by media, police, and political complicity, however, the youth now roam everywhere looking for cars to steal and people to rob. What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example). I frankly don’t know what to make of such advice, but even in my little town of Lake Jackson, Texas, I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming.

Originally, a pdf of this newsletter was hosted at The New Republic, though this link is now broken. A scan of this newsletter (link to a png file) can now be found at “Game Over: Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters” at the blog, Et tu, Mr. Destructo.

This newsletter is now at a archive.org record of The New Republic page: “Ron Paul Newsletter October 1992”.

There are dog whistles about “urban” youth and “hip-hop” which become explicit when we reach the part of how they play “unsuspecting whites like pianos”. There is no possibility that these urban youth are anything other than black. These black men are on the prowl and stealing cars. Yet now they are not just in the cities, but everywhere. In order to protect oneself, one must carry a gun. There may be a possibility that you will have to shoot this man; but there may be complications if the police arrive, so one must have a gun that cannot be traced to you and be prepared to leave the scene. There is the chilling coda, chilling not for the violence it anticipates, but for the violence within this writer: the animals are coming. Since there has been on-going controversy over who authored these newsletter stories, I will point out that this is one of the many stories where the writer drops a detail which fits with Paul’s life, in this case, Lake Jackson, Texas, his residence at the time.

Perhaps there is a subtlety I miss, but this, to my mind, reads like nothing other than a guide on how to kill a black man and get away with it. Mr. Andrew Sullivan in defending his endorsement of Paul writes of a justifying context for such a remarks and stresses that they were made two decades ago. I find such explanations astonishing. Were I to find out that a musician or painter whose work I’d loved had written something so loathsome, it would qualify my admiration. I would expect any discussion of it to be blunt and forthright, no excuses over artistic temperament or the morays of the times. Is the fact that a white man could kill a black man in many parts of the country for far too long without legal repercussion to be part of the understandable morays that would permit a white man to publish such filth in 1992?

When I read this Timothy Noah piece on the new conditions the unemployed must fulfill in order to maintain their benefits, I read of a group of people who cannot fail at any obligation, whether it be GED requirements or drug tests, all while juggling family and work, without being chastised for their lack of accountability and irresponsibility. All this, while in a more privileged place, a man can write about how to kill a black man and get away with it, make a few mumbles that someone else was to blame, and his grevious irresponsibility is waved away, his shoulder given a hearty clap, and he’s moved a few steps closer to the levers of power and nuclear codes. There is a contrast that is wretchedly hilarious. The poor do not even have the freedom to pee when they want to, while a wealthy doctor can give out instructions on murder, and told he’d make a great president. All this because this good doctor, who views black men and women as expendable animals, may be the only hope for letting out some of their dark skinned kin from jail sentences for drug crimes that he views as one more variety of state tyranny. It used to be that some men and women had to abide every indignity of a slavemaster while hoping against hope that he would finally provide some mercy and grant them freedom. Now, their descendants must forgive the past indignities of Paul in the desperate hope that he, like Pharaoh, will give their brethren release.

That Mr. Sullivan, who did brave, righteous work into the evasions of law that took place in Abu Ghraib and secret prisons around the world, could endorse the man who wrote this, after having read this article, baffles me. I very much want an end to the ridiculous costly prison sentences for drug crimes; but just as I can ask for such a rational, sensible thing as good roads from a better man than Napoleon, I can ask for such a sensible thing as drug legalization from a better man than Ron Paul. I can only think there is some detail of all this that has escaped me, that makes sense of this blindness to racial thuggery, that would make this endorsement other than an utterly amoral act. This is not a case where either Scylla or Charybdis must be picked. There is the possibility of finding all those in the Republican primary to be craven, fanatical, stupid, or hateful. If a guide to killing a black man isn’t sufficient cause for disqualifying someone of the republican nomination, I ask: how far will deviancy be defined downward for a presidential leader and the holder of the nuclear keys?

My post on the transcription of the Ron Paul newsletter articles can be found here.

(Originally, this post linked to a pdf of the newsletter at the New Republic site. On April 14th, 2014, this link was changed to the Mr. Destructo blog after it was discovered that the link was broken. On August 19th, a scan of the specific piece “Blast ‘Em?” was added, as well as a postimage upload of the newsletter, should the Mr. Destructo link become unavailable or go down.)