Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat are the Libertarian Party’s presidential and vice-presidential nominees in the upcoming November 5, 2024, election. But you would never know that from an upcoming two-day rally in Washington, D.C., that is being co-sponsored by the national Libertarian Party and Angela McCardle, who serves as party chairman.
The two-day rally is entitled “Rescue the Republic” and it consists of two parts: a rally on Saturday, September 28, entitled “Rage Against the War Machine” and another rally on Sunday, September 29, entitled “Rescue the Republic: Join the Resistance.”
There are twelve speakers listed for the Saturday rally. There are twenty presenters for the Sunday rally.
There is a notable omission from the speaker lineup for both rallies: Neither Chase Oliver nor Mike ter Maat, the Libertarian Party president and vice-presidential candidates, is listed as a speaker at either rally!
What’s up with that? Isn’t this a presidential election year? Isn’t this campaign season? Isn’t this the time that political parties are supposed to be featuring, promoting, and campaigning for their presidential and vice-presidential candidates? Why aren’t Oliver and ter Matt speaking at that two-day rally?
That’s not the only strange thing about this two-day rally. At the top of the speaker page for the Sunday rally was initially a picture of Donald Trump at the head of what seemed to be a Valley Forge/George Washington type of boat crossing the Delaware. It seems that they have now, for some unknown reason, removed that depiction from their rally website. See the deleted graphic at the end of this article.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, Trump is not the Libertarian Party presidential candidate. He is the Republican Party presidential candidate. He sought the Libertarian Party’s endorsement when the party hierarchy invited him to speak at the Libertarian Party’s national convention last summer, but he was instead subjected to a a massive boo-fest at the hands of the convention delegates, as I detailed in my article “Wrecking the Libertarian Party.” The day after the boo-fest, the L.P. delegates elected Chase Oliver, not Donald Trump, their presidential nominee.
It might be worth reminding ourselves, at least in the context of the upcoming two-day rally, that during his four years as president, Trump surrounded himself with generals, appointed John Bolton as his “national-security” advisor, deferred to the CIA on its long-secret JFK-assassination-related records, refused to pardon Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Ross Ulbricht, and steadfastly kept the troops killing and dying for nothing but lies in Afghanistan.
That’s not all. The speaker lineup for the two-day rally includes MAGA-Trumpsters who will undoubtedly be making the case for voting for Trump. Such speakers include former progressive Democrats Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have been named to Trump’s “transition team” should he again be elected president. In fact, both of them were also depicted inside that Valley-Forge/George Washington boat that was initially at the top of the speaker line-up page of the Sunday rally and then, for some unknown reason, removed.
But while MAGA-Trumpsters Kennedy and Gabbard will be speaking at the two-day rally, Chase Oliver and Mike ter Maat will not be. Why not? Is this the Libertarian Party we are talking about or the Republican-Libertarian Party?
