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Im a libertarian, but Im totally turned off by the party. And Im not alone, especially now that Chase Oliver is its 2024 candidate.

Although libertarian ideology has mass appeal, the party has consistently alienated voters with outlandish antics and out-of-touch nominees, and this election cycle is no exception.

Since Oliver won the Libertarian primary late last month, the former Georgia Senate candidate has been going viral for some of his more lefty stances.

In resurfaced clips, the 38-year-old has been dragged for publicly advocating for defunding the police until [they] restore trust with the people, describing drag queen story hours as performance art, advocating for open borders and defending gender-affirming care for transgender kids as the status quo.

The fundamental libertarian principle is live and let live, and there are certainly libertarians who embrace that ethos on both the political right and the left.

But the party is making a massive error by choosing a hard-left-leaning libertarian with values destined to turn off Republicans who might be looking for an alternative in 2024.

The entire country is looking for something different than two old fogies and the same old uni-party, Mark, a 42-year-old libertarian, told The Post. This came to a crashing halt when the party nominated another leftist Libertarian in 2024.

For Mark, who works in IT in Dallas, Olivers nomination was the final straw that led him to re-register on voter rolls as being unaffiliated with any party: So many wasted opportunities in the last two decades, and Ive had it.

Indeed, the party has embarrassed itself for cycles on end with candidates that nobody had ever heard of like no-name professor Jo Jorgensen in 2020 and nominees who are downright outrageous, like Gary Johnson in 2016.

The former New Mexico governor, who peaked at 13% in polling numbers, couldnt name a world leader he admires during an interview and famously did not know where Aleppo, Syria, was during the height of the Syrian refugee crisis.

He actually asked a MSNBC host, What is Aleppo?

To Johnsons credit, he was the only candidate on the 2016 Libertarian primary debate stage who replied yes to the question, Should someone have to have a government issued license to drive a car?

His rivals answered with hell no and Whats next, requiring a license to make toast in your own damn toaster?

Most people associate libertarianism with principles like free speech, small government, religious liberty, and gun rights not the right to get behind the wheel without any qualifications and endanger others lives.

But that viral moment was emblematic of the extremist ideological purity of the party.

A third party needs pragmatism, first and foremost, Sam, a 22-year-old disaffected libertarian who works in communications in New Jersey, told me. Most people, myself included, associate libertarianism with social free-will and free market capitalism. We arent puritans or philosophers.

But the drivers license debacle wasnt even the craziest thing to come out of a libertarian convention.

Other greatest hits include a party chairman candidate stripping on stage during a convention on a dare, and Vermin Love Supreme, who served as a member of the Libertarian Partys judicial committee despite always wearing a boot on his head.

I changed my registration to Independent when I saw how unserious the party had gotten, a California finance professional named Greg, 34, told The Post. It is not an effective or serious party in any real sense.

This years presidential election should be a historic opportunity for libertarians. Two incumbents with record low approval ratings should make a third-party candidate more viable than ever.

Freedom, liberty and self-determination are values that appeal to the right and the left.

And yet the party which has become an anarchist echo-chamber insulated from any real market pressure managed to completely drop the ball by selecting a candidate who is an instantaneous turnoff to many Americans.

Libertarian ideology should be taken seriously. The libertarian party, however, has demonstrated time and again that it cannot be.

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I'm a libertarian but the party has turned into a joke - New York Post

Its a battle flag once again, and a group of Granite State libertarians brought the fight to Nashua City Hall Monday.

The Pine Tree Flag, sometimes called the Appeal to Heaven flag, flew over the Battle of Bunker Hill as Gen. George Washington and American revolutionaries faced the British outside Boston. But when that flag was the subject of a citizens fly request, it was rejected by Gate City Mayor Jim Donchess.

As a result, Donchess rejection may have brought more attention to First Amendment constitutional rights than he bargained for.

On Monday, a group organized by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire rallied outside Nashua City Hall to protest Donchess decision.

Mayor Donchess censorship of the Pine Tree Flag demonstrates his hatred for New Hampshire values and its history. It also likely violates the First Amendment, since the Nashua government is picking and choosing what speech is allowed to be displayed using taxpayer dollars, said organizer and UNH Law student Zephan Wood.

The flag, Wood noted, dates back to the Pine Tree Riot an April 1772 act of resistance to British authority by American colonists in the town of Weare, N.H.

Donchessviewed the flag-flying issue differently.

The reason we wont fly this flag is that since the attack on the (U.S.) Capitol it has become a symbol of violence against local, state and national government, Donchess said.

Some legal experts believe Donchess stance puts the city, and its taxpayers, in financial jeopardy.

In March, pro-Christian activists successfully lobbied the city to fly a Christian flag above Nashua City Hall. The flag-flying event was attended by Boston-based Camp Constitution founder Hal Shurtleff, whose group won a landmark 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2022 after Boston city officials rejected their citizens request. The city paid out more than $2 million to the Liberty Counsel, the pro-faith nonprofit who brought the suit.

Nashua has the same citizen flag-flying policy. Like Boston, Nashua has a policy encouraging citizens to submit flag-flying requests.

Yet Donchess on Monday claimed city officials were within their rights to reject Nashua resident Beth Scaers request to fly the Pine Tree Flag because, we have that discretion.

Scaer, who attended Mondays flag protest, said she is grateful this protest is bringing more attention to the erosion of our First Amendment rights.

The pine tree has been a political symbol in New England for at least 250 years, including the pine cone currently on top of the Massachusetts state house. But critics of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, including writers at the The New York Times and other left-leaning news outlets are trying to use the flag to attack Justice Samuel Alito. The Times turned the fact that Alito flew the Pine Tree flag over the familys New Jersey beach house into major headlines.

However, the City of San Francisco, known for its aggressive progressive policies and history of Democratic Party dominance, had flown the same flag on city hall grounds for upwards of six decades until its removal late last month following The New York Times expose.

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Libertarians Gather to Protest Nashua's Pine Tree Flag Ban - NH Journal

Lone Tree City Council member Nicholas Gluba plans to run for Congress as a Libertarian in Iowas 1st Congressional District, he announced Wednesday.

Gluba, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran, will join what is anticipated to be a competitive race between incumbent Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Christina Bohannan, a former state representative. Miller-Meeks staved off a primary challenge from David Pautsch earlier this month.

In a news release, the Libertarian Party of Iowa said Glubas priorities include individual liberty, property rights, a free-market economy, gun rights and opposition to foreign intervention.

"I am running on a platform of freedom for all people regardless of ethnicity, religion, social status, and gender. My campaign is built on the principles of personal freedom, economic opportunity, and accountable government, Gluba said in a statement.

Iowas Libertarian Party regained official party status under state law after the 2022 election, when its gubernatorial candidate garnered more than 2 percent of the vote in the state. The partys 2024 presidential candidate will need to take in at least 2 percent of the vote to retain that status.

Gluba was not a candidate in the partys June 4 primary election. The party will need to hold a district convention to nominate him and submit paperwork to the Iowa Secretary of States office to get Gluba on the November ballot.

Betsy DeVos, former U.S. secretary of education under then-President Donald Trump, will be a featured speaker at the conservative Christian group The Family Leaders annual conference on July 12.

The groups annual conference, The Family Leadership Summit, has been a magnet for GOP presidential candidates in recent years as they courted the evangelical vote ahead of the Iowa caucuses.

Joel C. Rosenberg, a Christian author who covers news in Israel and the Middle East, also will speak at the event, along with Egyptian American pastor Michael Youssef.

"With emphases on Israel, parental rights in education, religious liberty, and more, theres no doubt this will be one of the most timely and personally relevant FAMiLY Leadership Summits yet," said a statement from Family Leader President and Chief Executive Officer Bob Vander Plaats.

The group has also invited President Joe Biden and Trump to the event, along with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to its website.

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, both Republicans, are also invited speakers.

Two national political organizations, one Democratic and one Republican, announced endorsements for Iowa congressional candidates following last week's primary election.

Americans for Prosperity Action, a conservative group founded by Charles and David Koch, endorsed Republican incumbent Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowas 1st Congressional District following her primary win over Republican David Pautsch last week. The group endorsed Republican Rep. Zach Nunn in the 3rd Congressional District last year.

I am proud to receive the support of AFP Action and its dedicated grassroots team, Miller-Meeks said in a statement. We are both committed to removing barriers to opportunity and helping Iowans improve their lives.

Democratic challengers to Miller-Meeks and Nunn also notched endorsements after last weeks primary by the nations largest federal employee union.

The American Federation of Government Employees announced it had endorsed Christina Bohannan in the 1st District and Lanon Baccam in the 3rd District. Both are Democrats.

The union said both candidates will fight for federal employees and their right to collectively bargain.

Lanon Baccam has the perfect resume to fight for federal employees, said District 8 National Vice President Ruark Hotopp in a statement. As a combat veteran, a former USDA official, and a public servant, he understands the unique challenges and needs of federal workers.

Both districts are expected to be competitive elections that have already attracted significant national attention.

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Libertarian announces bid for Congress in Southeast Iowa - The Gazette

David Boaz in his Cato Institute office in 2008. (Photo by Katherine Frey / Washington Post via Getty Images)

BACK WHEN I WAS STILL LIVING IN THE BAY, the Cato Institutes David Boaz sent me an email out of the blue asking if Id join him for lunch; he happened to be in town for a speech. We had been pen pals for years and seen each other at conferences but somehow never really met, so I was excited for the opportunity to kibitz with somebody whom I respected a great deal.

I was never a libertarian per se, despite having some impulses in that direction. But anytime I read or listened to David I thought that he was the kind of libertarian I would like to be.

He took the liberal part of the ideology seriously. Not prone to wild-eyed notions or conspiratorial thinking, he was not motivated by some Darwinian desire to let societys less fortunate fail. Just the oppositeto me it seemed as if all of his advocacy was motivated primarily by the desire for people to be able to live as they wished, free from discrimination or oppression, free from the unfeeling and capricious power of the state. This was no doubt informed in some ways by his experience as an openly gay man through the crackdowns of the 70s and 80s.

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He was principled but open-minded. Though he was as versed in libertarian philosophy as anyone on the planet, unlike many ideologues he was not blindly chained to dogma or determined to backfill a rationale for his preferred solution. He described himself as a reasonable radicalthe aptness of that label revealed his self-awareness. My husband once lobbied him on a food-labeling policy issue that he thought Cato should support. David instinctively rebuked his position, but listened, read, kicked the idea around, and eventually landed on the other side because he decided his first impulse was wrong. Refreshing!

But on the issues where he was right and righteous from the jump, he was unsparing and often ahead of his time. David wrote about ending the drug war for the New York Times in 1988 (1988!!!). The piece concluded:

We can either escalate the war on drugs, which would have dire implications for civil liberties and the right to privacy, or find a way to gracefully withdraw. Withdrawal should not be viewed as an endorsement of drug use; it would simply be an acknowledgment that the cost of this warbillions of dollars, runaway crime rates and restrictions on our personal freedomis too high.

Show me the lie.

So when I finally got to spend time with him, naturally I was looking forward to the opportunity to engage on these big ideas. I imagined wed have a little debate with a few glasses of white wine and for dessert hed share some stories about 1980s gay San Francisco over Tadich Grills famed rice custard pudding.

But when I arrived for our lunch I was disappointed to find David a little melancholy. He was excited to chat, of course, and up for some old stories, but rather than wanting to mix it up with me, he wanted mostly to commiserate.

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Two years into the Trump term, many of his libertarian colleagues had followed the same path as my Republican ones. I would have thought the contrarian, powerless, strident, anarchic libertarians would have had more antibodies to resist the MAGA wiles. Its not as if people were angling for jobs or trying to prop up their careers as campaign ad men like my friends were.

But, unfortunately, the siren song of access, the hatred of the progressive left, and the appeal of an imaginary deep-state-destroying strong man was too much for that motley group of weirdos to resist.

David felt like he was on a bit of an island. He, like so many of us Never Trumpers, was devastated and gobsmacked that people he respected and believed in were succumbing to this buffoon. So we ate our comfort pudding and lamented our lost colleagues and friends. And walked out together into the crisp Bay air feeling a little better, having discovered there was another tribe on our isle with which we could break bread.

In the ensuing years David kept speaking out. He wasnt going to leave the movement that he had dedicated his life to. But he also wasnt going to follow them down the orange-bricked road to hell. So he became an outcast among the outcasts. Never wavering. Never backing down.

In what I believe was his last major public address, a speech he delivered in February, David sent a message to his fellow libertarians about resisting the allure of populism:

When you see self-proclaimed freedom advocates talking about blood and soil, or helping a would-be autocrat overturn an election, or talking about LGBT equality as degeneracy, or saying we shouldnt care about government racism against black people, or defending the Confederacy and the cause of the South, or joining right-wing culture wars in supporting politicians who want to use the state to fight their enemies, or posting Holocaust jokes and death threats on Twitter, recognize that for what it is. Speak up. Fight back. Tell people: Thats not America and it's certainly not libertarianism.

Amen to that.

Send this remembrance to a libertarian-leaning friend:

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David Boaz, 19532024 - by Tim Miller - The Bulwark

David Boaz, a writer and scholar who for nearly half a century was a leading voice of libertarianism, a political philosophy that he labored to move from the margins to the mainstream of American politics, died June 7 at his home in Arlington, Va. He was 70.

His death was announced by the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington where Mr. Boaz served at the time of his death as a senior fellow and executive vice president. The cause was cancer, said his partner of 30 years, Steve Miller.

Libertarianism does not fit tidily into categorizations such as liberal or conservative, but Mr. Boaz did have a tidy summary of the cause to which he devoted nearly his entire professional life. Libertarianism, he said, stands for the idea that each person has the right to live his life in any way he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others.

In practical policy terms, that means small government, low taxes, free enterprise and school choice, among other positions associated with the political right. It also means robust civil liberties, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the repeal of bans on drugs and prostitution, and the rejection of censorship, among stances traditionally taken by the left.

There are only a few rules: You cant hit other people and you cant take their stuff, Mr. Boaz once quipped to The Washington Post. After that, you have to make the important decisions for yourself.

Mr. Boaz said he was drawn to libertarianism during his adolescence in western Kentucky, where he acquired a twang that never fully left him. His mother had studied economics and kept on her bookshelf a copy of Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt, a best-selling 1946 volume that articulated in laymans terms the case for an unfettered free market.

The young Mr. Boaz also consumed works such as the 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a cult classic among libertarians, and The Conscience of a Conservative (1960) by U.S. Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona Republican who lost the 1964 presidential election in a landslide but invigorated the conservative movement.

(In his office at the Cato Institute, Mr. Boaz kept a Goldwater poster and two busts of Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher associated with laissez-faire capitalism.)

By the end of his life, Mr. Boaz was one of the writers to whom people of his persuasion turned for their political moorings. He was the author of books including The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom (2015) and The Politics of Freedom (2008) and edited the volume The Libertarian Reader: Classic and Contemporary Writings from Lao-tzu to Milton Friedman (1997).

Mr. Boaz helped shape the course of libertarian thought from his longtime intellectual home at the Cato Institute, which he joined in 1981.

He quickly scaled the leadership ranks and was widely described as one of the key leaders who helped grow Cato from a scrappy operation into a significant presence in the Washington policy world.

Mr. Boaz contributed prolifically to newspapers including The Post, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. He drew wide notice with a 1988 commentary published in the Times in which he argued against the criminal laws, immigration regulations and other policies enforced under the umbrella of what was often described as the war on drugs.

An antiwar song that helped get the Smothers Brothers thrown off network television in the 60s went this way: Were waist deep in the Big Muddy, and the big fool says to push on, Mr. Boaz wrote in the op-ed. Today were waist-deep in another unwinnable war, and many political leaders want to push on. This time its a war on drugs.

In his personal life, said Tom G. Palmer, a longtime friend and colleague at Cato, Mr. Boaz was a teetotaler. He drank no alcohol, smoked no cigarettes, used no pot. His only vice, Palmer said, was Coca-Cola, which he preferred so strongly that he avoided restaurants that offered Pepsi products.

But Mr. Boaz saw anti-drug laws as a violation of civil liberties and the right to privacy. He compared them to Prohibition, which officially banned but failed to actually stop the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States from 1920 to 1933. He argued that alcohol and tobacco both legal accounted for many more deaths per year than illegal drugs did.

For libertarians, the growing contemporary movement toward the legalization of marijuana represented a significant victory; the drug is now legal for medicinal purposes in 38 states and the District and for recreational purposes in 24 states and the District.

Mr. Boaz counted another victory in the expansion of rights for same-sex couples most notably the U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2015 finding a constitutional right for gay couples to marry, a cause that he had worked toward for decades.

But mainstream American politics, on both sides of the ideological spectrum, remained, in his view, woefully distant from foundational notions of liberty.

He criticized Democrats for seeking to raise taxes and Republicans for attempting to censor books and television. Liberals who oppose school vouchers, as he interpreted their position, would deny parents the right to send their children to the schools of their choice, while conservatives opposed to gay rights would constrain an individuals right to marry and build a family.

He conceded that the Libertarian Party was not a very successful political party but posited that most Americans support at least some libertarian ideals.

Millions and millions of Americans, if you ask them, What do you think about drug laws; what do you think about Social Security; what do you think about taxes? theyre going to come out in a libertarian direction, he said. But theyre not going to call themselves libertarians, because libertarianism really is the basic theme of America.

David Douglas Boaz was born in Mayfield, Ky., near the Mississippi River, on Aug. 29, 1953. His mother was a homemaker. Mr. Boaz described his father, a circuit court judge, to the Washington Examiner as a Jeffersonian conservative Democrat. Reflecting on his own political evolution, Mr. Boaz said that he was a conservative before he was a libertarian.

Mr. Boaz enrolled at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he received a bachelors degree in history in 1975. He landed one of his first jobs with the Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative youth organization, before working as a campaign staffer for Ed Clark, a libertarian who unsuccessfully ran for California governor in 1978 and for U.S. president in 1980.

Besides Miller, of Arlington, Mr. Boazs survivors include a brother and a sister.

Mr. Boaz did not join the Libertarian Party, telling NPR in 2002 that he preferred to think of himself as an independent.

He found stark flaws in the Democratic Party platform and during the 2016 presidential campaign, in which Democrat Hillary Clinton lost to Republican Donald Trump, remarked that among libertarians, the view was that if someone puts a gun to your head and says you have to choose between Clinton and Trump, the correct answer is, take the bullet.

But in that election, Mr. Boaz also condemned Trump for making racial and religious scapegoating so central to his campaign and for vowing to be an American Mussolini, concentrating power in the Trump White House and governing by fiat.

Mr. Boaz expressed deep distress about Trumps efforts to overturn the 2020 election, in which he lost his reelection bid to Democrat Joe Biden, and opposed the appearance of Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, at the Libertarian Partys 2024 national convention in May.

I have friends who say Biden is the biggest spender ever and hes regulating and hes woke and how can anyone consider voting for him over Trump? Mr. Boaz told CNN in April.

And Ill say that one reason is that Biden has not tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power. Thats a very fundamental issue. You can add up all these [other] issues and weigh them. But the big freedom issue that Biden has over Trump, he continued, is that Trump tried to steal an election.

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David Boaz, leading voice of libertarianism, dies at 70 - The Washington Post