No wonder Massachusetts’s biggest paper endorsed him. Zing.

You make the call: Depressing proof of how far some of Paul’s fringiest supporters will go or a false-flag operation designed to make Paul look bad and/or create sympathy for Huntsman? The Paul campaign denounced the clip today as “disgusting” and the candidate himself said this of whoever put it together:

“Of course I disavow him and he shouldn’t do it, because you have one out of how many, a couple hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, I don’t know how many people we have, because one does that, to bring that up just doesn’t sound like a fair thing to do,” Paul said. “Of course I denounce it, I couldn’t even hear it, haven’t looked at it, but people do that, and they do it in all campaigns.”

Paul continued, “So obviously I just disavow him and try to go on and do the thing I’m supposed to do.”

I’ll let you write your own punchline about mysterious authors publishing offensive material on Paul’s behalf. There is a chance, of course, that this really is a false-flag production: Even for a racist appeal, it’s almost comically crude and stupid, especially the photoshop of Huntsman as Mao at the end. You’d have to be a true imbecile, and truly paranoid about Chinese infiltration, not to realize that you’re doing more damage to Paul in posting it than to your alleged target. Plus, if the goal is to raise doubts about Huntsman, why even bother tacking Paul’s name on to the end? Just go about your business of smearing JH and leave no fingerprints. As it is, not only is Paul’s name mentioned in the video, it’s mentioned in the name of the YouTube account too — an account which has uploaded this one clip and nothing else, ever. I’m not saying one of his fans didn’t do it — anyone who enjoyed the “edgier” parts of those newsletters could be capable — but I don’t know how to say definitively that one of them did. Anything can happen on YouTube.

Exit quotation from Huntsman: “What I object to is bringing forward pictures and videos of my adopted daughters and suggesting there is some sinister motive there. I have a daughter from China who was abandoned at two months of age in a vegetable market, picked up by the police and sent to an orphanage. No future, no hope, nothing to look forward to. Now she’s in my family, and she’s one of the greatest human beings I’ve ever known. She’s also, at 12 years old, my senior foreign policy adviser.”