12/13/07 – Trevor Lyman – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, so welcome back to Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95-9 in Austin, Texas, and our first guest today, well, I have two words for him.
Thank you.
It's Trevor Lyman, guy from my understanding never cared about politics at all until he decided to raise $4.3 million for Ron Paul in one day.
Welcome to the show, Trevor.
Hey, how are you doing?
I'm glad to talk to you finally.
New website, TeaParty07.com.
We'll talk all about that, but first of all, tell me how it is that you found yourself involved in the Ron Paul campaign.
Sure.
Well, basically, the whole Tea Party, I'm sorry, the first event was ThisNovember5.com.
That was actually another guy's idea.
His name is James Sugre.
He lives out in Huntington Beach, California, and he made a video that put together the idea of having 100,000 Ron Paul supporters donate $100 each on one day.
That day was, at that time, November 5th, to try to go for $10 million.
And I found that video, I put it in forums, people really went crazy over it, and I knew that it was going to be something that people wanted to do, and they were asking for someone to make a website and to get it going, and so I did that.
And then everybody pitched in and got that going, spread the word, and it was a success, and so now we're where we're at.
We have a new system, a new way to get the media to pay attention to Ron Paul, and everyone's doing their part, and we're making it happen.
Yeah, you know, I was really impressed.
I saw a clip, the preview, of the news piece for Now, Bill Moyer's Now on PBS that's going to run tomorrow night, and in that piece, you told the reporter that you never were really interested in politics, thought everything was fine until you started learning about Ron Paul before you got involved in this thing.
Right, actually the thing that woke me up was the 2006 election.
I thought everything was fine because I thought the will of the people was done in this nation, and I saw that the will of the people was to get out of that war, and so I thought things were going to, you know, we can deal with problems here and there, a little corruption here and there, it seems like it's unavoidable, although maybe we can avoid it.
But when I saw for a fact that the will of the people was to get out of that war, that we were promised to get out of that war, and then we didn't, and you know, basically I was like, okay, this is broken.
We're in trouble here.
The will of the people is no longer being done, and that's not America.
For me, that's what it was.
Everybody else has their own thing, but that was what it was for me.
Sure.
Now, tell me, what was it that got you interested in Ron Paul?
Soon after that, I found him.
He was going through an exploratory committee.
I basically found it because so many people were replacing their personal pictures on Myspace with Ron Paul, and so you start to see his face pop up everywhere.
So I thought, okay, great, I'm going to take a look, and when I did, I found a man who was consistent, always did what he said, stuck to the Constitution for year after year of service to this country, and also who was against the war.
And he had the foresight to know that it was going to bring us problems.
So those two things together really sold me on him, but then as I continued to learn more and more about monetary policy, just more about the Constitution and how we appeared from it, and I still have more to learn, but as I learned all these things and looked at his character, and we had come off of a betrayal, I was like, well, we can't mess around with people who promise and don't deliver, so for me, he's the only candidate.
Yeah, very good.
Now, help dispel a myth for me.
Whenever I read about the success of November the 5th in the paper, they always say that you were celebrating the gunpowder plot against King James.
Right, right.
Is that the point?
You celebrating the terrorist act there?
Right.
No, not at all.
It actually had to do with, the reason the idea resonated, well, first of all, is because it's a good idea just to do that.
To have a money bomb on one big day.
Yeah, exactly, to have everybody come in on one day, and also because we had just raised $5.3 million, so it seemed so much more doable.
A lot of this is just timing.
If we hadn't done that yet, I don't know if people would have believed in it so much.
But the creator of the video did, too, that date on November 5th, and had images from the movie View for Vendetta, and that does have a correlation to the gunpowder plot thing, but it's really such a side plot or a side connection.
Right, I don't think most Americans had ever heard of the gunpowder plot until the movie View for Vendetta came out.
And even then, they really didn't pay attention to that.
If you went down the street, even today, if you went down the street and you just said, have you ever heard of Guy Fawkes, or what's View for Vendetta?
I would guarantee you, you're going to get, you know, 20 times the response from View for Vendetta than you are for Guy Fawkes.
Yeah, and you know, in that movie, I guess the state would call the guy a terrorist, but he only blew up empty buildings in the middle of the night, so it wasn't quite, you know, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or anything.
Right, he was sort of an anti-hero with just, he was symbolic.
And you know, what really happened at the end of the video is that the people finally came together and peaceably just said, you know, this is our nation, we are the decider.
And I think people really want that again, you know, because it's clear that we're not getting that.
And also, just that there were so many parallels in that movie about what the government was doing to its people that, you know, our government does to us.
Spying, abusing propaganda, the lie, and you know, we're tired of paying the consequences for that.
All right, now tell me about this last November 5th.
I'm sure you must have got up early in the morning to see how it was going.
Can you share with me what it was like at your house that day, watching those numbers go up, up, up until midnight like that?
Oh, it was great.
And I was up late, so I was there.
I donated once after midnight and then once again during the day.
We definitely saw a surge right at midnight.
It was incredible, very exciting.
But I didn't really know, even at that point, what would happen.
And because it wasn't quite as big as I thought, but I just didn't know, okay, do people stay up or are they just going to donate tomorrow?
And then things were good.
But then sure enough, 8 a.m., 6 to 7, 8 a.m., things really started picking up.
And it was just a straight line up all day long.
It never let up.
I think it just probably got even more intense towards the end of the day after people saw the success.
They were so excited.
And we just really blew them away that day.
Yeah, I remember, you know, I'm over there refreshing at RonPaulGraphs.com and so forth.
And I remember thinking, well, there's going to be, you know, a slump during coming home from work traffic time and then it'll probably, you know, trail off a little bit, you know, around dinner time, maybe hopefully come back a little bit more after that or something.
No way, just a straight line all the way through all day long.
$4.3 million in a day, Trevor, you raised for this guy.
Well, we did it.
I definitely do not see it as something I did.
The way I look at all this is I think of a race car environment and that the political arena is the racetrack.
There's a car that you drive in and then there's the driver.
I think I played one, I was one of the people that helped supply the car, but at the end of the race, who do you, who claims victory?
Well, it's the driver and the people drove this, you know, so the people, us, we, RonPaul supporters, we took this around that track fast, you know, just as many times as we needed to and we won the race.
Well, you know, even in the racetrack terms, they always refer to the team, the pit crew and the guy on the radio and the guy with the Gatorade and everybody working together.
Sure, sure.
And really that's, I think, kind of the overarching theme of the RonPaul campaign is it's his message of individualism and natural order is the exact thing that's, you know, growing up all around him and propelling him forward on this campaign.
Absolutely, it's just, he's, you know, illustrating, he's a living example or, I mean, he's offering us with proof of his principles.
Even during his campaign, he's showing us how much and how much better America is going to be when we get more and more of what we're about back into our lives, which is this, you know, entrepreneurial spirit.
It's the power of the individual, it's the power of individuals working together and, you know, just the ingenuity of freedom, you know, we find a way.
Tell me about December the 16th, that's this Sunday, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, right?
That's right.
And the plan is for what, everybody to start kicking down at midnight Saturday night?
That's right, midnight Eastern Standard, and I need to clarify with the campaign how their clock works.
I think it's really all done on Eastern Standard Time, so there's a cutoff for 9 p.m.
On the day of November 5th, we had 18,000 pledges.
We did that in about two and a half weeks, and we had more time to prepare this time, and now we're at about 30,000 pledges.
Really?
Yeah, so we're definitely, you know, I would, no one knows what will happen, but I think because we have so many more pledges that we're going to blow past 4.3 million, I hope, and also because everyone knows how successful it was, I think they're going to be more willing to give.
You know, it's like, I know this is going to work, so I want to be in, you know, that kind of an attitude.
It's success breeds success.
Right, yeah, I hope the fact that it's a Sunday doesn't hurt.
I guess it probably won't.
I'll tell you this, I saw in the newspaper, what, yesterday or two days ago, they said, yeah, Ron Paul, he's at 10.3 million now or something like that, he's already broken 10.
I'm looking at it now, it's almost at 11.4.
He's raised a million dollars just in the last couple of days leading up to this thing.
That's right, and it's excellent.
You know, the media is just going to, they're not going to know what to do.
He's going to beat all of his quarterly projection, which nobody, you know, other than us, thought that he could do.
I think even we weren't so sure.
November 5th gave us the hope that we could, the certainty, and today we know we're going to blow by it.
It's just going to be great.
We're going to have a rally there.
There's going to be a blimp in the air.
You know, it's going to be awesome.
Now tell us about the blimp.
I heard some rumors that the blimp was actually having some trouble, the banner was late, the weather was bad, and things weren't working out.
Well, things are, it's just not, in some ways there's some truth to that.
Things aren't going to go exactly as planned.
We wanted the blimp above Boston for the Tea Party event Sunday, but that's not going to happen because there's a nor'easter coming in, and we found out that, you know, we're new to this, none of us have ever put together a blimp project before.
We found out that the blimp can't be anywhere near snow, not even a little amount, and the reason is that snow will collect on the top, freeze, and it'll do so in an unbalanced way.
You know, so weights will be added, so it'll be heavier on one side than the other, and what will happen is the blimp will spin.
So, you know, people can get hurt, the blimp will be destroyed, so because of this, any time there's going to be a chance of snow, we can't be there.
So we're going to go down to South Carolina, another key primary state, over Columbia, and we'll be in the air, the blimp will still be on the news, while all that money is coming in to Ron Paul, and there'll still be a rally there, so we'll have footage of the blimp, of the rally, the numbers will be going crazy, and Monday will be a huge news day as well, it'll just rock that whole week.
Right, yeah, sounds like it, and you know, I know there's a rally here in Austin, Texas at the south side of the Capitol building, and then I believe a march down to the river, and is it the case that there are going to be rallies like this all over the country?
Yeah, I really think so, in fact, all over the world.
Strasburg, France is doing their own tea party to commemorate what we're doing.
Alright!
Yeah, you can check that out, and you know, it's not just, what's so amazing about what they're doing, is it's not just what we'd like, you know, America to have a president that, you know, will change the foreign policy, etc., or, you know, that kind of thing because it affects us, they're not just saying that, they're saying we want those principles here in our country too.
Right, yeah, and it goes to show that Americans really can still spread liberty, just not by invading people, but it is still the case that around the world, they like our Declaration of Independence, our Statue of Liberty, that's how they want it too.
Exactly.
And still just as much of an inspiration as it was before George Bush started murdering so many people.
Yeah, exactly.
It's kind of amazing, really, that it stayed on.
I saw yesterday where a bunch of guys ambushed Al Gore getting his Nobel Prize with a bunch of Ron Paul signs in Norway.
Right, yeah, they love it, they love what we stand for, and, you know, so do we.
We've been hijacked, and we're taking it back, you know, this is the awakening, and whether we do it right now or not, you know, it's on its way.
It doesn't matter how long it's going to take, we'll just go for Congress next, which is really the key, you know, that's where all our problems are.
Anyway, if they were doing their job, we would be out of this war by now.
Absolutely right.
You know, so it's a movement, it's not just about Ron Paul, he's a spokesperson, he's breaking the ice, breaking the new ground, he's an incredible person, but he knows and we know that we're not giving this stuff ever.
This is America, back to America, and the voice of the people.
There you go, everybody, it's Trevor Lyman, the website is TeaParty07.com, and I just want to thank you, again, from the bottom of my heart, Trevor Lyman, for all your efforts on behalf of the Ron Paul campaign, you've done a hell of a lot.
Oh, well, thank you, and thank you to everybody out there who, because we're all doing this together, this is just, you know, it's incredible, we're taking it back, we're getting the message out there, we're growing day by day, and it's just a great thing.
This is, we are, you know, illustrating what America is all about.
Hell yeah.
Alright, thanks a lot for your time, Trevor, appreciate it.
Alright, thank you.
Bye-bye.
Alright, and everybody, you can catch Trevor Lyman and the Ron Paul Revolution tomorrow night on Now, PBS Now, Bill Moyer's show, it's going to have a whole piece on the Ron Paul Revolution, check that out as well, and again, the website is TeaParty07.com.