If the main purpose of a political party is to run candidates for office, former Libertarian Party of Virginia Chairwoman Holly Ward says it felt like a “violation” to keep taking people’s money. ...
The resolution to dissolve the state party, which Ward says was approved Sunday in a 7-6-1 vote by the party’s central committee, said the national party has become “functionally indistinct from other alt-right parties and movements.”
Those “destructive” ideas, the resolution said, include “endorsing thinly-veiled antisemitism, explicitly welcoming bigotry into the party, reversing the LP’s 50-year legacy of support for LGBTQ+ rights, and openly denouncing women’s suffrage, the civil rights act, and democracy itself.”
Ward attributed those trends to a Libertarian faction called the Mises Caucus, which she said is taking over the party apparatus and discouraging Libertarian candidates from running in swing states where they could hurt Republican votes and tilt the outcome toward Democrats.
Ward pointed to several social media posts as examples of the types of messages she opposed, including posts from the national party saying “Social justice is a Marxist lie created to bully and divide the American people,” defining democracy as “mob rule that endangers individual rights” and replying to the AP Stylebook suggesting the pronoun “she” could no longer be used “since we don’t know what a woman is anymore.” She also pointed to a deleted Martin Luther King Jr. Day Twitter post by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, an account the national party amplifies, that said “America isn’t in debt to black people, if anything it’s the other way around.” Another post from the New Hampshire account said “6 million dollar minimum wage or you’re antisemitic,” which many interpreted as a reference to the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
“Obviously I don’t support any of these messages,” Ward said. “It’s bigoted. It’s absolutely repugnant.”
