APOSTLES OF PAUL

On the hometown turf of Clinton and Giuliani, EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE has found a small but determined group who support the quixotic candidacy of Ron Paul.

By Edward-Isaac Dovere

Avery Knapp is a 28 year-old lanky, blond radiologist originally from Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., in the last year of his residency at Lenox Hill. He is not the guy always talking politics in high school, nor the guy long drawn to iconoclastic ideology—always a conservative, he thinks he voted for Bob Dole in 1996 and knows he picked George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. He is a committed Republican. But he never thought to vote in a primary or care much about who did.

Knapp found Ron Paul this spring while sitting in his girlfriend’s apartment in Chicago, on a week of vacation. He was surfing the web during a study break, researching monetary policy for his father. Articles about inflation and the federal reserve led him to Give Me a Break, John Stossell’s libertarian polemic, and Freedom to Fascism, a documentary by Aaron Russo in which Paul says there is “a possibility” that the private bankers of Fort Knox could have taken control of America’s wealth.

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