A Second Hand Conjecture

Happened into a video on YouTube alleging that Ronpaul is actually a “luciferian” member of the dastardly and super-secret Illuminati / Freemason / Roman Catholic / CFR world conspiracy. Many Ronpaulists of course support Paul because they believe him to be battling these fictional conspiracies and secret societies. Which schizophrenic delusion will prevail? Who cares. It’s enormously amusing to see all the same.

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What’s this? Bob Barr wanted Ronpaul as his veep? Take your eyes off the Libertarian Party for a minute and you miss a lot of foolishness. Our old friend Steve Newton fills us in on the amusing drama that ensued (Ronpaul said no BTW).

Now, I had been under the impression that Barr already had a vice presidential candidate and it turns out I was right. Evidently Barr sought to dump Wayne Allyn Root for Ronpaul, or Root dumped himself in honor of Ronpaul. Apparently Root had been controversial within the party for his support of the very uncontroversial war effort in Afghanistan.

Sometimes the LP can look like a bloody civil war in Lilliput, fought over possession of a discarded matchstick.

Alas, it also seems some Ronpaulists are now accusing Barr of being a Republican double agent, sent to destroy the Libertarian Party. As if Libertarians ever needed any assistance in doing that. Where Ronpaulists go paranoia follows though, and a faction within the LP has begun an effort to get the Libertarian National Committee to un-endorse its candidates for being clandestine conservative operatives.

So very LP.

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The explosion of enthusiasm for Palin on just about every conservative blog and media outlet has apparently gone unnoticed at the DailyKos, which is predicting that Sarah represents a divisive force, who will soon fracture and ultimately destroy the Republican party. Hmm.

Now, there has always been a tendency among ideological people to retreat to fantasy in moments of peak political crisis, when the ideological narrative they’ve been following suddenly runs aground of some protruding reef of reality, but this is almost too much. I’m not sure it’s even possible to be more comprehensively mistaken in a single political assessment.

In truth, Palin is of course the ultimate force for unification and it’s why she or someone like her was so desperately needed by McCain and the Republicans. How much of a unifier is she? When the neoconservatives and Ronpaulists like the selection, if you are familiar with the party beyond name, you need say no more.

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(photo: companyink)

After writing about the Ronpaulist fear mongering of Jordan Page, and then reading Lance’s splendid post on the latest contheorist pandering of Glenn Greenwald, a common insight has reoccurred to me: the absurd amount of cognitive dissonance conditional to political paranoia.

This is something Christopher Hitchens explored quite adeptly last year at the “Four Horsemen” chat with his three fellow atheist luminaries, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris (video, skip to 8:17). In a response to a point by Dennett, Hitchens argues that the stress of cognitive dissonance is the inevitable state deriving from belief in political unreality, and furthermore, that this condition exists and persists on purely survival grounds (seems true in miniature too).

I’d add that it’s the compartmentalism that political paranoia necessitates in an open society that is the most conspicuous betrayal of its essential cynicism. Something especially apparent when you run into it face to face.
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Jordan Page (who is a kind of Ronpaulist Joan Baez) reflects on the “Revolution March,” a July 12th Ron Paul protest rally in Washington DC, in part organized by Adam Kokesh (who of late believes the Washington police are involved in a clandestine conspiracy against him).

Now, I grew up in the libertarian movement such as it was. Although I no longer consider myself a libertarian out of respect for the philosophy, I think I knew it well. My libertarianism was of the rightish sort, but fundamentally a movement for liberty through reason. A movement of the great economists and political philosophers of the Austrian School and the University of Chicago. The movement of Mises and Friedman. But this paranoid, revolutionary rubbish presented by Page as libertarianism, is utterly unrecognizable to me.

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You’ve probably noticed that the catchphrase “last chance” (often in all caps) conspicuously appears again and again in the arguments of many Ronpaulists. Indeed, the phrase is repeated by them almost as frequently as Ronpaul’s name itself, as a kind of bludgeoning mantra. For instance: “Dr. Ron Paul is America’s LAST CHANCE against the Illuminati and CFR shadow government!” After seeing the phrase a couple of times, you may have wondered what exactly comes next on the Ronpaulist agenda, now that their last chance has been rejected by the public. Well, I found one possible answer in a graphic over at the Economic Populist Forum. Here’s a still of the relevant slide:

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One of the sadder aspects of Ronpaul’s candidacy is how many people (who can barely afford to do so), have been convinced to give well over their means to his campaign. My friend Jason has a co-worker who he believes took out a second mortgage solely to give more money to Ronpaul, convinced that he was “America’s LAST CHANCE!!!” A commenter on a Vaughn Ververs post at CBS News isn’t sympathetic to their plight, but he does tell the truth: “LOL. Ron Paul pulled off the perfect swindle of his fawning disciples. He took them for $30 million, most of which he did not spend, and now will two-step on back to Texas with the rest of the loot.” What do you suppose he will do with that enormous windfall? We might soon see “Director of Ronpaul Institute” appearing under Lew Rockwell’s name.

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The ever entertaining Girl in Short Shorts, on why she’s again wasting her vote on the Libertarian Party: “If a restaurant gives you a choice between eating food laced with rat poison or with arsenic, you might want to eat somewhere else, even if it’s a long drive, and even if the new restaurant hasn’t gotten great reviews.” She’s supporting the crunchy Ronpaulist “Peace Driven Candidate,” Christine Smith.

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It looks like the revelations of racism and conspiratorial paranoia in The New Republic may have had a profound effect on the once fanatical Ron Paul movement. The Girl in Short Shorts notes something: “Now today, for the first time in months, Ron Paul is not among the top five searches on Technorati.” Now that’s news.

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