Give Us Liberty (11 page)

T
HE
S
INCEREST FORM OF
F
LATTERY

L
EFTY BLOGGERS HAD GOOD
fun with our fund-raising strategy, particularly as it related to on-site bathroom facilities. But at this point they had nothing left to throw at us except nastiness, smears, and name-calling.

The Democrats sensed that the momentum was on the side of those who were rising up in defense of liberty. They were getting anxious, and their nervousness led to mistakes. On August 18 former Clinton cabinet secretary Robert Reich called for a countermarch the following day, September 13, telling advocates of government health care and the euphemistically named “public option” that they had “to be very loud and vocal” if they hope to save their beloved vision of socialized medicine.

“We won't get a public option
¹
, or anything close to it, unless people who feel strongly about it make a racket,” Reich told
Politico.
The “first step is to be very loud and very vocal: Write, phone, e-mail your congressional delegation and the White House. Second step: Get others to do the same. Third step: Get voters in Montana, North Dakota, Nebraska, and other states where Blue Dog Dems and wavering Senate Dems live and have them make a hell of a fuss. Fourth step: March on Washington.”

That sounded like a challenge. Listening to the attacks leveled by Democrats against the citizens who showed up at town halls over the summer, you would have thought that the Left eschewed citizens who “make a racket,” “a hell of a fuss,” and anyone who is “very loud and vocal.” Were we not just lectured to about such things? Was there a double standard?

Organizing for America, Barack Obama's lauded grassroots machine, did in fact pick up the cudgel and organize a counterprotest on September 13. Sophia Elena, a video blogger
²
whose compelling footage of the Taxpayer March on Washington is some of the best on YouTube, captured the counterprotest the next day. All of 175 advocates of government-run health care attended. It was little noted and quickly forgotten.

The real power revealed on September 12 was the actual people who organized the march. True to the independent libertarian spirit of these decentralized protesters, there were tens of thousands of organizers for the march, and thousands of assorted caravans of buses from every corner of the nation. No speaker or attendee was paid a fee, and no transportation or hotel was subsidized.

E
XPLOSIVE
I
DEAS

O
N THE AFTERNOON OF
September 11, 2009, staff and volunteers were gathered at FreedomWorks' headquarters at 601 Pennsylvania Avenue, scrambling to finish up the many projects that needed to be done. Campaign manager Nan Swift was working with the volunteers who were printing maps and directions, rolling T-shirts, and making protest signs. Brendan and Jenny Beth were working out a final order of speakers. Melissa Ortiz, a FreedomWorks volunteer, was working out the logistics of directing people around Freedom Plaza, along the route on Pennsylvania Avenue, and inside the barriers around the stage. Everyone else was on the phone, calling local organizers to bolster turnout.

And then Alberta, our office administrator, received the call: “There's a f—ing bomb in your building, bitch.”

According to ABC News: “On the eve of what organizers call a ‘Big Ol' TEA Party,' the Washington, D.C., offices of FreedomWorks were evacuated by D.C. Metro police on Friday afternoon after the conservative organization reported to authorities at 3:42
P.M.
ET that it had received a bomb threat
³
. Tens of thousands of anti–big government activists are expected in Washington on Saturday as part of a march on Washington being organized by FreedomWorks, a conservative group headed by former House majority leader Dick Armey, R-Texas. . . . D.C. Metro police has confirmed to ABC News' Jason Ryan that the D.C. Metro police had, indeed, evacuated the organization's offices. . . . Fifty volunteers were forced to leave the office where they were making calls encouraging people to come to tomorrow's event.”

At the time the call came in, Matt Kibbe was being interviewed by Luke Livingston, who was shooting footage for
Tea Party: The Documentary Film.
Luke had traveled to Washington on a Tea Party bus from Atlanta with some of the activists he was following and filming for the documentary. When they knocked on the door to tell Matt and Luke's crew that the police were evacuating the building, the crew kept the cameras rolling. It made for a little drama in the movie, and Luke actually put together a short vignette that we played the next day. It was like a scene taken from a Hollywood production: police cruisers, sirens, bomb-sniffing dogs—we had it all.

It all happened so fast it was surreal. Certainly, some of the staff and volunteers were shaken up by the threat. Most of us were far more annoyed than scared. The incident, like the march the next day, was underreported, if acknowledged at all, by many liberal reporters in the media. Where was the outrage? Where were the scolding lectures to the Democrats and their liberal attack machine about political civility?

The best part of the incident was the resolve demonstrated by the volunteers who were making the march a reality. “What are they going to do,” a volunteer asked while waiting to return to the building, “kill me, I guess?” The activists just shrugged it off and headed back up to the office as soon as D.C. Metro police was certain it was safe.

We would witness and hear this sentiment repeated over and over again among the activists of the Tea Party movement: Call us names. We will not take the bait. Ignore us. We will not stop. Threaten us. We will not back down. We love our country, we love our liberties, and this fight is too important.

When we finally worked our way up to the appropriately named Freedom Plaza on the morning of September 12, it all seemed worth the risk. It all seemed worth the work and the hassles and the threats. A beautiful sea of humanity greeted us as we worked our way to the stage.

N
OW OR
N
EVER

W
E NEVER DID GET
to the stage. The plaza was too crowded with people. Tom Gaitens, FreedomWorks' Florida director, was firing up the crowd. “What do we want?” Tom asked the crowd. “Freedom!” The whole scene looked and felt like a carnival or a concert. Everyone was laughing and joking and enjoying the fact that they were participating in something that mattered. That day we all became a cohesive community of concerned, and now mobilized, Americans: 9/12ers, conservatives, Tea Partiers, libertarians, grandmothers and granddaughters, fathers and sons, independents, Republicans, and Democrats. You could find one of anything and/or everybody in the crowd that day.

We had planned to arrive at the stage on Pennsylvania Avenue at around 10:00
A.M.
, rally the gathering crowd with some quick comments, organize the various delegations by state, and march together down to the Capitol. Many of the groups that traveled in from across the nation had brought their state's colors to fly above the crowd in case things got chaotic. That way, people could find their local groups and march in an orderly procession down Pennsylvania Avenue at the designated time.

Billie Tucker and her First Coast Tea Party group from Jacksonville, Florida, had towed a massive replica of the HMS
Dartmouth
to Washington with them. The original
Dartmouth
was the first of the three East India Trading Company ships to dock in Boston Harbor in 1773 before the “Mohawks” emptied their cargo into the ocean in protest. The Jacksonville crew planned on “sailing” the
Dartmouth
down Pennsylvania Avenue when the police gave the signal.

Ready to lead the march was a contingent of Revolutionary War reenactors who planned to call the procession forward promptly at 11:00
A.M.

On the morning of the march, we arrived at Freedom Plaza. That is, we were trying to get to Freedom Plaza. In truth, we couldn't get anywhere near the area because that whole quadrant of the city was closed off by the National Park Service officers and D.C. city police who were trying to manage the mass of humanity that had started flooding into the plaza at 7:00
A.M.
Freedom-loving activists from all over America were shutting down a good part of the city simply because of their sheer numbers!

So we walked toward Pennsylvania Avenue after police roadblocks stopped our cars far away from the center of the gathering. We were already behind schedule and scrambling to catch up with the citizens who had already claimed the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington as theirs. As we walked, wading through the growing crowd, it was clear to us that it was now their day. It was their march. It was their moment to petition their government for a redress of their grievances.

Everyone was in great spirits
⁴
. We wandered around looking at all of the posters and flags. It really reminded me of a tailgate party at a football game. Groups would gather on one side of the plaza and cheering and singing would ensue, then it would start up on the other side of the plaza. There was a float parked along Pennsylvania Avenue that looked like a sailing ship hosted by a group called The First Coast Tea Party. A speaker on deck would rouse the group gathered there into frenzy and then they would play some patriotic music and when that was done they would start all over again.

—R
ON
K
AEHR
, A
LBUQUERQUE
, N
EW
M
EXICO

As we gathered at Freedom Plaza that morning, the crowd quickly overwhelmed the space and spilled out into the streets as the sun rose above Washington. The crowd became so huge, so fast, that the National Park Service officer in charge came up to Brendan Steinhauser at the stage and said, “It's time to go. You've reached critical mass.” So, a full two hours earlier than scheduled, Brendan yelled into the microphone, “They are telling me that we've reached critical mass! If you're ready, I'm ready to march!” The roar of the crowd was incredible, and the mass of a million people began to make its way down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the Capitol.

It was an emotional moment. We were overwhelmed about what we were seeing. It is still overwhelming to think about it. We had always said that government goes to those who show up. We always knew that good policy would be considered inside the halls of Congress only when America beat Washington. We hoped that the citizens of our great nation valued freedom, free enterprise, and limited government as much as we did—not just because freedom is the only efficient way to allocate scarce resources and create economic prosperity for all, but because it is right and good and just to leave people free. And we always believed that the American people were with us, ready and willing to step up and take to the streets in defense of their liberties, just as the founders envisioned. Now we were seeing it with our own eyes: this beautiful mob of happy people—in the process of shutting down Washington, D.C.—was a dream realized for a small grassroots organization fighting for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom.

F
ACES IN THE
C
ROWD

O
NE OF THE GREAT
things about true grassroots gatherings is how different the culture is from a typical political event. This is not the place for partisan agendas, or politicians for that matter. There are none of the mind-numbing policy lectures typical of free market events. There are, in fact, no canned speeches carefully crafted from the best opinion polling data and focus groups. There is lots of music and singing and chanting and talking and mingling and cheering.

The sheer size of the crowd could have been a logistical disaster because we simply were not prepared to accommodate and manage nearly a million people. Neither, apparently, was the city, the D.C. Metro service, the Capitol Hill Police, or the National Park Service. But it did not turn into a logistical debacle. Everybody seemed to go with the flow.

I loved seeing people of all ages marching
⁵
! Elderly folks, lots of veterans, families with children, college kids, bikers, you name it! It was definitely a cross section of America, and as I looked at the crowd I was struck with the fact that these people aren't your normal protesters. They are normal people—the kind that make this country work! Most of us left jobs, school, family, and our normal responsibilities to go try to be heard and make sure the world knows we are out there and won't be silenced.

—M
ARILYN
, D
AVID, AND
A
NDREW
T
AYLOR
, C
ODY
, W
YOMING

By the time we got to the stage, set up in front of the U.S. Capitol, we knew that September 12 was one of the most important days for economic freedom and individual liberty we would witness in our lives. This wonderful mob of humanity quickly overwhelmed all of our carefully planned logistics and the city's transportation infrastructure, appropriating Washington, D.C., at least for that afternoon, to the cause of freedom.

T
HE
N
UMBERS
G
AME

T
HE
T
AXPAYER
M
ARCH ON
Washington was the largest gathering of fiscal conservatives in history. Nothing else comes close by comparison. Indeed, this was indisputably one of the largest protests of any kind ever in D.C. Martin Luther King's monumental March on Washington, by comparison, was 250,000 strong
⁶
.

The size of the crowd was so large that it became the source of heated—and partisan—debate in the media. In fact, the debate started before the first activist arrived in D.C. A private memo released by the House Democratic leadership predicted a big crowd the morning of the march. “As you may know,” the memo read, “FreedomWorks held a Capitol Hill demonstration yesterday
⁷
that turned into an impromptu rally for embattled Rep. Joe Wilson. Now, based off of news reports and comments from leaders in the Tea Party movement, it looks like Saturday's event is going to be a huge gathering, estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to two million people.” This was the Democratic spin machine setting what it thought was a ridiculously high bar, presumably to ridicule the actual attendance the next day.