The Montana Libertarian Party announced on Tuesday that it has officially rejected Libertarian nominee Chase Oliver, urging other affiliates to do the same and calling for the national party leadership to suspend and replace him as the nominee.
In a statement made over social media on Tuesday, the Montana Libertarian Party stated that it does not believe the Oliver campaign advances the party’s goals for the state, which it views as its main priority. The statement further called on other state affiliates to follow their lead in rejecting Oliver’s candidacy and urged the Libertarian National Committee to consider suspending and replacing Oliver as the party’s official nominee.
“We have maintained that we will always prioritize Montana first, and we do not believe his campaign advances our goals in this state,” the statement read. “Similarly situated states should follow our lead, and we call upon the LNC to consider suspending and replacing him.”
It was not immediately clear if the Montana Libertarian Party’s rejection of Oliver meant refusing to endorse and support the campaign or if the party intended to exclude Chase Oliver and his running mate Mike ter Maat from the state ballot. In 2023, state leadership unanimously voted to amend the party bylaws to allow endorsements of candidates outside of the Libertarian Party. Independent Political Report has contacted the party for clarification on its statement.
As of Tuesday night, the Oliver campaign had not yet addressed the Montana affiliate’s decision to reject its candidacy.
I’m 100% certain you all will arrive at the definitive libertarian answer this time, as opposed to the countless past times and places libertarians debated this to death.
Meanwhile, more state parties arent putting your national ticket on the ballot, a splinter “liberal” party is forming, your national chair is quasi endorsing Trump, more and more libertarians are spending their time and money suing each other and fighting over control of affiliates and other faction fight matters – these are death throes.
I’ll stand by predictions Oliver-TerMaat will have the fewest ballot lines, fewest raw votes, and lowest percentage of the vote of any LP ticket since the 80s if not the 70s. Also, least media coverage, least poll inclusion, and lowest place ranking – behind Biden, Trump, Kennedy, Stein, Terry, possibly even West. That’s if they don’t get the nomination taken away by the LNC, which is starting to look like a real possibility before November (and maybe before ballot printing).
5 way polls still don’t include them.
Tl; Dr the party’s over.
They got one last big media balloon pop for booing Trump, and promptly failed to capitalize and sank below the horizon, most likely permanently.
Seebeck – a parasite is an organism that feeds off of another organism. That’s of a different species than itself, so a human fetus isn’t literally a parasite. It was a comparison. A comparison made by Rothbard which I have simply continued.
In biology, symbiotic relationships are not necessarily mutually beneficial. Symbiosis includes parasitic relationships. Ticks feeding off of humans isn’t a one way transaction, either. Tick saliva and other organisms that it is carrying can enter whatever it is feeding off of. That two way transaction doesn’t make ticks not a parasite.
Pregnancy can cause plenty of biological changes in the mother which she may not want. It should not be assumed or insinuated that pregnancy is entirely beneficial for her.
I’m surprised I have to explain this to you, but a postnatal baby only feeds off of a mother when she explicitly allows it. She has to opt-in to that relationship each and every time. Prenatal she can only consistently opt-in to that relationship if she has the choice to opt-out, which you would deny her. Contrary to your assertion, my position is consistent – she always has control over her body and what is, or is not, feeding off of it.
You are correct in your criticism of Nuna that “there is no intent needed for aggression to occur.” That also applies to an unwanted fetus feeding off of a woman’s body.
Why do you believe a fetus has a right to life? How do you believe someone acquires rights?
Jim needs to update his understanding of pregnancy. It is confirmed biology that the mother and in utero child have a symbiotic relationship, not parasitic. That’s been known for decades. The mother and child exchange cells, blood, immunity, and nutrients and waste through the umbilical and placental system throughout the entire gestation until shortly after birth. It’s not a one-way thing.
Or is he simply referring to himself and every other human being as a parasite? And why would it be that while prenatal one is a parasite but postnatal they aren’t? That’s illogical, inconsistent, and insulting to human dignity.
As a parent who has had two children and lost one of them in utero (he would have been 24 today), and is married to a biologist, I sorta understand this firsthand from multiple directions, including rational, emotional, and scientific. Human lives are unique in themselves and begin with conception, even if it takes 9 months in utero and years afterwards to gestate to full adult. As such, they deserve dignity and respect and have a right to peacefully live regardless of age.
The unborn innocent human being also has its own right to life, and the mother (and father!) have a *responsibility* to the life that they created through their actions. People tend to forget about the responsibility part.
Nuña is mostly correct in his position, with two errors: First, there is no intent needed for aggression to occur. A pregnancy that threatens the life or health of the mother, such as ectopic or extra-uterine, is aggression upon the mother and can be addressed by termination *as a matter of self-defense,* but the child lacks the mental ability to have intention–it simply is trying to exist. Second, that is the only case where a termination of the pregnancy is acceptable. All other cases are aggression of either convenience or killing the innocent child for the crime of the father, or to put it bluntly, prenatal homicide.
SocraticGadfly, yes, I am Christian. However, the libertarian argument against any and all abortions, in no way hinges on any faith, Christian or otherwise.
See my June 9th reply to Jim, if IPR decides to place it. If not, then I fear you will have to take my word for it, because I am not going to the effort of rewriting all that merely so as to avoid any section that might “offend” totalitarian statists. I said exactly what I meant to say the first time.
And there is no libertarianism that is not inherently right-wing. Libertarianism, classical liberalism and any kind of minarchism, voluntaryism or anarchism are necessarily right-wing ideologies by the very definition of the left-right dichotomy, just as socialism – including communism, fascism and nazism – neo-liberalism, globalism and any other kind of totalitarianism or statism are necessarily left-wing. That is the way the Assemblee Nationale coined the left-right dichotomy, and any revisionist attempt to redefine that definition is socialist cognitive dissonance in an attempt to try and deny that national socialists and Sorelian and Gentilean socialists (i.e. fascists) are also socialists.
Oy, Nuña is some degree of Religious Right-ish mixed with libertarian? Shock me.
“There is no god and I am his prophet.”
Your claim that all pregnancies are the result of the mother’s choice is clearly false. There is always the cases of rape or failed contraception or, since you apparently believe in such things, immaculate conception. I’m glad to see you admit that you believe rights are granted by an invisible sky wizard. That, of course, is not where rights come from. All religions are just human inventions to fill in the gaps in human knowledge including, variously, to explain why it rains, why the sun crosses the sky, why a harvest was good or poor, where the earth came from, where humans came from, and what happens after death.
A fetus absolutely feeds off of an other’s body, as do parasites. That is indisputable. A person can voluntarily ingest parasites and then sometime later choose to rid himself of them. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I assume you have no objection to ridding yourself of parasites. And since the only difference between voluntarily becoming pregnant and having an abortion and voluntarily consuming parasites and then taking medication to kill them is that one is human and the other not, that is the crux of your argument. Whether someone voluntarily consumes parasites or contracts them by accident is irrelevant, same as with pregnancy. So lets drop that line of argument. It lets you off the hook for having to defend the position that all women choose their pregnancies.
Your only argument is that a woman is required to allow a violation of her person by a fetus because that fetus is human and God uniquely gave humans a special right to life.
Someone attempting to murder you is also “God’s property” with a right to life. Do you have an objection to killing them to prevent them from killing you?
Rothbard was not an egoist-anarchist in 1973, or ever. He was an anarcho-capitalist from roughly the mid 1950s to late 1980s and a PaleoLibertarian after (and, arguably, before the mid 1950s, as well, but the word had not yet been invented.) You’re going to have to support your claim with a source on that. Being pro-choice is insufficient evidence of being an egoist-anarchist. There are quotes from Rothbard from the early 1990s where he admits that he is NOT a libertarian any longer, so you aren’t defining libertarianism in the same way that Rothbard did in the early 90s.
I repeat: a fetus is not a parasite “feeding off” of anyone’s body. The fetus is there as a result of the parents’ actions. If the mother did not want to see through her entire term, she should not have gotten pregnant. Now that she is, she does not have the right to change her mind and murder an innocent child. That would be a violation of the NAP.
Even if we were to pretend that someone’s body is their own property, instead of God’s, then the child’s body is the child’s property, not the mother’s. Having been responsible for giving them life and thereby bestowing human rights to them, including the right to life, now that they are their own person, she does not get to make decisions about them that will result in their death. So even within the heathen fallacy of “my body my choice”, a libertarian cannot but oppose any and all abortions.
It is no secret that Rothbard only became libertarian during the ’80s. For a New “Liberty” is from ’73, back when he was still your run-of-the-mill egoist zombie. As demonstrated nicely by your anti-libertarian quote.
Yes, a fetus has the same rights as anyone else. Those rights do not extend to feeding off of another person.
“If we are to treat the fetus as having the same rights as humans, then let us ask: What human has the right to remain, unbidden, as an unwanted parasite within some other human being’s body? This is the nub of the issue: the absolute right of every person and hence every woman, to the ownership of her own body. What the mother is doing in an abortion is causing an unwanted entity within her body to be ejected from it: If the fetus dies, this does not rebut the point that no being has a right to live, unbidden, as a parasite within or upon some person’s body.
“The common retort that the mother either originally wanted or at least was responsible for placing the fetus within her body is, again, beside the point. Even in the stronger case where the mother originally wanted the child, the mother, as the property owner in her own body, has the right to change her mind and to eject it.” – Murray Rothbard (aka not a real libertarian according to Nuna) in For A New Liberty
There is no “pre-existing aggression” against which to “defend”. The fetus is not “attempting to murder” anyone. It is not “violating” anything. It is not doing any harm whatsoever. It couldn’t aggress against anyone if it wanted to. It is not a parasite “feeding off” of anyone’s body. It is a human being with the same human rights as anyone innocent, and far more rights than murderers who commit infanticide through abortion.
Facts don’t care about you feelings, and biology does not change to accommodate your cry-bullying victim complex. The fetus is there as a result of the parents’, the instigators’, actions. If someone abducted you and duct-taped a knife to your bound hands, are they then justified in shooting you? Who violated the NAP you or your abductor?
Even in the case of conception from rape, the NAP was violated by the father, not by the innocent child whom mother is seeking to murder. Abortion is never ever justified under any circumstance whatsoever. All abortion is murder and violates the NAP. No libertarian has ever pretended otherwise.
Pro-life “libertarians” necessarily believe that rights are either granted by government or that rights are granted by an invisible sky wizard. Wanting the government to prohibit transitioning kids points to the former.
There is no NAP violation in removing a fetus from a woman’s body for the same reason there is no NAP violation in ending the life of someone attempting to murder you – there is a pre-existing aggression which makes the action defensive, rather than offensive. In the case of abortion, the fetus is literally feeding off of a woman’s body. The woman can choose to tolerate that violation or cease tolerating it at any point. The only restriction to stay within the bounds of the NAP is that the fetus should not be harmed more than necessary during the process of removal.
Rothbard, during his more libertarian phase, said that children should self-emancipate and accept the full rights of an adult whenever they determined they were ready to take on adult responsibilities (getting a job, etc.) Prior to self-emancipation the child was to follow the rules set by its caregiver. The caregiver-child role was always by mutual consent and the child could find another caregiver if the one they had was abusive or otherwise not up to the task.
He’s pro choice on abortion, like most LP members, the LP platform throughout the party’s history until the last two years, and most past LP presidential candidates and most past LP candidates for any office.
He believes that parents should have the right to decide whether their kids transition. Some parents would rather have a live daughter than a dead son, and for many kids that’s what it comes down to.
On covid, he was against government mandates and restrictions. His personal preferences on masking, distancing, etc, are not government policy, and not sound reasons to not put him on the ballot or override the vote of the delegates.
When you consider all the other issues out there, these seem like nitpicking reasons to not back the convention’s choice of nominee and put him on the ballot, or especially to call for the LNC to override the delegates.
Walter, besides the usual endless arguing about whether or not libertarians should support abortion (i.e. an violation of the NAP regarding the child’s right to life) and transitioning kids (including drag queen story hour, etc.), the main argument I have seen made, was Oliver’s weak stance regarding covid restrictions (lock downs, social distancing, masking, gene-therapy masquerading as “vaccines”), where he seems to have argued against explicit government mandates but in favor of every type of social pressure and coercion. That seems to have rubbed the more classical liberal and paleolibertarian wing of the party the wrong way.
“Chase Oliver is a horrible candidate”
How so? The positions he takes on his website look pretty libertarian to me. What am I missing?
Best news I’ve read in a long time. Chase Oliver is a horrible candidate and Montana is making a bold yet principled move. More states should follow suit.
Robert, yes. The Alaska GP pulled that stunt in 2020 and got decertified in 2021.
“Similarly situated states should follow our lead, and we call upon the LNC to consider suspending and replacing him.”
Based AF. And it sounds like they also haven’t endorsed Trump. So doubly based. Montana LP should disaffiliate from all those statist LINOs that don’t follow suit.
Anyone can go to Chase’s website and read his platform. It all sounds quite libertarian to me. It seems sufficient to me that the party simply hold Chase to the positions that he publicized on his own website.
Are there any other candidates out there more libertarian than Chase in this election?
Unless something extremely bad occurs, the LNC will not suspend him. There simply is no desire on the LNC to do so, based on reading their discussion list.
If their goals in Montana are to persuade Montanans that the Libertarian Party is a useful vehicle for making positive change, their move against Chase Oliver is counterproductive. It makes it seem as though Libertarians can’t get along with each other. If Libertarians can’t even get along with each other, how can they make positive change in the wider society-wide sphere? Positive change requires skill in making coalitions and getting along with people who disagree.
“We have maintained that we will always prioritize Montana first, and we do not believe his campaign advances our goals in this state,” the statement read. “Similarly situated states should follow our lead, and we call upon the LNC to consider suspending and replacing him.”
1. What are their goals in their state?
2. Why should the LNC consider suspending him, beyond what they consider their goals in their state ?
It is well past time that this affiliate was stricken from the rolls. This is world class Mises stupidity. A president, whomever is elected, does not run on or work as, a Montanan candidate. That is the job of that states representatives. I’m sorry those imbeciles missed that year of 6th grade, but this is a clear indicator of why we should support Chase. He wants to close down the Department of Education. It’s obvious with this crew that it’s been an abject failure.
There’s no question after reading this – & the comments on the LNC business list – that states are free to essentially follow the LP’s Chair’s lead & choose trump over Chase. There will be no repercussions & no disaffiliation. In any other political party both the Chair & affiliate would be removed immediately.
I do appreciate the very few LNC Members who have come out with their full fledge support for Chase -as they should – but better if the entire LNC & their so called Chair put out a statement not only stating their 100% endorsement, but show their support financially & also make it very clear that any affiliate that doesn’t do the same with be removed immediately.
If you – like me – are sick of these shenanigans & the hypocrisy of the LNC so called Leadership – then please join me here: https://www.liberalpartyusa.org/