Among the most bizarre things I have ever witnessed in my life is the Libertarian Party hierarchy’s invitation to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump to address the 2024 Libertarian Party national convention. It still befuddles me. Why would a political party have a likely presidential nominee of an opposing political party address its own presidential nominating convention and seek support from its members? It makes absolutely no sense to me.
The invitation to Trump was hailed by the right-wing element that controls and dominates the Libertarian Party. The fact that Trump was willing to address an L.P. convention shows how powerful and influential the Libertarian Party has become, the right-wingers exclaimed. It will bring the party much-needed publicity, they maintained. A former president is actually willing to come to our convention to listen to our grievances, they excitedly declared. As right-wing vice-presidential candidate Clint Russell, who was L.P. presidential candidate Michael Rectenwald’s running mate, put it, the Trump invitation was a grand opportunity for L.P. members to share their views with who Russell referred to as our likely “ruler.”
Michael Rectenwald
For his part, Rectenwald himself also initially expressed approval of the Trump invitation. Exclaiming that he didn’t suffer from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome), Rectenwald considered the Trump invitation to be a great achievement on the part of national L.P. chairperson Angela McCardle.
Rectenwald’s positive mindset toward the Trump invitation should not have surprised anyone. Rectenwald had voted for Donald Trump. While he had an affiliation with the libertarian Mises Institute, Rectenwald also had held a paid position with Hillsdale College, one of the most right-wing schools in the country. He also had written regularly for Chronicles magazine, a longstanding right-wing publication.
In fact, Rectenwald didn’t join the Libertarian Party until sometime last year, when he accepted the invitation by Mises Caucus founder Michael Heise to run for the 2024 L.P. presidential nomination as the Mises Caucus-endorsed presidential candidate. Given the overwhelming control that the Mises Caucus had over the Libertarian Party since the “Reno Reset convention” in 2022, it was Rectenwald’s race to lose once he announced his candidacy.
Dave Smith and the Reno Reset convention
After the 2020 presidential election, in which the L.P. presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen garnered 1.1 percent of the national vote, the Mises Caucus, which was one of many caucuses within the Libertarian Party, declared a dual aim: (1) to take control over the Libertarian Party and (2) to run popular libertarian podcaster and comedian Dave Smith as the 2024 L.P. presidential candidate.
Going from state convention to state convention from 2020 to 2022, the Mises Caucus succeeded in taking over a majority of the state Libertarian parties. At the 2022 national L.P. convention in Reno, the Mises Caucus succeeded in taking control over the Libertarian National Committee (LNC), which is the governing board of the national party. That included the election of the Mises Caucus-endorsed candidate for national chair, Angela McCardle, who would later play an instrumental role in securing Trump’s appearance at the 2024 L.P. national convention.
For about three years, both Smith and the Mises Caucus made it clear that Smith was going to be vying for the L.P. presidential nomination as the Mises Caucus-endorsed candidate for the 2024 L.P. presidential nomination.
But then sometime in early 2023, Smith announced that he had changed his mind. He had decided to no longer seek the L.P. presidential nomination. That was when Michael Heise settled on Rectenwald as the new Mises Caucus-endorsed presidential candidate.
While I wasn’t familiar with Rectenwald, as I began researching him it became readily apparent why Heise had selected him to replace Smith: Like Smith, Rectenwald was right-wing-oriented, especially when it came to immigration controls, which is the most important domestic issue of the right-wing element that has come to dominate and control the Libertarian Party.
In February 2023, I announced my own candidacy for the 2024 Libertarian Party presidential nomination. The central theme of my campaign was my seeking to restore the brand of principled libertarianism on which the L.P. had been founded and reject what has become the standard message of both the Libertarian Party and L.P. presidential campaigns — a message that combines support for the continuation of socialism (e.g., Social Security and Medicare), Republican-lite positions (e.g., immigration controls), and reform of welfare-state programs (e.g., school vouchers). Among my principle positions was open borders, which directly contradicted the right-wing position that favors America’s century-old system of immigration controls.
A right-wing direction
By this time (2023), I had come to the realization that the Mises Caucus was bound and determined to continue moving the Libertarian Party in a right-wing direction. This had surprised me because I had come to believe that the aim of the Mises Caucus was to restore the brand of principled libertarianism that I advocate. That’s because the Mises Caucus had endorsed me in my run for the 2020 L.P presidential nomination. Given the fact that I had advanced the principled case for libertarianism for more than 30 years, including open borders, I naturally assumed that Heise and the Mises Caucus endorsed my libertarian positions. In fact, anticipating that the Mises Caucus was going to restore the brand of principled libertarianism in which I believe, prior to the 2022 national L.P. convention in Reno I became a lifetime member of the Libertarian Party by making a $1,500 donation to the L.P.
Much to my surprise and great disappointment, however, I quickly discovered how wrong I had been. Instead, it quickly became clear that the Mises Caucus and the new “Reno Reset” regime intended to continue moving the L.P. in a right-wing direction, especially with respect to the issue of immigration controls. (“Reno Reset” was the slogan that the Mises Caucus put on the Reno convention.)
There were two discomforting signs of this phenomenon that arose almost immediately after the Reno Reset convention.
One was that the L.P. hierarchy recruited two Republican candidates for state house to change their party affiliation to Libertarian and run instead as L.P. candidates. Was it really possible that those two Republicans could be libertarian in philosophy when they had been running as Republican candidates? A member of the Mises Caucus assured me that both candidates had been “vetted” and were determined to be “libertarians.” That was shocking to me given that one of them was a super-Trumpster who wore a MAGA cap. The LNC even authorized several thousands of dollars of L.P. money to be spent on those two campaigns.
It was then that I realized that the right-wing element that had taken over the Libertarian Party truly believed that both of those Republicans were, in fact, libertarians. That’s because they were considered to be “freedom-leaning” Republicans, which, in the eyes of the L.P. right-wing, actually made them libertarians. Therefore, by switching to the Libertarian Party, they would simply become Libertarians rather than “freedom-leaning” Republicans. In other words, a “freedom-leaning” Republican is, in the eyes of the L.P. right-wing, the same as a Libertarian.
School vouchers and public schooling
Soon after the 2022 Reno Reset convention, I was invited to a fundraising event in Virginia that was being sponsored by the new LNC. Much to my shock and dismay, the featured speaker at that event was a person named Corey DeAngelis, who is the premier advocate of school vouchers in the country.
School vouchers, a concept that the Libertarian Party imported from the Republican Party, are nothing more than a socialist educational reform measure designed to improve the state’s educational system, which is the biggest socialist program at the state and local level. Vouchers use taxation to take money from people to whom it belongs in order to give it to people to whom it does not belong. At the same time, vouchers put private schools that accept the vouchers under government control.
Most important, vouchers violate the libertarian non-aggression principle, which is the core principle of the libertarian philosophy. They also violate the solemn pledge to not support the initiation of force that every member of the Libertarian Party must take upon joining the Libertarian Party. It was clear that neither of these two points posed any concern for the right-wing element within the L.P. Soon after that fundraising event, the Libertarian Party hierarchy sent out a fundraising letter seeking support for its advancement of school vouchers.
This pro-voucher fundraising appeal was followed up later by fundraising appeals to help Libertarian Party members get elected to school boards. In fact, from the start of his presidential campaign, Rectenwald himself made it clear that one of his principal goals as a L.P. presidential candidate was to travel the country to help L.P. members get elected to school boards. Presumably, the idea was to show Americans that Libertarians could run socialist institutions as well as Democrats and Republicans, if not better.
Two messages within the L.P.
The upshot of all this is that two separate messages of libertarianism have arisen within the Libertarian Party. One is the right-wing message that encompasses things like school vouchers, taking over the public-school system, immigration controls, taking over healthcare agencies, welfare-state continuation and reform, and others. The other message is the message of principled libertarianism that I advocate, which encompasses things like separating school and state and healthcare and state, the immediate dismantling of the welfare state, and, of course, open borders.
Unfortunately, it is the right-wing message that has come to dominate the Libertarian Party and L.P. presidential campaigns, along with the propensity to favor “freedom-leaning” Republicans who favor that message. That’s why Rectenwald was comfortable coming to the support of national party chair Angela McCardle’s decision to have Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump address the L.P. national convention. While Rectenwald, Smith, Russell, McCardle, and other right-wing Libertarians certainly don’t agree with Trump on all issues, like many other libertarians both in the Libertarian Party and libertarian movement, they view Trump as a better “freedom-leaning” ally in the fight for freedom than Democrat Joe Biden.
A conversational love-fest
Trump was scheduled to address the convention on Saturday evening. But what occurred on Friday evening was also of the utmost importance. On that evening, another Republican, Vivek Ramaswamy, had also been invited to address the L.P. national convention. Ramaswamy had been a 2024 Republican candidate for president before being knocked out of the race by Trump. Since then, he had become one of Trump’s ardent supporters.
The Friday night event was billed as a “debate” between Ramaswamy and Russell, who was almost certain to be elected the L.P. vice-presidential candidate after Rectenwald was elected the L.P. presidential nominee. The host of the “debate” was none other than Dave Smith.
The reason that I put the word “debate” in quotation marks is that the event was as much a debate as a conversational love-fest is a debate. And that’s precisely what the event was — a conversational love-fest between Ramaswamy, Smith, and Russell.
During the course of the 2024 race for the L.P. presidential nomination, I participated in many, many debates, perhaps as many as 20, maybe more. The standard format was something like this: “Each of you has 2 minutes to make an opening statement. You will have 1 minute to respond to questions. The timekeeper will tell you when your time is up. You will have 1 minute for closing statements.”
There was nothing like that in the Ramaswamy-Smith-Russell conversational love-fest. In fact, Ramaswamy asked to make a preliminary statement that lasted, I would estimate, about 15 minutes, without any objection by his “debate” “opponent” Russell or by the “debate” moderator Smith. Moreover, in the course of the “debate,” both Smith and Russel displayed a very friendly, deferential, and passive attitude toward Ramaswamy, not daring to take on his Republican positions in any aggressive way.
The Georgia L.P. debate
And it’s not as though Russell doesn’t know how to be aggressive and offensive. At the Georgia Libertarian Party convention, where he was serving as moderator (and as Rectenwald’s vice-presidential running mate), he effectively became one of the debaters, coming after me and other presidential candidates with an aggressiveness and viciousness that defied credulity. Of course, Russell’s debate format in Georgia, which he strictly enforced as the debate moderator, was essentially based on the format I set forth above.
One of the most momentous aspects of that Georgia L.P. debate was when Russell began subjecting each L.P. presidential candidate to a fierce examination that conjured up images of Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, who has long been a darling of right-wingers and who subjected people to his infamous question as part of the right-wing anti-communist crusade during the 1950s: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” If someone answered yes, he was immediately shamed by McCarthy and other right-wingers, who did their best to get the person fired from his job and ostracized by people in American society.
During the Georgia L.P. debate, Russell began asking each L.P. presidential candidate to confess as to whether he had taken the Covid vaccine and, if so, to publicly repent his decision. It was only when Russell got to L.P. presidential candidate Mike ter Maat that Russell’s McCarthy-like scheme got shut down, when ter Maat dramatically declared, “None of your business!” The episode brought to mind attorney Joseph Welch’s famous put-down of Joe McCarthy, when he exclaimed to McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency?”
What Russell never explained was how he felt comfortable serving as a debate moderator and, at the same time, a vice-presidential running mate for Rectenwald, who was one of the debaters on stage. Needless to say, basic ethical principles regarding conflict of interest and the importance of avoiding the appearance of impropriety dictated that Russell disqualify himself from serving as a debate moderator, a position that necessarily calls for impartiality.
Ramaswamy and the Covid vaccine
I looked up Vivek Ramaswamy and quickly learned that he had taken the Covid vaccine. While he had come to regret it, his wife, who also took the vaccine, continued to stand by her decision.
What was Russell’s attitude toward Ramasmawy and his wife during the so-called “debate”? Did he take the same aggressive and offensive approach that he took at the Georgia L.P. convention? Did he go on the attack against Ramaswamy by exclaiming, “Shame on both you and your wife for taking the Covid vaccine! I’m pleased that you now regret it, but she needs to repent — now!”?
Not at all. That’s because this was not a debate, like in Georgia, where Russell, as debate moderator and Rectenwald’s vice-presidential running mate, aggressively went after his opponents on the stage for having taken the Covid vaccine. This was a conversational love-fest where the “debate moderator” Smith even made himself one of the three conversationalists — a conversational love-fest whose aim, in my opinion, was to pave the ground for an ebullient appearance by Donald Trump the following evening.
After the so-called “debate” with his “freedom-leaning” Republican “debate opponent,” Russell gushed, “Major thanks to Vivek for giving myself & the LP this opportunity. I sincerely believe that he has the same goals as I do & our overlap is far greater than our differences when it comes to the remedy. He's a great guy and deserves a ton of respect for reaching out. What a night.”
The Trump speech
Thus, after the Friday evening conversational love-fest between Ramaswamy, Smith, and Russell, everything was set for Trump to make a triumphant entrance into the Libertarian Party convention. By this time, it had become clear that this was not simply a matter of Trump being granted a wish to address the L.P. convention. Instead, it was, in my opinion, clearly an event whose terms had been negotiated and prepared between the L.P. hierarchy and Trump’s people. (Since Trump was embroiled in his criminal case in New York, it is unlikely that he would have taken the time to negotiate the matter himself.)
As Trump proceeded with his Saturday night talk, it was clear that he fully expected a nice, warm reception from the L.P. delegates. After all, given that the Mises Caucus controlled the Libertarian Party, Trump had every reason to believe that he would be talking to a warm and receptive crowd. During his talk, he made it clear that he viewed himself and the Libertarian Party as allies in the fight to prevent Biden from winning another term. Trump’s positive feelings toward the L.P. were manifested when he promised to appoint a Libertarian to his Cabinet and also promised to pardon Ross Ulbricht, the libertarian who is serving an extraordinarily long jail sentence for his role in the Silk Road website controversy. Given that Ulbricht is not a famous person outside libertarian circles, like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, it would not be unreasonable to assume that whoever was negotiating Trump’s invitation to speak at the Libertarian Party convention might have suggested to Trump that these would be two items of importance to L.P. members that would help garnish Trump some positive feelings from the L.P. delegates he was addressing.
And in my opinion, that is what Ramaswamy, McCardle, Smith, and other members of the right-wing element within the party were hoping for and expecting — a polite, enthusiastic reception for a “freedom-leaning” former Republican president who was quite possibly to be America’s president once again, one who had taken the time to come to address the delegates at the Libertarian Party national convention, listen to their “grievances,” and seek their support by assuring them that he too was a libertarian and promising to appoint a Libertarian to his Cabinet and also to pardon Ross Ulbricht.
After all, don’t forget an important point: Rectenwald himself had voted for Trump. Equally important, he, Russell, and Trump were essentially on the same page with respect to what is the most important domestic issue for right-wingers within the Libertarian Party — immigration, which also is a burning domestic issue of our time.
Rectenwald and Russell on immigration
In fact, both Rectenwald and Russell are among the most vociferous proponents of America’s system of immigration controls in the 53-year history of the Libertarian Party. On his podcast, Russell had continuously stood in favor of the extreme right-wing view on immigration, one that essentially matched that of Donald Trump, Florida Governor Ron de Santis, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott — one that maintained that the flood of illegal immigration was destroying America and, therefore, that it was imperative to militarize the border and seal it shut.
It was a view that was also held by Rectenwald, even though he clearly tried to downplay it during the course of his quest for the nomination. But in my opinion, once he and Russell won the presidential and vice-presidential nominations, their fierce support of essentially the same overall immigration position held by Trump would immediately surface and become a major campaign position for both Rectenwald and Russell.
Before Rectenwald had been approached by Heise about running for the L.P. presidential nomination, Rectenwald wrote an article in the February 2023 issue of the right-wing Chronicles magazine entitled “What Next for the Right?” in which he counseled a future Republican president on various measures he should take as president. In that article, Rectenwald wrote: “Close the border by completing the border wall, reinstating the Migrant Protection Protocols (“remain in Mexico” policy), and expelling illegal immigrants.”
Needless to say, completing Trump’s border wall would mean more stealing of people’s property through the power of eminent domain. That would be an interesting position for an L.P. presidential candidate to proclaim to the American people, to say the least. Moreover, “closing” the border would necessarily mean militarizing the border, which necessarily would entail the Pentagon and its massive military machine. Expelling illegal immigrants would mean a massive national investigation to ferret out and deport the millions of illegal immigrants residing in the United States, which naturally would entail the FBI, ICE, the Border Patrol, Homeland Security, and a nation-wide network of snitches. And of course, supporting America’s system of immigration controls also meant supporting the massive immigration police state that has come into existence over the past 100 years, including highway checkpoints and warrantless searches and seizures, to support the immigration control-system that Trump, Rectenwald, Russell, and other right-wingers so ardently support.
Rectenwald’s message
By the time the national convention was approaching, I think that it is entirely possible that some L.P. right-wingers were coming to the realization that a Rectenwald presidential campaign was going to go nowhere in terms of votes. Not only did Rectenwald stand no chance of being elected president (needless to say), he was almost certainly going to receive the lowest vote total in the history of the Libertarian Party, most likely barely above 0 percent. In fact, one of the pre-convention polls even had the L.P. presidential candidate at 0 percent.
The reason was that while there was obviously a great amount of support for Rectenwald’s message within the Libertarian Party, there is no constituency for his message among American voters, a point that was obviously being reflected in that 0 percent poll.
Consider Rectenwald’s overall message:
Rectenwald often proudly referred to himself as an “anarchist” — that is, a person who favors the abolition of all government. While the anarchy position is popular among some within the Libertarian Party (and libertarian movement), the number of people in American society who want to abolish all government and establish anarchy in America is minuscule, to say the least.
Equally important, Rectenwald was the strangest anarchist in the history of the Libertarian Party. That’s because he wasn’t a full anarchist. He favored, for example, the federal government’s system of immigration controls and the massive immigration police state that comes with it. Like his running mate Russell, he also favored sealing the border, which obviously meant sending a massive number of military troops to the border, which necessarily meant keeping the Pentagon in existence, run by a president who would be governing without a Congress and a federal judiciary. By calling for the completion of Trump’s wall, Rectenwald implicitly favored the federal government’s forcible taking of people’s property on which the wall was being constructed.
Anarchist Rectenwald also favored the federal government’s welfare-state system, as reflected by his support for a long-term continuation of a Social Security “off ramp,” which he proudly declared he was in favor of at the South Carolina L.P. presidential debate.
Thus, Rectenwald advocated a system of governance that entailed the abolition of the Congress and the Supreme Court (and the federal judiciary) but with him at the helm as president managing the welfare state and the federal government’s massive system of immigration controls, the immigration police state, the continued building of Trump’s Wall, and the Pentagon’s military machine to “seal the border.”
I don’t know where Rectenwald stands with respect to Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet, but Rectenwald’s system of governance certainly brings to mind Pinochet’s regime. Pinochet was a strongman president who ruled the nation with an all-powerful military and without interference from either a congress or a judiciary. He has long been a darling of right-wingers both in Chile and the United States for having ousted a democratically elected communist president from office, for having brought the free-market Chicago Boys into his administration, and for rounding up, torturing, or killing some 50,000 “communists” as part of the right-wing anti-communist crusade during the Cold War.
Interestingly, Rectenwald’s “anarchist” position also favored the continuation of state governments, whose powers would no longer be subject to the constraints of the U.S. Constitution because Rectenwald’s message effectively called for burning up the Constitution.
In fact, one of the strangest aspects of anarchist Rectenwald’s states-rights position and his statist immigration position was that his message called for state governments to establish border controls around their respective states. Thus, rather than simply have a perpetual border crisis along the Southern border, there would now be perpetual border crises around each state, with each state having a massive immigration police state around its borders.
Who was ever going to vote for Rectenwald’s highly unusual anarchist/anti-anarchist message? Except for L.P. members, hardly anyone.
It also bears emphasizing that no right-wing proponent of immigration controls was ever going to waste his vote on Rectenwald and Russell. They were all going to vote for the real immigration-control advocate — the Republican, Donald Trump. Even if there were a few disgruntled Trumpsters, they were almost certainly going to vote for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., whose position on immigration essentially matched that of Trump. Thus, Rectenwald and Russell stood to garner zero votes for their fierce Republican-lite support of immigration controls.
A possible pro-Trump strategy
Some right-wingers within the L.P. undoubtedly recognized that Rectenwald’s message would garner close to zero percent of the national vote in the presidential race. It’s my hypothesis that at least some L.P. right-wingers may have come up with a political strategy that would entail trying to induce Rectenwald and Russell to throw their support to Donald Trump in battleground states late in the race — and with the expectation that Trump would return the favor by appointing a Libertarian to his Cabinet, appointing other Libertarians to high salaried posts in his administration, and pardoning Ross Ulbricht.
Would Rectenwald and Russell have gone along with that strategy? It is my opinion that they would have at least given it thought. If they did decide to go down that road, one can imagine Rectenwald and Russell making the following declaration: “The election is only three weeks away. Since we are receiving less than half a percent in the polls, it is obvious that we are not going to be elected president and vice-president of the United States. Therefore, we have to do the next best thing for America. We have to ensure that Joe Biden is not reelected. Therefore, we are exhorting our supporters in every battleground state to vote for Trump. Don’t waste your vote on us. Our job at this point is to save America from Joe Biden and the Democrats, who are destroying America with their ‘open-border’ policy and their big spending, debt, and inflationary policies. That means taking the only viable step forward, which means supporting Donald Trump. Of course, we Libertarians have our disagreements with Trump on various issues, but don’t forget: Unlike Biden, Trump came to our national convention to hear our grievances and seek our support and promised to appoint a Libertarian to his Cabinet and to pardon Ross Ulbricht. Let’s go!”
Endorsing Republicans
Before anyone experiences utter shock over the possibility that Rectenwald, Russell, and other L.P. right-wingers might throw in with Trump to help him get him elected, we should remind ourselves of a few pertinent facts.
There is precedent for this type of thing. In the 2022 presidential election, Dave Smith enthusiastically endorsed a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona, Blake Masters, over his Libertarian Party opponent, Marc Victor. Most L.P. right-wingers didn’t bat a eyelash over Smith’s decision. His endorsement of a “freedom-leaning” Republican was considered perfectly normal. Remember: In the minds of L.P. right-wingers, a “freedom-leaning” Republican is the same as a right-wing Libertarian.
That’s, in fact, why a revolving door was long ago established between the Republican Party and the Libertarian Party — to enable “freedom-leaning” Republicans like Bob Barr, Wayne Alan Root, Gary Johnson, Bill Weld, Justin Amash, and others to come and go between the two parties.
Dave Smith also exhorted the Florida Libertarian Party not to run a candidate against Florida Gov. Ron de Santis. Apparently Smith felt that the positions of the “freedom-leaning” de Santis, especially with respect to Covid and immigration controls, were sufficiently right-wing libertarian that the L.P. should not be taking votes away from DeSantis in a contested race and possibly costing him the election.
Another precedent was when Marc Victor, the L.P. candidate who was running against Republican Blake Masters in the Arizona race, himself threw in the towel and decided to endorse Masters. (See my Substack column “The Surrender of Marc Victor.”) Victor surrendered and endorsed Masters because he concluded that his own Republican-lite positions were essentially the same as those of his “freedom-leaning” Republican opponent.
Don’t forget also that after the Reno Reset convention, the Libertarian Party recruited those two “freedom-leaning” Republicans, at least one of whom was a Maga-Trumpster, to come over to the Libertarian Party and run as Libertarians — and that the LNC was ready and willing to fund their campaigns with thousands of dollars of L.P. money.
Let’s also not forget that Rectenwald himself had voted for Trump and was counseling a new Republican president in his article in Chronicles magazine, especially on the need to seal the border, finish the wall, and deport all illegal immigrants.
It’s also worth pointing out that many members of the Libertarian Party and the libertarian movement supported Trump in both 2016 and 2020 and that many of them are now supporting him in his 2024 quest for reelection. Indeed, both before and after the 2024 L.P. national convention, national party chair Angela McCardle herself has stated that between Trump and Biden, Trump is clearly the preferable candidate, which, in my opinion, comes very close to an endorsement of Trump.
Therefore, in my opinion, there would have been nothing unusual, in the eyes of the L.P. right-wing, if Rectenwald, Russell, Smith, and other Libertarian right-wingers decided to throw in with Trump on the eve of the November election. On the contrary, I think that some L.P. right-wingers would have hailed it as a magnificent strategy, especially if Trump won the election and returned to the White House. One can easily picture Rectenwald, McCardle, Smith, Russell, Heise, and other L.P. right-wingers basking in the glory of serving in Trump’s Cabinet or in some other high salaried posts in his administration, especially within ICE or the Border Patrol. McCardle would have been honored, praised, and glorified for having brought Trump to the LP. national convention. All of them would be featured speakers at state conventions, where they would be given standing ovations and honored and feted for their glorious achievement.
The boo-fest
And it all would have worked beautifully except for one thing that they had not anticipated: the boo-fest. It was the boo-fest that ended up wrecking everything.
As Trump’s speech approached, Rectenwald and the L.P. hierarchy had to know that they were in big trouble. They could sense that the mood of the delegates was not to give a nice, polite reception to Donald Trump after all. On the contrary, the mood of the delegates was to go after Trump in a surprisingly negative way — with what ultimately became a massive boo-fest during the course of his talk that ended up garnering an incredibly large amount of nationwide publicity in the mainstream press — adverse publicity that subjected Trump to an extraordinarily big amount of nationwide laughter and ridicule.
In one of the more amusing parts of the convention, prior to Trump’s talk Dave Smith did his best to try to control the crowd. With him and Russell giving what were clearly designed originally to be “warm-up” talks for Trump’s speech, Smith exhorted the crowd to be respectful to the former president. Acknowledging that L.P. members, including him, had disagreements with Trump, Smith beseeched the delegates not to act like protestors at Berkeley. He reminded them of the libertarian commitment to principles of free speech.
But the delegates would have no part of that. In a clearly negative, anti-Trump mood, they were bound and determined to treat the L.P. hierarchy’s invited guest speaker Donald Trump, a former president of the United States, to a massive boo-fest that would quickly hit the wires and go out to the entire world.
While it was publicity that the L.P. party hierarchy was seeking in its invitation to Trump to address the 2020 L.P. national convention, my hunch is that it wasn’t the following type of publicity that the L.P. hierarchy was seeking:
“Trump Loudly Booed at Libertarian Convention (CNN)
“Trump Booed at Libertarian National Convention (NBC News)
“Trump booed repeatedly during Libertarian convention speech” (AP News)
“Trump booed and heckled by raucous crowd at Libertarian convention (Reuters)
“Trump greeted with chorus of boos at Libertarian Party convention” (Marketwatch)
“Trump heckled, booed at Libertarian Party convention” (CBC News)
”Trump booed at Libertarian convention (BBC)
”Trump Fiercely Booed at Libertarian Convention (Forbes)
”Trump Loudly Heckled at Libertarian Convention” (Washington Post)
Rectenwald’s untenable situation
This growing anti-Trump sentiment before Trump even got started placed Rectenwald in an untenable situation. He knew that his leading contender for the nomination on the day before the nominating election was Chase Oliver. He also knew that they were both running neck and neck.
On the one hand, if Rectenwald chose to go with the “I don’t suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome” position he had previously taken, he himself stood to get booed by the delegates, a sentiment that would be likely to carry over the next morning and possibly cost him the nomination. He also knew that both Chase Oliver and one of his other opponents, Mike ter Maat, would aggressively go on the attack against Trump at the post-Trump press conference at which the three of them would be participating.
On the other hand, if Rectenwald chose to go with the crowd and attack Trump, he knew he would probably defeat Oliver for the nomination. At the same time, however, an attack on Trump at the convention and, later, during the campaign, would almost certainly cost Rectenwald any possibility of later serving in a Trump administration should Trump end up returning to the White House. After all, Donald Trump is not the forgetting and forgiving type. He demands absolute and total loyalty.
Self-sabotage
It was at this point that Rectenwald made two fateful decisions, one that virtually guaranteed him the nomination and the other that wrecked his nomination.
Prior to Trump’s talk, Rectenwald delivered a short address to the delegates who had come to listen to Trump. In that address, Rectenwald abandoned his “I don’t suffer from TDS” position and leveled a critical attack on Trump. In the process of doing so, he virtually guaranteed himself the nomination, given the strong anti-Trump sentiment that ended up manifesting itself with the boo-fest.
However, at about the same time, Rectenwald made the fateful decision that wrecked any chance he had to win the nomination. That’s where the ingestion of “the edible” came into play.
In any popular self-help psychology book, there is a big possibility that there will be a chapter on the concept of self-sabotage. It holds that people will oftentimes sabotage their chance of success on a subconscious level. In other words, on the conscious level, they strive for success, but for whatever reason, their subconscious drives them to engage in actions that are intended to sabotage their chance for success.
That, in my opinion, is why Rectenwald decided to ingest a mind-altering substance knowing that he was about to participate in the most important presentation of his life — a press conference following the speech to the L.P. national convention by a former president of the United States, to be followed the next day by one of the most important days of Rectenwald’s life — the election of the L.P. presidential nominee.
Who would do such a strange and self-destructive thing? A person who subconsciously was trying to sabotage his chance of winning the L.P. presidential nomination, that’s who.
After all, given that he had made the fateful decision to go on the attack against Trump and given the massive well-publicized boo-fest heaped upon Trump during his speech to the delegates, what did Rectenwald have to look forward to as the L.P. presidential nominee? He knew that as a practical matter, he would have to continue attacking Trump for the next five months during the course of his campaign. He also had to know that Trump would never forget and forgive him for doing that. He also knew that Trump would never forget and forgive the L.P. for the ridicule heaped upon him in the press for the boo-fest he had received at the national convention.
After all, don’t forget: Trump had come down from New York in the midst of his criminal case to address the Libertarian Party and fully expected a warm response, perhaps even an L.P. nomination of Trump. Instead, he received a massive boo-fest, one that made him the subject of tremendous ridicule and laughter within the mainstream press. In Trump’s conspiratorial mind, it undoubtedly even occurred to him that the invitation that had been extended to him might have been a gigantic set-up to make him look bad. After all, who extends a friendly invitation to a person to speak to an event, only to subject him to a massive boo-fest when he accepts the invitation in good faith?
Rectenwald is smart enough to know that once the boo-fest occurred and once Rectenwald continued attacking Trump through the November election, the chances that Trump would appoint a Libertarian to his Cabinet and other Libertarians to high salaried posts in his administration were wrecked. That would mean that Rectenwald and Russell would just be going through the motions as L.P. presidential and vice-presidential candidates, promoting and advancing their right-wing Republican-lite positions and garnering close to 0 percent of the vote, while also knowing that there would be no realistic chance that Trump would ever invite any Libertarian Party right-winger to serve him in his administration.
The edible
It is my considered opinion that Rectenwwald’s decision to ingest a mind-altering drug — an “edible” — succeeded in turning a sufficient number of delegates against him to cost him the nomination. His meandering answers at the post-Trump press conference were a sight to behold. The moderator even had to ask the candidates to limit their answers to the question asked and not to make a “stump speech.” One person in the audience yelled to Rectenwald, “How high are you?” In another obvious subconscious act of self-sabotage, Rectenwald answered, “Not high enough.” Then Rectenwald made the situation even worse by quitting the press conference before it was over and then, facing the audience, raised his arms and made one of the strangest side-to-side shaking motions I have ever seen. The final subconscious nail in the coffin came when Rectenwald confessed to a reporter from the Washington Post that he had, in fact, ingested an “edible” prior to the event. Of course, he could have instead simply responded, “No comment” when asked whether he was on drugs.
The next morning, Rectenwald could have expressed remorse to the delegates in his nominating speech. He could have said that he had made a grave mistake in ingesting the “edible,” apologized, and sincerely sought forgiveness for his clear error in judgment. Instead, in what appeared to me a final subconscious act of self-sabotage, Rectenwald doubled down by laughingly exclaiming that he was “high on liberty.”
To this day, it is my considered opinion that had Rectenwald not had the drug episode, he would have won the nomination. Instead, he ended up losing to Chase Oliver in a very close vote.
Serving evil
Notwithstanding the massive boo-fest that subjected Donald Trump to tremendous ridicule, newly reelected party chair Angela McCardle continues to hold that Trump will honor his promises to appoint a Libertarian to his Cabinet and pardon Ross Ulbricht. In my opinion, she is whistling past the graveyard and suffering from a grave case of extreme naiveté. Although McCardle maintained that Trump was friendly to her after the boo-fest, in my opinion the chances that Trump will forget and forgive the boo-fest are equal to the chances of a snowball surviving in hell.
But what about McCardle’s actual wish to have a Libertarian appointed to a Trump cabinet or having L.P. members serving in a Trump administration?
I’m reminded of a great movie named Downfall. It revolves around a young German woman who accepted a position as Adolf Hitler’s secretary. At the end of the movie, the real woman — that is, not an actress — made an appearance, where she stated that she naturally believed that it was a big honor to be able to serve in the Hitler administration. It wasn’t until she discovered Sophie Scholl and the members of the White Rose that she was able to see the horror of what she had done by serving in an evil system. (See my essay “The White Rose: A Lesson In Dissent” and the great movie Sophie Scholl: The Final Days.)
I’m also reminded of the so-called Chicago Boys who eagerly sought positions in the Pinochet regime so that they could bring “free-market” principles to Chile, even while the regime they were serving was rounding up some 60,000 innocent people and torturing, raping, disappearing, or executing them.
The way I see it is that one who votes for the lesser of two evils is still voting for evil. More important, one who serves in an evil system participates in evil, even when one has the intention of making evil more palatable or more efficient.
Chase Oliver
Ever since Chase Oliver defeated Michael Rectenwald for the L.P. presidential nomination, the L.P. right-wing has displayed an unfathomably deep animus toward him, one that goes far beyond sour grapes at losing an election. On the surface, this would appear strange because Oliver supports the same Republican-lite, reform-oriented positions of L.P right-wingers — e.g., immigration controls, school vouchers, taking over the public-school system, continuing and reforming Social Security and Medicare, continuing the Pentagon, regulatory reform, healthcare reform, monetary reform, etc.
So, why the deep hostility toward Oliver within the L.P. right-wing? There are three major reasons: One, Oliver (like me) opposed the party’s hierarchy’s decision to invite Donald Trump to address the L.P. national convention. Two, Oliver (like me) sees no difference in principle between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, in that they are both cut of out of same statist cloth. Three, Oliver does not intend to use his candidacy to help Trump win the presidential election, which effectively dooms the possibility that Trump, the “freedom-leaning” hero of the L.P. right-wing, will appoint L.P. right-wingers to serve him in his administration. In the eyes of L.P. right-wingers, these are unpardonable sins that necessitate that condemnation, enmity, hostility, and hatred be heaped onto Chase Oliver
Post-convention wreckage
After the L.P. national convention, Dave Smith announced that he had decided to drop out of L.P. activity and devote himself full-time to his regular jobs as podcaster and a comedian.
Michael Heise announced that he too was dropping out and securing a regular job in the private sector. He said that the Mises Caucus no longer received enough donations to keep him going with a full-time salary. When I first met Heise at Ron Paul’s annual conference at Dulles airport many years ago, he had just founded the Mises Caucus and a Mises PAC. He told me that his dream was to make them big enough that they would be able to sustain him as a full-time job. By the time of the Reno Reset convention in 2022, it was clear that Heise had achieved his dream. Now, sadly, it is clear that the Rectenwald campaign has wrecked Heise’s dreams.
The chances that Rectenwald will be rehired by Hillside College and Chronicles magazine are slim to none, especially given his affiliation with the Libertarian Party and his attacks on Republican Donald Trump.
After unsuccessfully trying to be elected Chase Oliver’s vice-presidential mate under the deceptive guise of wanting to “unify” the party, Clint Russell has engaged in what might well be nastiest and most vicious attacks against Oliver in the 53-year history of the Libertarian Party — attacks that are the exact opposite of his conversational love-fest “debate” with his “freedom-leaning” Republican hero Vivek Ramaswamy and that are much worse than his unethical performance as a vice-presidential candidate/debate moderator at the Georgia Libertarian Party convention.
National party chair Angela McCardle is now walking a tightrope, one that involves fulfilling her responsibility to support the party’s presidential nominee, Chase Oliver. while, at the same time, seemingly still fantasizing about Libertarians being asked to serve in a Trump administration.
While there undoubtedly will be many right-wing L.P members who decide to support the “freedom-leaning” Republican Donald Trump instead of the L.P. presidential nominee Chase Oliver, the LNC, which is almost completely controlled by the Mises Caucus, is under the same constraint as McCardle in its duty to support the party’s nominee. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see what direction the LNC and its individual members take from now until the November election and then for the next two years. If Trump wins the election, will the LNC make the Libertarian Party a partner, ally, agent, or instrument of the Trump-run welfare-warfare state and immigration police state? What if Biden wins? What does the LNC do then? Does it devote itself to trying to get Republicans and LP. right-wingers elected to public (i.e., government) school boards?
The most important issue, of course, is whether the L.P. right-wing will succeed in completely wrecking the Libertarian Party.