PORTLAND, OR – Last Friday, as Jason mentioned in his Seattle Summary post, we met Rachel Hawkridge, the chair of the Washington State Libertarian Party (WA LP). Though she had been on the road the past few weeks and had only gotten back into town in time for our meetup, she agreed to sit-down with us on camera.

As is true with pretty much every video we shoot, we had to edit out some content for time length considerations. In this case, it was information about how the political process of Washington differs from others states (the state has both a primary and a caucus) and about Rachel taking steps to create institutional knowledge in the WA LP so that her successor essentially does not have to reinvent the wheel but can hit the ground running. This was done so that the recount of what Oscar McCoy and his wife endured thanks to an overzealous police department could be told.

The McCoy story demonstrates the harms government intervention causes to real people. Unfortunately with an institution so massive in scale committing so many rights-violations due to things like burdensome regulations, the war on drugs, eminent domain, taxation and more – it is far too easy for such stories to be forgotten and chalked up as mere statistics. With this video we hope to remind people of the true nature of government so that their rights are not usurped.