I don’t know how interesting this is, but it caught my eye and I thought I’d pass it on to RedState’s readers. A Campaign For Liberty e-mail sent out on February 19th contains an excerpt from a diary by Neil Stevens.

Here’s the quote from the email:

CPAC 2011 demonstrated clearly that our numbers are growing and young people are rising up in great numbers to support of our principled message.

As one pundit at the conference put it, “Looking around at CPAC, seeing the students here and watching the excitement, it’s clear to me that the youth coming up today have their own hero, and his name is Ron Paul.”

The quote comes from “CPAC: Reagan, Gingrich, and Paul” by Neil Stevens. If one were to read this without knowing the context in which it was first presented by Mr. Stevens, one might think that Mr. Stevens was a Ron Paul supporter, or at the very least, an unobjective observer who happened to note Mr. Paul’s popularity. I find this use of Mr. Stevens’ words very dishonest, as the diary itself does not in any way promote Ron Paul as a positive force. Another excerpt from Mr. Stevens’ diary says quite the opposite of what the C4L email seems to suggest:

“To the young people wearing Campaign for Liberty stickers, Ron Paul isn’t the porker who hasn’t accomplished anything in his long DC career but to spin conspiracy theories about the Federal Reserve. He is the idea of small government, respect for the Constitution, and a stable economy. It doesn’t matter that his monetary ideas would be a disaster for every American with a mortgage – not just all Americans who got in over their heads, but all Americans with debt – because that doesn’t matter yet to college kids. The details don’t matter; it’s the spirit that counts.”

By taking Mr. Stevens’ remarks out of context, C4L resorts to the same underhanded, dishonest tactics that propelled Michael Moore to his darling-of-the-left status. Moore got rich by distorting the facts, taking quotes out of context, ambushing people, conducting interviews under false pretenses, all the while calling himself a “documentary filmmaker” who was fighting for the “little guy”. And just as Moore used these tactics to squeeze money out of unsuspecting rubes, the C4L email attempts to get people to donate to some new training program.
An organization professing to stand in the name of liberty has no business using the same tactics as Michael Moore to achieve its ends. Its unfortunate that the work of a RedState contributor was hijacked to serve a purpose he never intended. It’s clear that over at C4L, the ends justify the means. Liberty is predicated on principles of righteousness and personal responsibility and when we abandon those principles, we abandon the cause for freedom. C4L’s shameless distortion of Mr. Stevens’ diary exposes them as just another lobbying group, one willing to sacrifice truth in pursuit of cash.