The respective leaderships of the Libertarian National Committee and the Ludwig von Mises Institute (LvMI) have been hurling insults at each other since the Unite the Right rally and subsequent riots in Charlottesville, Virginia last Aug. 11-12. Two days after protester Heather Heyer was rammed and dragged to death by an automobile driven by reported neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, Jr., Sarwark dinged Mises Institute President Jeff Deist for blaming the conflict on politicization without uttering the name "Donald Trump." Then Sarwark took a swing at Woods for defending Murray Rothbard's controversial "paleolibertarian" push toward the reactionary right in the late-1980s and early '90s.
Woods responded by calling Sarwark a "pansy" with "a very low IQ"; Sarwark accused the LvMI of being "the preferred choice of actual Nazis," and then Vohra issued a stinging denunciation of a pro-nationalism speech Deist had given two weeks before Charlottesville that had concluded with the line, "blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance." Retorted Vohra: "'Blood and soil' is a central Nazi and nationalist idea....[A]t the current time, Mises Institute has been turned into a sales funnel for the White Nationalist branch of the Alt Right."
Libertarian Party Executive Director Wes Benedict made the distancing exercise complete with an August 15 press release stating, "There is no room for racists and bigots in the Libertarian Party. If there are white nationalists who—inappropriately—are members of the Libertarian Party, I ask them to submit their resignations today. We don't want them to associate with the Libertarian Party, and we don't want their money. I'm not expecting many resignations, because our membership already knows this well."
Then something interesting happened: People didn't leave. In fact, they kept coming in. The Mises Caucus has continued to be one of the fastest-growing blocs within the party, even as the war of words between the L.P. and the LvMI (and Mises allies, such as the libertarian comic Dave Smith) raged on. Joshua Smith announced his candidacy for chair in September, winning an early endorsement from the caucus, and included in his critique of Sarwark "the fights with Tom Woods" and "telling people that maybe you're not the kind of people we want in the Libertarian Party," statements Smith characterized as "a huge ball-drop."
Woods, not previously noted for his party-related activities, organized* (see correction below) the day before the convention a raucous Take Human Action Bash a few blocks away, featuring a lively mix of speakers such as anti-war author Scott Horton and a piped-in Ron Paul. Unusually for both Woods and Paul, their speeches each made first-person plural references to capital-L Libertarians, and were basically pleas to make the party more like, well, Ron Paul
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