LNC Chair Angela McArdle FreedomFest Presentation

photo by Joe Buchman

Newly elected LNC Chair Angela McArdle addressed about 60 attendees of FreedomFest in Las Vegas this past Saturday (16 July 2022) in a breakout room presentation titled: “How to Win When You’re In The Minority”.  A partial transcript of LNC Chair McArdle’s comments follows:

McARDLE: I’m really invested in what we have built locally in the city of Los Angeles, and I know, LA is an absolute tyrannical Hellscape and you are right to be suspicious of that, but we have made tremendous progress considering it is 11 million people in LA county, and we have a pretty decent opposition, but we actually got people fairly organized. So I want to talk about that and a little bit about my history and then I’m going to talk about how you can do the same thing.

There are two major battles I have helped to win in the city of LA.  The first one was back in 2013 when the city council decided they were going to ban food sharing in public rights of way – which is feeding the homeless.  There was public outcry over it; nobody knew what to do, and I was involved with a couple of different grassroots groups.  One was a mission that feeds people on skid row, and another was Food Not Bombs which was a left-leaning anarchist group which also fed people on skid row.  I did both.  People always think of me as a very right-leaning Libertarian, but I have been historically more involved with more left-leaning anarchist groups because those are the groups that were more politically active in making a change.

So there were a couple of things that we did to make sure this ban did not pass.  We used a very aggressive social media strategy.  Aggressive.  We had a Facebook page Mitch O’Farrell’s War on the Poor and we ripped that city council member apart. We did dedicated small business outreach.  I went and flyered, before we had a major protest, 180 small businesses, just personally.  I took a flyer and spoke with every single one.  It took eight hours.  I had only three people tell me that they were in support of the ban.  So you have got to get connected to your community.  We cross-promoted between different grassroots groups.   So I spent a week on the phone talking to every church group, every non-denominational outreach group, the large, what I call, “Homeless Industrial Complex” groups – it’s a whole other thing.  You know those people suck; they just take all of your money and then pat themselves on the back and build like ten little box units.

We did really aggressive public comment at city council meetings.  We only had like two weeks and we put this whole thing together and it culminated in an 800 person protest in front of . . . I can’t remember his name . . . he has been  recalled, they all go to prison eventually.  It’s terrifying . . . in front of his district office on Hollywood Boulevard; it was a media storm, and the public outcry was so intense that they tabled the motion and said, we are never going to pass a ban like that. It was really incredible.  That is what inspired me to get more politically active.  It’s harder to get elected to city council in LA than it is to get elected to (the US) Congress.  So it really felt good to get one over on these scumbags.

(LAUGHTER)

So the next major thing that I did, which was much more recent, was an Anti-Mandate Initiative that we worked on in the city of LA.  I chair (the Libertarian Party of) LA County, and so you have to triage your problems and there are a lot of them. We focused very aggressively on overturning a vaccination mandate in the city of LA.  So in August of last year, the city council announced that they were going to implement a ban.  Anybody who wanted to go into any place of business – except for a church, a drugstore, or a grocery store – you were not allowed in unless you had proof of vaccination.  So we all lost our minds and rightfully so, but instead of just flipping out – because that does not work.

How many of you have attended protests and you were so excited by the energy of the rally, but afterwards you were like, “now what?”  That is not a good way to do things and I am going to really dig into this.

So instead of doing that, I get all my LA Libertarians lined up – by the way it is not herding cats.  Those of you who think that working with Libertarians is herding cats, take that paradigm and just drop kick that 100 yards away.  We are going to be professional and we are going to get shit done.

(APPLAUSE)

So I get all my guys lined up, we get one-minute of public comment, it’s very frustrating that we can’t do it in person, but we can do it over the phone which actually makes it easier.  You’re going to write out what you are going to say, you are going to hit these talking points, you’re going to call in and we are going to do it.  Line them all up, we get public comment – you do not just go through and say, “I hate vaccine mandates.”

“Hi, my name is Angela McArdle.  I chair the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County.  We believe vaccine mandates are a gross violation of your Constitutional rights and your natural right to bodily autonomy.”

You hit both.  You hit both because not everybody respects the Constitution and that’s okay.  And then you say,

“We are going to work to overturn these mandates.  We are going to file a ballot initiative.  If you would like to work with us, we would love to have you, regardless of you political affiliation.  Contact me at LPLAC.us.  I yield the balance of my time.”

One, by one, by one.  Every time we did that on public comment I would get about 30 interactions – a mix of phone calls and emails over the next several hours.  It was very successful.

The other thing that we did was to engage in community outreach – lots of phone calls and outreach to people in the community.  You have your ear to the ground, who are the groups who oppose these things?  Can we get organized? Are they doing anything like we are doing? No.  In a city of four-and-a-half million people, not a single person figured out that they should try to overturn the law.  They just wanted to be mad and yell, and that is not an effective political solution.

We identified where we are going to have the best outreach and for some reason it looked like Instagram was where all the pissed-off moms were at.  Those are the people who will get on the phone and talk, and tell their friends.  So you want pissed-off moms in your corner.  We had a handful of protests and we attended every community outreach thing that we can, and then when we finally launched our initiative to overturn the mandate – it took about two months to get it approved, and that’s a whole government corruption thing – because it was very simple, it was just one line – “is hereby repealed and replaced with nothing” – very Libertarian . . .

(LAUGHTER)

We dominated the local media for a week.  The tiny, little, Libertarian Party of LA County was on every major news station.  We won a mainstream news poll, which I thought was insane; that never happens.

(APPLAUSE)

So we got everybody organized; we had them out collecting signatures; we were onboarding people; we were getting them to understand how to collect signatures, to go out and gather them, to connect with local businesses, and then within a few weeks, I got an anonymous tip.  I do not know who it was, someone at city council – an employee – who said that they were going to get rid of it because the public was not in favor of it anymore and they are afraid for it to go to the ballot because they didn’t want people to see, even if we did not win, that 300,000 people in LA oppose it.  That would be a nightmare.

So that is how you can win when you are in the minority; it is possible; you just have to be a little bit smarter about it.

So I am going to cover Radical Political Action and Purpose Driven Activism today.  So it’s going to be divided into two parts of my talk.  Both are important; I wish I could do them separately, but I am just squishing them in.  The first part is going to help you accomplish the second part successfully.

So we are in the minority and our leaders are passing tyrannical laws.  We do not have political power, and we feel helpless. Politicians are against us.  Media is usually against us, at least corporate media, and fifty percent of the population is allegedly against us.

(NOTE: From this point forward in her presentation, LNC Chair McArdle followed her outline, which is available on her website under the heading How to Win When You’re In The Minority, HERE.

Next year’s FreedomFest will be held in Memphis Tennessee, July 12 to 15, 2023.   Interested IPR readers can find more information and register HERE.

Audio of the entire presentation, as well as most other presentations at FreedomFest, some of which include video, will be made available on the FreedomFest “AUDIO” link HERE.  (NOTE: This link currently redirects to audio from the 2021 Freedom Fest, and is expected to be updated soon.)

IPR will be uploading selected partial transcripts of other libertarian FreedomFest presenters as they become available.)