Liberty Maven

It was a hot and sunny day in Washington DC today where estimates from 1500 (on the low end) and 8000 (on the high end) participated in the Ron Paul Revolution March and Rally. Several speakers and musical guests enthralled the freedom eager crowd.

Some of the guest speakers fell directly into the stereotypical mold of what critics view as “the Ron Paul supporter”. I guess the generalizations do come from somewhere, but like any group of freedom loving souls you will find all types.

For the most part the speeches were directly in line with the Ron Paul platform. Though for my money the best speech given today was the one by Michael Scheuer, former head of CIA’s Bin Laden unit. In an eloquent prepared speech he hit on several topics near and dear to a Ron Paul supporter’s heart drawing cheers from the crowd several times. To give you an idea of the content of his speech I uploaded a video of the last five minutes of it and it is embedded below. Unfortunately, I was unable to record the entire speech. Perhaps it will be made available by someone else soon.

Following Scheuer, Adam Kokesh from Iraq Veterans Against The War spoke with great passion firing up the crowd. Chuck Baldwin then gave a shortened speech because the schedule was running late and Ron Paul was next. Ron Paul peppered his now standard rally speech with a few new comments here and a few new jokes there. It would have been nice to hear a new speech from Dr. Paul, but it’s hard to complain when the man just goes up there and delivers his liberty message every single time.

Now a word about the crowd. I attended the “Freedom Rally” in the same exact location back on April 15th and the crowd today looked to be 3 or 4 times that size. I would estimate the turnout to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 2500 people. However I’m no expert and there were many people coming and going and just about everyone camped out on the outskirts of the area under the trees making it extremely difficult to deduce the numbers. Even if 8000 showed up throughout the day it was a far cry from the 15,000+ that pledged to be there. That aspect made the day a bit disappointing.

That being said, the day was a wonderful experience. I stood amongst the true believing patriots and cheered for the voices and sounds of liberty. It is truly a blessing to live in a country where speaking out against those in power is not met with immediate overt violence. It is even more impressive that those anti-establishment words bounced directly off the structures where that power conducts its business. We still live in a mostly free country. We shout to others in the name of vigilance to keep it that way.