CNN has the story about Ron Paul’s 1987 book, written at the time he was leaving Ronald Reagan’s Republican Party to run for president as a Libertarian and ” re-issued in 2007 during Paul’s last presidential bid with a cover photograph of an ominous SWAT Team”:

Paul criticized people suffering from AIDS or other contagious diseases for demanding health insurance coverage.

“The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim – frequently a victim of his own lifestyle – but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care,” Paul wrote.

In another chapter on the rights of individuals outside of government – the central theme of Paul’s libertarian philosophy – he sharply criticized the “absurdity” of politicians who try to bestow differing rights on various social and ethnic groups.

…”Every year new groups organize to demand their ‘rights,'” he continued. “White people who organize and expect the same attention as other groups are quickly and viciously condemned as dangerous bigots. Hispanic, black, and Jewish caucuses can exist in the U.S. Congress, but not a white caucus, demonstrating the absurdity of this approach for achieving rights for everyone.”

To be sure, Paul’s warnings about the divisiveness of identity-group politics are not terribly outside the mainstream of conservative thought, and to be fair, the state of public information about AIDS in 1987 was not the same as it would be in later years. But the significance of Paul’s book is that sounds an awful lot like the newsletters.