Happy Birthday, Ron Paul!

Liberty and peace are the same.

Today is the 90th Birthday of Ron Paul, M.D.

Ron Paul Congressional portrait, 2007.

I was already in alignment with Ron Paul’s views before I became aware of him in the early 2000s, through his articles on websites I frequented. Paul was a Republican Congressman from Texas, and I vainly hoped he’d run an insurgent campaign against President Bush in the 2004 primaries.

Paul did make a splash by running in the 2008 GOP primaries. As I wrote in 2016, “The Ron Paul Revolution started on a Republican Presidential debate stage in the spring of 2007, when Rudy Giuliani tried to disparage Ron Paul’s foreign policy views. It backfired, and many people took Ron Paul’s side.” (The moment is captured here.) My collection of essays from this time is called Ron Paul is a Nut (And So Am I).

Dr. Paul ran again in 2012, and with his libertarian ideas reaching more people, presidential candidate Gary Johnson received record numbers of votes for the Libertarian Party in 2012 and 2016. Unfortunately, however, a significant portion of Paul’s supporters didn’t take his message of peace and liberty to heart. Although Paul was attractive as an “anti-Establishment” candidate, his populist supporters jumped onto the (also seemingly anti-Establishment) Trump movement that…