Ron Paul tweets racist cartoon, faces backlash

By Emily Birnbaum - 07/02/18 12:36 PM EDT

Former Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) on Monday tweeted, then deleted, a racist cartoon depicting minorities with exaggerated features punching Uncle Sam.

The cartoon features a Jewish man with a hooked nose, a black man with exaggerated lips, an Asian man with slanted eyes and a man who looks like a neanderthal punching Uncle Sam and yelling “Cultural Marxism!”

“Are you stunned by what has become of American culture?” Paul said in the tweet. “Well, it’s not an accident. You’ve probably heard of ‘cultural Marxism,’ but do you know what it means?”

Paul later on Monday said a staff member had posted the cartoon. 
 
"Earlier today a staff member inadvertently posted an offensive cartoon on my social media," Paul tweeted. "I do not make my own social media posts and when I discovered the mistake it was immediately deleted."

 

 

 
Paul faced enormous backlash on social media, with some people drawing parallels between the image and Nazi propaganda.

Paul quickly tweeted the same message with a new image that reads “political correctness,” with a “no” symbol over the words.

The Jewish man in the image is referred to as “the Happy Merchant” and is often used in anti-Semitic online forums.

Paul has faced allegations of racism dating back to the late 1970s, when he published newsletters that contained references to black men as criminals and called Martin Luther King Jr. Day “Hate Whitey Day.” 

This story was updated at 3:49 p.m.

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