This week, the mainstream media and its social media followers found another target of wrath: former presidential candidate and Texas congressman Ron Paul. One of his staffers posted a link criticizing political correctness with a cartoon image attached that depicted ugly racial stereotypes. It was clearly insensitive and was quickly deleted with a notice of correction issued by Ron Paul.
CNN marched to the rescue with a Chris Cuomo segment headlined “What we ignore, we empower.” Cuomo mimicked the media narrative of Paul being guilty of “bigoted BS.” Cuomo declared,“We need to expose it because the ugliness is contagious…The BS from Paul resonates. It encourages more us vs. them ugliness.”
Obviously, it was a dumb mistake for a staffer to post an ugly cartoon. But no one of an informed, sound mind thinks Ron Paul approves of racial hatred. Since the 1970’s, Paul spent an entire political career denouncing the prison industrial complex, war hysteria, and majority rule oppressing minorities. In every appearance, he lectures about the importance of respecting individual personhood over collective group identities: an ethic that rejects racial tribalism completely.
When Ron Paul ran for president, he promised to pardon all nonviolent offenders from prison. He challenged the Bush, Clinton, Obama-status quo of bombing Middle Eastern countries and spying on Muslims, and protested the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, an innocent US citizen. All things an honest press should do but refuse to this day.
Cuomo is right. What we ignore, we empower. CNN and most of the major media has continued to ignore and empower all the worst state atrocities Ron Paul has battled. Journalists like Cuomo rage against a Facebook cartoon gaffe with righteous fury. But their silence was deafening on Abdulrahman’s execution by Obama.
CNN and the politically correct press carried water for the Obama administration as they illegally ravaged Libya, killing thousands of Africans for Machiavellian financial interests. Before the coup, Libya was the most economically independent north African nation with large gold holdings, women’s education, and plans to provide a clean water system to other African nations. Obama, like a good NPR, New York Times-approved corporatist puppet, unleashed terrorists from Libya’s prisons and permitted the mob torture and lynching of Gaddafi.
Hillary Clinton, upon hearing of her former arms client Gaddafi’s murder, laughed, clapped, and shouted, “We came, we saw, he died!” A fawning CBS PR hack interviewer joined in the chuckle.
CNN did not slam this horror with the righteous zeal they throw at Ron Paul over a stupid cartoon. They did not show the blood-soaked faces of Libyans crying out to God over how such evil wannabe gods can get away with destroying their homes and loved ones’ bodies.
Where was Cuomo’s call for Secretary Clinton to be fired for creating mass chaos in Libya? Hello Cuomo?
The media sat in silence. In 2016, state PR agents like Cuomo did their best to cover for Hillary Clinton to ensure her promises of Syrian no-fly zones, more sanctions sacrificing innocent Russian civilians’ lives, and more arms for jihadi rebels would continue unabated.
CNN and other major media sit in silence as millions of people of color have been raped, terrorized, and tortured by Obama and Clinton’s chaos campaign in Syria. When they do cover it, they pressure Trump for more intervention.
CNN sits in silence as millions of black, brown, Asian, Jewish, Native American, and white individuals – each endowed with sacred personhood from their Creator – waste years of life in prison warehouses for nonviolent crimes. Sure, you will see a token story on marijuana legalization. But you will never see the sold out mouths of CBS, NBC, ABC, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, et al, question the system of violence at the very heart of the state power they serve.
They will never speak the plain truth: that it is never just to harm a single hair or steal a single penny from a person of any race for a nonviolent act.
The principle of nonaggression and non-vengeance that Ron Paul has dedicated his life advancing – rooted as it is in the Golden Rule – is lost on a self-blinded media in the darkness of moral nihilism.
Politically correct media is a minority oppressing cartoon – shilling for inflation-financed wars and a nanny state backed by imprisonment and fines. These media-enabled policies harm minorities and the poor the most.
If Ron Paul had his way, millions of black, brown, Asian, Jewish, Native American and white human beings, innocent of violence, would be free from the assault and PTSD of prison cages.
Poverty creating laws like occupational licensing and wars on drug users and sex workers would be finished. Urban communities would be free from the daily shadow of death that prohibition-created black markets manifest. They would be free from warrantless search and surveillance. Nearly half of their annual labor would not be owned by income, payroll, and inflation taxes that subsidize the media’s Wall Street friends and crony corporations.
If Ron Paul had his way, millions of innocent Muslims, Yazidis, and Christians would still be alive in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, undisturbed by intervention and sanctions. Thousands of US soldiers would be safely home with their families – no missing limbs and no PTSD.
In a racially tense 1972, James Williams, a black man, brought his white wife in dire medical need to a Texas hospital. She was deep in labor and yet the hospital staff ignored them. Eventually, the front desk called police to confront Williams for his insistence. Williams reported that then-doctor Ron Paul intervened personally. He delivered the child – grievously, still born. Williams reported that Dr. Paul took care of the bill. During the 2012 media hit pieces on Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, Williams said of his candidacy, “When you have honesty, people will try to do anything to blot you out.”
The media desperately wants to blot out Ron Paul’s message of truth and nonviolence from the history books. That is why they parrot the same lies to rewrite his legacy with their own myths that serve state power. But they will fail.
For now, we suffer the statist quo Cuomo and the P.C. media empower. They are white washed tombs – shiny on the outside for shaming rivals’ politically incorrect speech; but inside – hiding the bodies sacrificed by the state they adore.
Come out of your mental tomb, media myth-makers. See our neighbors – flesh and blood victims of war and prison. Who will hide their faces from your viewers? History stands with Ron Paul. The voices of the victims of state violence will be heard.
David Gornoski is a writer, public speaker and thought leader on mimetic theory. A fellow of the Moving Picture Institute, he founded A Neighbor’s Choice as a media platform to explore Jesus’s culture of nonviolence. Email him at david@aneighborschoice.com.
He needs to do a better job of screening and supervising his staffers – this is not the first time his crew has put out racist shit He has so many crucial messages to get out; why does he hire people who screw him up? You have to wonder.
You mean like Drumpf or Obomba?
My thoughts exactly. I believe Ron to be a good man but he allows too many creeps to do his online bidding for him. I think a lot of the technology is over his head and he’s a bit too trusting of his followers, not all of whom are libertarians. But the reaction from Cuomo and others is so grotesquely over the top that it’s clear their motives have nothing to do with racial sensitivity.
I remember back in 2008, Bill Clinton made some blatantly racist quip about Obama getting him coffee. I also remember the scions of political correctness on CNN shrugging their shoulders and kicking the story under the rug. Racism only matters to these people when it’s convenient to their corporate agenda.
Keep in mind he’s 83.
Another excuse to marginalize about the only sane choice we might have had for president.
I saw the cartoon on Counterpunch and knew automatically that Ron had once again put his trust in another douche bag. It’s happened before. It comes with the territory of overseeing one of the widest tents in American politics. Ron Paul supporters run the gamut from libertarians, paleos, gun toting hipsters, ex-hippie burnouts, gay Republicans, old right gold-bugs, free market anarchists, and, ironically enough, disgruntled members of the new left like myself who could easily be labeled as the “cultural Marxists” of which the stupid cartoon in question lampooned. Sadly, Paul’s supporters also include some less than savory alt-right types.
With that being said, speaking as an openly queer anarchist, I have found the lion share of the Ron Paul fan-club to be far more accommodating than most so-called “progressive” movements, who do a great job of paying maligned communities lip service while doing very little to actually empower individual liberation movements beyond welfare state assimilation. Seeing this dynamic peace movement terrify the status quo convinced me that the so-called fringes of the left and right have far more common ground than we do with anyone in the mainstream. I remain committed to spreading that message and Ron Paul is a big reason why.
Actions speak louder than words, and Ron walks the walk (I’m a racial minority and a Muslim)
Good article. Ron Paul is a man of ethics and integrity, things seriously lacking in our government.