The American Free Press, which markets books like "The Invention of the Jewish People" and "March of the Titans: A History of the White Race," is urging its subscribers to help it send hundreds of copies of Ron Paul’s collected speeches to voters in New Hampshire. The book, it promises, will "Help Dr. Ron Paul Win the GOP Nomination in 2012!"

Don Black, the director of the white nationalist website Stormfront, said in an interview that dozens of his members were volunteering for Paul’s campaign, and a site forum titled "Why is Ron Paul such a favorite here?" has no fewer than 24 pages of comments.

"I understand he wins many fans because his monetary policy would hurt Jews," read one. Far right groups like the Militia of Montana say they are rooting for him as a stalwart against government tyranny.

Paul’s surprising surge in polls is creating excitement within a part of his political base that has been behind him for decades, but has been overshadowed by his newer fans on college campuses and in some liberal precincts taken with his anti-war, anti-drug-laws messages.

The white supremacists, survivalists and anti-Zionists who have rallied behind his candidacy have not exactly been warmly welcomed. "I wouldn’t be happy with that," Paul said in an interview Friday when asked about getting help from volunteers with anti-Jewish or anti-black views.

But he did not disavow their support. "If they want to endorse me, they’re endorsing what I do or say — it has nothing to do with endorsing what they say," said Paul, who is now running strong in Iowa for the Republican nomination.

The libertarian movement in American politics has long had two overlapping but distinct strains. One, backed to some degree by wealthy interests, is focused largely on economic freedom and dedicated to reducing taxes and regulation through smaller government. The other is more focused on personal liberty and constraints on government built into the Constitution, which at its extreme has helped fuel militant anti-government sentiment.

Paul has operated at the nexus of the two, often espousing positions at odds with most of the Republican Party but assembling a diverse and loyal following attracted by his adherence to libertarian principles.

Paul’s calls for the end of the Federal Reserve system, a cessation of aid to Israel and all other nations, and an overall diminishment of government power have natural appeal among far-right, niche political groups. Aides say that much of the support was unsolicited and that it is unfair to overlook the larger number of mainstream voters now backing him.

But a look at the trajectory of Paul’s career shows that he and his closest political allies either wittingly or unwittingly courted disaffected white voters with extreme views as they sought to forge a movement from the nether region of American politics, where the far right and the far left sometimes converge.

In May, Paul reiterated in an interview with Chris Matthews of MSNBC that he would not have voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawing segregation. He said he supported its intent, but that parts of it violated his longstanding belief that government should not dictate how property owners behave. He has been featured in videos of the John Birch Society — which campaigned against the Civil Rights Act — warning, for instance, that the United Nations threatens U.S. sovereignty.

In the mid-1990s, between his two stints as a congressman from Texas, Paul produced a newsletter called The Ron Paul Survival Report, which only months before the Oklahoma City bombings encouraged militias to seek out and expel FBI or Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents in their midst. That edition was titled "Why Militias Scare the Striped Pants Off Big Government."

Paul has long repudiated the newsletters, contending they were written by the staff of his company, Ron Paul & Associates, while he was tending to his obstetrician’s practice, and that he did not see some of them until 10 years later. "I disavow those positions," he said in the interview. "They’re not my positions, and anybody who knows me, they’ve never heard a word of it."

But production of the newsletters was partly overseen by Lew Rockwell, a libertarian activist who has been a close political aide and adviser to Paul over the course of decades. At the same time that he was working for Paul’s company, Rockwell called on libertarians to reach out to "cultural and moral traditionalists," who "reject not only affirmative action, set-asides and quotas, but the 1964 Civil Rights Act and all subsequent laws that force property owners to act against their will."

Rockwell and Paul came to know each other as followers of the free-market Austrian economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, who argued against socialism and centralized economic planning, a spokesman for Paul said. They joined with the libertarian theorist Murray Rothbard in the 1970s and 1980s during the early attempts to forge libertarianism into a national party.

In the Rothbard-Rockwell Report that they started in 1990, Rothbard called for a "Right Wing Populism," suggesting that the campaign for governor of Louisiana by David Duke, the founder of the National Association for the Advancement of White People, was a model for "paleolibertarianism."

"It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke’s current program or campaign that could not also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians," he wrote.

Arguing that too many libertarians were embracing a misplaced egalitarianism, Rockwell wrote in Liberty magazine: "There is nothing wrong with blacks preferring the ‘black thing.’ But paleolibertarians would say the same about whites preferring the ‘white thing’ or Asians the ‘Asian thing.’"

Their thinking was hardly embraced by all libertarians. "It was just something that we found abhorrent, and so there was a huge divide," said Edward H. Crane, the founder of the Cato Institute, a prominent libertarian research center.

Crane, a longtime critic of Rockwell’s, called Paul’s close association with him "one of the more perplexing things I’ve ever come across in my 67 years." He added: "I wish Ron would condemn these fringe things that float around because of Rockwell. I don’t believe he believes any of that stuff."

Paul said in the interview that he did not, but he declined to condemn Rockwell, saying he did not want to get in the middle of a fight. "I could understand that, but I could also understand the Rothbard group saying, ‘Why don’t you quit talking to Cato,"’ he said.

Paul described Rockwell and Rothbard as political provocateurs. "They enjoyed antagonizing people, to tell you the truth, and trying to split people," he said. "I thought, ‘We’re so small, why shouldn’t we be talking to everybody and bringing people together?"’

Black said Paul was attractive because of his "aggressive position on securing our borders," his speaking out against affirmative action and his goal of eliminating the Federal Reserve, which the Stormfront board considers to be essentially a private bank with no government oversight. "Also, our board recognizes that most of the leaders involved in the Fed and the international banking system are Jews."

Paul is not unaware of that strain among his supporters. Crane of the Cato Institute recalled comparing notes with Paul in the early 1980s about direct mail solicitations for money. When Crane said that mailing lists of people with the most extreme views seemed to draw the best response, Paul responded that he found the same thing with a list of subscribers to the Spotlight, a now-defunct publication founded by the Holocaust denier Willis A. Carto.

Paul said he did not recall that conversation, which was first reported in the libertarian publication Reason, and doubted he would have known what lists were being used on his behalf. Yet he said he would not have a problem seeking support from such a list.

"I’ll go to anybody who I think I can convert to change their viewpoints — so that would be to me incidental," he said. "I’m always looking at converting people to look at liberty the way I do."

© 2011 The New York Times Company