THREAD: Dave Smith considers seeking the 2024 LP POTUS nominationOriginally Posted by The Northbreather
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 04-27-2021 at 07:15 PM.
THREAD: Support the Mises Caucus
The LP Mises Caucus "goons" have taken over the Nevada LP:
THREAD: Support the Mises Caucus
Here's a sample of the sort of messaging (coming from the Nevada LP prior to the state convention) Dave was talking about in his tweet:
https://twitter.com/ThomasEWoods/sta...12472895164420
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 05-01-2021 at 10:13 PM.
Nicccccce. Time to speak some truth!!!!!!
The State Of The LP w/ Michael Heise - Part Of The Problem #730
On this episode of Part Of The Problem Dave Smith is joined by Mises Caucus founder Michael Heise to discuss the state of the Libertarian Party and what you can do to help the cause!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gLowuJXaYc
Lots of drama this past week with the LNC, LPNH, and basically the entire LP.
LNC Chair has resigned and decided to use woke terms and tactics by calling the people he doesn't agree with "toxic."
The Mises Caucus appears to be taking some names in their bid to try and steer the LP in a stronger direction and cut out some of the filth we saw with Jorgensen and the greater party pandering to BLM, etc.
Welcome to the R3VOLUTION!
Shenanigans in Pennsylvania:
The Fight Has Just Begun - A Mises Caucus Documentary
"The Fight Has Just Begun" is a Mises Caucus production about the events surrounding the 2021 LPPA Convention where 140 members of the state party, most of whom were Mises members, were stopped from voting in their own state party convention for the first time in the history of the state party.
The next LPPA Convention is taking place March 4-6 2022 in Williamsport, PA. #TakeHumanaction with us by joining the LPPA at lppa.org/join
Sign up to the Mises Caucus at TakeHumanAction.com Sign up by September 5th.
Get involved with the PA Mises Caucus: https://www.cognitoforms.com/Mises1/...LPPAConvention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b01qnZYQJE
https://twitter.com/ComicDaveSmith/s...43860614283265
(continued)
The nutbags are getting desperate:
https://twitter.com/ThomasEWoods/sta...59206411567106
Same person (h/t Connecticut Mises Caucus):
⬆️⬆️
Have to admit I’m loving this….
That nut job who laid down the curse is already there.-They will become physically and mentally ill
ETA: Is Jackie Perry trying to be funny or has she really lost it? I don't really get twitter (or whatevere that was). Is that satire?
Last edited by RJB; 12-04-2021 at 08:49 PM.
...
I think that stuff was from Facebook.
And yes, I think she really has lost it (assuming she ever had it to begin with).
A lot of anti-Mises people are losing it. For example, see the article in the post following this one (and that was before even more recent events, like the Delaware party fiasco from a few weeks or so ago).
Here's a selection from her Twitter account (which is here: https://twitter.com/jackie1776):
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 12-04-2021 at 09:57 PM.
Jackie Perry was mentioned in passing (see the bolded red passage) in the following Reason article from earlier this year.
The article is also relevant to the thread topic in general:
Inside the Battle Over the Soul of the Libertarian Party
A social media struggle in the New Hampshire L.P. fractured a state party and triggered a national meltdown.
https://reason.com/2021/06/23/inside...rtarian-party/
Brian Doherty (23 June 2021)
Joseph Bishop-Henchman resigned Friday as chair of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC), after a controversy that began three months ago with provocative tweets, intensified two weeks ago with an attempted schism of the New Hampshire Libertarian Party (LPNH), and has now turned into a battle for the soul of America's third-largest political party.
Two other members of the 17-person LNC, Tucker Coburn and Francis Wendt, have also resigned in wake of the tumult. The long-influential Pragmatist Caucus, associated with the two presidential campaigns of Gary Johnson, has dissolved as a direct result. And one of the party's few elected officials, DeKalb, Illinois, City Clerk Sasha Cohen, resigned from the national Libertarian Party (L.P.) in protest, saying in an LNC Zoom meeting that "we are a big tent party, but no tent is big enough to hold racists and people of color, transphobes and trans people, bigots and their victims."
A "toxic culture has recently been harnessed in the service of a grouping with a declared goal of taking over the party and making it as repulsive as possible to everyone except themselves," Bishop-Henchman wrote in his resignation letter, referring to the party's ascendant Mises Caucus, which for the past few years has been advertising its intentions to launch a "takeover" of the L.P. to realign it more with the policy and messaging associated with Ron Paul and the Ludwig von Mises Institute. "I will not chair a party that knowingly and has now affirmatively chosen to stay affiliated with the toxic garbage that was being spewed by the New Hampshire party and similar bad actors in other states, the violent threats emanating from these people, and the deliberate destruction of the party's ability to appeal to voters and win elections."
Bishop-Henchman did not detail the specifics of the source or nature of the "violent threats" in his public comments on the LPNH matter and his resignation. He declined to be interviewed for this article, deferring to his public written statements.
The outgoing chair had lost the confidence of many Libertarians, and not just Mises Caucus members, by lending support to a highly irregular attempt on June 12 by the LPNH's then-chair, Jilletta Jarvis, to break away from the existing state L.P. and form a new one, seizing the former's digital assets in an attempt to regain control of a Twitter feed that had since the party's convention in March made headlines by saying stuff like "John McCain's brain tumor saved more lives than Anthony Fauci."
On June 16, the LNC voted 12–2, with three abstentions, to reject a Bishop-Henchman co-sponsored motion to disaffiliate with the existing New Hampshire party, which would have paved the way for Jarvis' rump to be recognized. The other pro-separatist voter, Coburn, the representative for the very region containing New Hampshire, joined Bishop-Henchman in resigning from the board after the vote.
On June 17, Jarvis relented, and returned control of the LPNH website and other digital property back to the existing party.
LNC at-large representative Joshua Smith, a leading member of the Mises Caucus, saw this as a resounding victory for the party's newer members, and for the independence of state affiliates. He says the group has effective control of around 25 state party affiliates now.
The failed New Hampshire coup was condemned by a wide range of non-Mises L.P. factions and figures as well, including 2020 vice presidential candidate Spike Cohen (who called it a "fiasco" that "should have remained an LPNH issue exclusively") and former congressman Justin Amash, who argued that "due process" requires acknowledging that "there's only one legitimate executive committee of @LPNH," while also stressing that "official social media accounts are for advancing the party's mission of organizing libertarians, not for personal experiments in edgelording."
The state party's restored Twitter feed wasted little time resting on its laurels. "The ultimate goal of wokeism is to infiltrate, occupy, and dominate every cultural, political, and corporate institution," the account tweeted June 20. "The Libertarian Party isn't immune to this. It must be identified and stopped immediately."
The "Mean Tweets"
"No one saw this even remotely coming, such a nuclear bomb," says LPNH Executive Committee at-large member Sean Dempsey, a Mises Caucus member. "No one imagined it happening. For my own part I considered myself good friends with Jilletta….We thought she was a true freedom fighter, and this caught us all off-guard. We were very hurt, and still feel stabbed in the back because of the way this was handled."
Jarvis (who declined to be interviewed for this article) and the rest of the six-member state Executive Committee, half of which belong to the Mises Caucus, were elected at the annual state convention March 19–21. While he was not on the Communications Committee coming out of the convention, Jeremy Kauffman was added to the committee in April; by May that committee's chair granted him posting privileges. Kauffman is the founder and CEO of a blockchain-based, censorship-free content-publishing system called LBRY. He is a big player in New Hampshire libertarian politics, sitting on the board of the Free State Project, and he is notorious for highly inflammatory tweeting on his own personal account.
Sean Brennan was elected as treasurer only after the convention changed its bylaws to make him eligible; he had not been a dues-paying member long enough to qualify before.**
The Brennan maneuver raised some eyebrows among those resistant to the Mises influx, and there was a smattering of other complaints about the LPNH's post-convention actions. They booted a long-term activist and thorn in the Mises Caucus' side, Jackie Perry, for allegedly revealing private contact information about Jarvis; Perry insists it was all public, and that it was not clear the ExCom even has the legitimate power to get rid of members this way. One executive committee members' suggestion that they consider not running a gubernatorial candidate if a specific Republican much beloved by the state's larger liberty movement (which in New Hampshire has always been far more geared to the GOP than the L.P., even or especially among Free State Project members) was used to suggest the new ExCom was deliberately taking the L.P. out of electoral politics. A filing with the state as a political committee that Jarvis' new group made and the old one did not was used as evidence the Mises crowd wanted to drive the organization out of legal existence, but Brennan says that the LPNH did not get enough candidate donations to hit the legal limit requiring that filing.
All those controversies swirled in the chatter around the LPNH's misdeeds, but Dempsey believes they all amount to "red herrings." The visceral disgust displayed toward the party by Jarvis, Bishop-Henchman, and other Libertarians comes down to what Kauffman has done with the state party's Twitter feed. The whole kerfuffle was traceable to what LNC Secretary Caryn Ann Harlos, a very loud voice standing up for the prerogatives of the LPNH within the LNC, describes dismissively as "mean tweets."
Among the controversial LPNH tweets attributed to Kauffman was a call to "legalize child labor" because "children will learn more on a job site than in public school," another to keep Gitmo open "so that Anthony Fauci and every governor that locked their state down can be sent there, never again to be allowed inside of the United States," and still another to "Repeal the Civil Rights Act."
Kauffman defended his tactics on the Taking Human Action podcast over the weekend. "I'm a very committed libertarian, and I think this is good for the libertarian movement," he said. "I think L.P. national had been sort of taken over by what I would call, you know, woke neoliberal globalists, and they're not libertarians. Libertarianism is private property, bodily autonomy, voluntary association, right? These are sort of the core atoms of libertarian philosophy. And I don't think that the people who were on the LNC endorsed them."
The child labor tweetstorm in particular was "an absolute win" for the L.P., Kauffman insisted, since the backlash—including from such people as Gary Johnson—only serves to spread radical ideas to those who wouldn't otherwise have been exposed to them. He maintained that the Mises incursion into the LPNH had grown membership from around 60 people last year to around 150.
The debate over "mean tweets" conflated Kauffman as voice of LPNH and voice for himself, in ways that he thinks are illegitimate but that many L.P.-adjacent folk think is perfectly appropriate.
It is Kauffman who Bishop-Henchman referred to, not by name, in his June 14 letter to the LNC when he writes of "an individual who does things like tweet about how black people have lower IQs and murdering trans people would be a good trade-off for lower taxes." Those ideas were tweeted on Kauffman's personal account, not the party's. (Kauffman and his fans stress that he specifically was talking about the superior morality of no taxes to 1,000 murdered transpeople, not just the "lower taxes" Bishop-Henchman wrote.***)
Kauffman insists "if the LPNH is in trouble, it needs to be about things LPNH said, not things I've said," since Mises Caucus folk are "on board with the idea of not policing things people say on private pages." This hits on one of the prime ideological or attitudinal fault lines between L.P. factions: The Mises crowd is far more likely to find only actual physical assaults on people's persons, property, or liberty worthy of condemnation, what they call "NAP violations" (for the "non-aggression principle"), not what they might write off as merely (at worst) bad words or bad thoughts.
Jarvis insisted, in arguing for her move to take the LPNH into her possession, that that messaging strategy "is, frankly, designed to discredit the Libertarian Party in the state and in our nation."
Jarvis continued: "January 6th showed us what can happen when people are riled up into a frenzy and given little direction. For the last two months, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire has been using this strategy, the strategy of riling up mobs to frenzy and giving them no direction."
The Short and Unhappy Life of the New New Hampshire Libertarian Party
As the LPNH Twitter account continued dropping social media bombs, LNC Chair Bishop-Henchman sent a letter to Jarvis June 7 stating that "the party of which you are Chair is the LNC's sole qualifying organization in New Hampshire" and is "part of the official structure of the national party." Five days later Jarvis announced she was launching the new party.
In a videotaped chat with some LNC members June 13, Jarvis said that Bishop-Henchman knew what she was trying to do when that letter was requested (though she said it was technically asked for by a third party who she wouldn't name), and that she was therefore confident the LNC would recognize hers as the true Libertarian Party affiliate in New Hampshire.
Jarvis had originally been planning just to resign over frustration at the Executive Committee's communication strategy, but unnamed other people told her creating her own new party from scratch was another option.
So was Bishop-Henchman's letter intended to imply that the authority of the LNC was behind the new splinter party? The LNC is in the process of selecting people to form an investigatory committee this week to find out. If so, says LNC Secretary Caryn Ann Harlos, this would count as "corruption"—an attack on a duly constituted state affiliate from the national party. For her raucous role in pushing this investigation, within and outside the LNC, Harlos was hit with a motion to remove her as secretary and from all her other L.P. committee positions, then another such motion when the first one was ruled out of order. That second one was also ruled out of order on Tuesday, so her position seems safe for now. She considered herself targeted as a whistleblower for her attempts to get to the bottom of whether LNC officials were illegitimately targeting a state party.
In his June 14 letter, written partly in response to calls for his removal over his alleged interference in New Hampshire, Bishop-Henchman insisted he did not know what Jarvis was going to do. "Claims that I was some kind of co-conspirator are false," he said. "I do not as LNC Chair tell state chairs and officers what they should do."
But Bishop-Henchman also tried to argue that the last three months of LPNH executive-committee behavior "amounted to their constructive resignation," since it was effectively "little different than if they had all gone out and endorsed Donald Trump or Joe Biden, basically." Thus, Jarvis "felt she had no choice to reconstitute the organization as best she could, with the people she could, who still supported the mission of the party."
Jarvis and 13 other LPNH members during the short-lived rump party wrote up new bylaws and a new platform, and crafted a familiar-sounding Libertarian oath with a new ending: "I will not advocate or endorse the initiation of force as a means to achieve political or social goals. I will advocate for the freedom from oppression and coercion for all New Hampshire residents and affirm that as Libertarians we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant."
At the same time she seized possession of the original LPNH's digital property.
"When she locked the existing Executive Committee members out of digital assets owned by the party, the website, all the social media accounts, mailchimp, paypal, access to our email account," even membership records, said LPNH Executive Committee Member Sean Dempsey, that amounted to "theft of party property."
The moves shocked New Hampshire Libertarians. Stephen Nass, an at-large member of the Executive Committee, said in a phone interview this weekend that Jarvis was "old school, had been around, knows how to run a party, so she got elected unanimously" by all factions at the March convention.
Caleb Dyer, a former L.P. state legislator in New Hampshire who straddles the Mises/non-Mises divide, says he knows "for a fact" that the separatists' claim that "they exhausted every possible option before going nuclear with this campaign for disaffiliation" is "just a lie."
Dyer does worry that some of the Mises-oriented types care more about radical messaging than they do about winning elections, which to him means "philosophically they are not there to further the interests of the [LPNH]. They are specifically hindering those efforts." But those differences of philosophy are better solved, he thinks, using the available tools of process, negotiation, and management, rather than engineering a radical reorganization on the fly.
According to Executive Committee member Dempsey and current LPNH Interim Chair Nolan Pelletier, if the tweets were a core problem, Jarvis had it within her power all along to keep the keys of the Twitter account out of the hands of the controversial Jeremy Kauffman. As chair, she could have simply issued an order, or changed the password. Pelletier says that Kauffman is not currently one of the people tweeting from LPNH's official account.
What Does the Mises Caucus Want?
Bishop-Henchman's departure is the biggest national victory yet for the Mises Caucus, which functions as a Political Action Committee, one that raised nearly $100,000 in 2019–2020. So what do Misesians want?
The most common policy complaint heard about the L.P. in 2021 from Mises types is that the national party and most state affiliates were not vociferous enough against COVID-related lockdowns, thereby dropping the ball on the most vital liberty issue of the times.
"I felt my voice was not being represented in the party," says the LPNH's Dempsey. "We went through in 2020 one of the worst tyrannical totalitarian regimes in modern history and the national party was tweeting about trans rights. Yes, those are important, but get on the right page" and "know your audience."
Part of that audience is sick and tired of any party or candidate utterance that smacks of pandering to "wokeism," whether it be 2020 presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen tweeting that "It is not enough to be passively not racist, we must be actively anti-racist" or three-time former LNC chair Nicholas Sarwark serially criticizing the 1990s "paleolibertarian" excesses of people associated with the Mises Institute. Joshua Smith, who lost the LNC chair race to Sarwark in 2018, said: "We [in the caucus] don't message to collectivist ideology."
"I passionately reject the notion that Mises Caucus is completely, or filled with, racists or bigots," Dempsey says. "We just have, probably to our discredit, been so force-fed a narrative about having to virtue signal we probably don't say things enough like 'we reject bigotry' or 'racism is repugnant,' but those are empty words." What's important is making America a nation "dominated by support for freedom, property rights, free association, and due process."
Dyer detects an inconsistency in the Mises Caucus approach. "In broad strokes," he says, "they see themselves combatting wokeness as having infiltrated the Libertarian Party. They claim they don't want to fight the culture wars, while simultaneously picking a side, which I think is disingenuous."
The more Pragmatic Caucus–friendly Libertarians now fleeing the LNC or the party altogether worry that the Misesians consciously attract intolerant (and intolerable) elements.
"When New Hampshire's messaging started getting toxic," Dekalb City Clerk Sasha Cohen said in a phone interview over the weekend, "I got calls and messages from people who supported me during my campaign asking, 'What the $#@! is wrong with your party?' A direct quote."
Alexander DiBenedetto, who ran the Pragmatist Caucus until its post–New Hampshire dissolution, warned in a phone interview Sunday that a Mises takeover would likely mean "the majority of the people from the Gary Johnson days leaving the party." (Those campaigns got the party its highest ever national vote totals and percentages.) The L.P. should spend less time and energy perfecting the most polarizing tweet to attract the most hate-retweets, DiBenedetto said, and more time organizing such initiatives as the door-knocking Frontier Project, which actually won a state legislative seat for Libertarian Marshall Burt in Wyoming last year. If a Mises Caucus–style candidate wins the party's presidential nomination in 2024, he said, state parties unhappy with that approach might disaffiliate from the national party.
Francis Wendt, the Region 1 LNC member who resigned June 19, wrote in his farewell letter, "I will give the [Mises Caucus] credit, they have a very active base….However, activists are only part of the equation. You also need candidates, leaders, staff, and donors. Twitter trolls don't do that. Email blasts don't do that. Regurgitated messages from people that only show up for a day (convention) don't do that. Knocking doors does that. Writing checks does that. Making calls does that. Sitting up till 3 AM pouring over research does that."
In his resignation letter, Bishop-Henchman sounded a warning of his own. "Toxic people exhaust or drive out good people," he said. "Our mechanisms for removing such individuals and addressing such bad behavior are designed to be effectively impossible, and culturally, too many people who should know better passively tolerate it rather than confront it. It turns off donors, repulses allies, and makes team projects unviable."
But for the victorious Mises Caucus crowd, it was Bishop-Henchman and the pragmatists who lost sight of basic libertarian respect for property and due process in the New Hampshire battle and are now taking their balls and going home when things for a change don't go their way.
LNC member Joshua Smith remembers when "this [whole Mises Caucus thing] was just me and 50 other people chatting on a Facebook page." Today he finds his faction victorious after a bitterly fought battle over a party already struggling for respectability and vote-share, one in which an affiliate with fewer than 200 members can shake a national political party to the core.
"But now," he says, echoing a common Ron Paul fan meme, "It's Happening!"
** The article previously stated, according to sources on the scene, that Kauffman had paid for Brennan's LPNH lifetime membership. Kauffman, and other sources, say that is not true, and Brennan provided evidence it was not. The author regrets the error.
*** The sentence preceding the three asterisks was added since original posting.
Disclaimer: I'm not intending to start any debates or arguments with what I'm about to say. Just speaking from my experiences this past year in a stream of consciousness. Anyone who wants to quote or respond, feel free but this will be the first post that I will not come directly back to.
The people who've been in charge of the LP, it seems to me after all of the drama this year, were the typical leftist-lite types. It's pretty effing clear they were not what many of us here would consider "true" libertarians. Their purge from party control and their responses to it seem to prove they are little tyrants.
I joined the MC and all of that. But, I discovered the LP is peppered at every level with dbags and libertarians who don't care about anything other than being able to smoke weed and marry whoever they want. Before you say "yea, that's a huge part of what we are," I know. But these last 21 months (and counting) have led me down a different path, one that I feel is evolving from some of the inadequate and immature takes on society and life in general that many libertarians have been "championing."
If any of you reading this still wants to join the LP, I'll definitely encourage you to join the Mises Caucus as the MC is basically your Ron Paul/Tom Woods types of folks. Otherwise, I think the LP has had a leftist bent that the MC is helping purge (this is a good thing), but based on my own experiences, there's still going to be those leftist elements sprinkled throughout and if that's not your cup of tea, you're gonna have an interesting time like I have.
Then there's the whole thing that most Americans don't agree with libertarianism. Literally, 2020 and 2021 are proving this, but try telling that to your local LP people. What will you get in response? Gnashing of teeth and people questioning how "libertarian" you are.
I wish the MC the best and hope its takeover continues. But even then, it's still decades away, arguably, from being a formidable force in the American political landscape. The LP has no teeth as it stands at this time. Its focus needs to be promoting and starting at local levels, nothing more. And now, I'm really trying to figure out what's best for my family politically.
The following quote is not mine, but I'll leave it here for people to consider. And no, I'm not trying to swipe at Atheism, but in my own journey I'm starting to see a major underlying problem that libertarians have and will continue to have: "Libertarianism has an atheist problem."
Here's to wishing the MC and LP all of the best. I'm just asking everyone else to really stop and think by assessing the current battlefield. Where does the LP come into play right now? They are nothing more than a neutral auxiliary force infighting while the battle rages on in front of them.
Welcome to the R3VOLUTION!
Libertines and their ilk have always been attracted to and present in the modern liberty movement as a whole (not just the Libertarian Party), and they always will be to one degree or another. They may be an embarrassing nuisance, but they're not really a problem as long as they are not the ones running the public-facing organs of the movement (such as the LP). One of the objectives of the Mises Caucus is the replacement of such "lifestyle" libertarians with ideologically-driven "Ron Paul Revolution"-style libertarians - at least when it comes to the leadership of the national LP and the state parties. The "lifestyle" folks would still be part of the membership (and the larger liberty movement in general), of course. And some of them would probably occupy leadership positions here or there - after all, no national or state-level organization of any significance is ever going to be "pure". But a number of them might well just abandon a Mises-ized LP for venues they find to be more congenial - which would certainly be no great loss.
Even worse than the "lifestyle" libertarians, though, are the "woke" activists and their ilk who call themselves "libertarian" (such as self-described "libertarian socialists" who push assorted bull$#@! like so-called "Universal Basic Income"). The "lifestyle" types are a nuisance to be sure, but the ardently leftist "woke" ones are an active and pernicious danger. They absolutely cannot stand the Mises Caucus, and the feeling is mutual. This is where the real fight is - not with the too-cool-for-school, social-clubby, weed-toking polyamorists or the like.
Most of them don't, and most never will.
But that doesn't matter - because (in this context) most people don't matter.
We don't need "most" people. We don't need a majority of them. We don't even need a plurality of them.
We just need enough of them, fostering enough open defiance and non-compliance.
If by "ha[ving] teeth" and "being a formidable force in the American political landscape" you mean winning U.S. congressional or presidential elections, then of course that's just not going to happen - which is why the LPMC isn't going to waste time trying to do those things. As for the statement that the "focus needs to be promoting and starting at local levels", the following is from the LPMC's "Our Actions" page:
Inside the Libertarian Party
Libertarian Party Candidate Recruitment and Support: This is the fundamental function of the Libertarian Party itself. The LPMC will be focused on supporting local and county level campaigns as well as the presidential nomination. [1]
Local Libertarian Party Affiliate Organization and Creation: Creating new county level affiliates of the Libertarian Party should be the first priority of our state teams. This will help us bolster our numbers and ultimately our influence within the Libertarian Party.
[...]
Outside the Libertarian Party
[...]
The LPMC will use ballot initiatives, referendums, and lobbying at every level of government (federal, state, county, municipal, etc.), choosing the most effective means allowed in each particular case. You can start a ballot initiative in your state much like Decriminalize Denver to legalize Gold and Silver for example, or you can lobby your local government to pass a bill to decriminalize marijuana, or bring attention to tax issues locally. These efforts will enable us to form issue based coalitions with both republicans and democrats on a variety of issues.
[...]
Anyway, I'm not going to criticize or condemn anyone who is not interested in the LP or the Mises Caucus. There is not One True PathTM that must be taken, and there are other venues and opportunities that should not be ignored (the Free Staters in New Hampshire, for example, are doing some interesting things by running and getting elected as Republicans - much to the alarm and consternation of local Democrats).
But as I said elsewhere (and will repeat again below), for better or worse, the Libertarian Party is one of the most visible "public faces" of libertarianism and libertarian ideas & ideals. Whatever one may think of the Libertarian Party or its usefulness, it behooves those who are genuinely concerned with liberty to at least respect what the Mises Caucus is trying to accomplish, regardless of whether one wishes to participate or not.
[1] As for the "presidential nomination" aspect, this is a matter of using presidential campaigns as messaging platforms, rather than as (certainly doomed) attempts to actually win the presidency. Now I am sure that some people are going to roll their eyes at this and mutter something about how "education" campaigns are a waste of time. And I agree - they are a waste of time. But I'm talking about "messaging", not "education" - and they are not the same thing.
IMO, the whole "education vs. winning elections" argument is a total red herring and a false dichotomy for which I have little patience. As far as fielding candidates who have any real chances of actually winning offices at the federal level goes, that's just not going to happen - at least, not outside of (at best) some flukes or unrepeatable special circumstances. And as for "education". most people are simply not educable in any way or to any degree that would make any significant difference.
Most people are inert ballast. Put tyranny on their plates, and they will eat it. They may grumble and grouse about it, but they will submit and eat it. Likewise, put liberty on their plates, and they will do the same. By their own choice of inaction and passive compliance, they relegate themselves to irrelevance. No amount of "education" is going to change that - not even if you ever do manage to get "most" people to agree with you.
But as I mentioned earlier, we don't need "most" people. We only need enough people. And we don't need to "educate" them - we need to rally and fortify them. They are the "remnant" that Ron Paul (and Albert J. Nock before him) has talked about. They are the ones who will do more than just passively submit to whatever is imposed upon them. They are the ones who will actively resist and refuse to comply. And the way you rally and fortify them is with messaging, not education. You let them know that they are not alone. You breathe fire against the regime, instead of pandering to it - and in the process, if some people end up being "educated" into being ideological libertarians, well, then, so much the better. But unlike for "education", that is just a bonus of messaging, not its purpose. And that is - or should be - why the LP POTUS campaign is important: messaging, not "education" or "winning".
THREAD: LP Mises Caucus features in SPLC "Hatewatch" hit piece
(SPLC "Hatewatch": Mises Caucus: Could It Sway the Libertarian Party to the Hard Right?)
Last edited by Occam's Banana; 05-28-2022 at 08:38 PM.
Mises Caucus Takes Control of Libertarian Party
Dominating the convention body by more than two-thirds, the Mises Caucus claims to offer an edgier, more libertarian organization. Foes accuse it of right-wing deviationism and racism.
https://reason.com/2022/05/29/mises-...rtarian-party/
Brian Doherty (29 May 2022)
A four-year battle for control of the Libertarian Party (L.P.) ended Saturday in Reno with a victory for the Mises Caucus at the party's national convention. The faction's chosen candidate for chair of the party's national committee, Angela McArdle, won on the first round of balloting with 692 votes—more than 69 percent of the voting delegates.
McArdle's first tweet after winning was characteristic of her caucus' style: It mocked the L.P.'s recent past, quote-tweeting a March 2020 post that mentioned social distancing. She told the convention Friday she would not allow the party to "humiliate ourselves and alienate everyone" when faced with the next COVID-style crisis.
McArdle, a paralegal and current chair of the Libertarian Party of Los Angeles County, said in her speech to the convention Friday that the government response to COVID has left many working-class Americans thirsty for personal liberty, and "we don't want to ignore them." They have, she argued, "low-resolution views of freedom…and we need to bring that vision into focus by communicating our message clearly and by supporting our candidates and affiliates."
While McArdle was the Mises Caucus candidate, the behind-the-scenes mastermind of its victory was caucus founder and leader Michael Heise. His disapproval of William Weld, Gary Johnson's running mate in 2016, was an initial inspiration for the caucus' launch. He found Weld painfully lacking in libertarian orthodoxy, especially when it came to issues such as war and gun regulations.
The caucus's official platform is plumb-line libertarian, but its foes say that too many Mises Caucus members and fans downplay libertarian positions that might offend the right, are intentionally obnoxious and bullying, and are often racist. For example, the New Hampshire L.P., a powerful vector of Mises Caucus messaging, tweeted on Martin Luther King Day that "America isn't in debt to black people. If anything it's the other way around." (The tweet was later deleted.)
The sense the caucus is soft on or actively encourages racism attracted the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center just before the convention began, which aired the concerns in a story reported with cooperation from many Libertarian Party members upset with the Mises Caucus.
Both Heise and Mises Caucus stalwart Joshua Smith, who won the vice-chair election Saturday, denied the charges of racism and said in phone interviews prior to the convention that the basic vibe they are seeking is online young men into edgy comedic podcasts, a new counterculture for whom the old L.P. holds little appeal. Heise believes that the current rumored frontrunner for a Mises Caucus–approved presidential nominee in 2024, comedian and podcaster Dave Smith, is so well-connected to the Joe Rogan world that legacy respectable mainstream media will be meaningless for party messaging moving forward.
In his nominating speech for McArdle before the vote, libertarian antiwar author and podcaster Scott Horton insisted that he's seen thousands of new convention-attending members energized by the Mises Caucus in the last couple of years. (The last non-presidential L.P. convention I covered, in 2006, had only slightly more than 300 delegates and I doubt more than 20 of them were under 30 years old. This convention drew more than 1,000, and while this is only a guess based on pacing around a huge packed room for a couple of days, I'd say one-thirdof them might have been under 35.)
Meanwhile, during that same period, fierce factional dueling has played out in hundreds of hours of podcasts, hundreds of thousands of words of tweets and Facebook threads, and often on the business listserv of the Libertarian National Committee (LNC) itself. One such fight, summed up at length in Reason in June, involved a faction of non-Mises libertarians in New Hampshire attempting to create a new L.P. affiliate so that the national party could disaffiliate the Mises-dominated one and recognize the new one. The gambit, which ultimately failed, led to the resignation of then-national chair Joe Bishop-Henchman and caused one of the party's few elected officials, Dekalb, Illinois, City Clerk Sasha Cohen, to quit in protest as well, saying "we are a big tent party, but no tent is big enough to hold racists and people of color, transphobes and trans people, bigots and their victims."
Despite bad blood, I detected no booing or walkouts today when McArdle's victory made the caucus' victory manifest. None of the anti–Mises Caucus delegates or supporters that I have spoken to at the convention—including people from Illinois, Florida, Texas, Massachusetts, and even Mises stronghold New Hampshire—said that this takeover would make them walk.
Two former significant donors to the L.P., Kyle Varner and Michael Chastain, both with decadeslong history in the party, did say in phone interviews that the Mises turn, which they see as importing a level of racist edgelording they have no taste for, has made them stop funding L.P. candidates. Such defections are particularly relevant in this environment: The national L.P. has just had three months in a row of spending exceeding income, and the number of active donors has been falling for seven straight months.
Varner and Chastain see a distinctly right-wing culture and policy bent from the Mises faction. The caucus, whose whipping of its team proved very effective at the convention (combining Discord channels and physical signs waved on the floor featuring Ron Paul saying "yes" and Bill Weld saying "no"), wants to eliminate from the L.P.'s platform a statement that "we condemn bigotry as irrational and repugnant." (This first entered the platform in 1974, though it has not remained there consistently.)
The caucus also wants to completely eliminate any mention of abortion, replacing a current plank that is effectively pro-choice, though it says in essence that Libertarians can differ in opinion based on when they think a protectable life begins.
A document of internal Mises Caucus strategizing that began circulating before the convention explicitly said—with reference to the plan to eliminate the line about bigotry being irrational and repugnant—that "one of the major goals of the Mises Caucus is to make the LP appealing to the wider liberty movement that is largely not currently here with us. That movement strongly rejects wokeism and the word games associated with it. This along with the deletion of the abortion plank will display that there are serious cultural changes in the party that are more representative of that movement." (The platform issues had not yet been decided at press time.)
Pennsylvania's new Mises-affiliated state chair, Rob Cowburn, insisted in a pre-convention interview that despite rumors otherwise he intends to continue his state's record of winning over 100 local positions in odd-numbered years by hunting for ones in which no other person is likely to be running, generally offices such as auditor and constable. (Disgruntled non–Mises Caucus libertarians in Pennsylvania have left the L.P. and formed the new Keystone Party.)
The L.P.'s most successful electoral project above the local level has been the Frontier Project, which got the L.P. its only currently seated state legislator, Marshall Burt in Wyoming. The project focuses on finding winnable elections, generally with just one major party candidate in opposition, in the West, where libertarian feelings tend to run higher. McArdle, in a May podcast appearance on The System Is Down, while musing about bad financial management and accountability in the L.P., said that while she thinks the Frontier Project is "fantastic," she worries that is "difficult to understand what that money was spent on, where it went, why it took so much money to get him elected." She considers the per-vote cost for Burt's victory overly high, and she wonders about "secrecy" around the funding with no one outside the LNC knowing exactly how the whole project works.
Apollo Pazell, who runs the Frontier Project, said in a phone interview a week before the convention that he was not aware McArdle had concerns about the finances of the project, which gets support from county, state, and national branches of the party as well as from separate funding sources.
The Mises Caucus' foes have accused the faction of planning to stop running candidates against Republicans they like. Heise denied this in a phone interview before the convention. The Mises-run party will continue to try to run local candidates especially, he said, with a preferred strategy of straight-up localist nullification of federal laws. "Decentralization" is a mantra of Heise's, and the caucus's Twitter feed has openly been against the long-held legal principle that the 14th Amendment means that states and localities also have to obey the federal Bill of Rights. Most libertarians might see decentralization as an often useful tool that often can increase liberty, but nonetheless agree that the federal government forcing states and localities to respect rights is perfectly fine. Heise in a phone interview suggested that federal pressure even to honor citizens' liberty is an unacceptable violation of the decentralization principle.
Christopher Thrasher, who has been senior staff on multiple Libertarian presidential campaigns and ran ballot access for Gary Johnson's 50-state sweep, worries that the Mises Caucus troops lacks granular knowledge of the terribly complex regulations surrounding ballot access and running campaigns. This, he says, is especially dangerous for the L.P. as inflation hits the cost of collecting signatures for ballot access.
Heise wrote on Facebook Friday night that his faction already controls a majority of the LNC, having swept the votes for regional representatives to the LNC in meetings Friday night. (More LNC member votes are still ahead in the convention, which does not end until Sunday.) Mises Caucus favorite Caryn Ann Harlos, who was booted by the LNC from her elected secretary position over Mises-related faction fights, re-won her elected position Saturday as well.
The Mises Caucus people often dub themselves the revival or continuation of the Ron Paul revolution of libertarian ideas in the GOP's 2008 and 2012 presidential races. (Paul spoke at a party the caucus hosted Friday night.)
Heise thinks the most important connection between the Ron Paul revolution and his caucus is its interest in uniting excited young activists with a sense of real community, an idea he stressed over and over. His people enjoy hanging out and trying to save/piss off the world together. "If you want to win elections," Heise says, "you better damn well start getting people to think or care about the principles of liberty. And you have to have a home in order to, from that point of stability, build the culture, build the base. And I think we can build that through the party." The Mises Caucus has taken control of an estimated 35 state L.P.s and now the national party as well, so that project now rests in its hands.
In those 2008 and 2012 races, however, Paul studiously avoided anything that might be construed as "anti-woke" and generally avoided talking to his campus audiences about abortion and immigration, where he was at odds with many other libertarians. While the Mises Caucus might argue that the threat of progressive woke thought control was less severe then, the podcaster/memelord edgy-offensive-insult-comedy stance they often embrace is entirely opposite to how Ron Paul presented himself and won his huge audience as a presidential candidate.
The general public will generally never know about LNC chairs or internal factions, but many of them will be aware of who the L.P. runs for president. Former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash was the only sitting federal congressman the party has ever had. (He was elected to the House in 2010 as a Republican, but he switched his affiliation to the L.P. in 2020.)
Amash said in an interview Friday that he has not made a decision to seek the L.P. nomination in 2024, but many assume he will. Amash sold himself in his keynote speech to the convention as proof that someone who presented himself ideologically as entirely libertarian can win federal office. He is not a Mises Caucus guy, and in his keynote Friday he trolled them by reading various quotes—including some opposing anarchism and supporting cosmopolitan international cooperation—to a chorus of boos, only to reveal that the quotes were from Ludwig von Mises himself.
"If you say Justin Amash isn't libertarian enough for you," Amash told the Mises crowd, "then I've got news for you about the rest of the country." Amash summed up the libertarian message as one of the richness and wonders of peaceful cooperation, in markets and all human relations, and said the L.P. must be the party of "democracy, of diversity, of tolerance, of humility."
After his keynote speech, Amash said in an interview that different conceptions of party messaging and mission are "healthy for the party." He has said he does not want to ally with any caucus. That may be the only strategy left for a man who still entertains the possibility of being the presidential nominee of a party now thoroughly dominated by a caucus with which he has documented disagreements about substance, tone, and style. He denied trying to get a rise out of the Mises Caucus with his Mises quotes, saying merely that "it's important that all of us understand the foundations of libertarianism."
https://twitter.com/LPBasedball/stat...14737445666816
Dave Smith 2024? Should be interesting.
Does the LP still have the political heft to get into the debates?
- Kim KardashianIt's all about taking action and not being lazy. So you do the work, whether it's fitness or whatever. It's about getting up, motivating yourself and just doing it.
Donald Trump / Crenshaw 2024!!!!
My pronouns are he/him/his
The Mises-run party will continue to try to run local candidates especially, he said, with a preferred strategy of straight-up localist nullification of federal laws.
- Kim KardashianIt's all about taking action and not being lazy. So you do the work, whether it's fitness or whatever. It's about getting up, motivating yourself and just doing it.
Donald Trump / Crenshaw 2024!!!!
My pronouns are he/him/his
And preferably not Amash 2024.
He's no good at "racist edgelording". (a key requirement imo for any LP Presidential candidate)
- Kim KardashianIt's all about taking action and not being lazy. So you do the work, whether it's fitness or whatever. It's about getting up, motivating yourself and just doing it.
Donald Trump / Crenshaw 2024!!!!
My pronouns are he/him/his
https://twitter.com/LPBasedball/stat...53767138938881
The abortion plank of the official party platfrom has also been removed.
https://twitter.com/LPBasedball/stat...53767138938881
The abortion plank of the official party platfrom has also been removed.on both counts
- Kim KardashianIt's all about taking action and not being lazy. So you do the work, whether it's fitness or whatever. It's about getting up, motivating yourself and just doing it.
Donald Trump / Crenshaw 2024!!!!
My pronouns are he/him/his
Apparently, Spike Cohen (the LP's 2020 candidate for US VP) authored the wording for the change:
Not a single MC-endorsed candidate or issue has lost yet.
At this point, I doubt any will. The Mises Caucus takeover of the LP is nearly complete.
All that remains is to "assimilate" the fifteen or so remaining "unassimilated" state parties (such as the Texas LP).
The takeover has already borne fruit ...
... and continues to do so:
https://twitter.com/LPBasedball/stat...63211373514752
(The bastards should never have removed it in the first place.)
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https://twitter.com/LPBasedball/stat...63211373514752
(The bastards should never have removed it in the first place.)
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