Today we have news that Julian Assange’s idol, Ron Paul, will be joining the president of the John Birch Society to address one of the most virulent antisemitic groups in North America: Ron Paul, Birch President to Speak at Anti-Semitic Conference.

Beyond the obvious, what do a far-right Italian politician, the president of the John Birch Society and former U.S. Rep. Ron Paul have in common?

In early September, the men are all scheduled to speak - along with a lengthy list of archconservative clergy, lawyers and academics - at a conference in Canada sponsored by the Fatima Center, part of the “radical traditionalist Catholic” movement, perhaps the single largest group of hard-core anti-Semites in North America.

Paul, the former Texas congressman and Republican presidential candidate, is the keynote speaker of the weeklong conference slated for Sept. 8-13 in Niagara Falls, Ontario. A physician before entering politics, Paul got into considerable hot water in 2008 when The New Republic published “Angry White Man,” an article about the contents of newsletters he published. What the newsletters revealed, the magazine reported, “are decades worth of obsession with conspiracies, sympathy for the right-wing militia movement, and deeply held bigotry against blacks, Jews and gays.” Paul denied writing the newsletters that bore his name.

The conference is titled, “Fatima: The Path to Peace” and “is a call,” according to a Fatima Center press release, “to a return to sanity in the government of the world and the Church, for the two cannot be separated.”

Also scheduled to speak is Roberto Fiore, an Italian politician, who, when he won a seat to the European Parliament in 2008, was described by a fellow member of the body as “absolutely the most extreme person who has ever served in the European Parliament.”

Julian Assange isn’t the only high profile extreme libertarian to admire Ron Paul; here’s a video of Ron Paul’s recent interview with our old pal Glenn Greenwald:

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