Lady Liberty
Keli Carender, Political activist
IT WAS THE best twenty bucks Keli Carender ever spent. The 30-year-old conservative Beacon Hill blogger who goes by the name Liberty Belle and is credited with launching the Tea Party movement waved a $20 bill in Democratic Washington Congressman Norm Dicks’s face last summer and dared him to use it as a down payment on health care reform. And in the process, she issued a rallying cry that socialism-fearing Libertarians everywhere could get behind: Come and take our money from us. On April 15, she’ll deliver that message to Washington liberals during her second-annual Tax Day protest.
LEGAL PLUNDER, that’s what it is.
BASTIAT’S THE LAW—that’s where I got the term plunder. You’re deeming one person more needy and worthy than the one who earns the money. You’re saying they’re more needy than me.
I’LL TELL YOU RIGHT NOW, if there was some kind of endowment fund or private foundation that helped poor people get medical care, I would give money in a heartbeat. I don’t want people to be sick and not be able to go to a doctor. I just don’t think it’s moral to force someone else to pay for it.
THINK ABOUT WHAT GOVERNMENT IS: At the end of the day, government is a force. And what is force? It comes at the end of a gun.
MY NOT-VERY-POLITICAL FIANCÉ told me I needed to start a blog. He loves discussing politics with me, but at one point he said, “I’m happy to talk about it with you, but that’s all we’re talking about right now, and I’d really like to have other conversations.”
IT WAS JUST A PERFECT STORM: an outgoing person, educated, passionate, a go-getter. I’ve been performing for years, so I wasn’t afraid to stand up in front of a crowd. At the first protest, I wasn’t like, “Who’s going to emcee it?” Obviously I was.
I DID AN INTERVIEW ON TV, and after it aired a guy I work with came up to me and was like, “I saw you on KING 5. I’m surprised. You sounded smart. I mean, I know you are, but…” And I thought, Oh I get it: You think everyone in the Tea Party is crazy.
I’VE NEVER TOLD ANYONE WHERE I WORK. I don’t like to tell because I don’t want my workplace to get inundated with complaints or have the windows broken.
WHEN I WAS IN THIRD GRADE, I LOVED JESSE JACKSON. Loved him. I had no idea what he was saying, but I loved to listen to him speak.
FOR A LONG TIME, I just ignored how blue Seattle was because I wasn’t politically active. I had my viewpoints, but I kept them to myself. And honestly that was harder than it is now that I’m open about my beliefs, because I’d have to sit through people saying really awful things about me. But they didn’t know; it wasn’t their fault I sat there in silence. At the end, I was more ashamed of myself because I didn’t stand up for myself.
WE’RE SUCH SOCIAL CREATURES. At school, you don’t want to be the kid with no friends, and I think that even as adults, we still have those fears of being ostracized. I remember moving from a school where I was a little quiet to another school and thinking, This is going to be different. I’m not going to be quiet. I’m going to make friends. So I made that choice. And it worked.
BELIEVE ME, life would be a lot easier if I had different viewpoints.
I LIKE TO HAVE DEBATES WITH MYSELF. I’m totally open to being swayed, but I have yet to find someone who can sway me fully.
IT MUST FEEL GOOD to take people you disagree with or hate and make fun of them with a sexual term. But technically, a teabagger is the one who’s dominant. So really, I’d rather be the teabagger than the teabaggee.
ON YOUR STREET, do you know who the needy are? Do you know if someone’s a widow who’s maybe on food stamps? Do you know who has really bad arthritis and needs someone to come over and vacuum their house? People used to know these things.
I WANT TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO PAY NO TAXES during the year and then have to write a check at the end of the year, just so I’m acutely aware of what they’re taking. I want to know. I want it to hurt.
I’M NOT AN ECONOMIST. But when George Bush said he had to—what was it?—let go of free market principles to save the free market, that was the most ridiculous statement I’d ever heard.
I’M TELLING YOU, we’re everywhere.
Published: April 2010
I was very disappointed to find Keli Carender was given the opportunity to have a full page of her quotes, unquestioned, in Seattle Metropolitan. I will not purchase your magazine again due to your decision to print the article.
At a time when the right is speaking in terms of violence, threatening elected officials with death, throwing bricks and shooting out windows, discussing the collection of arms for what Teaparty bloggers have called, “hundreds of little Waco’s”, your magazine chooses to give forum to another extremist with an agenda of violent anarchy. To quote her piece in your magazine, “It comes at the end of a gun.”
Any fools can tear a government down. It takes good people build a more perfect union. Good people do that by voting and becoming part of the system to repair it from the inside, not by encouraging violence from the outside.
You’re magazine says it’s also partnered with Q13 Fox News.
“I don’t usually comment” sounds trite, I know, but in the case of your Keli Carender article – and the comment above – I’m making an exception. Thank you, Seattle Metropolitan, for exposing another viewpoint and an interesting Seattlite – which is what the publication is all about, right?
I’m not going to say whether or not I agree with Ms. Carender, but I do agree that it’s right to expose Seattle’s diversity and to profile all kinds of viewpoints – and there are plenty published in SM that I don’t agree with! But that doesn’t prevent me from picking up the magazine and in this case it may have even convinced me to subscribe. So… lose one, gain one.
In response to the comment above about violence, I agree that it’s an unfortunate thing that there are those who discredit anything worthwhile they might have to say by their radical, inappropriate and sometimes illegal behavior. But just in case people haven’t noticed, there are radicals on BOTH sides of the argument; the right doesn’t own that entirely.
I think Ms. Carender proves that you can and should be able to voice your opinion in an intelligent manner — and everyone doesn’t need to agree (in America, right?).
I’m not afraid of reading opinions I disagree with. If anything, it makes me feel enlightened and aware. Ms. Carender herself does NOT seem to advocate any violence. If you research and read her blog/follow other stories about her activities, you would know this. Overreaction can often cloud our judgment, and so adamantly opposing a particular view to the point that it’s unacceptable to be even be written about is madness! I’m certainly not afraid of things or people different than me in many aspects of politics, culture, race, even sexuality. I wonder what else Dan is so very very afraid of even reading……
Dan, Dan, Dan…. My goodness! Have you been soooooo hibernating that you failed to catch the news that an Obama supporter has been arrested for threatening the life of Republican House Whip Eric Cantor, a Jewish American, and his family. Or, in all your news reading/viewing prowess, how did you fail to catch the video, and news stories, of SEIU members hurling epithets and fists and kicking (while he was down) a Black American (Kenneth Gladney) who happened to oppose Obamacare at a Townhall meeting in Missouri? Sounds like you, Dan, are really deep into the news! How did you miss the speech by Obama’s manufacturing tsar where he said that “…we kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun….” Presumably you also have a degree in “Misquotations and Incoherency” from Podunk U. How could one think otherwise, Dan? You wrote that the magazine gave a “forum to another extremist with an agenda of violent anarchy. To quote her piece in your magazine, ‘It comes at the end of a gun.’ " Dan, Dan, Dan…. If you scroll up, you can read what you missed and what Ms. Carender actually said. In case you don’t want to scroll up, here it is: THINK ABOUT WHAT GOVERNMENT IS: At the end of the day, government is a force. And what is force? It comes at the end of a gun.” As someone who has served this nation in the military and in civil law enforcement, there is NO question but that government force comes at the end of a gun. The big question, Dan, is this: What is the authority behind the gun? That is where the problem lies. Those on the left of the political spectrum desire to force you to do as they wish. Those on the right of the political spectrum seek to preserve your liberty. I choose the latter. Thank you, Seattle Metropolitan Magazine, and I will be buying your magazine!
I find it telling that of 4 comments as of yet (one being mine) 3 of them are responses to my post rather than comments about the article itself.
@ Margaret: I agree that Americans, “should be able to voice (their) opinion(s) in an intelligent manner” My post was not about censorship. It was about time and place.
@ Alison: Alison, you wrote, “I wonder what else Dan is so very very afraid of even reading…” and hinted that I’m, “afraid of things or people different than me”
Alison, I am not afraid of reading or listening to any news source, both national & international. I listen to about 2 hours of radio every day (KUOW, KPLU, KVI “Freedom” 570, KTTH “The Truth” 770, KPTK 1090), watch CBS news and an hour of Deutsche Welle as well as read news on the web. If anything my fear is that people are not paying attention to news or – more importantly – not getting enough from varied sources.
@ Bald Eagle: The Cantor thing happened 2 days after I wrote my post. Yet you fault me for it. One Fart Smeller. There is no comparison in number of threats or fanning the flames coming more from the Right then the Left. If you do not acknowledge that then you are getting your news from a very narrow source.
You spun the Ron Bloom quote, well done sir or madam, for pulling misinfo from the web.
And, yes, I read everything Keli Carender said in her piece of work above and also saw her speak in Seattle April 15th 2009, where I stood (in fear, according to Alison) in the middle of a whole bunch of Tea…people.
Bald Eagle, I have never had a gun pointed at me by any U.S. authorities. So in my life, government does not come at the end of a gun. If for you and Keli Carender it does than I suggest the two of you make changes accordingly.
—-
“America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the nation and gentler the face of the world.”
-George H.W. Bush
Dan
Great, insightful article (and clever photo, to boot). Thank you for being a brave enough publication to show the political underdog of the Pacific Northwest, instead of simply regurgitating the same old p.c. liberal speak we’re all so used to. I enjoyed reading Liberty Belle’s quotes right out of her own mouth — unadultered and uneditorialized — and found this easy to relate to. Good job, Seattle Met!