Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul may barely register in opinion polls, but that hasn’t dampened the enthusiasm of his tech-savvy supporters.

Fans of the libertarian Texas congressman have swamped reader polls, deluged political reporters with critical e-mails, and exploited sites like Digg to push their candidate to the forefront. “Ron Paul” is consistently one of the top search terms on Technorati, a blog search engine.

But now they may have gone too far. “You cannot pimp Ron Paul,” the conservative Red State blog decreed yesterday, banning all Paul-related comments from new users.

Why?

“You can probably guess. Unless you lack the self-awareness to understand just how annoying, time-consuming, and bandwidth-wasting responding to the same idiotic arguments from a bunch of liberals pretending to be Republicans can be,” moderator Leon Wolf wrote.

There may be an alternate explanation, Wolf allowed: “We are a bunch of fascists and we’re upset that you’ve discovered where we keep the black helicopters, so we’re silencing you in an attempt to keep you from warning the rest of your brethren so we can round you all up and send you to re-education camps all at once.”

UPDATE: Paul spokesman Jesse Benton retorted: “Redstate is a private entity and they are free to do as they see fit. Still, I have to question the judgement of a self identified conservative organization banning supporters of the most conservative candidate.”