Latinos Have No Viable Presidential Choice On The Right

By Dustin Mendus

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen Herman Cain’s campaign collapse and die due to allegations of scandal (must be an awkward Christmas at the Cain residence this year!). Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney took to the front, along with dark horse Ron Paul. Of course, both of them have their flaws: Gingrich wanting to send child labor laws to the history books, on one hand, versus Mitt Romney who just made a laughable deal to college students that “they’ll have a job” after graduation.

Mitt is seemingly stuck in dreamland, and Newt Gingrich… well, a Gingrich presidency would be a tragedy. But Ron Paul seemed relatively clean until people started digging up his dirt.

This seems to leave minorities with no viable option to vote for on the right.

Even worse, if you don’t want to vote for Obama, he sadly is the best choice at the moment. Obama has deported record numbers of “illegal” immigrants, failed to close Guantanamo bay, caved in many times to Republican demands rather than holding ground. The President also has turned to a policy of pulling out of southwest Asia, to militarizing the Pacific. Meanwhile, jobs are not coming about at home, and 1 in 2 Americans are poor.

Paul’s newsletter hobby in the 1980s and 1990s lead to some interesting, and scary, suggestions by the guy about our society. Apparently, there was a “homosexual-lead” cover up of AIDS back in the 1980s, carjacking became a hobby of non-white youth, and the idea that blacks are responsible for America having more crime than Europe. Scans of some of the letters can be found here.

In them we learn that Paul also had fear of a race war in America, as well as his claims that black radio shows are so full of “racial hatred” that it made “a KKK rally look tame.” Then there were uncited claims that black Americans want to replace “Eurocentricism” with “Afrocentricism” in schools and essentially put white kids in their place. In another letter, Paul sings praise of David Duke, defending the man’s past as “baggage.” I didn’t know being a member of the KKK was just baggage.

Of course, Paul is denying this, despite publishing this under a newsletter of his own name and signed by him, but white supremacists are in love with this. The Atlantic Wire’s story about members of the online forum Stormfront being upset that he “can’t just embrace the newsletters” is just the tip of the iceberg.

Election 2012 is rapidly turning into a contest of picking the lesser evil — and we haven’t even gotten past Iowa’s caucus.

Dustin Mendus is an undergraduate student at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He focuses on cultural geography.