Donald Trump has inspired his supporters to value Americana. They wear red trucker caps emblazoned with the slogan, “Make America Great Again.” Although Donald Trump expresses controversial statements, the itching question remains as to what exactly does he stand for?
Ron Paul was a congressman over the course of thirty years, and had campaigned for the United States presidency three times; the first of which in 1988 under a Libertarian Party ticket, the second time in 2008 as a Republican Party candidate, and then again in 2012, in no small part due to the Draft Ron Paul movement. He has written at least three political books, the most significant of which I think are The Revolution: A Manifesto, End the Fed, and Liberty Defined. Paul is the founder and chairman of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and remains a Distinguished Counselor to the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
I began writing about Dr. Paul during his 2012 campaign, originally intrigued by his resurgent attempt to win the presidency, which covered the good, the bad, and the ugly of his career, soon going beyond his candidacy to his eventual retirement from public life. What I discovered really taught me quite a bit about the nature of politics, logical fallacies, and just plain bad strategy. If it hadn’t been for the failures of Ron Paul’s candidacies, I doubt I would’ve publicly rebuked working inside of the system in order to change it from within; namely, reformism.
Simply put, Ron Paul’s platform was this:
- Bring the troops home
- Audit the Federal Reserve
- Repeal the Patriot Act (and reign in the American police state)
There hasn’t been a candidate for federal office, before or since Ron Paul, whose political platform was this concise and succinct. Love him or hate him, what can never be said about Ron Paul is that his issue positions were indecipherably vague or compromisingly soft. With Ron Paul, you knew what to expect.
Can the same be really said about Donald Trump, though? True, the Donald has accomplished what Ron Paul never did – securing the Republican Party’s presidential nomination; yet, does that really matter? I ask these questions simply because voters do not elect the President, as that constitutional prerogative belongs solely to the Electoral College, as enumerated in the federal Constitution (Art. II § 1 cl. 2).
Has Donald Trump ever truly rebuked political correctness? If so, I guess it would’ve been nice having him doing so two years ago, when libertarians were the sole guard holding the line against the “social justice” equality freaks, who spewed fake grievances so quickly that Christopher Cantwell took it up as his chief role within the alternative media to rebuke leftist diatribes promoting welfare statism. The fact of the matter is that Trump is, at best, a Johnny-come-lately, and certainly no trend setter; not even the constitutionalist American patriots were assisting libertarians during the Gamergate controversy of 2014, so we were left to fend for ourselves completely alone, totally assaulted on every front, as we found ourselves pitched against those disingenuous activists who incessantly complained that everything was racist, everything was sexist, and everything was homophobic (now, “transphobic”), even when it objectively was not.
Why does Donald Trump appear so staunch on immigration policy, even to the degree of promising to build a wall on the southern border? As a Texan, I can assure you all that trespassers have been crossing the Rio Grande since the 1980s, and in response, I’ve previously recommended how to deal with that specific violation of property rights (it entails the use of for-profit entrepreneurial business ventures protecting the ranchers whose private property abuts the international border with Mexico, regardless of whether the United States Border Patrol “approves” of them, or not). John Oliver was absolutely correct when he described Trump’s proposed wall as a government boondoggle, which for a progressive socialist, is unusually ballsy, because the entire welfare state is just exactly that – one gigantic boondoggle!
Obviously, any such border wall would, at most, only keep out the Mexicans and other Central and South American immigrants, so why Trump presumes a southern border wall would also keep out Muslims is beyond my ability to speculate. The fact of the matter is that the so-called “Syrian refugee crisis” spurred a deep-seated resentment against Muslims of all kinds through nationalistic sentiments, but what was troubling is realizing that the refugee crisis only happened because of the Syrian Civil War, which itself was directly caused by the meddling of the federal government directly arming, equipping, and training the not-so-moderate Syrian “rebels,” who weren’t just associated with Al-Qaeda, but who are in fact Al-Qaeda themselves. Naturally, Al-Qaeda in Iraq coalesced with Al-Qaeda in Syria, the latter of which eventually morphed into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the rest is contemporary history, so they say.
Unfortunately, when it comes to monetary policy, Donald Trump couldn’t praise Alexander Hamilton quickly enough. As the progenitor of the American School of economics, Hamilton advocated for a socialized perpetual war debt whose interest would be paid by a whiskey tax, a central bank, and subsidies for favored industries. When Trump says he wants to “Make America Great Again,” what he actually means is that he wants to enact Hamilton’s mercantilist policies that are more reminiscent of the British Empire whom the rest of the American Founders had just successfully thrown off during the 1780s. Whether it be the fascist corporate subsidies or the communist central bank, Donald Trump’s vision of a greater America contradicts the Framers’ original intent for the United States Constitution.
So, before you finally make up your mind as to what you want to do come November during the so-called “general election” (despite the fact that according to Texas Election Code § 192.0069, the Electors within the Electoral College meet at the state capitol in Austin at 2 p.m. on the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December), you may want to first go on a circuit or two of political fieldtrips so you can become more familiar with your local governmental bodies and what they regularly do, for as the Founders commonly believed, the most important government is the one that is closest to you. Should you ultimately decide that no government is worth your consent to be governed by it, then I welcome you to cancel your voter registration, just as I did three years ago.
For more information on what you can do to secure your personal liberty, I would suggest that you peruse the third edition of The Freedom Umbrella of Direct Action, which is a value-free directory of all the methods available that do not require you to subjugate yourself before those who falsely imagine themselves to be your rulers.
Kyle Rearden is a blogger, podcaster, and videographer who started The Last Bastille Blog in 2011 since he thought the blogosphere would be more conducive to his study of a wide variety of subjects within the alternative media. From 2009 – 2012, his former YouTube channel amassed over 127,000 total upload views with 150+ videos; and between 2012 – 2014, his blog has received approximately 81,000 total views. Currently, he is the creative consultant for Liberty Under Attack Radio, a co-host of Behind Enemy Lines, and records the Liberty Intelligence Files alongside Alex Ansary.