I guess I won't be voting Libertarian after all...

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https://mailchi.mp/tomwoods/lpconvention?e=8280e42600

Snip

Two years ago there was a clean sweep of the Libertarian National Committee, and it was long overdue.

During the Covid period, the party's leadership had been as useless as the Covid masking and lockdowns they barely lifted a finger to oppose.

Then of course they went in for every left-wing fad and every bit of dumb-guy wokery you can imagine.

That had to stop. Whatever the future was to hold, that right there had to stop.

How you let a craving for mainstream respectability destroy the greatest opportunity libertarians have ever had is beyond me.

I lent a hand in that absolutely justified effort, alongside some truly outstanding people who made enormous sacrifices in order to do the right thing, but since 2022 I have not been involved in the party. As Ron Paul has said many times, there is a division of labor in this movement, and I think the various things I've launched over the past couple of years are where my abilities can be put to their most effective use.

Thus I was not at the convention this past weekend (as you know, I was in Iceland with my family), so I know only what I've heard from others. I'll be commenting on the Trump speech there this week on the Tom Woods Show, though.

But of course the nomination of Chase Oliver as the LP candidate for president requires brief comment, if only because my inbox is filled with people asking for one (yet I feel like they obviously have to know what I'm going to say).

He is the best thing Donald Trump could possibly have asked for.

The same people who congratulated themselves on booing the former president just handed him the best gift the party could have given: a cultural leftist who will attract zero disaffected right-wingers (and since no disaffected left-wingers are considering the LP, it's a gratuitous minus with no upside), who will now simply hold their noses and vote for Trump.

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As one of the people in our movement who followed the Covid fiasco in very great detail, I can't possibly support someone who actually got caught up in it.

It's one thing in March 2020 to say: "I don't know what's going on."

But on November 19, 2020 -- November, by which time no reasonable person was still spouting the propaganda -- Chase wrote:

So I am having a Thanksgiving of less than 10 people and we will be masked inside and when we eat since masks have to come off, we have spacing happening. Its [sic] not impossible to be responsible.
Limit the size
Wear a mask when not eating
Space yourself accordingly

The very existence of Thanksgiving is imperceptible on the health charts from that time, because as those of us not in thrall to regime propaganda had figured out, none of the so-called public-health recommendations did a damn bit of good.

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Then also, from Chase:

"I'm disappointed that a legislature decided to limit therapies and care specifically for young people who may be trans or nonbinary."

Is there an elite obsession Chase Oliver does not himself share?

He's certainly eager to let people know (as if we didn't already) that he will hold only the officially allowable opinions, and that dear Mr. Journalist, sir, I am not like those bad libertarians over there who say things they have not been authorized to say.

Thus here is how he feels about you, dear reader:

"There is no tent big enough for myself, my friends and family to be alongside racists and bigots. Lew Rockwell and his work is bigoted tripe."

Ron Paul reads Lew Rockwell every day, and Lew was Ron's chief of staff. The message here isn't exactly subtle.

There is no way Chase or his supporters would have supported a candidate you and I might have liked (because our candidates are probably "fascists"), and likewise I would have to be out of my mind to support someone who has been a dupe for the worst parts of American life over the past several years.

This is what they call a hard no.

Tom Woods