The Libertarian Party of Georgia Becomes the Minor League Affiliate of the Georgia Republican Party

In the aftermath of the January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol by a rabid, violent mob of Trump supporters, I tried to figure out a path forward for my professional life and personal political advocacy. After a nearly two-hour-long phone call with my friend, Justin Amash, a few days after January 6, I decided to rejoin the Libertarian Party.

Those of you who know me and have followed my writing for the past two decades are well aware that I was a member of the Libertarian Party for many years, including a stint as state party chairman when I was 25. (For context, I’m 43 now. I feel really old.) I was on the Libertarian Party of Georgia Executive Committee for several years, served as legislative director of the state party, and was state director for Gary Johnson’s 2012 presidential campaign.

I left the party in 2012 out of frustration. Too many of the older, purist members of the party wanted it to remain what was essentially a debate club for libertarian ideals. I didn’t have time for that. After a year or so out of party politics, I was coaxed into helping some conservatives and libertarians who were alienated by the leadership of the Newton County Republican Party. I don’t really care to get into that here. Let’s just say that I was very much not welcome by the local party leadership because of my libertarian viewpoints, particularly on social issues.

The nomination of Donald Trump in 2016 changed a lot for me. I stopped being involved in party politics and decided to be politically homeless. I didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election. I wrote in a name in 2020. Then, the Capitol was attacked by a mindless horde. I rejoined the Libertarian Party. Several months later, I was elected to serve on the state party’s Executive Committee.

At the time, I was aware of the intraparty fights. On the one hand, many party members wanted to promote libertarian ideals by running candidates. These are your traditional party members. Good people like Doug Craig, Jack Aiken, Ryan Graham, Christine Austin, and Chase Oliver. The list isn’t limited to those I mentioned, but I know those people and others want to make a difference and have chosen the Libertarian Party because they don’t feel like Democrats and Republicans align with their views.

On the other hand, there’s the so-called Mises Caucus, which has bastardized the legacy of its namesake, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises. For example, Amash read quotes at the 2022 Libertarian National Convention and was on the receiving end of boos before revealing that all the quotes he read were from Mises’s book, Liberalism. Without question, the Mises Caucus has bastardized the legacy of its namesake.

Without getting into the super boring details, the Mises Caucus has its roots in the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, which has a history of promoting neo-Confederate, successionist, and Southern nationalist viewpoints. The caucus was formed as a reaction to a chairman of the Libertarian Party who dared condemn the racist and violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as Jeff Diest, the president of the Mises Institute, for using the Nazi slogan “blood and soil” a couple of weeks before the rally.

Although the Mises Caucus lost its first bid at power in the party at the 2018 national convention, it would succeed in 2022. The Libertarian Party has seen a decline in fundraising and membership since then. I immediately canceled my membership in the party when the Mises Caucus took over because I was aware of the reputations of people involved in it and the controversies surrounding them.

There has also been a moral and intellectual decay inside the party. The Libertarian Party of New Hampshire has become known for its Twitter account, which frequently posts racist, antisemitic, and pro-authoritarian content. More recently, the LPNH’s Twitter account promoted political violence against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

The most recent attempt to regain control of the Libertarian Party was a mixed bag. Mises Caucus-supported leadership candidates were successful at the 2024 convention, but delegates selected a more traditional libertarian, Chase Oliver, who resides in Georgia and was the state party’s 2022 nominee for U.S. Senate, as its presidential nominee. It’s worth noting that the Mises Caucus-backed Libertarian Party leadership invited Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to speak at the convention. Those invitations were accepted, and both spoke to delegates.

Oliver isn’t only struggling with the stereotypical problems of running a third-party campaign on a shoestring budget. He’s also fighting many in his own party who can’t seem to accept that he won the presidential nomination. Oliver is accused of being “woke,” a word that has been thrown around so much that it doesn’t really have any meaning anymore. His detractors also complain that he didn’t fight COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates (which were mostly rejected by the Supreme Court), and mask mandates hard enough. He’s also gay, which is apparently a problem for some Libertarians. I swear, I thought Libertarians didn’t have a problem with that. Welcome to the Mises Caucus’s Libertarian Party.

Some state affiliates have tried to replace Oliver as the nominee with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a conspiracy theorist, radical environmentalist, and long-time anti-vaxxer (even before COVID-19) who claims to have had brain worms, eaten dog meat, placed a dead bear cub in Central Park, and severed the head of a dead beached whale. You know, totally normal stuff.

Kennedy has, of course, endorsed Trump and won’t appear on the ballot in Georgia. That’s what makes a recent action of the Libertarian Party of Georgia Executive Committee so strange. The Executive Committee voted to join a joint fundraising agreement with the Kennedy Victory Fund.

Some Libertarian Party of Georgia members have launched a petition to protest the decision. “We, the undersigned, believe that this Executive Committee is acting contrary to the stated purpose of the Libertarian Party of Georgia which is to nominate and support Libertarian candidates, and in doing so, is disregarding its obligation to the membership of the Libertarian Party of Georgia to act as custodial trustees of the assets, resources, and ideals of the Party,” the petition states. “Entering into a fundraising agreement to allow a major party candidate access to additional fundraising directly supports the RFK/Trump campaign to the detriment of the Chase Oliver campaign. This service to one major party is in direct opposition to the stated purpose of the Libertarian Party of Georgia.”

It’s funny. When I was involved in the Libertarian Party, even when elected chairman of the state party, I had to deal with two problems. The first is that everyone wanted to tell me what I should do but offered no help doing it. The other was that I was accused of being “a Republican plant.” And here’s the Mises Caucus, which is actively destroying the Libertarian Party and seemingly bending over backward to help the Republican nominee.

The Mises Caucus’s Libertarian Party is the reason I don’t call myself a libertarian any longer. I have to describe my views as “classical liberal” because edge lords and racists have done irreparable damage to the libertarian philosophy. It’s why I’m politically homeless. I’d rather be a classical liberal and independent voter than associate with the clowns that run the Libertarian Party and, apparently, the Libertarian Party of Georgia.