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JUDY WOODRUFF: And back to the battle over health care.

I spoke a short time ago with Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, one of the key votes that could determine the future of the GOP effort to repeal and replace Obamacare.

Senator Paul, thank you very much for joining us.

Is there any doubt in your mind, if the vote had gone ahead today or tomorrow, that the bill would have failed?

SEN. RAND PAUL, R-Ky.: Yes, I dont think there were enough votes, but I think there also just hasnt been enough time to have a full discussion.

We just got the bill last week. We just got the CBO score on Monday. So, there needs to be a little bit more time to absorb this, then also to discuss, what are the changes that the leadership might be open to in order to get it to pass?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of that, you met with President Trump at the White House earlier today. You tweeted after your meeting, you said: @realDonaldTrump is open to making the bill better. Is the Senate leadership?

My question to you is and the president is meeting now with the rest of the Republicans in the Senate what changes does the president want to see in this bill?

SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, I dont think its so much him lobbing us for changes. Its us asking him for help in getting the changes done.

I think he has the bully pulpit. He has a great deal of influence with the Republican Party on both the House and the Senate side. And I think the bill right now to the conservative point of view doesnt have enough repeal. In fact, it looks like were keeping a lot of Obamacare.

Even the architect of Obamacare, Jonathan Gruber, said, hey, hey, guys, dont worry, were actually keeping Obamacare. So we actually think that there needs to be more repeal. Thats the message I took to him.

But I also took a specific list that were sending to Senate leadership, and were saying, if you address these items, theres a possibility we could vote for this bill, but its got to look more like repeal and less like were keeping it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, as you know, what the president has said about the House version of the bill, which many people said was tougher than the Senate bill, he said it was mean, and he wanted a bill with more heart.

So where are we on this?

SEN. RAND PAUL: You know, I think there are various ways you can characterize both Republican and Democrat proposals.

President Obama, I think, wanted what was best for the country, but I think it didnt work well. I think we have the death spiral, and I think particularly premiums in the individual market are going through the roof.

I think Republicans want whats best for the country also, but I think theyre not fixing the death spiral of Obamacare. Theyre going to subsidize it with a lot of taxpayer money. So, characterizing something as mean or generous I think goes to peoples motives, and I think it is sort of why we have such an angry country now. We think that people have ill motives.

But I think Republicans want people to have health insurance. We want people to be healthy. So do Democrats. We just believe in a different type of economic system or different types of limitations of government or more expansive government and how we can do it.

JUDY WOODRUFF: One of the things, Senator Paul, you have talked about wanting to do away with is the Obamacare tax on individuals making over $250,000 a year.

That would be money thats the money thats been used to pay for many of the subsidies for people with lower income.

SEN. RAND PAUL: Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Its a transfer, taking money away from those who have more to give it to people who have less, but that troubles you?

SEN. RAND PAUL: No, we already do quite a bit of that, and its call Medicaid.

The problem or the fundamental flaw of Obamacare was that they put regulations on the insurance, about 12 regulations, which increased the cost of the insurance. And so President Obama wanted to help poor, working-class people, but he actually hurts them by making the insurance too expensive to want to buy.

I had someone at the house just recently was doing some work, and he said: Oh, my son doesnt have insurance, hes paying the penalty because its too expensive.

So, President Obama said, oh, we want to make insurance perfect for people, but he added all these regulatory mandates, made it too expensive. Young, healthy people didnt buy it, and the people remaining in the insurance pool were sicker and sicker. Thats the adverse selection and the death spiral of Obamacare.

And so really we do need to discuss the intricacies of what worked and what didnt work in Obamacare. And I think the better way to do this is to let individuals have the freedom to choose what kind of insurance is best for them. The government doesnt always know best. Maybe the individual should be allowed to choose.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator, I hear you, and I have read of some of the other comments you have made lately. You have some very strong views on this. As you just said, you would like to do away with this tax on individuals earning high earners.

You have talked about doing away with the mandates in Obamacare. You talk about health savings accounts. But other members of the Senate, including other Republicans, have very different ideas. They are worried about these Medicaid cuts in this legislation.

SEN. RAND PAUL: Right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Where is the common ground?

SEN. RAND PAUL: Well, thats what were going to see, if we can find it.

One of the things that horrifies me is that we would be giving taxpayer money to very, very wealthy corporations. The insurance companies make about $15 billion a year. They have doubled their profit margin under Obamacare. And so now were going to take a lot of this and call it a stabilization fund, but really its a bailout of insurance companies.

And I just think thats wrong. I just cant see why ordinary, average taxpayers would be giving money to very, very wealthy corporations. An analogous situation would be this: We all complain that new cars cost too much. Why dont we have a new car stabilization fund and give $130 billion to car companies?

JUDY WOODRUFF: Right.

SEN. RAND PAUL: We could do that in any industry, but its not really good economics. What it is, is, youre simply transferring money from the ordinary, average taxpayers to very wealthy corporations.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, Senator, my understanding is that plan was put in there to take care of some of those people at the lower income level because of these changes in Medicaid.

I still dont see where the middle ground is between you, other Republicans, and certainly with Democrats.

SEN. RAND PAUL: Actually, the money in the stabilization fund, $130 billion which I call an insurance bailout, is put in to try to cure the adverse selection that Obamacare created by making insurance too expensive. Healthy people didnt buy it.

They tried to fix this by forcing young people to buy it through an individual mandate. Even that didnt work. So the way the Republicans fix it is they dont actually fix it. They subsidize it. So we have to fix what went wrong with Obamacare, not just recapitulate something thats broken.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What youre saying makes it sound like youre still uncertain this is going to pass.

SEN. RAND PAUL: Yes. Im uncertain whether its going to be enough of a repeal bill for conservatives. And we need to adhere to our promise. We promised people wed repeal it. We talked about all the problems of Obamacare. We shouldnt leave half of it in place and expect things to be better.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, we thank you.

SEN. RAND PAUL: Thank you.

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Sen. Rand Paul: Senate health care bill needs more Obamacare ...

Christopher Cantwell, the self-described anti-Semite and alt-right activist who starred in a viral Vice News documentary about the deadly protests in Charlottesville, isfacing three charges based on his conduct.

Unlike some of the other marchers, Cantwell was no stranger to confrontations with authority. In New Hampshire, his sudden fame startled libertarianswho had known Cantwell as a busy, talkative but increasingly extreme anti-government activist. In 2012, he arrived in the state as a vocal supporter of Ron Pauls 2012 presidential campaign, and as a critic of the police a hot issue in Keene, a college town in western New Hampshire with a robust libertarian population. During the Obama years, he had changed.

Until the last year or two of his life, hed been a libertarian activist with no known racist streak, wrote Ian Freeman, a radio host and commentator in the Free Keene movement, in a post last week. A couple of years ago, he began down this road to his current skinhead-racist form and once that happened, we had to dump him as a co-host of my radio show,Free Talk Live. As libertarians, we believe in the individual and dont see people as groups based on color, gender, or religion. Chris now only sees the group rather than the individual. Hes one of the few people who has turned away from the libertarian message after having embraced it.

But in Cantwells own words, he had come to racism and anti-Semitism through libertarianism not by abandoning it. Cantwells story is one of several that have made libertarians ask fresh questions about the turns that their movement took in the Obama years, as Pauls two Republican bids for president consolidated everyone from anti-government voluntaryists to racist conspiracy theorists into one roiling campaign.

Ive been concerned about some libertarians trending alt-right, because these hard alt-right proto-fascists and neo-Nazis have been trolling libertarians for years, said the libertarian writer Jeffrey Tucker, who has written extensively about the racist threat to the movement. Theyre doing to libertarianism what they did to Pepe the frog, or Taylor Swift to co-opt it. They know that no normal American is going to rally around the Nazi flag, so theyre taking ours.

One person was killed and 19 were injured amid protests of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville on Aug. 12. Here's how the city became the scene of violence. (Elyse Samuels,Zoeann Murphy/The Washington Post)

But as Cantwell himself pointed out, a debate about racism and racisms political utility had been taking place among libertarians for decades. Ron Paul first ran for president in 1988, drawing media attention but bringing his Libertarian Party less than 1 percent of the vote. In the wake of that defeat, the libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard argued that the movement needed to take a page from the campaigns of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. Libertarians, stuck in a losing effort to win yuppies, needed to realize the potency of an appeal to white working-class voters, one that explained how shrinking the state would mean fewer benefits devolved topeople not like them.

The proper strategy of libertarians and paleos is a strategy of right-wing populism, that is: to expose and denounce this unholy alliance, and to call for getting this preppie underclass-liberal media alliance off the backs of the rest of us: the middle and working classes, Rothbard wrote.

In an essay published at his personal website last week, Cantwell cited Rothbard as one of the thinkers who had moved him from generic anti-state activism toward racism.

What I realized in the course of my inquiries, is that the people everyone called racists werent claiming that race was a reliable way of judging individuals. They were only observing demographic trends, and hate was not the focus of their efforts. They were trying to reduce the amount of conflict and violence in their society, and they figured out that discrimination based on ethnic categories was an efficient method of accomplishing this goal.

That seemed to coincide well with my libertarianism. Libertarians also want to reduce conflict over scarce resources. In libertarian philosophy, nobody ought to be compelled to associate with anyone else. People should be free to exercise complete control over their own person and property. If blacks are committing crimes, or Jews are spreading communism, discriminating against them is the right of any property owner.

Mainstream libertarians were worried about the spread of ideas like that. Pauls campaigns, which some cosmopolitan libertarians viewed skeptically, took their philosophy to new heights of political support. It also, indisputably, won the support of some white supremacists. In 2007, as Paul was rising in polls for what had been a quixotic presidential bid, he appeared as a guest speaker for the Robert Taft Club, led by Richard Spencer the same Richard Spencer who, after the 2008 election, coined the term alt-right.

This year, when Spencer was invited to talk to some attendees ofthe International Students for Liberty conference, Jeffrey Tucker confronted him in an exchange filmed from several angles and shared by alt-right activists who thought that Spencer got the better of it. I used to read your articles, Spencer said, mockingly, while Tucker accused him of trying to troll the conference.

The confrontation had been a long time coming. In 2014, Tucker had written an essay against what he called libertarian brutalism, defining it as an anti-liberal tendency that grew out of a perversion of libertarian principles.

The brutalists are technically correct that liberty also protects the right to be a complete jerk and the right to hate, but such impulses do not flow from the long history of the liberal idea, he wrote. As regards race and sex, for example, the liberation of women and minority populations from arbitrary rule has been a great achievement of this tradition. To continue to assert the right to turn back the clock in your private and commercial life gives an impression of the ideology that is uprooted from this history, as if these victories for human dignity have nothing whatever to do with the ideological needs of today.

One of Tuckers criticsat the timewas Christopher Cantwell. What we brutalists are saying is, egalitarianism is not the means or end of libertarianism, and saying otherwise in hopes of attracting Democrats into our ranks is illusory, he wrote. When you repeat statist race propaganda, do you grow our ranks? No. You simply distract from the point that race is irrelevant.

Three years later, having substantially changed his views on race, Cantwell would turn himself in to police after bragging about his actions at a rally organized by racists.

Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, told attendees at the 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 23 that members of the alt-right are "anti-Semites, they are racists, they are sexists." (The Washington Post)

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Libertarians wrestle with the alt-right - The Washington Post - Washington Post

Last December as the smoke was clearing from the electoral explosion and many of us were still shell-shocked and wandering around blindly searching for emotional shelter, Salons Matthew Sheffieldwrote a series of articlesabout the rise of the alt-right. The movement had been discussed during the campaign, of course. Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton even gave a big speech about it. Trumps campaign strategist and chiefconsigliere, Steve Bannon the once and future executive editor of Breitbart News had even bragged that his operation was the platform of the alt-right just a few months earlier. But after the election there was more interest than ever in this emerging political movement.

Its an interesting story about a group of non-interventionist right-wingers, who came together in the middle of the last decade in search of solidarity in their antipathy toward the Bush administrations wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was a motley group of conservatives, white nationalists and Libertarians that broke apart almost as soon as they came together. The more clever among them saw the potential for this new brand and began to market themselves as the alt-right, and it eventually morphed into what it is today. The series is a good read and explains that the alt-right really was a discrete new movement within the far right wing and not simply a clever renaming of racist and Nazi groups.

This week, conservative writer Matt Lewis of The Daily Beast, a Trump critic,wrote a pieceabout the Libertarian influence on the alt-right and suggested that Libertarians work harder to distance themselves from this now-infamous movement. He points out that former Rep. Ron Pauls presidential campaigns were a nexus of what became alt-right activism. Sheffield had written about that too:

Pretty much all of the top personalities at the Right Stuff, a neo-Nazi troll mecca, started off as conventional libertarians and Paul supporters, according to the sites creator, an anonymous man who goes by the name Mike Enoch.

We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this,he said on an alt-right podcast last month. [Note: This podcast seems to have been deleted.]

It wasnt just obscure neo-Nazi trolls. Virtually all the prominent figures in or around the alt-right movement, excepting sympathizers and fellow travelers like Bannon and Donald Trump himself, were Paul supporters:Richard Spencer,Paul Gottfried, Jared Taylor,Milo Yiannopoulosand Alex Jones. (The latter two deny being part of the alt-right, but have unquestionably contributed to its rise in prominence.) Pauls online support formed the basis for what would become the online alt-right, the beating heart of the new movement.

In fact, Ron Paul then a Texas congressman and the father of Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the original alt-right candidate, long before Donald Trump came along. Paul was also, by far, the most popular Libertarian in America.

Those of us observing the Paul phenomenon and Libertarianism from the left always found it curious in this regard. Pauls racism was simply undeniable.It was documented for decades. He hid behind the states rights argument, as pro-Confederate racists have always done, but it was never very convincing. If you are a principled Libertarian who believes in small government and inalienable individual rights, what difference does it make whether a federal or state government is the instrument of oppression?

Most of us thought a lot of Pauls appeal, especially to young white males, came down to a loathing for the uptight religious conservatism of the GOP, along with Pauls endorsement of drug legalization. That made some sense. Why would all these young dudes care about the capital gains tax?

And lets face facts, it wasnt just Libertarians who could be dazzled by Pauls iconoclasm.There were plenty of progressives drawn to his isolationist stance as well.But as it turns out, among that group of Atlas Shrugged fans and stoners were a whole lot of white supremacists, all of whom abandoned Ron Pauls son Rand in 2016 when Donald Trump came along and spoke directly to their hearts and minds.

Is there something about Libertarianism that attracts white supremacists? It seems unlikely, except to the extent that it was a handy way to argue against federal civil rights laws, something that both Paulpreandfilsendorsed during their careers, legitimizing that point of view as a Libertarian principle. (In fairness, Rand Paul has tried to pursue more progressive racial policies in recent years which may also have helped drive away his dads supporters.) Other than that, though, it seems to me that Libertarianism has simply been a way station for young and angry white males as they awaited theirGod Emperor, as they call Trump on the wildly popular alt-right site, r/The_Donald.

Still, Libertarians do have something to answer for. While principled Libertarianslike Cathy Youngcertainly condemned the racism in their ranks at the time, but others who supported Ron Paul failed to properly condemn the rank bigotry undergirding the Paul philosophy.

Lewiss Daily Beast piece certainly provoked some reaction among Libertarians. Nick Gillespie at Reasonobjectedto the characterization of Libertarianism as a pipeline to the alt-right, writing that the alt-right and Trumpism, too, to the extent that it has any coherence is an explicit rejection of foundational libertarian beliefs in free trade and free migration along with experiments in living that make a mess of rigid categories that appeal to racists, sexists, protectionists, and other reactionaries. So he rejects calls to purge Libertarianism of alt-righters, since he believes they were never really Libertarians in the first place.

Gillespie does, however, agree that Libertarian true believers should call out such people wherever we find them espousing their anti-modern, tribalistic, anti-individualistic, and anti-freedom agenda. (It would have been easy to include racist in that list but, being generous, perhaps he meant it to fall under the term tribalistic.)

Meanwhile, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler addresses some Libertariansmisplaced affinity for the Confederacy,a phenomenon I must admit I didnt know existed. Evidently,there really are Libertarianswho take the side of the secessionists, supposedly on the basis of tariffs and Abraham Lincolns allegedly monstrous record on civil liberties. Adler patiently explains why this is all nonsense and wrote, Libertarianism may not be responsible for the alt-right, but its fair to ask whether enough libertarians have done enough to fight it within their own ranks.

Good for these prominent Libertarians for being willing to confront the currents of racism, anti-Semitism and xenophobia that at the very least have contaminated their movement. We await the same honest self-appraisal from the conservative movement and Republican leaders as a whole.

Original post:
Now the Libertarians have known sin: Reckoning with the rise of the ... - Salon

In 2002, I got it into my head that I wanted to attend what was then described as the Old Latin Mass. I had been reading in the dingy corners of the Internet, which is always dangerous, and these Latin Mass people seemed able to explain some of the gap between the grand ideas I was studying in a medieval-theology class at my college and the worship at most Catholic parishes, which, to me, seemed little different from the Lutheran services Id seen as a teenager. One Sunday morning I got in my car, and life has never been the same.

For most of the people I met there, the Old Mass was the one quixotic cause to which they were attached. They knew that the local bishop didnt like this movement, and that it placed them outside the mainstream not only of their culture but of their own Church. But they believed.

The price for their conviction was that they had to put up with the others the people for whom the Latin Mass was just the first or the latest in a long line of disreputable fascinations and commitments. One of these folks told me that every bishop and cardinal and even the pope himself was homosexual. Another let on that she frequently wrote encouraging letters to certain Bourbon descendants. And honestly, it was the freaks and conspiracy theorists who seemed more kind and generous with their time, and who generally were less discriminating in everyday ways. They might be worried that Freemasons in the government were spying on them, but they really didnt notice bourgeois morality or care about what you did for a living.

Eventually, Pope Benedict made clear that the Latin Mass was a good thing and said the bishops shouldnt give us such a hard time. Since then, the ratio of normal people to kooks has changed dramatically in favor of normal people.

Which brings us to the strange liberty-to-fascism pipeline.

According to a theory Matt Lewis recently floated, libertarianism is some unique gateway drug to neo-Nazism. Lewis runs through a few white supremacists who have become notorious since Charlottesville and finds that some of them once self-identified as libertarians or have tried recruiting at libertarian events.

But its not just libertarianism. Jason Kessler, the lead organizer of the Charlottesville torch march, was formerly in Occupy Wall Street. And hes not the only Occupy veteran who found himself on the alt-ish side of the street. Online activist Justine Tunney went from Occupy to Gamergate to creating a petition for a CEO of America, fitting her new net-reactionary views.

Lewis comes across the most powerful explanation for the pipeline when professor Kevin Vallier tells him, Libertarianism is an unpopular view. And it takes particular personality types to be open to taking unpopular views. Indeed, marginal ideas attract marginal people. The experience of conversion itself can be intoxicating, and so often the first conversion is not the final one.

It also takes a particular sort of character to handle marginal ideas safely. People dont just think themselves into their ideas; they feel their way to them emotionally, and they are socialized into them. Adopting a big new idea can be like adopting a new wardrobe; it can signify and propel a change in persona.

Before the Latin Mass, I spent some time in Evangelical churches, and I count many Evangelicals as friends and spiritual peers. But after 15 years of socializing myself into my religious views, I think one of the chief barriers to my ever concluding that Martin Luther correctly interpreted St. Pauls letters is that I dont want to become a person who wears khakis and a broad smile when prefacing a difficult conversation with the words, The Lord put something on my heart.

Im sure theres someone who looks at my religious views and thinks, I dont want be the kind of person who talks about G. K. Chesterton to strangers and tells their kids to offer it up when they fall and scrape their knee. Theres no logical connection at work. You can have Luthers view of justification without being a typical American Evangelical. Martin Luther himself managed that trick. But the human machine isnt strictly logical. To believe something isnt just to accept the conclusion itself; its to accept yourself as the type of person who believes it.

Cranks therefore come to accept or even embrace their own crankishness. One marginal idea leads to the next even more marginal idea. And the mainstream they rejected isnt just wrong; its proponents become contemptible and corrupt. And contempt spreads easily: Normal people dont care about ideas, the cranks thinking goes, and endure the corruption around them in nearly silent docility. Its the normies that kooks really cant stand.

Like religion, politics attracts kooks and grifters because it is a field where results have a mysterious and hard-to-trace relationship with the time, effort, and cash invested in them. Grifters use this to create lucrative and low-effort consulting jobs. For kooks, the comfort is more psychological. If a kook can convince himself or better yet, others that Freemasons, Jews, or Cultural Marxists run the whole world, hes suddenly relieved of the burden of explaining to himself and others the shipwreck of his own talents and ambitions.

And speaking of grifters, if kooks start digging into the crack in their minds and sometimes end up with a cracked will, grifters start with a cracked will and usually end up with an empty mind. Anything like a conviction could get in the way of the money-making.

If libertarians have a pipeline for kooks, it is probably because they have some non-mainstream views. But if you have perfectly acceptable views, you probably have a pipeline for grifters. Conservatives have a mix of mainstream views and non-mainstream views. Consequently we are always fending off kooks on one side while being preyed upon by grifters on the other.

If libertarians have to account for Christopher Cantwell, Richard Spencer, and a hundred other kooks, perhaps the respectable types need to explain the long parade of money-grubbing nullities marching through political media and political power. All the way from Dick Morris and Morris Dees to Tom Daschle, Trent Lott, and the functionaries at the Clinton Foundation. What pipeline produces these, and who is willing to clean it up?

READ MORE: Campus Conservatives Gave the Alt-Right a Platform The Kids Are Alt Right: The Internets Most Infamous Subculture The Alt-Right Is Bad And So Is Antifa

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review.

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The Libertarianism-to-Fascism Pipeline - National Review

If you speak to any political activist operating outside of the two-party mainstream, a common point mentioned is how party politics compromises principles. Republicans often sacrifice conservative principles to advance the party elite. Although individuals such as House Speaker Paul Ryan or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are considered leaders in the Republican Party, conservative activists generally do not consider them standard bearers of their cause. Case in point is the failure to legitimately repeal Obamacare.

The same is said for many liberals and progressives in terms of the Democratic Party. Instead of nominating someone more devout to their cause such as Senator Bernie Sanders, the party elite opted for Hillary Clinton, a mistake possibly responsible for Trumps unexpected presidency. The Democratic Party seems more concerned with the party elite than advancing their principles.

So why would the Libertarian Party be any different?

Libertarian National Committee chairman Nicholas Sarwark has an active presence online, targeting individuals who stand at odds with his party. This is not unusual, as across the country, Republicans figuratively snipe at Democrats and vice versa. Even on that rare occasion there is common ground among both sides, partisanship always reigns supreme. It is a fact of life in todays political climate.

But with the last election, the Libertarian Party sought to brand itself as the sane alternate to the madness of the two-party duopoly. The problem is that the partys own chairman contradicts this own line of logic.

Sarwark has criticized libertarian icon, former Texas Congressman Ron Paul as well as his libertarian-leaning son Senator Rand Paul. More recently, he has taken aim at historian Tom Woods. The recurring theme is Sarwarks love for hurling insults at non-Libertarians, even the ones that are simply unenrolled libertarians.

Is this healthy for the cause of liberty?

The liberty movement had a very brief moment of unity in 2012 when Ron Paul ran for President, but after that, the movement splintered almost immediately. Libertarians want success for the Libertarian Party, but many Paul-aligned activists remain within the Republican Party. In a number of ways, libertarianism has fallen victim to a tug-o-war between political parties.

So where does this leave Sarwark?

The question ultimately lies where his loyalties are and to a degree, what the aim of the Libertarian Party is.

Is the Libertarian Party in existence to advance its own brand, or does it exist to advance libertarian principles? More importantly, do these goals align?

If the answer to the latter question is yes, then the Libertarian Party would support causes that advance libertarian principles. Nobody is arguing that the Ron, Rand, or Woods are perfect. With that being said, it is undeniable that these individuals have made a significant contribution to liberty. Given Sarwarks attacks, its then easy to assume that advancing the Libertarian Party and the cause of liberty are not parallel causes.

So where does that leave the Libertarian Party?

Ultimately, the Libertarian Party is a lot like the Republican Party. Candidates, activists and scattered leaders may genuinely identify with the principled cause, but the party structure works contrary to it. Political parties work contrary to principles, whether it be Republicans with conservatism or Libertarians with libertarianism.

When Sarwark attacks prominent libertarian figures simply because they dont identify with individuals such as Gary Johnson or Bill Weld, he is setting back the cause of liberty in favor of pushing his brand. This may be his job as a party chairman, but lets not operate under the assumption that he is working towards the goal of advancing liberty.

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How The Libertarian Party's Partisan Politics Hurts Libertarianism - The Liberty Conservative