2022 California Libertarian Party Convention
An annual meeting of people in California that most desires freedom, in one of the least free places in the state.
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| Big crowd at the Friday reception to hear Dave Smith speak. Apologies for the amateur hour shot. I really need to start bringing my real camera to the event. // photo from my phone |
I hate Los Angeles.
The family and I drove down to Long Beach to attend the California Libertarian Party Convention. Due to the three-day weekend worshipping mostly dead people who have collectively murdered millions of people, Interstate 5 was not particularly fast-flowing either on the drive up or down. I'm so glad the state wasted tens of billions of dollars on the high-speed rail that was never built (don't look at me, I voted no on that stupid Proposition). If they had just taken a tiny fraction of that money, under $100 million, even with the ridiculously high amount of money California needs to spend on each mile of highway, they could have built a third lane for the entire I-5 stretch between Tracy and the Grapevine. This would have alleviated much of the traffic caused by trucks passing other trucks and Priuses driving in the fast lane under the speed limit. And we would be tens of billions of dollars richer.
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| Shortly after taking this photo, I purchased Los Angeles is Hideous: Poems About an Ugly City by Andrew Heaton. // photo from my phone |
Oh, I wish that was the end of my frustration. Coming right down the hill into Six Flags, we hit dead stop traffic Friday early afternoon. Of course, we did. Google told me to take the surface streets to bypass about a mile of the highway. Like a moron, I did what it asked me to do. Immediately exiting, it told me to do a right turn immediately followed by a left turn. Of course, the left turn lane was backed up for miles, with only one car turning for each green light. I abandoned this course and went straight after making that first right. I may have well been in Mogadishu. I hit a roadblock of cars doing a quartet tango, a food truck just stopped abreast of the road, an accordion bus in the intersection wedged between two cars unable to move, and countless refugee camps and panhandlers. Perhaps Google Maps knew I was going to the Libertarian convention and was trying to run me off the road. Well played, Google.
When we finally arrived at the Long Beach Marriott, the hotel staff asked me to put my mask on because the idiot county decided to maintain its mask mandate.
I hate Los Angeles.
Nevertheless, after stepping inside, I found my people, nobody with their mask on. I was finally home.
After mingling with some friends, meeting some new people, and rubbing elbows with some Libertarian Party legends, Dave Smith took the stage.
He was his usual funny and charismatic self and spoke of his main topics like war, the Fed, and the COVID Regime, but that's just preaching to the choir at this event. He encouraged libertarians to speak out more against these, saying that they, The Cathedral, lie about all of these things without shame, so we should not feel we should silence our truth without shame. Although everything he said was more or less things we already knew, he put his eloquence on display, proving again how invaluable he is to the movement; to explain things to people that don't know what we know. He did speak more about internal party matters about the infighting, calling for peace between the Mises Caucus and the opposing faction. Where have I heard that one before?
It was a great opening to the convention, even if there were aircraft landing in the background behind the hotel, though that made easy fodder for jokes about the NSA spying on us.
Joel Salatin opened the following morning with breakfast and spoke briefly about farming issues before talking more about regulations as it relates to food. He made an interesting point about how food regulations are not about safety. If it were, food regulations would be akin to the drug war (though he disagrees with the drug war), where regulations would be on both sellers and consumers, but food regulations are only on sellers. He went on to highlight what libertarians are up against when he talked about speaking to a room about farming. He asked the audience how many people think a carrot grown by a person for their own consumption should be regulated by the state. A third of the hands went up. Yikes.
After breakfast, sitting down in the main hall that morning just before business started, a person handed out a rather disgusting paper with a Swastika logo on it, accusing the Mises Caucus of being Nazis. If I was as dishonest as the corporate media and the Trudeau media, I could have called that person a Nazi supporter, and then call the entire party Neo-Nazis by association. I knew there would be attacks. Not that the person who handed it out listened to Dave Smith talk the previous night anyway (he ducked out of the room when Smith spoke at the gala dinner). People have been urging the end of infighting only for years. The flyer included Dave Smith, who is Jewish. The Mises Caucus, of course, is named after the legendary economist Ludwig von Mises, who is also Jewish. They also pretty much universally adore Murray Rothbard, another person with Jewish ancestry. The Nazi reference, as always when applied to the Mises group, was a headscratcher. The paper also pointed a finger at someone who I consider a friend which, to say the least, I did not appreciate. I won't mention the name of the person who handed out this ridiculous paper. It doesn't matter since he has just about no following and no influence in the Party. But I'll say that two years ago at convention, he led the California support campaign for Lincoln Chafee (remember him?), the most milquetoast, unlibertarian candidate with any kind of chance we had on the slate. The former Raytheon lobbyist and Hillary Clinton supporter Bill Weld, rightly hated among libertarians, urged him to move to the LP. Chafee's support was dead on arrival since nobody had an appetite for another Republican transplant after what Weld pulled in 2016. I voted down this person's bid for National Delegate. I don't think I was the only one, as he did not make the cut. I voted him down again this election for National Delegate and I know for a fact this time that I wasn't the only one. [update 3/6/2022: The person in question did not make it as a National Delegate for Reno.] This person also was the sole nay vote later in the convention for a resolution supporting Angela McArdle's heroic stand against the Vaccine Mandates in Los Angeles, winning the Activist of the Year award this convention, either because he somehow supports requiring people get injected with a substance or he hates Angela. Probably both.
I did not, by the way, see any Mises Caucus member try to expel him from the party, say anything rude to him, or otherwise harass him. Ben Weir did get up and admonish the flyer, without pointing fingers, to raucous applause, and Dave Smith made a quick joke about flyers accusing Jews of being Nazis during the gala. And that was the end of that.
Despite this initial bout of negativity, it was extremely heartening to see how full the main hall was. Four years ago, the last time the party convened there, a bunch of seats were open. This time, it got to standing room only and an overflow room was needed for non-delegates.
Chair Mimi Robson reflected back to four years ago when in that same hotel room, she was elected chair for the first time. She mentioned that there were approximately 800 members at the time and now there are about 1500. We have also hit the 1% threshold, or about 220,000 people, of registered Libertarians among all registered voters with an approximate 25% increase over the last four years in the state of California, the first time that threshold has been met.
The Mises Caucus drove the higher attendance, seemingly every new face I saw joined due to the Mises Caucus recruiting efforts, and although they didn't get all the bylaws they wanted, they swept the elections. Every seat that was up for grabs was occupied by a Mises Caucus member. It has been victory after victory for them, as locally, they swept San Francisco as well as Contra Costa counties in the previous few months, two of their primary targets.
The unwieldy California platform was abolished in favor of the succinct national platform to great controversy and debate, although the second proposal to create program planks in addition to the national platform was nixed due to a procedural error, the same error the platform committee committed two years ago. It's unclear if this will be rectified by the Bylaws Committee next year.
Between the lunches and gala, several other speakers took the stage. The overall slate of speakers was quite good this year with Dave Smith and Justin Amash likely the biggest draws, though Joel Salatin was also very interesting.
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| Justin Amash, one of the only shots of the speakers (while peaking) I took that wasn't blurry or with resolution loss. Stupid cell phones. // photo from my phone |
He went on to talk about what libertarianism actually means to him. He thinks that individualism is sometimes too focused on when instead, human cooperation is the ultimate goal via the avenue of individual freedom of association and will. He ultimately spoke out against the infighting as other speakers have done, as well as gatekeeping, saying that if Justin Amash is not libertarian enough for you, how are you going to get to a third of the country?
Jo Jorgensen spoke at the third California convention in a row and merged a speech between libertarianism and psychology. She talked about the cognitive dissonance in a cult where the members were told to give up everything to the cult leader so that the spaceship will pick them up and be saved by the world ending. When the spaceship didn't come and the world didn't end, the explanation wasn't that they were wrong, it was that they had done so well that the spaceship didn't need to come and the whole world was saved! She related this story to the Covid Regime, as they had been wrong on item after item but it's too painful for them to admit they were wrong, so they just double down and make claims like "the science has changed", as Dave Smith put it, despite the fact that we had linked to studies showing they were wrong at the time they were wrong. Jorgensen's best moment came when she said she was asked a question about how to fix the public school system so kids can learn about what they're supposed to. Her response was "You don't. You overthrow it," which was met with thunderous applause.
A debate was hosted following business on Saturday between three nominees for the Libertarian National Committee chair. One was our very own Angela McArdle, and the two others were Tony D'Orazio from New York and steve Dasbach from Indiana. I may be biased here, but I thought Angela torched the field in the debate. She had good answers and was extremely passionate while the other two seemed a bit stiff.
Moderated by Judge Jim Gray, the very first question was regarding infighting and how they would be able to work together. D'Orazio basically punted, saying he has no caucus affiliation as if there are no other biases. Dasbach went on the attack, saying the "take-over caucuses" are "in error", a clear criticism on the Mises Caucus. McArdle talked about creating a clear plan and how she is good at conflict resolution. It was a ho-hum answer lacking specifics but knocked it out of the park when later, in rebuttals, mentioned that LA County, which she chairs, has had excellent cohesion, despite the fact that not everybody there was in the Mises Caucus, which drew rounds of agreement from the LA County folks sitting behind me. Another question was about the presidential debates and the duopoly. D'Orazio and Dasbach both talked about how to get into the debates, both of which were dubious. D'Orazio said to get someone that is high profile without really getting into any specifics. Dasbach responded by saying the party needs to get big enough to where they can't ignore us, also without specifics of how exactly to get there or where exactly "there" is. Of course, they can't answer that because the threshold always shifts with the debate committee, specifically to keep third parties out. McArdle was the only one who had the answer of flexibility, the only answer that seems to make sense, to create a plan for an alternative platform in the likely event of exclusion. Like Joe Rogan, perhaps?
After the convention, I went out on the town with my family and I'm happy to say that not a single business asked me to put a mask on or asked me for papers. One woman at a vintage store reached for her mask, like she was caught by the police as we rounded the corner into her field of vision, but when she saw that I was unmasked, she relaxed and smiled. Something small like that will make my day. Perhaps Los Angeles still has some hope.
