The Case Against Ron Paul

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German translation here ^[2]

In all of the pro and con debates that I read about Paul in the white nationalist blogosphere, one rather simple reality is mostly left out of the analysis: the fact that Ron Paul can’t win. But that simple fact changes the analysis entirely.

Because he can’t win, it is meaningless to point out what he “would do,” because he will never have the opportunity to do it. So yes, it would be great to have a president actively attacking the Federal Reserve. But Paul is never going to be a president. It would be great to have a president actively opposed to wars for Israel. But that president will never be named Ron Paul.

White nationalists need to grasp what we garden variety libertarians understood back in 1988: at best, the campaign is a message candidacy. It is intended to educate and spread an idea. It is intended to strengthen and build a movement. It’s also designed to rake in a lot of money, but I’ll put that aside for now.

Point is, Ron Paul knows that he can’t win. That’s not what the campaign is about. It’s ultimately about promoting HIS ideas, not ours. Perhaps it could serve as a springboard for a future Rand Paul run, but again, that would be about promoting his worldview, not ours.

That worldview is race-free libertarianism. It’s an idea of pure, deracinated Economic Man, eternally free to make a buck as his children pump out black and brown grandchildren.

It’s an idea that, fundamentally, has nothing to do with us, however it may overlap in certain policy areas.

Ron Paul is promoting his ideas, his movement, and the values that he undeniably cares about. He is doing this at the expense of our ideas and the values that we care about. He has spent a lifetime on the fringes of the Right, and during much of that time political correctness was not nearly as developed as it is today. If he had wanted to pick up the racial mantle, he could have done so. He was superbly positioned for decades to do so. He did not. At the end of the day, he was simply more interested in Austrian economics and the gold standard. Greg Johnson summed it up simply but brilliantly, “Sound money for the brown people ^[3].”

Some white nationalists say that we would be better off under libertarianism than the system we have today. This may be true, and certainly our path to extinction would be a little less unpleasant. But again, that’s pretending that we have a choice that we don’t have. Ron Paul can’t win. Libertarianism can’t win, at least not in the purist sense of true freedom of association, virtually no taxes, etc.

Sure, I’d take a pure libertarian society over what we have today. But that option is no longer on the table, to the extent that it ever was. Pure libertarianism will never appeal to more than a minority of whites, and a vanishingly small minority of non-whites. For example, southern California used to be a hotbed of libertarianism (and even there it couldn’t come close to a pure form). No more. The brown tide snuffed that out right and proper. Not that libertarian idiots ever acknowledge this, and not that their fatally flawed worldview is capable of addressing the problem. They are slaves to an ideology that doesn’t even allow them to process reality, much less act upon it. The idea that they are “Objectivists” is laughable.

In any event, the reality is that the sort of purist libertarianism that we would need to get any benefit at all out of it has a very low ceiling of support. Without the purism, you’d just end up with a corporate dominated, open borders society that didn’t engage in too many foreign wars. Libertarian Lite would, if anything, speed up the destruction of our people, and certainly would not halt it.

Ron Paul can’t win, and the United States as it is currently constituted will never be purist libertarian. So why make your decisions on the basis that two plus two equals five? To base one’s support upon impossible outcomes is pure folly.

Having said all of that, the current Paul campaign has been somewhat exciting for me. Not overly, but somewhat. Even though our white nationalist solution does not and cannot ultimately be found at the ballot box (in this we share a fate with libertarianism), an insurgent political campaign does have a certain value.

For example, Paul’s campaign has demonstrated that the internet has matured enough (sometimes we forget just how young it really is) to play a vital role in money raising and organizing. Most significantly, we see in Paul’s prominent campaign the result of several decades of libertarians slowly but surely spreading their ideas. This was done mostly through writing, as other venues have been largely closed to them. Not nearly so closed as they are to us white nationalists, but still.

They have labored long in the vineyards, and now have a movement that can actually bear fruit. The current success (relatively speaking, of course) of Paul required the foundational building that we libertarians of twenty years ago were actively, consciously engaged in. We knew what we were doing and why.

When I started as a young libertarian activist, libertarianism was a virtual unknown. Many still thought that it had something to do with Lyndon LaRouche; we were pretty much aliens from Mars. However, as the ideas spread, so did the reaction from John Public. Back in 1990 you would almost never run into someone who claimed to be a libertarian. By 2000, on the other hand, you started running into people who would come right out and say, “I’m pretty much a libertarian, but I vote Republican…” This without me having broached the subject at all; they just volunteered it. Middle aged moms would say this. The same people that would have stared at us blankly ten years earlier would say this.

Most of these people had never heard of Rothbard, and many had never even read Rand. Mentioning Austrian economics would have only drawn a confused look. The ideas had spread from the inner circle to ever broadening outer ones, just as the people who ultimately provide the warm bodies to create a White Republic will have probably never heard of William Pierce, much less have heard anything of archeofuturism or what not. Ideas spread outward, if they are spread at all.

And so it goes. Observing this transformation was fascinating to me. Today, libertarianism has transformed from a tiny grouping of misguided idealists into a much more significant grouping of misguided idealists. It’s certainly true that we as white nationalists face a level of suppression and sanction that libertarians did not, but it is also true that we are capable of doing many of the same things that worked for them. There are lessons to be learned here.

Again, libertarianism has a built in ceiling, and I can’t see it ever appealing to a majority of the population. But it is still a vibrant movement for now, though I hope and suspect that many will ultimately see that it is the road to nowhere, and will undergo an evolution similar to my own. We may be experiencing, or at least getting close to, Peak Libertarianism. A run by Rand Paul in the future could change that a bit, but not in the long run.

Point is, if we had a white nationalist movement half as vibrant as libertarianism has become – but open to working outside of the system – we’d be well on our way to achieving the White Republic, very possibly within our lifetime. We often talk of some sort of collapse scenario, or the “balloon going up.” But that’s all relative. If we had millions of people clamoring for or at least highly receptive to a White Republic, it wouldn’t take much of a balloon at all. Just a little something could be all the nudge that we need.

This is all entirely possible. It’s not fantasy, it’s not hopeless daydreaming. We know how ideas spread, we know how to do it. It’s not a great mystery, though some of our “own” (read liars and kooks) will say anything to misdirect people from this truth.

Chechar ^[4] alludes above to the 2010 debate between vanguardists and mainstreamers. The “big debate.” While I agree with Chechar as to its significance, I think we dignify it a bit by framing it as we have. Really, it was a debate between liars/idiots on the one hand and those who have a grasp as to how revolutionary ideas actually spread. You want an idea to spread . . . you’ve got to actually promote that idea. Who’d a thunk it? Amazing how “controversial” that was.

Bottom line: this is a battle for minds, for hearts and for souls. It’s the total package. You don’t get that by hiding your views, but by spreading them. You don’t get that by watering down, but by passion. And you don’t get it all at once, but by constant repetition. I’ve amazingly heard, and this from a writer I respect, that he has pretty much written all that he has to say, and his past work is there for anyone who is interested. What the fuck? Did the Jews just make their case with the Frankfurt School, say they’ve pretty much said what needed to be said, that people could either agree or disagree, and now it was time to hit the links? Hell, they had written the subject pretty well to death by the early fifties. Did they stop there? The answer is obvious.

It’s about laboring long in the vineyards. It’s about spreading our ideas, not Ron Paul’s ideas. It’s about raising money for our own activists, not providing jobs for open border libertarians. I’m sure guys like Jesse Benton are having a high old time right now. I’m not interested in paying for their high old time. I’m interested in some white nationalist activists getting paid for their productive work. Let them have a high old time, if they’ve earned it. Jesse has earned it, but not for US, and it shouldn’t be funded by us.

It’s about building a white nationalist infrastructure, not a libertarian infrastructure.

The libertarians are big enough to take care of their own. Our money needs to be spent on, well, us.

Anybody who donates money to Ron Paul in 2012 just doesn’t get it. I donated back in 2008, and now wish I had given to a white nationalist cause instead. Still, I don’t regret it too much, as it was given during the initial money bomb that was really a breakthrough moment. It was a powerful demonstration of what the internet could do, and that alone was worth something. But never again, and particularly never again when the libertarian movement is clearly big enough to take care of its own. To donate now would be money purely wasted in promoting libertarian ideas as opposed to our ideas. If we aren’t passionate enough about our own cause to support it above the other guy’s cause, how the hell can we possibly achieve our goals?

As for voting, I’ll vote A3P. I’ll write in A3P if the candidate is not on the ballot in my state. Just as I used to vote Libertarian when I was still interested in seeing those ideas spread, if for no other reason than to offer a token of appreciation and some encouragement.

But you know what? IF Ron Paul was the Republican nominee (which he won’t be), I might, and emphasize might, make an exception. Maybe I’d vote Ron Paul in the general. Because at that point, it wouldn’t just be a battle of ideas. It would be a real, physical opportunity for a major political shakeup in this country. It WOULD be great to have a president opposed to wars for Israel, and attacking the Federal Reserve. It would be great to physically throw a monkey wrench into the political system.

But that’s not going to happen, though there may be one last shot at that with Rand in the future. But unless we are truly on the verge of throwing a physical monkey wrench into the works, what is really going on here is a battle of ideas. Why in the world support the other guy’s over our own? As small and pitiful as our resources back in 1988 were, we libertarians never would have done that. Support Ross Perot in 92, because at least he was not a major party candidate? Nope. Not gonna happen. If you weren’t libertarian, we weren’t interested. The willingness I just expressed above to possibly making an exception under extreme conditions . . . I wouldn’t have even considered it back then. So my “might consider” is rapidly turning into . . . I’d still vote A3P. See how easy it is to get off track?

As libertarians, we were absolutely committed to the rightness and justness of our cause, and if you didn’t promote our core values, you were dead to us. No way were we giving you any money. No way did you get our vote. It wasn’t enough to just wink and bat your eyes at us. You had to be one of us.

White nationalists need that mindset. We’re right, everybody else is wrong. We have the way forward to a great future, everybody else is an utter fool. I realize that’s a bit oversimplistic, and that even guys like Duke had to tone it down a bit for their political runs, just as libertarians do when they speak to a more general audience. That’s standard sail trimming, but whether one likes it or not, it shouldn’t be confused with the absolute stupidity of actively supporting the other guy’s values, the other guy’s movement, and the other guy’s bank account. White nationalists need to learn this distinction. Sail trimming is one thing if done by one of our own (like Duke), supporting a whole other movement is something entirely different.

One last point about Paul’s “integrity.” The guy charged serious subscription fees for a newsletter that purported to offer HIS perspective on financial and investment issues, as well as politics and current events. People paid good money because they thought they were getting Ron Paul’s take on things, a take that had considerable value given his role as a congressman and long time advocate of hard money. He now claims that he had no idea what was in the newsletters, that he didn’t even read them. He just sat back, let the checks roll in, and laughed his way to the bank.

That’s integrity?

Now, as it happens, I don’t believe the above to be the case. I doubt Paul actually wrote the lines in question, but he surely knew of them. Now, he shamelessly lies about the fact. Like Sergeant Schulz, he knows nothing.

So either he was a scumbag grifter then, or a shameless liar now. There is no third option.

That’s integrity?

And even if he had a monopoly on integrity in a decaying world, he’s not one of us. We’re either white nationalists or we’re not, and it is pathetic how a few seductive glances from across the dance floor can send more than a few of us into tittering like a teenage girl. We need to have some pride and some loyalty. Though one must cut through all of the kooks, liars and fools, there are some damn fine white nationalists out there. Counter-Currents is a great example of what is best in our cause, and it’s a worthy recipient of any extra change that’s burning a hole in your pocket.

Dance with the one that brung ya.