David Blau is former National Secretary of the Libertarian Party of the United States, and has held multiple offices in the Libertarian Association of Massachusetts. He writes in his opinion column:
The current chair and secretary of the Libertarian Party, Angela McArdle of California and Caryn Harlos of Colorado, have spent the last two years systematically dismantling that organization with the support of one Michael Heise of Pennsylvania and his Mises PAC.
They are all toxic narcissists, serial liars, and bullies; they take credit for the hard-won successes of others; and they use sabotage tactics to corrupt or destroy everything they touch. They are not to be trusted.
I strongly recommend severing contact with all of them, and anyone supporting them who wants to ride on their coattails.
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I signed up at the Liberal Party website, and have heard nothing. There are no links to any of the state affiliates, no contact info, no nothing.
They have to learn to walk before they can run. Give them time, they are barely out of ICU, having been born prematurely.
If they don’t respond to the initial people who indicate interest, they’ll NEVER get out of the ICU.
We would of course welcome editorial statements, civilly phrased, advocating for the current Libertarian National Committee.
As a related note, the Liberal Party is now up to nine state affiliates, and expects to add another third-of-a-dozen fairly soon, and more thereafter.
I don’t wish to wade into their faction fights, but here’s an excerpt from an interview that puts a different perspective on at least one of the current national chairwoman’s controversial decisions than what many of your readers expressed or perhaps even considered.
I’ll include both the link and excerpt. If the excerpt is too long, please use just the link. However, the whole interview is significantly longer, and much of it – especially the part before the excerpt – isn’t relevant to the point I’d like to illustrate here.
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2024/07/ipr-interview-west-virginia-libertarian-gubernatorial-nominee-erika-kolenich-talks-key-issues-and-campaign-goals/
Evans: While you’re having these conversations—and I do want to keep the main focus on your campaign in West Virginia—but I have to ask, as you know, in May, the Libertarian National Committee created some press for itself when it had former President Donald Trump as a speaker. I’m curious, for you as a candidate who’s running down-ballot, do you have any problems with that? What kind of responses do you get? Have you received *any* kind of response to that while you’re talking to voters? Is this something that you think has been good for your campaign, or do you feel otherwise?
Kolenich: I have not yet been in a situation to have voters ask me about it. I will tell you that it did do something quite momentous for me in West Virginia, though. And I say this quite candidly, telling you that I was one of those people who raised an eyebrow about it and thought, “Oh boy, I don’t want to go to D.C. and hang out with Donald Trump. This is not my jam. I don’t like the optics of this.” And, you know, I really had to eat my words on that.
The most widely listened-to talk show in West Virginia is a thing called West Virginia Talkline. The host’s name is Hoppy Kercheval. Hoppy also moderates the gubernatorial debate, which probably doesn’t shock you that I’ve never been invited to. The gentleman who ran for governor before me twice in a row on the Libertarian ticket, David Moran, has never been invited to those debates. When I ran in 2020, this gentleman, Hoppy Kercheval, would not give me the time of day. He refused to interview me and he never mentioned me on his show once.
All of the polls that Talkline—that West Virginia MetroNews, which is the entity that owns Talkline and hosts these debates—they never included me in any of their polls. They basically pretended like I did not exist. The Sunday night of the convention, the state party chair and I got an email from Mr. Kercheval, who wanted to have us on the radio that week. Granted, he only gave us seven minutes, and during that seven minutes, he mostly wanted to talk about our reaction to Donald Trump, but it did end with a promise to have me on the show later in the summer to talk about my campaign.
Evans: Oh, wow!
Kolenich: Yeah, it did get us some attention. I mean, maybe not in the way that I would want, but it did get us some attention from him that I would have never gotten before. And then he writes an op-ed commentary daily, and he specifically wrote an op-ed commentary on myself and my campaign later that week. So it got eyes and ears on me and earned media attention for me in West Virginia that I would not have gotten but for Donald Trump being at that convention.
Evans: I’ve asked this question to a few different Libertarian candidates now, and the answers I get are so varied. It’s interesting to hear that you’re someone who went into it with some skepticism but ended up actually getting something good out of it. So, I certainly agree that it’s a more nuanced topic for the Libertarian Party than I feel some people initially thought it would be.
The LP did get a lot of positive press for booing Trump at the convention. The only positive press that I saw was based on that booing of Trump. That was not the intention of our Chair.
In this case, what you didn’t see is more important than what you did. That was the point of posting the above excerpt. Have you read it? Any specific takeaways? We all saw the general coverage to some degree, presumably.
Political parties are means to ends, not ends in themselves. If the Libertarian Party is not working for the ends that members want, then those members should consider a new party.
Yes, its hard to start over again from scratch, but not as bad as watching your political vehicle stuck in the mud, or even sliding backwards.
That’s how there got to be so many socialist parties. If it’s not working towards the ends that they want, wouldn’t if he better for them to consider what other means besides political parties as such might serve those ends?
Those means could include many ways of participating in electoral politics, including independent runs for office, insurgent campaigns within major parties,pacs, single issue and multi issue lobbying groups, candidate rankings, and many others.
You think a vehicle that’s stuck in the mud is the closest analogy. I see it more as a case of horseshoe manufacturing in the face of the internal combustion engine overtaking horse and buggy transportation. But, it has elements of both.
I’m not advocating against voting for minor parties. I’ve voted for them often, and might again. I’m advocating for other tactics to serve whatever ends those minor parties seek to advance. Comparatively, minor parties are becoming less advantageous via a vis other means of advancing any such ends. This makes it a particularly bad time to try to start a new minor party from scratch, especially in an ideological space that’s very similar from the outside perspective to one which already exists.
Consider also that the faction Mr. Blau derides in the post above were largely exiled from your party’s leadership from 1989 to 2022. During those 33 years, they advanced their ends through numerous means, but didn’t try to start any new political parties, to my knowledge. Perhaps those who consider them in a negative light should learn from that approach.
David we welcome you to join us here: https://www.liberalpartyusa.org/
Right on the money David Blau