This blog has had a long and sordid history with the more ardent supporters of Ron Paul, as clearly evidenced in the comments to this post from yesterday.

Over the months leading up to the primaries and throughout the primaries, I’ve seen that those enthusiastic Paul supporters have often found it difficult to believe that Ron Paul’s support was as limited as some of the national polls indicated, largely because Ron Paul dominated straw polls, both online and offline. They came up with several reasons for this apparent lack of support:

1. Media bias — If the media doesn’t give Ron Paul any airtime, how could his support improve?

2. Polling bias — If polls don’t mention his name, or don’t call the “youth” without land-lines, or only registered Republicans, can they be trusted?

3. Diebold — Those pesky electronic voting machines are paid for by people who are anti-Paul

4. Election fraud — The system of neocons will silence those who speak truth to power

5. Illuminati/Bilderberger/etc — The people who really control everything won’t let him ascend

Inherent in these excuses is a consistent belief that Ron Paul is actually winning the hearts and minds (and thus the election), but that the system is so incredibly corrupt and fraudulent that he is being kept down by those above. With this, the following point is clear: the system is no longer to be trusted, and if Ron Paul does not become President, it is an indication that the system has been hijacked by people who will not allow it to be fixed.

What does this mean? It means that these Paul supporters, who have committed themselves to the rEVOLution, are up against a wall. They’re faced with a question:

“If the democratic process no longer works and has been subverted, what are you going to do about it?”

Those of us who don’t believe that Ron Paul is being denied his rightful place in the Oval Office by nefarious henchmen suggest that the next step is for those Paul supporters to join a wider liberty movement, and carry the torch that Ron Paul has ignited farther than he could ever do himself.

But for those who have placed their faith in the man himself, the fact that he’s been bested by statists like John McCain is a fact that cannot stand. There are only two options: agorism, or rebellion.

The choice is simple. The system is flawed, and must be destroyed. Agorism is the attempt to do so, through extricating oneself from the system and working to establish an alternate system in parallel. The end goal is that legitimacy in the establishment will fail, and at the same time the agorists will have created a viable alternative. The system thus withers away. Rebellion, of course, is much more clear: the taking up of arms against the established system. I would think, of course, that this is a ticket to either a penitentiary or a morgue. But for those who believe that the true support for Ron Paul greatly exceeds what appears in polls, such a rebellion would be too large to be quashed.

So the question still stands. For those truly adamant Ron Paul supporters who believe that he deserves to lead this country, and cannot accept the fact that he will not be President in November, what are you going to do about it?