Ron Paul's defenders have twisted themselves into all sorts of knots as they try to white wash these inconvenient facts. Their most common claim is that because Ron Paul supports ending the ruinous War on Drugs (with its well documented racial disparities in enforcement, imprisonment, and punishment), that he is a believer in racial equality. This is a symptom of a larger dynamic at work in post-Civil Rights era racial discourse
Primarily, the bar for what constitutes racism has been set so high that even the most obvious examples of racial animus have to be couched in careful terms lest an "innocent" white person be branded a bigot. Second, the definition of what constitutes "racism" has been narrowed down to include only bogeyman and caricatures of White wickedness, White hate, White sheets, White race pride tattoos, White hands holding nooses, and White hands burning crosses. And as an auxiliary-enabler of post-Civil Rights race discourse, the lazy newspeak of "playing the race card" was invented precisely to serve as a defense mechanism that exists only to enable such specious concepts as "white oppression" or "reverse racism."
Of course, real life is much more complicated. Here, the argument that Ron Paul is not a racist because he wants to end the War on Drugs is a logical fallacy. Racist people can support policies that are "race neutral." Racists can be "good people." Anti-racists and progressives can be forward thinking in some areas and unrepentant bigots in others. And of course, while many are loathe to admit it, racism is a sin of both liberals and conservatives alike.
As I am so fond of saying, history is once more our greatest teacher. For example, there were abolitionists who wanted to end slavery and the vile trade in human beings, yet who also thought that black Americans were subhuman. There were abolitionists who urged blacks to rise up against the evils of the Southern slaveocracy, yet these same people thought that the presence of Africans in America was a problem to be solved by colonization because their presence was antithetical to white democracy.
Hinton Rowan Helper was one such figure. His 1868 work, "The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It [ http://www.northcarolinahistory.org/commentary/345/entry ]", was second only to Uncle Tom's Cabin in its influence on the public imagination about the evils of chattel slavery. Helper was also an unrepentant white supremacist.
In every part of the United States, there is a broad and impassable line of demarcation between every man who has one drop of African blood in his veins, and every other class in the community. The habits, the feelings, all the prejudices of society, — prejudices which neither refinement, nor argument, nor education, nor religion itself, can subdue, — mark the people of color, whether bond or free, as the subjects of a degradation inevitable and incurable. The African in this'country belongs by birth to the very lowest station in society; and from that station he can never rise, be his talents, his enterprise, his virtues what they may." — African Repository , Vol. IV., page 118.
Even more pithy, Helper included how:
"'The negro is not wholly without talents, but they are limited to imitation, — the learning of what has been previously known. He has neither invention nor judgment. Africans may be considered docile, but few of them are judicious, and thus in mental qualities we are disposed to see a certain analogy with the apes, whose imitative powers are proverbial.'" — Burmeister's Black Man, page 14.
Or how about this gem of common sense race science:
"So great a difference of opinion has ever existed upon the intrinsic value of the negro, that the very perplexity of the question is a proof that he is altogether a distinct variety. So long as it is generally considered that the negro and the white man are to be governed by the same laws and guided by the same management, so long will the former remain a thorn in the side of every community to which he may unhappily belong. When the horse and the ass shall be found to match in double harness, the white man and the African black will pull together under the same regime. It is the grand error of equalizing that which is unequal that has lowered the negro character, and made the black man a reproach." — Baker's Great Basin of the Nile, page 195.
People are complicated. One can be an abolitionist like Hinton Rowan Helper and believe that black humanity and personhood are sub-par, well below that of whites, and that African Americans have no place in American society. Ron Paul can be right on foreign relations and government waste for example, but dead wrong on matters of race, justice, and civil rights.
Such is life. Despite the temptations, there are no easy answers. Some in the American public will see Ron Paul's racism as necessarily compromising his vision, ethics, and judgement more generally; it is a first order problem, not a mere inconvenience. For Ron Paul's supporters, attitudes about black people are secondary to his libertarian vision for the United States. How a person reconciles this matter tells us a great deal about their own ethics and values.
On questions of race and justice the personal is indeed the political. The challenge here--and for libertarianism more broadly--is how these personal choices become impositions on the full citizenship, full rights, and full personhood of other people. To this point, Ron Paul's version of libertarianism offers no satisfying answers for those who are not White, not privileged, and outside of the moneyed classes.
Is he a racist? I do not know. But the policies which Ron Paul advocates, and the philosophy which he subscribes to, are none too friendly to people of color. For me, that is enough of a disqualification.
Ron Paul has about as many votes in this year’s GOP primaries as he has Facebook fans – is his fierce online following that much less relevant than it appears?
Four years ago, the shrewdest presidential candidates used YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and a dash of Twitter. They also tried to gain a strange new psychic edge called—in the contrived conceit of the day—"mindshare in the blogosphere." Apps were nowhere in campaign strategies. The iPhone was new. The iPad didn't exist.
So who e-campaigned best last time? During Super Tuesday week in 2008, Garlik, a British firm that monitors digital reputations, ranked the day's presidential candidates by online popularity. It didn't take Nate Silver or that Zogby person to call the winner. If you hung around social media even a little, you knew the fix was in.
It wasn't Hillary Clinton. Nor Mitt Romney, John McCain or Barack Obama. Blowing them all away—sealing for himself, in fact, the Presidency of the United Cyberstates of Digital America, commander-in-chief of the Information-Wants-To-Be-Free World—was, naturally, Congressman Ronald Ernest "Ron" Paul.
Ron Paul, President of the Internet! Hail to the online chief! Four more years!
Ron Paul. Elfin ob-gyn goldbug. Ayn Randian. Foe of war, abortion and government. Texan. Rejector of Medicaid, rejector of Medicare. Climate-change skeptic. Keeper of odd company. Espouser of tendentious views.
In 2012, he's still kicking back in the Online Oval Office. Ron Paul, commanding the mad and visible support of somebody. Sure he doesn't fare so well with actual flesh-and-blood voters of majority age who are motivated to drive gas-burning cars and appear with their laminated IDs at three-dimensional voting booths. But you can't have everything.
Big online, small in the real world?
Tim Hwang, a researcher of online movements and memes and the managing director of the Web Ecology Project, says that Ron Paul illustrates a fact we often overlook: "The Internet is not coterminous with the real world." He told me by email, "Like in a rearview mirror communities can be smaller than they appear on the Internet: discussion is often subject to parties who are loudest and can rally the most participants to appear online and participate at that specific moment."
This time around, for Paul, the Internet rally seems to have been sound and fury signifying little.Paul's big hopes for Alaska, Idaho and North Dakota were dashed on Super Tuesday, and he has yet to score a victory in a single contest in this election.
However, he's still logging mindshare in the blogosphere.
So how does he do it? Paul, for all his flat, engineer-like charisma, hardly seems like a Julian Assange mastermind, able to bend the Internet to his Machiavellian hacker will. Instead, it seems the President of the Internet just got lucky.
"I was on YouTube looking for some sort of guitar video or something," an ardent supporter of Ron Paul told PBS a while back, by way of explaining how he came to his candidate years ago. He had stumbled on a Paul propaganda video: "Ron Paul: A New Hope." "He was just speaking truth," concluded the guiter-vid-hunter. A Paulian was born
And then: lots more Paulians were born. Pop pop pop—everyone on the Web was for Ron Paul! Or so it seemed. They all seemed to have those punk RE/ EVOL /UTION stencils and theories about fiat money. And if a blogger in those days dared to criticize Congressman Paul for, say, taking money from card-carrying neo-Nazis or claiming authorship of a newsletter that talked smack about, oh, black people ("I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in [Washington, D.C.] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal") she was roundly creamed by organized commenters.
I know, because this happened to me. I'd give a link to my interrogation of the Paul scene from the waning days of 2007, but it doesn't exist. My editor at the New York Times fully expunged the recordafter hundreds of Paulians swarmed the site—like bacteria or antibodies—and sowed the comments section with vitriol......Sound FAMILIAR? ..;)
The complete retraction delighted the Paulians. And to their credit, Paulians can bring the bombast. Lew Rockwell, the "anti-state, anti-war, pro-market" blogger wrote ominously at the time: "Those who smear Ron Paul will live to regret it." He went on: "MSM, here are the new rules: no lying, no ridiculing, no suppressing. Remember 'journalistic ethics'? You really have no choice. The Internet rules."
A victory for Ron Paul would be a victory for the Internet, then, and in theory that victory would be a victory for people—anti-statist, libertarian people, the normal kind who have grave doubts about paper money and spooky conceptions of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Support is limited, but organic and real
The grassroots support Paul lavishly enjoys is either illusory—"astroturfing" by a campaign determined to make its marketing initiatives seem organic—or real.
Most observers feel it is real, as far as it goes. Hwang doesn't believe the campaign is funded well enough even to seed all the user-generated Paul propaganda that's out there.
Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham legal scholar who organized Howard Dean's online campaign, has said that where most campaigns make "Stepford" Web sites that aim to control a candidate's brand, as Coke or Apple would, Ron Paul's sites, many of them made by fans and not PR firms, look like places where anyone can belong and contribute.
Paulians, Teachout says, do not endeavor to meet the candidate, which would be costly for the campaign. Instead, they content themselves with meeting one another—online and in live meetups. Thus convened, they figure out clever ways to engineer shows of online force.
Some of Paul's most ardent supporters are sui generis, including Trevor Lyman, an Internet music entrepreneur and Ron Paul superfan. In 2008, Lyman abandoned a lifetime of political apathy to throw in with Paul, whose opposition to the war in Iraq appealed to him.
Though he's now not on the campaign's payroll, and has had very limited contact with the candidate—no tete-a-tete flights in Gulfstreams to discuss pet issues—Lyman is credited with having staged the campaign's biggest fundraising initiatives (many of them Internet-driven "moneybombs"). He also co-owns a for-profit company that flies blimp advertising Ron Paul for President in 2012. Giving money to Lyman's company is one way for donors to do an end-run around the federal contribution limit of $2,500, per election, to a candidate.
Getting around limitations imposed by government or big business is second nature to digital natives like Lyman who are the right age to have grown up getting music and movies from Napster and BitTorrent. Ron Paul's politics are a natural fit with the frontiersman ideology that drives longtime users of the Internet—especially the pure-hearted ones, trained in the 1990s, who can code, develop online projects, create and curate user-generated content and start digital initiatives. They also happen to be the ones who don't expect money for their labors.
For now, they have only one problem as a support base. There are not enough of them. Ron Paul has about 900,000 Facebook likers, almost precisely the number of votes for Paul in this election, which he is not—you heard it here first—going to win.
I couldn't find a date anywhere ...I just thought it so fit what we, on ihub know of them ... the pompous trolling over and over again ... the 'having' to answer EVERY post you make about him .. is just so obsessive .. anyway, I thought it was funny that at whatever time this article was written that the number of votes he had was the SAME as his 'facebook' 'friends' .........lmao!
just linking it in .. F6, re your Santorum strategy, you know the one Alex posted about facts reinforcing conservative bias you found for me before .. sheesh .. i picked this one up while looking for it .. again .. :)
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