I spoke at the Libertarian Party of Washington Convention last weekend. Thank you so much to everyone who has donated and helped me travel to conventions this year. I’m on my way to Nevada now to speak at their convention May 1st (tomorrow).
Here’s a rough transcript of my Washington LP talk, which was live streamed from their Facebook page.
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WHAT HAPPENED LAST YEAR
The last year or so is a better example than anything else in our lifetimes of what kind of horror is unleashed upon the world when society abandons the idea of the individual.
People lost their jobs, their family businesses, their savings, their children’s college funds… suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence rates soared. Civil liberties all but disappeared.
People gave into tyranny for sake of the greater good – to save “society”. To save YOU whether you like it or not. Whether it helped or not. Whether it hurt or nor.
There was so much suffering. But who suffered?
THE DANGER TO THE INDIVIDUAL
It’s the individual who suffers. The group does not suffer. What a wild time we live in. Identity politics have been pushed on us with extra intensity during the last year. Special interest groups lament that they’ve been mistreated and oppressed while practically the whole country was placed on some level of house arrest. There was no special privilege for lockdowns (unless your bureaucrat) based on race, gender or skin color. Why do they overlook that? Why do they elevate the perceived suffering of group identities while overlooking the obvious?
The individual people who make up the group suffer.
This is why individual rights are paramount. It’s why the reality of the individual must never be compromised or abandoned.
It’s why the individual must be taken seriously if suffering is to be taken seriously.
I’ll tell you something, the libertarians who are afraid to speak out against the lockdowns are afraid to confront themselves.
They don’t feel confident as libertarians.
They don’t feel confident talking about individualism with non libertarians.
That’s a good litmus test to see who’s serious about the movement. Can you talk about the intrinsic, precious value of the individual in front of your socialist or leftist friends?
The individual is something to be cherished. It’s such a unique concept and its taken us thousands of years to get it right.
Be proud of it.
SO HOW DO WE KEEP ALL OF THIS FROM HAPPENING AGAIN?
BE BRAVE.
Not everyone is brave.
How do you become brave?
You need to confront 3 things:
1) Yourself, 2) your surroundings (or your party), 3) and the world.
THE SELF
Many people never get to the point of confronting themselves because it seems too unbearable, and this why they struggle to effect meaningful change in the world – or to do it without wrecking things around them.
The best way to confront yourself is to rip the band-aid off quickly.
No one is perfect. There is no perfect libertarian.
Maybe you already know what’s wrong with yourself internally but you’re too afraid to articulate it in your head or say it out loud…. So just get it over with as quickly as possible.
Maybe you’re fearful, and you’re in debt, and you’re disorganized.
But you’re also good at data analytics and IT, you‘re very well read on libertarian philosophy, and on some days you’re very generous…
Confronting the things that are wrong isn’t just about pointing out everything that’s wrong. It’s a SWOT analysis. It’s assessing your strengths, weaknesses. opportunities and threats. – And I’m gonna relate this back to why it matters for the LP.
… So how do you become brave?
You start by working on one thing at a time.
Maybe you have authoritarian neocon family members who praise the drug war and tyrannical foreign policy all day long and every time you hear it you grind your teeth but you never say anything, even though you’re a very articulate messenger.
Well, maybe you can start by piping up, respectfully, and putting some of that articulate messaging out there.
“Well, aktchually, mom and Dad, I think the drug war has failed and it’s torn families apart. I know you think the family unit is really important and you hate welfare entitlements so maybe you should reconsider your position on the drug war.”
Tackle these things one thing at a time, It’ll make you brave.
YOUR SURROUNDINGS
You need brave people in the LP. You need brave leaders. What does the LP look like if no one is brave? It looks like an organization that’s afraid to speak out against the worst violation of civil liberties in the last hundred years.
This is why I spoke out against the mismanagement of national’s messaging and announced my candidacy for the chair race so early. We need to rip the band aid off quickly.
What does it mean when an organization who’s Statement of Principles says “we reject the cult of the omnipotent state” is unwilling to speak out against the state?
What does it mean if an organization is unwilling to speak out or act on its stated purpose?
The reason it’s good to work on yourself first, before you go and tackle a county, state, or national organization, is because organizations need to be made up of principled, brave people.
You’re better situated to defend the principles of freedom on a state or national level when you’re able to defend your personal freedom.
You probably don’t have the same messaging problems here in Washington – but you do have the same tyrannical government problems.
And of course it’s hypocritical to go around judging everything and trying to right it without first working on yourself.
This room seems full of brave people. We need to take this spark and spread it across the country like wildfire.
After we’ve cleaned up our organizations, we can set our aim on something broader. Cleaning up the country, or the world.
HAVE VISION
So how else do you get a freer world in your lifetime?
You need to have vision.
A vision for yourself. A vision for the future of your organization. A vision for the future of the world you want to live in. A vision for the world you want your children to live in.
Just like with bravery, you start with yourself first.
You cant have vision for the future without vision to see what’s happening in front of you. That one of the reasons why LP national is floundering so hard right. They’re willfully blind to the agenda of the mainstream narrative, wokeism, progressive pandering, whatever you wanna call it.
In order for the LP to have vision, it needs to have:
1) the ability to see the tyranny around us, and
2) the ability to identify the 1) people who are eager to receive our message, 2) viable solutions to solving our problems 3) and pockets of hope.
Vision is a clear image of how you see your future. You need to see what’s right in front of you before you can map out your future.
Washington is toying with some insane Big Brother spying road tax, your homelessness crisis is spiraling to California proportions, and you’re looking at a potential capital gains tax.
Your personal liberties are being aggressively encroached upon. So conceptualize your vision for the future and be brave when you work to achieve it.
Right now, LP National has a low resolution vision of the future, it moves half heartedly towards it, and it has no goals to meet along the way.
We need to bring vision to the LP. That means we need to see what’s going on politically and culturally in the world. And we need to have hope. We need to BELIEVE in a better future and actually work towards it and try to speak it into existence.
I believe in this vision. I believe in our messaging. The Washington Convention represents a tipping point in the direction of a bright future and unconstrained libertarian messaging.
Last words about bravery.
People get bullied because they wont fight back
How do societies lose their freedom? One little sin at a time. You go to work, someone’s lording their cubicle authority over you, someone’s tyrannical – you don’t have the wherewithal to stand up. You see someone else being bullied or censored, you don’t have the backbone to stand up for them. Government thugs rob you of your income and lock you in your home for a year and you roll over to them.
It’s like, Ok! You’re a slave. And if you continue to be a slave, you will continue to generate tyrants all around you. And the only thing that can stop you from behaving that way once you’re locked into that pattern is the right kind of terror. Be careful what you give up, because you don’t know what kind of terror you’re unwittingly unleashing upon yourself.
The forces of tyranny expand to occupy any space made available for their existence. People who refuse to defend themselves with their speech are just as vulnerable to exploitation as those who are genuinely unable to stand up for their own rights because of a disability or other serious limitation on their physical or intellectual power.
We are not intellectually crippled. We are the best and brightest. We have the best philosophy. We have the best solutions.
Let’s be the bravest people.
Let’s be visionaries.
Angela McArdle 