I have long felt at a loss to do justice to how completely the Ron Paul revolution has blunted the force of the far-Left (and far-Right) I once knew. But fate has now intervened. The recent smearbund hysteria against Ron Paul, so brilliantly deconstructed by Justin Raimondo, has hit home to me. It mostly involves, in its absolutely sick ironic twist, a cast of characters I once knew all too well. I was once a friend of "Commander" Bill White — whom I mentioned in an earlier article had become an especially mad neo-Nazi cult leader. At the time I knew him, he was in transition from “Utopian Anarchist” candidate for school board running as the champion of school shootings to ghastly neo-Nazi self parody. Said transition period consisted mainly of his coasting around the right-populist scene, working briefly for an unwitting Pat Buchanan in 2000 and running as an independent for the Maryland legislature in 2002—then during the closing months of the Maryland campaign, taking the plunge into unalloyed Jew hatred.

Bill White is nothing more and nothing less than a textbook sociopath. His primary interest has always been to create as appalling an outrage as he could. Since founding his American National Socialist Workers Party, his obsession seems to have shifted from Jews to blacks. His exploits in the fever swamps have been accompanied by a penchant for seeking out small, meek young women to dominate. In all his campaigns at many points of various political extremes, he accomplished little beyond harrying the top of his lungs whatever poor public official got within shouting distance.

As for how this twisted, wicked man got his name in the New York Times: When I knew him, White would speak often, and grandiosely, of “dinner meetings” he would attend, which were nothing more than the periodic meetings of the local Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC). The statement which Raimondo attributes to Peter Gemma about these meetings—that he never hosted Ron Paul, nor knowingly anyone named Bill White—fits my own experience. I have never wanted anything to do with the CCC, but I attended one of these dinner meetings when my old friend M. Raphael Johnson was speaking: A meeting of Washington insiders, where you would ever expect to find a U.S. Congressman, this was not.

Here’s the important question: Is White is simply inserting himself, adeptly as ever, wherever he can get publicity? Or is he consciously taking part in Republican dirty trick? My own guess is a little of both. Raimondo has indispensably documented the strange career of the Klansman Don Black, who was notably active in the Republican brownshirting of the Florida recount in 2000, and before that made similar black-op appearances on the verges of the Buchanan campaigns in 1992 and 1996. When I knew him, White had a mysterious relationship with a number of characters at the Washington Times, and it was widely held that his father was a CIA operative. I have been tempted to agree with the leading “anti-fascist” nut job Daryle Jenkins that White is merely living off a trust fund, but it is impossible to be sure.

Speaking of the “anti-fascist” crowd, this is where things really get interesting, for I also knew well the key figures implicated by Raimondo at D.C. Indymedia, where, I must say, he was too quick to jump the gun and believe the crazies. Raimondo seemed to suggest that Bill White’s followers have somehow infiltrated Indymedia. There is no reason whatever to believe this. The first thing that cries out to be clarified is the case of Luke Kuhn. Kuhn is a paranoid schizophrenic who was close to Bill White in his “anarchist” phase and whom I got to know on the leftist scene in Washington before meeting White. As time went on I would mostly see Kuhn wandering around various protests dragging a bicycle behind him and not wearing a shirt. If I deigned to speak to him he would respond completely out of his mind, more off his meds than ever.

Mike Fluggenock, however, so far as I know, is a good and honorable man. I knew him when I spent the most time around the leftist scene in the early part of the decade, even as his artwork gained him a national reputation. In this era, when I was wildly and recklessly dabbling in both radical Left and Right, Fluggenock always struck me as one of the more likeable and open-minded folks on the Left. I ran into him just several weeks ago at the huge Veterans Day rally for Ron Paul in Philadelphia, it was a pleasure to see him and to feel his solidarity at that most extraordinary event. Incidentally, there was a gang of about two dozen skinheads at the rally. I ably stared them down with my Semitic good looks, and was greatly heartened by the crowd’s contemptuous response to them. A lovely young lady I’ve gotten to know well on the New York Ron Paul scene simply responded to their presence “That’s sad,” and I took great delight in loudly conversing with a black friend from the New York scene as we passed them by.

This whole controversy was interestingly presaged for me when I was back in Washington for Thanksgiving. At a mall in suburban Maryland near where I grew up, I ran into a girl wearing an IWW t-shirt who could not have been more than 15, I chatted her up largely out of curiosity of what had become of the scene, wondering what kids her age who were getting into it thought of Ron Paul. She bit back with the most dreadful reactionary leftist bromides, and when I told her that I ran into an old friend from the scene covering the Ron Paul rally for Indymedia, she snapped at me, oozing adolescent ignorance from every pore, “And Indymedia has been swarming with fascist trolls.” What this incident encapsulated for me, even before all this context was provided for me all too vividly, was how pathetic had become the remnants of the world to which I years ago had said goodbye.

When Bill White still had some modicum of sanity and humanity, I recall him aptly describing the neo-Nazi confrontations with the quasi-anarchist nutjobs as pathetic teenagers play-acting the street battles of the Weimar Republic. All throughout I have found it absolutely mind-boggling why anyone would consider this a constructive vehicle for social change. Intellectually, I have come to appreciate why the so-called left of my generation failed and served only to make way for the Ron Paul Revolution. But only now do I see it on a truly personal level, and there can only be relief and pity over the world being ground into the dust, whose final act is to come together to save their sick fight club by aimlessly attacking the honorable, constitutional libertarian Ron Paul.