LOUISVILLE, Kentucky–FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe, one of the featured speakers at the organization’s FreePAC Kentucky event in Louisville Saturday, told Breitbart News that the estimated 2,000 Tea Party activists attending the event will focus on the tools and techniques of community organizing they first “reappropriated” from the left when the movement began in 2009.
“Community organizing is how we beat the establishment door to door, neighbor to neighbor,” Kibbe told Breitbart News in an exclusive interview Friday. Kibbe said the event is called FreePAC Kentucky for a reason. “PAC stands for principled action community. We’ve sort of reappropriated a much-hated acronym [of the left] for our purposes.”
It’s a theme Kibbe also hit in his new book, Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff. “The name of the book comes from a thought I had after I slogged through Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiment. It dawned on me: So what he’s saying is don’t hurt people, and don’t take their stuff.”
The title idea came to Kibbe in 2011 “when [he] was trying to explain the difference between the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. At Occupy Wall Street events, they were hurting people and taking their stuff.” Conversely, at their Tea Party functions, he explained, “everybody said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and picked up their garbage.”
Kibbe delivered a more detailed version of that message to the crowd at FreePAC Kentucky on Saturday afternoon. Many of the activists, waving Matt Bevin for Senate signs, appeared ready to apply, over the next six weeks, the community organizing techniques recommended by Kibbe. On May 20th, Tea Party-endorsed challenger Matt Bevin and incumbent Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) will face off in the Kentucky Republican U.S. Senate primary, and several activists told Breitbart News they will deliver the most robust door-to-door effort ever seen in any Senate race.
Kibbe told the crowd that we have to beat the Republicans before we beat the Democrats, and everyone present appeared to agree.
Matt Bevin and Chris McDaniel, the Tea Party-endorsed challenger to Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS) in Mississippi’s June 3rd Republican U.S. Senate primary, also addressed the crowd.
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