Obviously, I wouldn’t vote for anyone. As an anarchist and someone who is generally conscious of how America, democracy, and plutarchy works, I know that my vote is irrelevant. I also think that it is unethical and counter-productive to society to vote for the lesser of two evils; after all, the lesser of two evils is still evil. Representative democracy simply does not work. It has failed us, the people, regardless of our political party affiliations, for over a century now and I am baffled that we still so mindlessly support it. In the case of Ron Paul, he has become very popular amongst voters, particularly the college youths, thanks to the Internet. He went viral like a meme and like a video on YouTube entertained people without them ever asking what the source was. In my generation of pseudo-political consciousness, active laziness, blissful ignorance, and a constant search for easy solutions, it seems my peers have chosen Ron Paul as their new Band Aid. Of course, they did so without research and, at best, with plenty of compromise.

Fact is, Ron Paul is just another politician. Politicians have never and will never totally defend the people. What’s most startling about Ron Paul’s popularity, especially amongst my peers, is that his platform consists of two main concerns: 1.) a strict adherence to the Constitution, an archaic political document that was never perfect and certainly doesn’t apply to the context of today’s issues and situations; and 2.) stingy federal budgeting and fiscal responsibility. I had no idea that my generation was so concerned with fiscal issues and the Constitution! I thought my generation wanted affordable or free health care, gay rights, environmental protection, and our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan! The funny thing is, Ron Paul at his core is just like every other politician we’ve ever had: he is obsessed with an archaic doctrine of beliefs and rules and is obsessed with money and preserving capitalism. If we absolutely must live within a democracy here in this country, you would think we would need someone who will fight for and defend our rights and pave the way towards a sustainable and bright future for our species, not just another suit and tie tax attorney who is old, out of touch, and socially conservative.

Below are a few important reasons why I personally do not and cannot support Ron Paul. I think you should take them all into heavy consideration before forming an opinion of him, especially if you already consider yourself a supporter of him as a potential voter.

First and foremost, let me clarify two things:
1.) I do not believe that, even if Ron Paul were a worthwhile candidate for president, he could actually win this thing. While he may be “just another politician” in the grand scheme of things, he’s also adamantly against the Federal Reserve and promises to abolish it if president. In America, elections are bought and sold and play out exactly as planned the same way any other scripted, televised event would. These political curve balls are shown to us to create the illusion of choice. But have these underdogs ever won? No. There’s a reason for that: The Federal Reserve owns this country.
2.) I do agree with some of what Ron Paul believes in. I totally support his belief in a more limited government and especially his promise to abolish the Federal Reserve. However, as I’ve already said, voting for the lesser of two (or six or eight) evils is still evil. I absolutely refuse to support anyone short of perfect. I would never be able to find within my conscience the ability to do so. If we, the people, responded this way and refused to vote until we finally had candidates that actually were chosen by us in the first place, maybe things could change.

Now.

* Ron Paul is very likely a racist.
Other than the fact that his son, Rand Paul (senator of Kentucky) has several ties to white supremacists and the groups they belong to, as well as other fringe right-wing extremists who harbor racist tendencies, Ron Paul’s newsletters have been the subject of controversy since the ’90s. Below are quotes from these newsletters…
(# = confirmed, admitted statements written by Paul; & = claimed to have been written by his “ghostwriters”)

# “If you have ever been robbed by a black teen-aged male, you know how unbelievably fleet-footed they can be.”
# “Opinion polls consistently show that only about 5 percent of blacks have sensible political opinions, i.e. support the free market, individual liberty and the end of welfare and affirmative action.”
# “Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the ‘criminal justice system,’ I think we can safely assume that 95 percent of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.”
# “[Although] we are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.”
# “We don’t think a child of 13 should be held responsible as a man of 23. That’s true for most people, but black males age 13 who have been raised on the streets and who have joined criminal gangs are as big, strong, tough, scary and culpable as any adult and should be treated as such.”
& “Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy that Ronald Reagan approved it! We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day.”
& “Listen to a black radio talk show in any major city. The racial hatred makes a KKK rally look tame.”
& “[Y]ou’ve probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos.”

Ron Paul has also negatively criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landmark move towards the end of institutional racial discrimination in this country that allowed blacks to vote, go to school, and eat in public places of business with whites. According to Paul, “[It] not only violated the Constitution and reduced individual liberty; it also failed to achieve its stated goals of promoting racial harmony and a color-blind society.” Because of how extremely he adheres to his libertarian beliefs, he believes that it directly infringed on the individual liberties of Americans by, for example, federally forcing business owners to allow people who weren’t white into their establishments. His son has also come out with the exact same sentiments and both of them have stuck to them. Basically, they believe in individual liberties to the fullest extent… even if those individuals use their liberties to oppress another’s.

He has also spoken highly of David Duke, a former state representative and presidential runner, as well as a former grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/opinion-ron-paul-is-a-white-supremacist/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070512114222/http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/aol-metropolitan/96/05/23/paul.html
http://newsone.com/nation/casey-gane-mccalla/ron-pauls-racist-newsletters-revealed/
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/269671/20111219/ron-paul-2012-racist-newsletters.htm
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul188.html
http://www.tnr.com/downloads/November1990.pdf

* Ron Paul is anti-abortion and will not protect a woman’s right to choose.
Despite the fact that Ron Paul usually avoids divulging his personal, honest perspectives on almost all social issues during campaigns and uses the libertarian philosophy of state-by-state legislation to abdicate any responsibility to protect the rights of all human beings, he certainly still fights in his spare time to try and end abortion at all levels, even by federally means.

In 1981, he wrote as a member of the group Libertarians For Life, “Pro-life libertarians have a vital task to perform: to persuade the many abortion-supporting libertarians of the contradiction between abortion and individual liberty; and to sever the mistaken connection in many minds between individual freedom and the ‘right’ to extinguish individual life.”

As an obstetrician and gynecologist who has delivered over 4,000 babies in his career, he often uses his experience to validate his stance against abortion. Telling a story of one time accidentally witnessing a late-term abortion, he claimed, “It was pretty dramatic for me to see a two-and-a-half-pound baby taken out crying and breathing and put in a bucket.” He says this despite the fact that partial-birth abortion procedures kill the fetus before it passes its head out of the woman’s body and induced labor is almost always in the case of life-threatening pregnancies or for fetuses who died in-utero.

He has reintroduced a bill called the Sanctity of Life Act several times, first in 2005 and then again in 2007 and 2009. The bill would have defined life and legal personhood as beginning at conception, regardless of the fetus’s, “health, defect, or condition of dependency.” This would have given each state the right to completely ban all abortion. Even though he has stated that, “the federal government has no authority whatsoever to involve itself in the abortion issue,” he voted in favor of the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2000 and 2003, which goes as far as saying in its statute that partial-birth abortion, “is never medically necessary and should be prohibited.” He himself has called it a, “barbaric procedure.”

http://www.dailypaul.com/157342/ron-paul-being-pro-life-is-necessary-to-defend-liberty
http://www.ronpaul.com/on-the-issues/abortion/
http://www.washingtonwatch.com/bills/show/110_HR_1094.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/vance/vance133.html

* Ron Paul has exhibited homophobic tendencies and will do nothing to support or protect equal marriage rights for homosexuals.
Aside from his appearance in Bruno where he looks literally terrified of the character long before he pulls his pants down, and his subsequent reaction of, “He’s queer as the blazes!” Ron Paul has made it clear that he will not do a single thing to ensure equal rights for homosexuals. Again, he will use state-by-state legislation to cop out of defending the rights of all Americans. While many will still side with his extreme libertarian dedication, we must all realize that to allow the discrimination of human beings based on their skin color, orientation, or gender is to be complicit in it.

In one of his newsletters, a column entitled “The Pink House” (get it?) ranted, “What an outrage that, for the first time in our nation’s history, the organized forces of perversion were feted in the White House…. I miss the closet. Homosexuals, not to speak of the rest of society, were far better off when social pressure forced them to hide their activities. They could also not be as promiscuous. Is it any coincidence that the AIDS epidemic developed after they came ‘out of the closet,’ and started hyper-promiscuous sodomy? I don’t believe so, medically or morally.” Later that year, this quote also showed up in his newsletter: “Many Americans belong to the Smithsonian Institution, which is charged with collecting artifacts that reflect the spirit of American history. But now homosexuals are being asked to contribute memorabilia of their struggle for ‘civil rights’. The Smithsonian is planning an exhibit to advance the gay political agenda, which is uniformly statist.” Again in 1994, a column in his newsletter said, “[G]ays in San Francisco do not obey the dictates of good sense. They have stopped practicing ‘safe sex.’ … First, these men don’t really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners. These conditions do not make one’s older years the happiest. Second, because sex is the center of their lives, they want it to be as pleasurable as possible, which means unprotected sex. Third, they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.” When brought up, Ron Paul has claimed that these don’t exist or that he didn’t write them, once again laying blame on ghostwriters for his newsletter.

He spoke in support of the Defense of Marriage Act, favoring the way it supported state-by-state legislation of gay marriage; under this act, a gay marriage recognized as legal in one state does not have to and will not be recognized in a state where gay marriage is illegal. It also, at a federal level, recognizes the union of marriage as, “between one man and one woman.” The only reason Ron Paul did not vote for this act was because, at the time of its admission, he was not a member of Congress. According to Paul, recognizing gay marriage at a federal level would be, “an act of social engineering profoundly hostile to liberty,” although, apparently, recognizing same-sex marriage at a federal level is okay. In a televised interview, when asked if gays should be allowed to get married, he responded, “[T]hey should be allowed to do whatever they want and call it whatever they want, [as long as] they don’t expect to impose their relationship on somebody else. They can’t make me personally accept what they do.”

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/01/08/433066/-Ron-Pauls-Racist-Newsletters-Revealed
http://www.tnr.com/downloads/June1990.pdf
http://www.tnr.com/downloads/december1990.pdf
http://www.tnr.com/downloads/january1994.pdf
http://web.archive.org/web/20070207225148/http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congrec2004/cr093004.htm
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul207.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul160.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJz81lAwY0M

* Ron Paul does not believe in global climate change.
Despite the fact that the vast majority of scientists support the theory of global warming and global climate change, Ron Paul does not and has been open about not believing in it. He considers himself a “free-market environmentalist”, which essentially means that he believes that environmental destruction caused by a business is the business’s responsibility to fix, not the government’s, and that nature is all just “property”. While he sees polluters as “aggressors”, visualizing nature, and hence the ecosystems and land contained within it, is detrimental and unsympathetic towards nature and the environment as a whole. It is not a pragmatic means of viewing the world as we know it. In fact, it is the capitalistic redefining of nature and natural resources that has systematically destroyed it over the last couple of decades. His plan for preventing or limiting pollution? Making it more costly for the business to do so; basically, making it a tad more inconvenient for businesses to harm the environment. He also opposes favoring one energy over another and believes that capitalism will naturally phase out the least popular and sustainable method; a lax means of approaching the inevitability of reaching peak oil without even beginning the transition towards a more sustainable fuel. Of course, this not only plays in appropriately with his libertarian beliefs, but also with the fact that he simply does not believe that we are in danger.

When asked in an interview if he, “considered climate change a major problem threatening civilization,” he responded with a laugh, “No. I think war and financial crises and big governments marching into our homes and elimination of habeas corpus — those are immediate threats. We’re about to lose our whole country and whole republic! If we can be declared an enemy combatant and put away without a trial, then that’s going to affect a lot of us a lot sooner than the temperature going up.” Unlike government and laws, the environment isn’t a human abstraction. Without the planet to sustain us in the first place, we can’t have tyranny or freedom. Along with this, he believes, of all sources, nuclear power is, “the safest form of energy we have.” His voting record has done nothing in favor of environmental protection or sustainability, either, voting “no” on just about any legislation that would have federally regulated or put a stop on corporate pollution.

Ron Paul has been quoted as saying that global warming is, “the greatest hoax that has been around in many, many years.”

http://www.ronpaul2012.com/the-issues/energy/
http://web.archive.org/web/20070927093141/http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=154
http://www.grist.org/article/paul1
http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Ron_Paul_Energy_+_Oil.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hCc5Gk1nops#t=416s

* Ron Paul is a hypocrite.
Perhaps a lot more consistent than most politicians, but a hypocritical politician nonetheless. Putting someone on a pedestal because they’re not as bad as the majority of something is like choosing prison over homelessness.

An earmark is funding from a bill that is allocated toward a specific project or cause. Even though Ron Paul vocally opposes federal spending on most things, he has had no issue in his career as a politician of requesting earmarks to fund things, even the arbitrary (such as for a Texas shrimp company and the renovation of an old movie theater). In 2007 alone, he requested $400 million in earmarks, some of it from bills he voted against. Now, my problem isn’t with his government spending, it’s with his hypocrisy. Based on the staunch standards of Ron Paul, Ron Paul would likely not support what Ron Paul has done with earmarks if he wasn’t Ron Paul.

He voted in favor of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, which also permitted electronic surveillance of Americans without a warrant.

http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2007_4483248
http://web.archive.org/web/20070625083730/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2007/tst061807.htm
http://www.dailypaul.com/1135/ron-paul-earmarksno-pork-here
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292334,00.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20071104024813/http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_keyvote_member.php?cs_id=V3064

* Ron Paul is devoutly religious.
This might not be a concern to some people, particularly with Ron Paul who doesn’t visibly impose his religion on the people through his proposals as president. However, we must take into consideration that he does carry all of the conservative, anti-social beliefs that come with right-wing evangelical ideology. I firmly believe that it is more this than his conservative libertarianism that keeps him from standing up in defense of human rights of any kind. Anti-abortion and anti-gay mentalities are deeply rooted in religious backgrounds.

He opposes the idea of separation of church and state, even going as far as stating that it isn’t in the Constitution and that the Founding Fathers wrote it with deep inspiration from their faith. He also believes that prayer in public school should be allowed, albeit not mandatory. In a column he wrote, he was quoted as saying, “[T]he secularists wage an ongoing war against religion, chipping away bit by bit at our nation’s Christian heritage. Christmas itself may soon be a casualty of that war.” The fact that he believes that our nation wasn’t built on secularism is scary in and of itself.

Ron Paul also does not believe in evolution. I personally cannot trust someone who, as a grown man, trusts a vague notion of a Creator over years upon years of scientific research.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/post/ron-paul-the-religious/2011/10/14/gIQAPdUFkL_blog.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20040103072942/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2003/tst122903.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Ron_Paul_Principles_+_Values.htm
http://www.ontheissues.org/2008/Ron_Paul_Education.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JyvkjSKMLw

* Ron Paul is very anti-immigrant, even aggressive towards children born to illegal immigrants.
I don’t believe in borders either way, but even in the confines of this country, which has been built on illegal immigration and imperialism, to be so aggressively anti-immigrant is absurd. This is just another example of a politician who places capitalism, nationalism, and archaic documents over the lives and rights of human beings. You can swing it whichever way you want and I don’t care if this, like other things, fall perfectly into play under his political beliefs; this shit is wrong and anti-human, as well as at its core very anti-American.

He supports strengthened border security and opposes any and all welfare and support of gradual citizenship for those who have already entered the borders of our country illegally, even if the illegal immigrants in question are children born after the crossing. He voted for the infamous Secure Fence Act of 2006, which lead to over 700 miles of physical barriers and security along the U.S.-Mexico border. Just the fence cost over $1.2 billion in government spending. He also believes that we should completely end emergency hospital treatment of illegal aliens and that they should seek help from charities. On top of this total lack of sympathy for illegal aliens, he does not support birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants.

http://www.ronpaulforcongress.com/html/bordersecurity.html
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul150.html
http://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/Stossel/story?id=3985423
http://youtube.com/watch?v=C4c9S9meOng
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul346.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20070430013426/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2006/tst100206.htm
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul269.html

* Ron Paul is a republican.
Listen, I’m an anarchist. I don’t believe in anything a politician is going to say. But, hypothetically, if I had to choose, I certainly am not going to choose a republican. I know democrats aren’t any better, but republicans are the ones who are in your face about their extremist, anti-human values. Democrats, on the other hand, help the world crumble simply by not doing anything to stop it. It is in this respect that Ron Paul is the best of both parties. The way I see it, though, is that representative democracy isn’t going anywhere any time soon. If we absolutely must live under the rule of a presidential figure, the very least they could do is protect us. Ron Paul is just another republican when it comes to the rest of the issues, though.

He does not believe in universal health care, something almost the entire industrialized world offers their citizens. The minimization of income tax under his presidency, he theorizes, will shrink the cost and hence increase the affordability of individual health care. This is all well and good, but medical treatment and mere survival should not be just another privilege we must earn through hard work and wage slavery. That is, after all, why we’re a minority in the industrialized world: because other nations understand this.

Ron Paul loves guns and wants everyone to be able to have them. The Gun Owners of America gave him their A+ rating. Of course, he has the Second Amendment to cite for being so romantic about the right to bear arms. He doesn’t even care if they’re machine guns. According to him, “[T]he assault weapons ban does nothing to make us safer.” Um, neither does owning a gun, as statistics have proven. He believes that it is our individual duties as American citizens to own guns as a means of protecting ourselves from school shootings, terrorists, and violent criminals. I don’t disagree with that, as I do not condone in the calling of cops, but the idea that we are all somehow responsible for being able to protect ourselves implies that teachers, students, and bystanders should all be carrying guns. While this stamps out a heavy reliance on government legislation, it also places a huge emphasis on the need for guns, which have one purpose: to harm and/or kill people. “People don’t kill people, guns kill people.” No, people with guns kill people!

He supports the death penalty, another outdated methodology protected by our outdated Constitution, but no longer used in most of the industrialized world due to the progression abroad while America stays the same. That’s what Ron Paul, appropriately as a conservative, will do: keep us where we are. He will conserve outdated traditions, even those that kill people, despite the fact that capital punishment does not and has not ever verifiably deterred crime and has been shown time and time again to kill innocent people. According to Paul, “capital punishment is a deserving penalty for those who commit crime.”

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul105.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20080301114038/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2006/tst092506.htm
http://web.archive.org/web/20070604202950/http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2005/tst042505.htm
http://www.reason.com/news/show/118086.html
http://www.gunowners.org/op0636.htm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCM_wQy4YVg
http://web.archive.org/web/20080101055205/http://www.ronpaullibrary.org/document.php?id=509
http://theamericanview.com/index.php?id=898&PHPSESSID=5fcc4750ffc284dbf49756d2142c7cf6

In summation, the lesser of two evils is still evil and Ron Paul is no savior. He is not the new hope we can believe in. He represents the Constitution and federal budgeting; not you, or me, women, homosexuals, black people, poor people, sick people, or the environment. I will not be voting for anyone in 2012 and neither should you. Regardless of whether or not you consider yourself an anarchist or whatever, you should refuse to compromise as an individual whose vote and voice are supposed to matter. How can someone represent you, or the people as a whole, when we are not in their interest? How can you support someone who doesn’t support us all? It is this constant compromise as voters, and as a generation, that has perpetuated the politics that have deprioritized us and brought us to where we are today. Wake up. The revolution is not in the form of a politician. It never has been and it never will be. Ron Paul is no different.

Oh, and one more thing, guys: Ron Paul will not legalize weed. He’ll make it so individual states can. And very few will.

*** Still relevant. Please read and, if you want your peers to have a fair, balanced, and knowledgeable perspective of Ron Paul, reblog.