Presidential candidate Ron Paul has a reputation for making extreme statements.  Paul’s views and beliefs have caused many voters to ask if he has the temperament to be President of the United States.

Once again, Ron Paul’s past is now coming back to haunt him.  About 20 years ago, Ron Paul sent out a direct-mail solicitation in his political and investment newsletters – in that newsletter from 1993, Ron Paul warned of a “coming race war in our big cities” and of a “federal-homosexual cover-up” to play down the impact of AIDS.  He also made a dire warning that the U.S. government’s redesign of currency to incorporate different colors, was not a move to thwart counterfeiters as the government said, but was actually part of a plot to allow the government to track Americans using the “new money.”

In addition to urging readers to subscribe to his newsletters for $99.00 so he could “tell you how you can save yourself and your family” from an overbearing government, the mail piece also included newsletter articles that called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a “world-class philanderer,” criticized the U.S. holiday bearing King’s name as “Hate Whitey Day,” and said that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.”

The subscription solicitation also claims that through a network of “extraordinary sources” in Congress, the White House, the Treasury and Justice departments, the Federal Reserve and the Internal Revenue Service – he had acquired unique insider information that would help his subscribers to “neutralize” the plans of “powerbrokers.” He goes on to detail numerous plots and schemes that he had “unmasked,” including a “plot for world government, world money and world central banking,” and a plan by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to “suspend the Constitution” in a falsely declared national emergency.

The letter also said that despite being told “not to talk,” his newsletters also “laid bare” the “Israeli lobby, which plays Congress like a cheap harmonica.”

While the newsletter appears to bear Paul’s signature at the end, facing mounting criticism for its racist, anti-homosexual and anti-Israel rants, Paul’s’ campaign is denying he wrote the newsletter.

During a campaign stop in Manchester, Iowa this week, his Iowa chairman, Drew Ivers, reiterated Paul’s claims that he did not write the articles that resurfaced this week in a report in the Weekly Standard magazine.  In an interview with CNN’s Gloria Borger on Wednesday, Paul said of the newsletter’s articles: “I didn’t write them. I didn’t read them at the time and I disavow them.”  However, when Borger tried to further pursue the subject, Paul removed his microphone and walked out of the interview.

James Kirchick, a contributing editor for The New Republic magazine provided the solicitation letters to Reuters and says that he found them in archives of political literature maintained by the University of Kansas and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Kirchick also published an article in The New Republic during the early part of the 2008 Presidential campaign in which he described Ron Paul as “not the plain-speaking antiwar activist his supporters believe they are backing – but rather a member in good standing of some of the oldest and ugliest traditions in American politics.”

SEE COPY OF LETTERS HERE