From the desk of Kim Ruff

Kim Ruff is spot on here.

Personally, I hope Amash can hang onto his seat as an independent or bona fide Libertarian, instead of running for POTUS as a Libertarian...I think that would be the most strategic victory.

I am usually skeptical when someone who has been a sitting officeholder defects from their chosen political party midterm, because there’s a high probability of political opportunism.

That being said, the Libertarian Party has been fortunate enough to find beautiful exceptions of existing officeholders who did that very thing not because they were pandering, but because their experiences working in politics helped them to give a name and purpose to their growing disillusionment with the powers that be.

Sometimes, you have to have to walk that path to know it isn’t the right one.

We have members who were active soldiers and officers from every single branch of the military whose experiences at home and abroad opened their eyes to the extraordinary fraud, waste, and abuse of human and financial capital that the Military Industrial Complex and the nonstop war machine begets. They’ve lost friends and colleagues, observed soul-shattering atrocities, and continue to carry those mental and emotional scars with them every day.

Sometimes, you have to walk that path to know it isn’t the right one.

We have members who were educators in the public school system who learned first-hand how government policies penalized good teachers who rightly recognized the unique learning needs of individual students, presumed to know better than parents, and forced young developing minds into medication in order to make their one-size-fits-all antiquated model of education fit snugly like a straight jacket.

Sometimes, you have to walk that path to know it isn’t the right one.

We have former police officers, field agents, bureaucrats, government employees, businessmen who worked in industries that benefitted from crony capitalism, district attorneys, state and federal prosecutors, and judges who have all realized through first-hand experience how ineffective and wasteful at best, and how horrifying fatal and cruel at worst, government can be.

They walked that path once, true, but as I tell my children often: redemption comes when you recognize your mistakes, make the appropriate amends where and when you can, resolve to not repeat them, and commit yourself to doing the right thing.

That these people are here, standing alongside us and equally committed to pushing back, is a testament to the fact that not everyone is too far gone, too unreachable for us to not try. We love our narratives distilled into a matter of good versus evil with clearly defined heroes and villains, but reality is not so simple because people are inherently complex and dynamic.

Outside of legitimate sociopaths of which only a tiny minority of people qualify, all of us have the capacity to do great good and terrible bad. Every day, we are given multiples scenarios in which we are faced with that choice - to take the hard right, or the easy wrong.

The Liberty Movement is filled with people who forwent a lifetime of easy wrongs to take the hard right. Some may crawl, some may walk, and still others may sprint, but if they’re facing true north, they are finally on the right path.

Come with us.

#RuffPhillips2020 #ReigniteLiberty