RNC Recap Part 1: Politics School and Meeting Ron Paul

I apologize to everyone that this has been so long in coming. I didn’t realize just how busy we would be while at the national convention. Most nights we ended up with about 3-4 hours of sleep. And for both Toby and me, missing a week of work meant that piles of projects were waiting when we returned. Our time in Minneapolis Saint Paul was at turns exciting, adventurous, exhausting, boring, fun, depressing, infuriating, and motivating. I will try to recap as best I can over the next couple of days. Here’s part 1:

We (Toby, me, my wife, Ellany, and my daughter, Taytem) hit the road August 30^th, Saturday morning, drove all day, and arrived in St. Paul 13 hours later.

Since we had worked in the grassroots of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, we were excited about the slate of events planned by the Campaign for Liberty, which is the ongoing organization that will carry on the legacy of Ron Paul’s rEVOLution.

The Campaign for Liberty’s events started at noon on Sunday with their all-day Real Politics Training School. This turned out to be well worth our time as we joined 600 other students to learn invaluable lessons on the systems and techniques of effective grassroots political activism.

Mike Rothfeld taught us about the different paths to power: direct and indirect. He told us about the weaknesses of the theory that we can educate everyone into right thinking. We learned that politics is not about vapid theories. Rather it takes concrete actions in real time to effect political change.

We learned that politicians are people who have subjected their humanity to their ambition. Mike joked (sort of) that we don’t need to worry about witnessing to politicians since they don’t have souls anyway. Since they are ruled by their ambition, their actions can be reduced to Pavlovian responses to pleasure and pain granted and inflicted by those of us on the indirect path to power.

We learned that to achieve real political change, we must not fall prey to the access trap, but rather pursue grassroots mobilization and confrontation. The keys are to withstand their threats, resist their bribes of access, and never lose sight of the long-term goal while pursuing victory in the short-term. That point was driven home with an unexpected visit and word of encouragement from none other than Ron Paul. It was exciting to see and hear him in person for the first time.

We learned many other great methods of communication, marketing, fundraising, and winning elections. I believe we will be holding some special meetups in the next couple of months so we can all learn these important lessons that will make us much more effective grassroots activists. I encourage everyone to keep an eye out and try to attend, because the only way we will ever begin to address the huge mess of American politics at the national level is by taking our cities, counties, districts, and states for Liberty first!

We actually had to miss out on the last Politics School session, but it was for good reason: The C4L was hosting a special reception for the delegates and alternates and their spouses with Ron Paul himself! By the time Ron entered, the room was packed and he was immediately surrounded by delegates eager to meet him and get a picture. It took quite a while to work our way through the crowd, but I finally had my chance to shake his hand.

I was also lucky enough to get him to autograph my copy of his book The Revolution: A Manifesto as well as the hat that had signaled our supporters to vote for me at the district convention. It was so great to finally get to meet the man we had worked so hard to elect, and who has been such a humble and fearless defender of Liberty. As a huge bonus we also got to meet Barry Gold water Jr., one of Dr. Paul’s longtime allies.

After patiently greeting everyone, Ron stepped to the mic to share a few words. I will post the video soon.

The week hadn’t even officially started yet, and we were already having an amazing experience.

We have so many more exciting and shocking stories to share with you, so be sure to check back often!

-RR Team