Ron Paul

About

Ron Paul (born August 20, 1935) is an American physician and legislator who served as the U.S. Representative for Texas from 1976 to 2013 and a nominee for the Republican candidacy in the 2012 U.S. presidential election.

Online History

2008 Presidential Campaign

Ron Paul announced his candidacy for the Republican Presidential nomination on March 12th, 2007 after serving ten terms as a Texas congressman. Supported by a grassroots campaign^[14], Paul supporters raised $4.3 million dollars online and $200,000 over the phone over the course of one day, November 5th, 2007.^[15] Organized via YouTube and ThisNovember5th.com in October 2007, the event came to be referred to as a "money bomb"^[16], a fixed period of fundraising intended to greatly inflate a candidate's campaign assets. This record-breaking event was covered by the New York Times^[17], ABC News^[18] and on-air on CNN.

2012 Presidential Campaign

Following his supporters' "Draft Ron Paul" initiative for the 2012 presidential election, Ron Paul officially declared his candidacy for President of the United States on May 13, 2011 in Exeter, New Hampshire.^[19]

In early January, social media research firm Socialbakers^[12] found that Ron Paul had the highest overall viral reach with just short of 60,000 people talking about him on Facebook the week of January 2nd. After the Iowa caucus, where Paul took third place, Sociagility^[13] published an infographic breaking down each candidate’s social media mentions. The week before the caucus, Paul had the most Twitter mentions as well as the most new YouTube subscribers. On February 22nd, 2012, opponent Rick Santorum aggressively shook Paul's hand during the GOP candidate debate.

Following Super Tuesday on March 6th, Paul had not won any of the 23 nomination contests but managed to accumulate 47 delegates. On March 7th, the Wall Street Journal^[25] reported that Paul could still win the nomination if front-runner Romney could not reach the 1,144 delegates needed to secure the nomination by holding a floor fight at the Republican Nation Convention in August. As of March 8, 2012, Ron Paul has 259,213 Twitter^[10] followers and 900,187 Facebook^[11] fans.

On May 14th, 2012, Ron Paul announced in a press release via e-mail that his team will cease the funding of campaign operations in the 11 remaining primaries, although he would continue to accumulate delegates for the Republican National Convention that will be held in August. Despite his lackluster performance in the state primaries with 104 out of 1,144 delegates, Ron Paul had been portrayed by his supporters in the news media and online as the underdog candidate, having raised more money than any of his former contenders (with the exception of President Obama and Mitt Romney) through online fundraising campaigns.

Ron Paul Channel

In early June 2013, The Daily Call^[37] reported that the retired Texas congressman is preparing to launch an Internet-based subscription-only news service called "Ron Paul Channel" under the motto "Turn Off Your TV, Turn on the Truth." On July 8th, Paul further explained his motivation behind the project during his interview on the Peter Schiff Shows:

“I was at a debate one time, a couple years ago, where I didn’t think I got a fair shake. In a two hour debate, I had 89 seconds. I thought, maybe there’s something wrong with the media. Maybe they’re not covering us fairly. I’m just using it as a pun, but there’s a bit of truth to this. We don’t get a fair shake. The people who believe in liberty and limited government, don’t expect it from the ordinary media.”

On August 12th, The Ron Paul Channel^[38] was unveiled as a online streaming service that will provide all original programming hosted by Paul "several times a week" for a monthly subscription fee of $9.95.

Reputation

Ron Paul's record of political beliefs and legislative votes has been subject to much debate. According to Wikipedia's article on Ron Paul's political positions:

Based on his presidential campaigns in 1988, 2008 and 2012, the political positions of Ron Paul have been described as conservative, libertarian and constitutionalist. In economic policies, Paul believes the size of federal government should be reduced significantly and has regularly voted against almost all proposals for new government spending, initiatives, or taxes. According to National Journal's review, Paul's overall economic policies in 2010 have been described as more conservative than 78% of the House and more liberal than 22% of the House (85% and 15%, respectively for 2009). In 2006, as more conservative than 48% of the House and more liberal than 51% of the House. For 2008, his ratings were more conservative than 91% of the House and more liberal than 8% of the House (80% and 20%, respectively for 2007).

Grassroots Support

Ron Paul's presidential candidacy has drawn a notable degree of grassroots support and donations. The decentralized structure of Paul's support base became most evident after his announcement of presidential candidacy in late 2007, when a website was set up to raise $1 million per week by recruiting individuals to pledge the same amount on the same day each week.

During the last fiscal quarter of 2007, several fund-raising operations unaffiliated with the official campaign managed to raise more than $17 million, boosted by a record-breaking collection of $4.3 million in donations on November 5th alone. Described by the news media as a "money bomb," this day-long campaign marked the largest amount of donation collected in a single day by any Republican candidate and the most successful online fund-raising campaign in a single day in American history.

Ron Paul Revolution

In addition to the fund-raising efforts, Paul's supporters often work independently of the official campaign team or the Republican party to promote his public image and mobilize fund-raising campaigns, a phenomenon which has been described as the "Ron Paul Revolution." Since its emergence during Paul's presidential candidacy in 2008, supporters of the Ron Paul Revolution movement have been a staple part of his campaign rallies and identified by placards and t-shirts bearing the slogan or "EVOL," a reversal of "LOVE" to represent peace and hope.

Ron Paul Festival

In the days leading up to the Republican National Convention on August 27th, 2012, core supporters of Ron Paul and the non-profit organization Liberty Unleashed held a three day-long music and activist-oriented festival known as the "Ron Paul Festival" (Paulefest) at the Florida State Fairgrounds. Although the event's turnout of few thousand attendees was reported as far below the initial expectations put forth by the organizers, the festival drew some media coverage from mainstream news outlets^[29][30] as well as political blogs^[27][28] for the attendance from a diverse range of political and religious groups, most notably the John Birch Society and members of the Church of Scientology.

Related Memes

Ron [Paul] Swanson

On January 1st, 2012, a single-topic blog titled Ron [Paul] Swanson^[1] was created, pairing photos of Ron Paul with quotes from likeable Libertarian Ron Swanson, a character from the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation. The site was featured on Uproxx^[8] and the Atlantic Wire.^[9]

Good Guy Ron Paul

A slew of Advice Animal image macros centered around portraits of Ron Paul have surfaced online since his announcement for the 2012 election bid, with strong results on image macro generator sites like Quickmeme and the social media aggregator site Reddit. On both sites, Ron Paul has been portrayed in a generally positive light across the board, reflecting his popularity amongst young conservatives on the web:

Doom Paul / It's Happening!

Doom Paul is a photoshop image macro series featuring American physician Ron Paul. Originally used to jokingly depict what could happen if Ron Paul was not elected for President during the 2012 elections, the images eventually grew to be used alongside incoming events to jokingly indicate that their arrival will have apocalyptic results. A common catchphrase used in combination with Doom Paul image macros is “It’s Happening!”

Google Bombing Campaign

Following in the footsteps of the negative Spreading Santorum and Spread Romney Google bombing campaigns, Paul fans preemptively created "Spreading Ron Paul"^[26] which provides a flattering definition of the candidate's name:

Ron Paul Coin

RonPaulCoin is an alternative cryptocurrency featuring the face of Ron Paul and based on Litecoin’s SCRYPT-based protocol. In comparison to other leading alternative cryptocurrencies, RonPaulCoin is decisively limited in its scope and circulation volume with a market threshold of up to 2.1 million coins, about one tenth of Bitcoin's 21 million cap.

Controversies

White Supremacist Affiliation

On February 2nd, 2012, hacktivist collective Anonymous published the text of e-mail exchanges made between Ron Paul's campaign associates and members of the white supremacist group "American Third Party Position." According to the statement released via Pastebin^[20], Anonymous obtained the e-mail correspondence after hacking into the group's e-mail account as part of Operation Blitzkrieg^[23], an Anonymous operation targeting a list of white supremacist groups and forums on the web.

It further claimed that the hackers were able to obtain evidence of direct contacts and meetings between Paul and members of the group including Jamie Kelso. The accusations against Paul's campaign were rapidly picked up by various news sites including International Business Times^[22] as well as political blogs like Daily Beast^[21] and Little Green Footballs.^[24] When asked by journalists about the accusations, Paul's campaign spokesperson Gary Howard denied the story as "completely false, and a waste of time."

RonPaul.com Domain Dispute

In 2008, a group of Paul supporters launched RonPaul.com^[33] to drum up support for the politician. In January 2013, Paul mentioned in an interview on the Alex Jones radio show that he regretted not buying RonPaul.com previously. The owners of the site contacted him^[35], asking to keep the domain they had worked on for five years. They also offered him RonPaul.org free of charge so he could maintain his online presence there. If he chose not to accept this, they valued the domain name at $250,000. Instead of responding to their letter, Paul filed a complaint^[32][34] with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) asking for control over both RonPaul.com and RonPaul.org with no compensation to the sites' current owners. On May 11th, 2013, the WIPO panel ruled in favor of the grassroots organization, finding Paul guilty of reverse domain name hijacking^[31][36], trying to intimidate the domain name owners after refusing their offer to transfer RonPaul.org to the politician for free. A spokesperson for Paul called the ruling "disappointing" but assured Paul would be launching a new site in the coming weeks.

"Cultural Marxism" Gaffe

On July 2nd, 2018, Ron Paul tweeted and posted to Facebook a post attempting to illustrate the dangers of "cultural marxism." Along with the post, he used an image showing Happy Merchant and several other racist stereotype characters punching Uncle Sam with arms colored like the USSR flag (shown below, left). The image is signed by Ben Garrison, but this is likely a photoshopped edit of a very similar political cartoon from 2008 (shown below, right).

Paul quickly deleted the post and replaced it with an image against "political correctness" (shown below).^[39]

Twitter users caught the original tweet and began spreading it online. Twitter user @PatBlanchfield pointed it out and gained over 1,200 retweets (shown below, left). @jackdwagner did the same and gained over 250 retweets (shown below, right). The gaffe was covered by The Hill^[40] and Splinter^[41] that day.

Later that day, Ron Paul signed a tweet attributing the error to a person on his social media staff and said that when he saw the tweet, it was immediately deleted (shown below).

Search Interest

Search for Ron Paul was on the radar in small doses throughout his early career and hit its first peak in January 2007 when he took second place in the Louisiana caucus, behind John McCain. A smaller peak happened in September 2008, possibly coinciding with the Montana Constitution Party announcing^[6] that Ron Paul would be their candidate. He asked to be removed from their ballot^[7], but was denied. Search picked up again in May 2011 when he announced his bid for the 2012 Republican candidacy.

External References