Paul Ray Ramsey

A scathing critic of “cultural Marxism” — once an actual school of socialist thought but now a bogeyman to radical rightists who see it as a secret conspiracy to destroy Western society from within — Paul Ramsey is a white nationalist who posts Internet videos of himself talking to the camera under the screen name of Ramzpaul. Since 2009, he has uploaded hundreds of liberal-loathing, feminist-bashing, and racial separatist-supporting videos to his personal YouTube channel, typically at the rate of three a week. By 2014, his channel had close to 20,000 subscribers, and his videos were being frequently posted to unapologetically white supremacist websites like Vanguard News Network and Stormfront.

In His Own Words:
“Single mothers, rampant divorce, abortion and falling birth rates are part of the cancer that is destroying what is left of Western Civilization. But very few people (even conservatives) fail to realize that the inception of this cancer can be found in the passage of the 19^th amendment.”
—Blog post on “men’s rights” website The Spearhead, referring to the 1920 extension of voting rights to women, 2010

“East St. Louis represents the end results of the multi-culturalist or diversity dream. It’s 100% diverse. There’s no evil white men or racist [sic] B’s in East St. Louis anymore. The last reported sighting of a white man was May 1, 1952. … I want some white men to get together, and we’re gonna cross the Mississippi and we’re gonna establish a beachhead and we’re gonna explore the territory.”
—“Into the Heart of Darkness — East St. Louis,” Ramzpaul video, 2012.

“And the Supreme Court, those five that voted for this. I mean, let’s face it, those are guys that have issues with women. In fact in their official statement, when they wrote their official court brief, they said they ruled that way because they hate women, and they want to rape them. That’s their official legal position.”
—“Home Depot Declares War on Women,” on the Supreme Court’s ruling on Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., on the Ramzpaul Youtube channel, 2014

“If I were the EU president I would appoint Breivik as head of the refugee commission. We nee some creative solutions.”
– Tweet from @ramzpaul, October 31, 2015

“I believe it [the Holocaust] should be able to be discussed, let me put it that way. And that’s because — and it depends what you mean by the Holocaust. Do you mean that 6 million figure? You know that 6 million figure has been used many times before World War II, did you know that?” — BuzzFeed

Background:
A lifelong conservative, Ramsey says he subscribed to National Review at the age of 12 and still favors older books, such as H.G. Wells’ history of the world, because they were published in an era before “political correctness.” A former supporter of the Republican Party, Ramsey has since moved far to the right as a video blogger, using humor to deliver racist and misogynist messages. “The problem with a lot of nationalists I see is they’re always serious,” he said once in explaining his technique. “They’re intelligent, but they’re not interesting for most people to watch.”

Ramsey’s YouTube career started essentially by accident when, in 2008, he made a satirical video for a brother living in California. Although the video was only intended for his family, Ramsey forgot to set it on private and was encouraged to continue making videos by others who saw it. By 2009, he was posting political videos in response to various news events, first on the now-defunct Liberty Forum and then on his own YouTube channel. He quickly became known as a “funny nationalist,” or as one anti-racist dubbed him, the “smiling Nazi.” He used the moniker of Ramzpaul and long sought to keep his real identity private, but eventually it came out that he was in fact a resident of the Tulsa suburbs who had apparently been uninvolved in the radical right until he began making videos. A fellow white nationalist once addressed him in public with his real name and Ramsey corrected him, saying, “It’s kind of like a one-word name thing, like Cher, Madonna, Elvis – Satan.”

Ramsey began with a small, inexpensive Flip camera but has since upgraded to a $500 camera. He usually films his videos in what appears to be an office in his home. At one point, Ramsey told a political fellow traveler who interviewed him that he makes these videos to get around what he sees as the “gatekeepers” of political correctness, and for fun. He is informal and relaxed in his presentations, typically beginning his videos with a greeting of “Hey, guys” and ending with “Talk to you later.” He specializes in mocking feminism, political correctness, what he calls “Europhobia,” the notion of white privilege, and the alleged failures of multiculturalism and egalitarian thought.

For what it’s worth, Ramsey has denied being a white nationalist, telling one radio interviewer, “I don’t call myself a white nationalist. I call myself a nationalist who is white.” And he said he regularly deletes comments on his YouTube channel that used racial slurs for black people or savage Jewish people.

But that didn’t stop him from, for instance, posting a May 2012 video entitled called “Happy Travyon Martin Day.” The video ridiculed an elementary school in Washington, D.C., that honored the unarmed black Florida teenager who had been slain by a white neighborhood watch volunteer. In the video, Ramsey wears a black hoodie, points a gun at the camera, and flips off the camera at one point with both hands. In a typically sarcastic rant, Ramsey deadpans as he sits in front of a white cross, “God sent his only son Travyon Martin to Florida,” adding that only through Martin’s suffering and death are the sins of white privilege and racism forgiven. He then goes on to asks for Martin’s forgiveness in a “prayer” before crossing himself in the name of “Obama, Trayvon, and Al Sharpton.”

Ramsey also has advocated for secession from the union and the establishment of a new 90 percent white nation – what he called a “21^st century Fantasy Island.”

Although for years he was unknown to the radical right outside of his videos, in April 2013 Ramsey had a coming-out party of sorts, attending one of the biannual conferences convened by Jared Taylor, the editor of the seriously anti-black journal, American Renaissance. (Taylor has written, among other things, that black people are incapable of sustaining civilization, and his conferences have attracted neo-Nazis, former Klan leaders and an array of other racist activists.) There, he was lauded by fellow attendees and gave a talk entitled “Sex and Nationalism,” which was essentially an attack on feminism spiced up with juvenile sex jokes.

Ramsey believes feminism is part of an “anti-white, anti-male, and anti-Christian” plot” to turn white men into “wussies” and “wimps,” that he describes as part of a general “cultural Marxist” attack on America society. (Although the term cultural Marxism originally referred to a strain of Marxist thought emphasizing the role of culture, in the hands of the radical right it been transformed into an actual plot, originating in a school of German Jewish philosophers, to attack and weaken Western civilization by pushing feminism, gay rights and so on.)

While many on the radical right are enthusiastic about Ramsey, seeing him as someone capable of greatly expanding the audience for white nationalist ideas, others are not so sure. The main criticism of Ramsey is that he crossed a movement Rubicon when he described an Asian actress as cute in one of his videos. That remark prompted a furious 2011 thread on the racist Stormfront site in which Ramsey was called, among other things, a “degenerate” for showing any interest at all in non-white women. In six days, the thread grew to 26 pages.

Outside observers have noted that it’s always clear that Ramsey knows just what he is doing. He avoids open racial slurs and seems to hide behind the idea that he is a comedian, not a real racist activist. Tim Wise, a white anti-racist activist, said that it’s that approach that makes him so dangerous. “I’m not sure Paul is sure who he is trying to appeal to. It looks like he’s still trying to figure it out. It’s clear, though, he’s trying to conform much more to the Jared Taylor style. And if anyone is paying close attention, I don’t think there is any doubt that Taylor’s methods and approach are the most effective and dangerous.”

Ramsey regularly butts heads with the founder and editor of the neo-Nazi, image board inspired website the Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin. Beginning in 2015 and spilling over into 2016, Ramsey and Anglin repeatedly took shots at each other over tactics and the ownership of the term Alt-Right.

Responding to a 2015 video by Ramsey, Anglin wrote in an article titled “The RamZPaul Attack on the Daily Stormer is Pretty Disappointing” that, “Ram’s apparent assertion is that the Daily Stormer is a Jewish-run Neo-Nazi organization. When he mentions the Daily Stormer in the video, he gives us a condescending chuckle, signaling to the audience that we are a joke, so far below him that he can’t even make a comment on it. This is a type of condescension I have seen him use regularly when attacking people in the pro-White movement he does not like because he views them as plebeian (and also secret agents working for the ADL).”

Ramsey repeated the assertion that the Daily Stormer is funded by the Anti-Defamation League again in 2016 in a video titled “White Nationalism is a Cult.” In the video, he bemoans the popularity of the Alt-Right, which he claims was due to the “1488ers” behind the Daily Stormer and responsible for alienating “normal white people.” This feud led to several fights online between Anglin, Ramsey, and the neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer, also known as “Weev,” who provides Anglin technical support for the Daily Stormer.

In March of 2016, Ramsey joined Richard Spencer, editor of the white nationalist journal Radix, and disgraced former California State University, Long Beach, professor and anti-Semite, Kevin MacDonald, as a speaker at the National Policy Institute’s bi-annual gathering in Washington D.C. titled “Identity Politics.” His speech focused on the rise of the Alt-Right and his understanding of its three major tenets: sex realism, race realism, and the “Natural Order.”