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May 10, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:56
1061 Political Action - One Last Time! :)

Tidying up a few loose ends...

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Hi everybody, hope you're doing well with stuff.
It is May the 10th, Saturday?
I think it's the 10th.
And I'm out doing some gardening, and I thought that it would be worthwhile laying down some thoughts about this question, which is still floating around and I think is an interesting one, about politics and the role of politics in spreading and establishing the concepts of Freedom and so on, particularly libertarianism.
And this stuff keeps popping up on the board and in my inbox.
And I thought that it would be worthwhile laying down a few things that are just, to me at least, things which are indisputable.
And to concede, of course, things which People seem to think that I or others think are disputable.
I gotta tell you though, just before we get beginning, my lawn, I guess there was some grubs or some worms or something like that under the surface.
And it seems like the birds have actually developed a rather enviable ability to drop depth charges on my lawn to get at these things because, oh my goodness, it is really rather aggressive what they've done to my poor grass.
So, with regards to the question of political advocacy, political programs and so on, the...
Question as to their efficacy is something that is always brought up.
And so the general debate, if debate is the right word, tends to go a little something like this.
Somebody will say, well, I don't think that the Ron Paul candidacy was very good.
And then somebody else will say, well, but I learned about FDR or Libertarianism, or Harry Brown, or maybe even Ayn Rand, or maybe even,
although this is much less likely, Murray Rothbard or Mises, I guess Mises a little more, through the Rompol candidacy or something like that, in which case it is considered to be a proven fact that political advocacy is worthwhile because one or more or some A number of people have found their way through to anarchism or philosophy or maybe even the classical liberal style of minarchism through political action,
and that is considered to be proof positive of the value of political activism.
And I just do not at all think that is the case.
There's no way to clinch the matter either way, but I'll sort of share my thoughts about what that all means, and maybe it will make some sense to you, and maybe it will be a way of closing off certain repetitive, in fact, damn grindingly repetitive aspects of this debate.
So let me just lay out some basics, and these, I would hope, are not at all controversial, but Can be accepted as given.
That's a given. So the first, of course, is that economics is the study.
Not of visible benefits, since those scarcely need to be studied.
Everybody understands that Lamborghinis are popular, so we don't need to study why people buy them particularly.
But the opportunity costs can be Can be, like, are very important to understand.
So everybody understands that certain people who benefit from the minimum wage who would get a raise are going to be in favor of the minimum wage.
That does not take a PhD in economics or philosophy to understand.
On the other hand, though, those people who We cannot see who lose jobs because of the minimum wage or suffer some other kind of problem, which they are probably not even aware of because of the problem of the minimum wage.
Those people are who we need to focus our attention on, because they are the great people.
Unseen. So, people who come to libertarianism through Ron Paul, let's just say, take Ron Paul as the example, are obviously and clearly and indisputably going to credit Ron Paul with their awakening to this stuff, right? That's all good and reasonable and right, I would say.
But it doesn't prove anything.
I know it's seductive and tempting to think that it does, but it doesn't prove anything.
I don't think that certainly myself or anyone else that I've read who is negative or skeptical towards political activism has ever put forward the claim that not one single person ever comes to libertarianism as a result of So,
we can drop that as a criterion for judging the efficacy of political action.
There's no question That thousands or possibly tens of thousands or possibly more people have gained exposure to ideas or ideals that we would consider necessary and beneficial.
No question. That is perfectly, I guess you could say, granted, although it's just a granting of a fact of reality.
Lots of people were exposed to philosophy and minarchism through the writings of Rand.
Lots of people have gotten exposed to some very wonderful anti-tax rhetoric through Ron Paul and so on.
All of that seems to me perfectly fine, perfectly fair, and perfectly positive.
I'm of course also I'm perfectly willing to state that it seems to me quite likely and reasonable and valid that, or to say, that these people would not have achieved a knowledge of libertarianism through any other source, right?
So it's not like, well, just before they came to FDR, they went to Ron Paul's site, So I'm all perfectly valid and perfectly granted as a basic set of realities which prove nothing.
Again, it's very tempting to look at this stuff and to say, well, a lot of people have achieved knowledge of more political realities through libertarian activism, and therefore libertarian activism works.
But that, of course, is exactly like saying a lot of people gain increases in their wages through a rise in the minimum wage, and therefore the minimum wage is effective at raising people's wages.
And that, of course, we understand is a fallacious argument.
What we need to do, of course, as I've sort of always cancelled with the Ron Paul thing, what we need to do is to look at The hidden costs, not the visible benefits.
So there's a couple of things that we need to look at.
And the first, of course, is to recognize that the people who would fall into this category, who may have been open and receptive to libertarian economic or political ideas, But who were not,
who are not religious, or who are, I don't know how to put it nicely, maybe, not xenophobic, not anti-illegal immigrants, not fundamentalists in that way, who are more scientific, and so on, that those people,
as I've mentioned before, will look at the libertarianism of Ron Paul, and we'll see that And we'll look at it as a kind of old-school or old-style form of bigotry, a form of fascism.
And this, of course, is not to say that our friend Ron Paul is a fascist, but there are certain elements of fascism in the Ron Paul platform.
Dislike of immigrants, a strong religiosity, a desire for economic freedom, But a contradiction of those principles in xenophobic or racist realms.
Again, I'm not calling him a fascist.
I'm just saying that you would look at that as somebody who would be a secular and possibly even socialist or atheist and so on.
You would look at that platform and you would have an impression of libertarianism that would cause you not only To reject libertarianism, but to strongly reject libertarianism, right? And those people we don't really see.
I mean, what we do see is we see anti-libertarian or anti-Ron Paul diatribe showing up on a wide variety of websites, but That is a cost.
It's the number of people who are driven away from the truth because of wildly illogical inconsistencies in the Ron Paul platform, right?
Around the realm of belief in the magic of the Constitution.
The veneration of the Founding Fathers, which almost has a certain form of racism to it.
I mean, whether you like it or not, the degree to which the founding of the American, quote, Republic, which was not a republic at all, but the fact that it was so founded in racism is the degree to which you venerate the Founding Fathers is the degree to which you ignore The slavery problem,
right? You can't venerate the Founding Fathers without saying that slavery at best was a blip of inconsistency or something like that.
So that's just something that more sophisticated historians look at the founding of the American Republic and see something very different from those who are Have this sort of Founding Father fetish, the Triple F. They see something very different, and I think that's important to understand.
It looks simplistic, you know, that America's just a heroic country that lost its way, as opposed to the basic reality that America was founded on a fairly wide variety of racist and prejudicial premises.
Which took a long time to be overturned and still remain problematic and so on.
So we just don't see those people.
We don't see all of those people who, as I said before, are scientific or rationalists or atheists who just look at the Ron Paul campaign and say, well, heavens to Betsy, here we have somebody who's a libertarian who also believes that Jesus rose from the dead and healed the sick.
And if you don't, if you find someone's beliefs bizarre, which, of course, libertarianism, even on the Ron Paul variety, would be considered by the mainstream, if you find one person's arguments, a person's arguments in one area bizarre,
but you can't really evaluate them because of a lack of knowledge, then what happens, just psychologically, and this is unconsciously, and I don't think it's a bad thing, what happens is you look at They're opinions in areas that you do have some knowledge and expertise in.
And you will tend to judge those people's...
Like, all the stuff that you don't know about, you will judge by the rationality of the person's beliefs in areas that you do know about.
That's quite...
So, I mean, I don't know about, you know, the...
Some of the conspiracy theories that float around, I don't really have much knowledge of them and I don't really care that much about them, but if I also find that the people who are kind of into these conspiracy theories also believe that a Jewish zombie came back from the dead to save humanity and the world is 6,000 years old,
then what I'm going to do is I'm going to judge The truth value of the beliefs that I don't know about according to the standards that they openly display with regards to the things that I do know about.
So, if somebody believes that the Earth is 6,000 years old, I'm not saying that Ron Paul does, but I'm just using this as an example, I don't know.
But if, you know, I know that evolution is valid, or, you know, even if you have questions about it, it at least is scientific in a way that Creationism is not, then I'm going to look at Ron Paul and say,
well, his truth criteria includes a belief in evolution, therefore he does not have a dedication to a scientific or rationalistic approach to the truth.
So why would I investigate his claims into libertarianism anymore, if I'm not that way inclined?
Anymore than I would investigate his claims into creationism.
I just know that creationism is false and nonsensical, so I'm not going to bother.
And in the same way, I'm not going to assume that he has any more truth or rigor with regards to truth with libertarianism than he does with With his creationism.
So that is hugely costly, and we don't know how many people are driven away from libertarianism by this stuff, right?
To use a silly example, but just to drive the point home, and I apologize for the repetition, but I'm going to assume that since this debate has gone on for so long, there is a fundamental misapprehension with regards to this stuff, so I do apologize for the repetition.
If I am an advertising campaign, and I put out some racist cartoon, or some racist advertisement implying that, I don't know, some group is shifty or whatever, right?
Then, of course, I am going to get a lot of hits from racist groups and a lot of praise from racist groups.
But it's going to be harder for me to track the people who are not coming and not praising because they're offended by what it is that I'm saying.
So, the problem with politics is that it simply requires In order to raise the kind of money to have any effect on the national stage in America, in particular, though this could be in other areas as well, is that America is such...
A fundamentally religious country in a way that, I mean, if you're not from America, it's really hard to process, right?
And all the European listeners are like, whoa, a bunch of, you know, medieval tokamatas.
And there's some truth in that.
But the problem is, with American politics, if you want to have any effect and raise any kind of money...
On the national stage, you simply cannot be an atheist.
You simply cannot be an atheist.
And what that means is that you cannot be a philosopher and a politician in America.
I mean, this is probably true in other areas as well, but you simply cannot be A philosopher and a politician.
And therefore, you have to take irrational or anti-rational stance in order to gain the kind of popularity that you need.
I mean, politicians are not leaders, they're followers, right?
They have to follow the prejudices of the crowd, otherwise they simply will not get money.
And we all know that Ron Paul appealed To a large number of fundamentalists, xenophobic, religious people.
And he could not have had any success if he had not taken that approach.
In politics.
I mean, I don't take that approach.
And I have, I would say, some considerable and positive success.
So, obviously, Christianity is a vile and repugnant cult.
It's full of hatred and irrationality and brutality and genocidal commandments and sick, twisted, evil weirdness.
So that's just the nature of the beast.
You can't be a politician in the States unless you are Christian, particularly in the realm of libertarianism.
So what has it cost us?
Well, the people who are most trained In science, the people who are most trained in reasoning are going to be the ones who are going to, by definition, be the ones who reject Ron Paul the most.
Now that doesn't mean that they're completely rational and so on, but what it means that is that we've lost the most secular and the most rational people right up front.
Right. Up. Front.
They have been driven away.
With all likelihood, never to return.
And they're going to come to a site like Free Domain Radio, and they're going to see that it is a pro-free market, and they're going to say, oh, it's like Ron Paul, you know, whatever, right?
They may get to the religion page, they may not.
But either way, there's a barrier.
There's a barrier to entry, so to speak.
And we don't see that.
Now, just as a...
I was going to say former businessman, but it's not like FDR isn't a business.
But as a businessman, I can tell you very clearly that if you spend 20 to 25 million dollars on a marketing campaign, you are damn well going to include in your budget a tracking of...
The costs and the tracking of the benefits.
You have a marketing campaign designed to generate a certain amount of business that you will include in your budget.
This is just basic responsible money spending.
You will include in your budget a way of proving your claims.
So what you do is you say, well, Ron Paul is supposed to Raise the positive view, or is supposed to increase the positive or expand the positive views of libertarianism through his political campaign.
Nobody seriously donated with the thought that he was going to get in, right?
So the fallback position is, well, he raises the profile of libertarianism, and that's a good thing.
But once it became...
Once it became clear that he wasn't going to win, there was still some money in the kitty, and they were still asking for money after it became mathematically impossible for him to win.
Now, if you were a responsible individual and had this money, they must have got at least another couple of hundred thousand dollars as a bare minimum.
Through these after-the-fact appeals for income, then it would have been clear by that point that the only way that the Ron Paul campaign could be considered successful is if it had raised or expanded the Positive perceptions of libertarianism in the population as a whole.
And it would not cost more than fifty to a hundred thousand dollars, I would imagine, to pursue a very large-scale survey of Americans to say to them, have you heard of Ron Paul?
What is your perception?
of what Ron Paul represents.
What would you call it?
If you call it Ron Paulism, that doesn't really do libertarianism any good, right?
And would you say that your perception of Ron Paul, or of libertarianism, or whatever, is better, worse, or about the same?
And also What would you say, have your beliefs changed as a result of exposure to the Ron Paul message or the Ron Paul campaign?
Because if no one's beliefs changed, then it was just a massive and self-referential circle jerk where you all preached to the choir and didn't change anyone's mind, but rather merely reinforced the beliefs of people, the beliefs that people already had, the beliefs that people already had.
And that would be a responsible post-mortem to prove that the Ron Paul campaign did achieve what it said it was going to achieve, a positive increase in the perception of the value of libertarianism.
What do you remember from the Ron Paul campaign?
If the only thing that you remember is that he was anti-abortion, pro-states rights, anti-immigration, and against evolution, or disbelief in evolution, and that would be, of course, an unmitigated disaster for the Ron Paul campaign.
It would have basically been a way to spread ideas which are false.
If the ideas that people remember from the Ron Paul campaign are those ideas which are the least credible and the most ridiculous, Then, clearly, that would be a very bad result from a philosophical standpoint.
Because the funny thing is...
It's only sort of funny, right?
But the funny thing is that Ron Paul and Ron Paul supporters all claim to be, for the most part, kind of pro-market, right?
You know, we like the discipline of business.
You know, we really don't like these government programs that claim all of these positive benefits and never submit themselves to the discipline of proof, right?
So they get really mad at the war on drugs because it's supposed to, you know, they say, well...
The war on drugs says that it's supposed to reduce drug use, but it doesn't, and it just keeps trundling along nonetheless, and the fact that they never really review objectively their success and make decisions.
You know, the welfare state says it's supposed to help with poverty, but it doesn't.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
They really dislike the naturalization that's supposed to protect us from illegal immigrants, and it doesn't, and, you know, they really dislike the fact that Government programs operate outside the discipline of the free market and objective feedback from, you know, consumers and objective review of the successes that they claim.
And you see...
You sort of see where I'm going with this here.
Do you get the irony?
The massive irony that what's happened, of course, is that the Ron Paul campaign...
has commissioned, as far as I know, not one single study after Ron Paul was fated to not win to prove the claim that they make that Ron Paul has increased people's positive understanding and exposure towards libertarianism.
Now why, since that is their claim to fame, why would they not want to prove that?
Right? I mean, skeptics like me could be very easily...
I still wouldn't be a big fan of the Ron Paul campaign, but at least I would accept the claim that Ron Paul has brought more people towards a positive understanding, not of the conclusions, but of the ability to think, right?
I mean, it doesn't really do much good to the world if someone says, yeah, the income tax is bad, right?
Why? Well, I don't like it, and it was on Ron Paul's website.
But that's not... I mean, we want to teach people the methodology, not the conclusions, right?
So that they can think for themselves.
That's certainly the point of philosophy.
So, you know, we would do these...
You know, well, I heard about Ron Paul and I got into this, I learned to think about that, read a bunch of stuff, and, you know, can now think for myself in this realm, and so on, right?
If it's educational, let's actually educate people, not just give them conclusions and have them believe them for prejudicial reasons.
That's not education, that's indoctrination.
And, to my knowledge, and again, if you've heard of them and I've missed them, I just, I'm sure that...
At least it would have been on the Lou Rockwell site.
I do get that daily email.
But they haven't done a damn thing to prove their claims, even though a proof of these claims would be enormously beneficial.
And that is very telling.
That is very telling.
If you make claims which are relatively easy to substantiate, You could do a cheap poll.
You could do an internet poll. Or maybe not internet poll.
Lots of Ron Paul hackers around.
But relatively easy to substantiate and would cost a tiny fraction of a single percentage point of the entire amount of money spent on the Ron Paul situation or the Ron Paul candidacy.
But, you know, they steadfastly refuse or avoid These polls.
Why? Why?
Why, why, why, why, why?
When they claim that government programs should subject themselves to objective measures and that you can't just say the government is achieving its ends but you need to prove it, why won't they submit themselves to the same rigor?
Well, because...
Well, do we even need to say it?
Because I don't believe that it's true.
Or if it is true or false, it doesn't really matter, which means that the people who say, the people who say, well, see, Ron Paul has just brought more people to liberty, without any proof, are merely indicating that they have not learned how to think, but they have only learned how to cheer and how to assert, without need for all that bothersome proof.
And that, of course, is by far the biggest indication that the Ron Paul campaign has been a complete disaster.
Because it has not taught people how to think critically and rationally.
It has merely taught them to cheer for a team that they like.
And that is far from, in fact, is quite the opposite of the purpose of Philosophy.
When I'm constantly and annoyingly nagging people not to accept the damn thing that anybody says, but rather to think for themselves using reason and evidence.
So, I think that aspect of things is pretty important to understand.
Now the final point that I make, and of course you could go on and on, but this is just, you know, I just want to have a reference for people to understand at least where a rational and empirical thinker is coming from with regards to these claims that are put forward.
People are going to put claims forward without any proof, and rather in the presence of evidence to the contrary, which is that they want to put forward claims without proof, That's exactly the same as religion, right?
It's just believing in shit because you want to, because it feels comfortable, because it is pleasant to some degree, right?
Fulfills some psychological need.
Now, the other thing is that if it's true, the theory that FDR has been working with for the past couple of years, if the theory that the state is an effect of the family,
Thanks again, Christina. If that theory is true, then the Ron Paul campaign is a complete disaster at that level as well, right?
Because if the state is in effect to the family and all that is done or proposed or focused on in the Ron Paul candidacy is the The attempt to control or mitigate the effects rather than to go to the cause, and if the cause is the family, but the solution is considered to be political action, then it's the wrong solution too.
If that is the case, then it is completely, it's worse than futile, it's actually completely counterproductive.
It's like trying to teach, you know, let's say you've got some village doctor, you've got some village...
Everybody's dying of cholera, and you prescribe a voodoo, a completely futile voodoo, quote, cure, then what happens is that people think there's a cure, they stop looking for the actual cause, and they take this cure, which only actually ends up spreading cholera, which has been the history of libertarianism for the past 80 years or so, right now.
The political approach has done nothing to reduce the size and power of the government that is at all empirically measurable.
So if you recognize that you don't have the cure, then you will actually start looking for a different approach to the problem.
So with cholera, what happens is you actually start looking into the cleanliness of the water supply, and this of course requires a period where you accept Inactivity, and you reject the possibility of a, quote, cure that doesn't work, and you start to do research into the actual cause.
Now, once you find the cause, you can clean up the water supply, and bingo bango bongo, people end up doing a whole lot better because you're actually dealing with the cause, not just trying to prescribe the wrong thing for the effect.
So, political action, as I've said before, creates the illusion of a solution.
It does not create a solution.
And the illusion of a solution is worse than no solution, because when you have the illusion of a solution, you stop looking.
And that's not good at all.
So, from that standpoint, It's also highly negative.
Let's say, I mean, if we just, it's the opportunity cost, too.
If it's true that the state is an effect of the family, and maybe it's not true, of course, right?
I'm perfectly happy to hear alternate theories as to why libertarianism hasn't worked.
You know, let's put our heads together and recognize that we can never sail the ship into the harbor, but instead we keep Heading out to sea, which is where we don't want to be, let's, you know, let's hear alternatives.
Absolutely. But let's not continue to pretend that that which has not worked for 80 years is going to suddenly magically start working, which has done the opposite of working for 80 years, is going to magically start working.
Let's stop doing these voodoo dances and think that we're curing cholera.
You know, maybe it's not the water supply.
Maybe it's the air supply. Maybe it's another 80s cheese band.
Who knows? But...
The point I'm trying to make is that we have to stop digging ourselves in the same hole.
So what's happened, of course, is that 25 million dollars has been spent pursuing a, quote, cure that hasn't worked.
And to the degree that it has worked, let's say that people have got a more positive Belief in political libertarianism through the Ron Paul campaign.
Can't be exactly anti-political because it was a political campaign, all right?
So, but let's say that people have gotten a more positive response or belief in political libertarianism.
Well, that doesn't do us a whole lot of good if political libertarianism doesn't work, right?
It's kind of a core aspect of what it is that we're We're talking about if political libertarianism does not work, then reaching people through the Rompol candidacy and getting them interested in political activism is also not going to work.
It's going to just basically get more people interested in voodoo dances to solve cholera, which doesn't solve the problem.
And what has happened...
Excuse me.
Sorry about your ears. What has happened is that People have spent large amounts of money and invested a huge amount of personal and emotional energy into something which doesn't work.
And in so doing, what are the opportunity costs?
Well, it's like hitchhiking versus walking.
If you spend... A day, let's say you've got a journey and take your day to walk and you spend a day hitchhiking, it just becomes that much harder to walk, right?
Once you've invested in the wrong solution, it becomes harder to...
It's a sunk cost fallacy, right?
It becomes harder to then change your direction and invest in a positive solution, a working solution.
So it's invested a lot of people with a lot of time and money into politics which don't work and it's prevented them.
And now I would suggest that they will actively avoid searching for...
Non-political solutions.
Real solutions. Solutions that are personal.
solutions that you can actually bring into bear in your actual life.
And for me, it's sort of like if I were running a, I don't know, some sort of agency to help the poor, some sort of agency to help the poor, what happened was some fly-by-night operator came out
and I was genuinely helping the poor, though it was slow and painful, and some fly-by-night operator came up with a sort of quick fix, or quick cure, if that makes any sense, for poverty or whatever it is that I was trying to cheat, and everyone went stampeding after that thing, and...
You know, then people could say, well, but they're interested in the problem, they're going to come back and see Europe, but again, there's no proof of any of that, and what I do see, of course, is that 25 million dollars were spent trying to make people free, and it didn't work at all, and there's every piece of evidence that it did the opposite of working, and there's also, there are many people untroubled by that, right?
It seems to be like, well, okay, well, you know, let's move on, right?
Which means that...
I don't know.
To me, continuing to ask for money when you know it's not going to work, there's something kind of sleazy about that.
Like, if you know your product doesn't work, continuing to sell it is just...
Kind of sleazy, in my opinion.
There's something pretty dishonorable about that.
I mean, if you tell people that you're doing the Ron Paul thing to educate about libertarianism, then that's one thing.
But if you tell people that you're doing it because he's going to win, when, of course, he's not.
Every Paul says the same thing, mathematical impossibility.
If you continue to say, give us money so that we can take a last run at the White House, that's just sleazy.
It's just dishonorable.
But this, of course, is where politics...
Always leads. So yeah, I just, I look at this money, that money, time, effort, energy, that has been poured into the Ron Paul candidacy.
Yeah, I mean, hey, if I had had a tiny percentage of that advertised free domain radio, we could be a hell of a lot further along the road of actually achieving real freedom.
And if people had taken that money that they had donated to Ron Paul campaign, And had instead invested it in their own lives, in therapy, in self-knowledge, in wisdom, in books, in learning, and all that kind of stuff.
Well, that would have been a whole lot better too, because it would have actually achieved something.
And last but not least, and I don't claim to be any kind of expert in this area, although...
It certainly could be said that I was right kind of first, that it was not going to be positive for freedom.
But nobody's really given me any credit for that and said, you know, Steph, over two years ago you talked about how this was not going to work and so on, but that's okay.
I mean, people have a tough time. With that kind of stuff for sure, giving credit where credit is due.
But the sort of last thing that I would say, or I guess I would say that I've, you know, had quite a lot of experience with the Ron Paul types.
So after I put out rational critiques of the Ron Paul position, then I got hundreds and hundreds of responses.
Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of responses, probably totaling about a thousand when it was all put together.
And these were people who were supporters of Ron Paul, right?
So there may be some other area or group or set of individuals who have had some other experience with Ron Paul supporters that is relevant in some manner, and I certainly would be happy to hear from those people or about that situation or experience.
I'm in a somewhat unique position of having It probably is more than a thousand if you include the board, email, inbox, comments on my blog, comments on the YouTube videos, which is the biggest source.
And, of course, the purpose, as I said before, is not to introduce people to Ron Paul as a solution, but to introduce people to challenging thinking as a methodology, reason and evidence as a methodology, so that those people can learn how to think for themselves, right? That is the purpose. It's not to get people repeating a piece of propagandistic mantra and any repetition, even of 2 plus 2, which is made without understanding, is propaganda.
The purpose is to get people to think.
And I put forward some challenging and original critiques of the Ron Paul position.
Just to take one example, my argument that...
The government exists to serve special interests, and all that Ron Paul supporters need to do is to prove that they can reverse that using smaller and more manageable organizations.
I think I used a pro-Hispanic group and said infiltrate that, or infiltrate the KKK and turn it to a pro-black group and so on, and you can prove how it works before you take on something as massive and abstract as the federal government.
Well, that's a good argument, without a doubt, right?
And, of course, I don't know of one Ron Paul supporter who has taken that approach or who has found evidence of that happening, who has sent me articles or links, or who has managed to infiltrate one of these groups, turn it around, and show that the theory...
All that happens is people got mad at and basically pissed all over my videos.
You know, hundreds after hundreds after hundreds of hostile, negative, aggressive, vituperative, vicious, ugly...
Responses. Personal insults, swearing, accusations of evil, corruption of being a disinformation agent.
These are the people that I saw who were for Ron Paul.
They couldn't think even a bit.
Not even a bit.
And, of course, it is these people who are held aloft as the shining gold nuggets that the Ron Paul campaign has sifted from the detritus of the mainstream intellectual positions.
These ugly, vicious, deliverance-area, retarded ass-clowns are held up to me As the best that spending 25 million dollars can do.
As the best that spending 25 million dollars can do.
We spent 25 million dollars to bring these people into the camp of liberty.
And boy, you just couldn't find conceivably a better use.
For $25 million, could you?
Well, I respectfully do a hell of a lot more than disagree.
If you're on the receiving end of these crazy-ass, trigger-happy nutjobs who think that swearing at you in caps is the sin qua non of intellectual debate and that these are the people that we're bending The largest set of resources that freedom has ever claimed to have at its disposal,
that we are getting these people, that these are the constituents that we are attracting, and by God, they are.
I did not have, despite repeated offers, I did not have a single Ron Paul advocate Come on and be willing to debate the facts with me, to debate the theories, to provide rebuttals to my arguments despite repeated offers.
This just didn't come about.
So they don't want to debate, they don't want to reason, they don't want to respond rationally, they just want to shit all over your videos and call you an asshole.
And this is the magnificent glory this fabulous herd of intellectual and moral heroes This is what we're supposed to fall to our knees in gratitude for reaching.
These people.
And this is what they're like on the internet.
Can you imagine what sort of wife-beating, pig-headed people they're going to be personally in their individual lives?
What's going to happen with these people when they meet other people and talk about freedom?
These crazy-ass rednecks, right?
Well, they're just going to discredit the movement entirely.
It's not even Ron Paul's positions, it's the Ron Paul supporters.
And they don't care about freedom.
They're just angry, bitter loners.
They don't care about freedom, because if they cared about freedom, they would recognize that a lot of people who are critical of Ron Paul, or a lot of people who are curious about Ron Paul, tens of thousands of them came to see my videos, and what they're going to do, of course, is they're going to judge the Ron Paul supporters By the quality of the responses to my criticisms.
If they at all cared about Ron Paul, or at all cared about freedom, at all cared about moving a difficult agenda forward, which even they would admit the Ron Paul agenda is a difficult agenda, even if it's just the anti-income tax stuff and so on.
If they really cared about freedom at all, they would recognize that they should be on their best behavior in a public forum.
You know, that they should offer to correct, that they should offer to debate, that they should That they should provide facts, that they should provide counter-arguments, that they should...
I wasn't rude.
I never called them assholes.
But if they come on and become webcourage, all caps, internet douchebags, then all they're doing is completely discrediting the movement that they claim they're devoting themselves to move forward.
So, of course, clearly, these people have nothing.
I mean, they have no interest whatsoever in freedom or even particularly in Ron Paul.
You don't come onto a public forum and portray yourself as a complete bunch of sub-humanoid, troll-based lunatics and then wonder why Ron Paul doesn't have more credibility.
This is just enraged acting out.
It's not people with any kind of wisdom or intelligence or maturity.
And these, of course, these Asshole, troll, lunatics are...
They're all waved in front of me saying, well look, look at how many people we brought to freedom.
Well, I gotta tell you, it ain't about quantity.
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