This shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who’s been keeping their ears and eyes open.
Check out my comments at Veterans Today on a Sybil Edmonds piece on Bruce Fein
and my comments at Deep Capture at the bottom of this piece.
And at Economic Policy Journal and at The Daily Bell.
(I’ll put the multiple links above and my previous posts), not to gloat, because I feel very bad about this for all the poor people and even the Paulbots (just a joke) who slaved away, contributed and put their credibility on the line for these two and now have egg on their face. I hope Ms. Freeman is only expressing a dark view and not the whole story…because a lot of people are going to feel very taken.
And that includes me too. …except, I don’t close my eyes when I see something I don’t like. I reevaluate things.
A lot of an-caps don’t. That kind of dogmatism is not reason. It’s emotion. And emotion blinds you to reality.
There were always these real problems with Ron Paul, as far back as 2008.
1. Too tied in to the financial world (especially the hard money network, which is riddled with intelligence operatives and propagandists)
2. His campaign showed too much nepotism
3. The campaign was too slick in marketing. They came off just like any other politician
4. There was too much money raised for what he seemed to be doing and no clear explanation of how it was used.
5. Too many Zionist advisors prominent in his following who appeared to have a disproportionate role.
6. Too much pandering to the left and to the media on some things – not critical enough of Assange; not critical enough of many of the trendy liberal-left positions (pro-porn, for eg) that actually support corporate interests.
7. Too many expedient decisions along the way.
8. Too tied into the internet newsletter community, marketing. Not enough criticism of corporate practices and ethics.
9. Didn’t support the people who are actually fighting the banksters (Byrne and Co on the right; Naked Capitalism on the left).
10. Used many decent people badly. This is what I hold against them most. I think many of the very credible and sincere people at LRC, including Lew R. himself, Tom Woods and a few others, now look gullible. Have to say they got a warning about that from Wendy McElroy. That went unheeded by Walter Block. He along with Kinsella and Hoppe may be heroes to some core constituency, but from where I stand, they aren’t the best spokesmen for liberty, since they advocate positions that deny it to substantial numbers of people.
Anthony Wile at The Daily Bell is taking the position that this sell-out doesn’t matter and the important thing is that Paul educated a lot of people.
Yes, he did that. And yes, he also struggled for a long time, taking the message where he could, in the face of ridicule and slander. And yes, he probably knows better than most that you can’t fight “city hall.” He’s old and he’s done his bit…..more than a bit, a tremendous amount.
Well, this is a smart position to take, for one’s own psychological health, but it’s not very truthful. Paul’s influence was not just benign. It has had its dark side.
By running a campaign that sucked money and energy from the whole grassroots opposition to war and the police state, he bled that energy and money away from initiatives that needed more support and might have done something more substantial (although, I’ll admit that’s hypothetical..and although, in my view too, education is a huge and important foundation that has to be laid before real long-term change can come.
More importantly, he distanced himself from the active fight against the money-power that was taking place at Deep Capture, a forum which endorsed Paul, but never received a word of support in return.
People have been killed trying to unravel the whole story of the grip of the intelligence networks on the United States. People have impoverished themselves to write what had to be written, they’ve been sued and fled the country, they’ve been hounded and killed by the government.
Those are libertarian heroes in my book, not people who weren’t prepared to forsake the comforts of life, career, and networks….and more disappointingly, seemed to distance themselves from those who did.
To be honest, I’ve come to believe there are more libertarian heroes on the left and among conservative Christians, than there are among most anarcho-capitalists, who, seem to confine themselves to theory and advocacy but not to the battlefield where all of that must hit the ground…
How could it be otherwise, since most of them have such a limited idea of self-interest. “Mind your own business” is not likely to produce heroes, at least, not outside your own family.
Don’t blame that on Ayn Rand, who had a much deeper view of self-interest and values. I tend to blame it on Murray Rothbard’s influence, but that’s a judgment I’m not yet fully comfortable with. It’s possible I need to understand him more.
No. Ron Paul is not a villain at all. But he wasn’t the savior the libertarian grassroots believed him to be. That has already been made clear.
And the fall out will be painful for the true believers.
The rest of us will just chalk one up to observation, over ideology, and to individualism, over mass thinking.
And then we’ll turn off this show… and tune into the bubble in the next messiah…..