Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired by Brian Doherty

Author:Brian Doherty [Doherty, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, Biography, National, United States, Political Science, Political Process, Executive Branch, American Government, History, General
ISBN: 9780062114815
Google: 9bPDwBLTj34C
Goodreads: 13425337
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2012-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Among the Paulistas

Ron Paul people are not exactly a different breed, but they are a distinct one. Their variety in socioeconomic status, original political outlook before discovering Ron, and choices of how to move through the world has been much noted. Students, housewives, street anarchists, soldiers, small-business people, even government employees have all found themselves dedicating their lives, fortune, and sacred honor to pushing the message of Ron Paul.

They tend to forge their own world of Ron Paul information, getting news and news recommendations from the Daily Paul and Ron Paul Forums and LewRockwell.com and from each other’s Facebook feeds and blogs. There is a heavy sense that the “mainstream media” isn’t going to give them the news and analysis they value or trust; this perception is fueled by, among other things, the media’s treatment of their man Ron and their ideas. It is widely believed, as Jon Stewart made comic hay from, that the media are more or less deliberately blacking out Ron Paul. His $3 million moneybomb (spread over three days, not the usual one day) was built around this idea in October 2011; Paulistas began turning the name Ron Paul into an unreadable black bar on their own sites as an ironic comment.

The Ron Paul Revolution is about more than Ron Paul—as Ron will himself insist both explicitly and in his use of the words us and we and our ideas in public. It’s also about the people who want you to know about Ron Paul. I spent some time seeking out Paul people in places where they gathered just as people, rather than just to hear or show support for Ron Paul.

Ron Paul fans are everywhere. They are inclined to try to be prepared for everything and anything. Far from utopian—an accusation often tossed at those who believe our country should have far less government—Paulites trend more toward the dystopian, nurturing a dark Paul-buttressed vision of a “normal” world far more fragile, far more ready to break apart in an ugly mess, than most typical Americans recognize.

Overspending, overborrowing, overintervening, overinflating: in Paul’s vision, all these things mean a looming crisis, one so severe and disconcerting that the debt ceiling mess in the summer of 2011 was merely a sanitized preview that glided discreetly over the parts too intense and harrowing for general audiences. As longtime Republican hand Drew Ivers, campaign chairman for Ron Paul in Iowa, had a habit of telling the crowds at Ron Paul gatherings, the crisis was not something we should fear will fall upon our children or grandchildren; we are in it now.

It thus made perfect sense that I would find a concentration of Ron Paul fans and interested parties in early June at a festival on the water called Ephemerisle, dedicated to figuring out how to escape the travails and oppression of modern civilization through particularly colorful means. This was the third such gathering. It began in 2009 as a sort of proof-of-concept experiment sponsored by the Seasteading Institute, a

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