Bernie Sanders has inspired his supporters to value populism. They used Twitter for hashtags ranging from #FeeltheBern to #NeverHillary. Although Bernie Sanders expressed controversial statements, the itching question remains as to whether he was genuine to begin with, especially given his concession speech alongside Hillary Clinton?
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 Bernie Sanders, though? Granted, much like Dr. Paul, Sanders failed to secure the Democratic 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).
Was Sanders truly antiwar? I never heard in any of his speeches that he promised to bring all the troops home, as Ron Paul did, and yet, what I did hear from him was that the so-called “Islamic State” is a threat to Western democracy. How is that any different from what Donald Trump was peddling? Bringing the troops home and then abolishing the military-industrial complex have been the ultimate goals of the antiwar movement at least ever since former President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American citizenry about it, if not before then with the publication of former Marine general and Medal of Honor winner Smedley Butler’s War is a Racket! between the world wars of the 20th century.
Many people only cared about Bernie Sanders because he claimed to oppose the Wall Street banksters, but was he truly? The 2008 banker bailouts, the subprime mortgage crisis, and the Great Recession were only possible because of the Federal Reserve and central banking. Once you understand that inflation and debt are caused by fractional reserve lending, then you can begin to understand the magnitude of the yoke the American people have been chained under. Not only are the Big Banks incredibly fascistic, but central banking is itself one of the planks ripped straight from The Communist Manifesto, specifically #5:
“Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.”
As an openly avowed democractic socialist, has Bernie Sanders ever opposed the Federal Reserve Bank by demanding its abolition, or at least an audit? Or rather, has he finger-pointed some Wall Street fascists, and then told his supporters that the solution was to raise the minimum wage because it fell softly on their ears, despite the fact that coercively imposed price floors only criminalize those poor folks who accept work below the mandatory minimum, yet socialists would try to have you believe that they simply wanted to help them? Ron Paul, by contrast, not only was against the minimum wage, but also wanted to audit the Federal Reserve.
Regarding the American police state, Sanders is much like any progressive who claimed he wanted to decriminalize cannabis, yet he also wanted to infringe on your property rights through regulations like closing the gun show loophole, imposing universal background checks, and outright banning the citizen ownership of semi-auto rifles. It’s not as if Sanders really had a problem with firearms themselves, because he never advocated for the firearms of the Bluecoats to be regulated or banned. If he’s this wishy-washy on gun rights, then what would prevent him from being similarly hypocritical about drug legalization? As Dimitri Karras of (the now former) Ares Armor put it:
“I wanna live in a world where a gay married couple can defend their marijuana pot farm with firearms that are fully automatic. That’s the world that I want to live in.”
Instead of promoting what American political prisoner KC Massey described last month as the “pussification of America,” Ron Paul supported both gun rights and cannabis decriminalization. Naturally, the editorial board of The New York Times failed to point out that there was truly nothing revolutionary about Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, whereas they couldn’t ignore the Ron Paul Revolution (which was displayed as “R-love-ution” and pronounced as “love-a-lution”) quickly enough despite the truly profound implications even a restoration of hypothetically limited government could have had on at least greatly alleviating the burden on the American taxpayer, if nothing else.
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 the 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 of 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.