Members of the Libertarian National Committee selected Steven Nekhaila as Chair and Paul Darr as Vice Chair during a meeting over the weekend. The party later announced the leadership change on social media, stating that additional information, statements, and a formal announcement would be forthcoming.
The Libertarian National Committee voted on Sunday to name Nekhaila, who has served on the committee since 2016, as Chair following the recent resignation of Angela McArdle. He defeated Michael Heise, the party’s current Outreach Manager and founder of the Libertarian Party Mises Caucus, in a 9 – 6 vote. There was also an effort to nominate former Michigan Congressman Justin Amash for the position; however, Amash reportedly declined the nomination.
Nekhaila previously sought the national chair position at the 2024 Libertarian National Convention, placing fourth in the first round of voting before withdrawing. A franchise owner of several restaurant chains, he began his involvement with the party in 2014 as a founding member of the Libertarian Party of the Florida Keys. He later served as a regional representative for the Libertarian Party of Florida before becoming its state chair.
Following Nekhaila’s election, the Libertarian National Committee is now voting on whether to appoint Region 4 Alternate Adrian F Malagon to fill the newly vacant At-large seat. The ballot to appoint Malagon is currently 4 – 2 in favor and remains open until Sunday.
The Libertarian National Committee also elected Paul Darr, the Region 3 South Representative, as Vice Chair. Unlike the Chair election, Darr’s nomination was voted on directly after no other candidates put themselves forward. At-large member Andrew Watkins was initially nominated but withdrew before a vote took place. Darr was elected with nine votes in favor, one abstention, and five votes for “None of the Above.”
Darr, an IT manager from Texas, currently serves as Secretary of the Libertarian Party Classical Liberal Caucus and has been involved in Libertarian politics at both the state and county levels. He was briefly the Region 7 Alternate Representative from 2023 to 2024 and has a long history of activism within the Texas Libertarian Party and the San Bernardino County Libertarian Party in California.
@Curious
More like a horde of brain-dead zombies.
@Steward Flood
That must be the worst part of being a vampire: not being able to enjoy delicious garlic.
Sunlight and reflections, I can do without. But not garlic – the king of the Allia (chives and scallions are its seneschals).
I left the LP in the summer of 2020, so if it turned into zombies since that time, I wouldn’t have any direct knowledge. I have run into a few of my old colleagues recently, and they did look like they were still alive. Of course, South Carolina was never taken over by the fascist mises caucus.
I probably should’ve asked them to look in mirrors or order garlic with their food, since there is also the chance that you would end up with a few random vampires in the cage.
Are you sure it’s not already a horde of undead zombies?
I said flaw not floor. No matter what I do, I cannot turn off this mutant zombie AutoCorrect AI that Apple has installed on my iPad.
And I am really getting frustrated that while third-party watch will save my name, IPR will not! It used to…
There is a floor on your logic. If you cover them with a cage, let them fight to the death, and then wait for silence, you may regret it.
When you remove the cage, it is more likely that a horde of undead zombies will arise and destroy you.
Hello, Mr Whitfield.
No, I am not a member of the Libertarian Party. (Thank God! – I might add.) I never have been, and I never will be. Certainly not after these past 8-9 months of schadenfreude-based tragicomedy of errors.
I was part of the Tea Party movement and the Ron Paul revolution, so I supported his bid for GOP nomination and later that of his son, as well as supporting other small-L libertarians in the Republican Party down ballot. And I have certainly voted for individual Libertarian Party and Constitution Party candidates, before switching my registration from Republican to Constitution Party. But it has always been my impression that libertarian and Libertarian were mutually exclusive for the overwhelming majority of people. The only exceptions seems to be such very special and larger than life optimists and idealists as Ron Paul and Spike Cohen, who for some reason think they can still do some libertarian good despite being in the Libertarian Party. I disagree with them on that, but more power to them if they can stomach remaining party of the unlibertarian – often anti-libertarian – LP.
I take an interest in following LP squabbles in much the same way people seem to enjoy watching sports – or more accurately in the way some people watch fail compilations. I root and cheer for the less bad, i.e. more libertarian, team(s) and against the worse, i.e. more statist team(s). I call out the fouls that I see being committed, as I did below. But at the end of the day, I don’t take any of it too seriously, because it’s just the LP – nothing even close to actual libertarians. As far as I’m concerned, we build a large cage around them, let them fight to the death for our entertainment, and wait till all goes silent inside the cage. That’s actually not a bad idea for the next national convention, if I do say so myself – which I do. Somebody should get on that. Make it a proper gladiatorial arena; add some bookie windows…
Hi Nuna, Are you a member of the Libertarian Party?
Unfortunately, IPR doesn’t support unicode. I had quoted the bylaws with italics and it looks like a mess.
The critical part in the bylaws reads as follows, from Article 10 Section 7:
Should a majority of the votes be cast for “None of the Above” in the Presidential or Vice-Presidential balloting, no candidate shall be nominated for that office.
That’s followed by a different procedure for party office in Article 10 Section 7:
Should “None of the Above” be selected for any Party office, that position shall be declared vacant and none of the losing candidates for that position may be selected to fill the vacancy for that term of office.
The explicit outlining of the procedures clearly delineates one procedure for POTUS and VPOTUS, and another procedure for party officers. The procedure for POTUS and VPOTUS clearly states “no candidate shall be nominated for that office”. There is no un-ringing the bell. If there had been a motion to suspend the rules to amend the bylaws prior to the beginning of the final round of balloting, that could have fixed the issue. I do not believe it would have received 2/3rds to pass, though.
The LNC has no authority to amend the bylaws, so the LNC could not have fixed the problem. If you’re inferring that the LNC could have filled the vacancy, that is also incorrect.
Article 14 Section 3 reads:
In the event of the death, resignation, disqualification, or suspension of the nomination of the Party’s nominee for President, the Vice-Presidential nominee shall become the Presidential nominee. Two-thirds of the entire membership of the National Committee may, at a meeting, fill a Vice-Presidential vacancy, and, if necessary, a simultaneous Presidential vacancy.
But that’s not a vacancy. And “no candidate shall be nominated” in Article 10 would override the ability to “fill a … vacancy” in Article 14.
While I believe the bylaws should be amended to provide that either NOTA causes a reset or it shouldn’t be an option, that’s just not what the bylaws say today.
As noted before, it has been our tradition to give losing candidates (after the first round) a 2-minute concession speech, which is usually where they would give such endorsement. From how I have heard it, the same offer and plan was in place for ter Maat to endorse Rechtenwald as well, using the same methodology; he just chose to endorse Oliver.
Oliver won in the last round of voting. He was our nominee.
Yes, our chair now theoretically has the ear of a guy who wants to take Panama and Gaza by force and annex Greenland, which would be largest expansion through warfare since the Mexican-American war. Yes, she helped get justice for one person, but it is still illegal to build a modern version of Silk Road, so liberty was not increased. I’m not sure how real that influence actually is, but good luck with that.
And the only actual difference between Ranked Choice Voting (aka Instant Runoff Voting) and (Multi-Round) Runoff Voting is that a voter can obtain more information between rounds with multi-round voting. Otherwise, the effect is exactly the same, except RCV would wrap everything up very quickly. Without the concession speeches, multi-round runoff voting is just a big waste of time.
“The comment section has some wild opinions here.”
Your comment here has some wild dishonesty and non sequiturs.
“?????? ? ???????? ?? ??? ????? ?? ???? ??? “???? ?? ??? ?????” ?? ??? ???????????? ?? ????-???????????? ?????????, ?? ????????? ????? ?? ????????? ??? ???? ??????.”
Should a majority of the votes be cast for “None of the Above” in the Presidential or Vice-Presidential balloting, no candidate shall be nominated for that office.
“That means that if NOTA had won, “?? ????????? ????? ?? ????????? ??? ???? ??????.”
Had NOTA won, the national party would not have made a nomination. That does not – and certainly should not – preclude state parties from making a nomination.
“To fix the problem, a motion to suspend the rules would have been necessary prior to the final round of voting.”
Not at all. The LNC could have fixed the problem – or rather problems, plural – at any point. But they did not clean up the mess they allowed to be created, from non delegates voting as if they were delegates, to questionable delegates voting on whether or not they themselves were seated as delegates, to ter Maat abusing a point of parliamentary procedure (according to Michael Rectenwald) or a personal privilege (according to my memory) to illegally endorse Oliver mid-vote, to delegates being lied to that a NOTA victory would lead to multiple state parties losing ballot access. All of that could have been fixed after the voting, and after the convention even. It should have been. But it was not.
“Someone making a point of personal privilege is legitimate.”
If it was a point of personal privilege, yes. But an eliminated candidate endorsing another candidate mid-vote is obviously not a point of personal privilege.
“Otherwise, the multi-round balloting serves no purpose and the process should be switched to RCV”
Tell me you understand neither multi-round balloting nor ranked choice voting, without telling me you understand neither multi-round balloting nor ranked choice voting…
Of course multi-round voting serves a purpose in the absence of eliminated candidate speeches. Every round allows for different tactical decisions to be made dynamically, which RCV does not accommodate. Besides, delegates can still discuss among themselves privately – but not via fake points of personal privilege or parliamentary procedure.
“Chase was the nominee. In the final round of voting, Chase defeated NOTA and became the party’s official nominee.”
Oliver was NOT nominated, and thus not the nominee. He barely scraped by the penultimate round of voting and only thanks to ter Maat’s cheating. Then he only managed to win from None of the Above because the delegates were lied to, i.e. more cheating. Oliver has never become any party’s “official nominee”.
“The party’s trajectory has been downward for years, since just before the Reno Reset as people saw what was coming and walked away.”
False. Only after Oliver and ter Maat’s illegitimate fake “nomination” did the national party go into free fall. We’ve been over this before. Multiple times even, I believe.
“Those efforts have failed on every metric for a political party; membership, donations, growth, number of candidates, number of elected officials, etc.”
Ah what you mean, is you can cherry-pick data in order to try and pretend that those efforts have failed, then claim that is “every metric for a political party”.
Meanwhile in reality, thanks to McArdle the LP now has more real power and influence than it has had in decades, quite possibly ever – or it did, till you totalitarian idiots just threw that all away in a tantrum…
“Hopefully, Nekhaila will treat the LP like a Wendy’s”
Hopefully so, since that would guaranteed end with the asshole getting his head stuck in a deep fryer several minutes into his first shift. U+1F602
“And everyone that disagrees with one faction isn’t automatically in another faction. That’s a false dichotomy.”
Well, that rather depends on what the factions are and how they are defined. “The unacceptable cannot be accepted. If you don’t stop the evil, you become evil yourself.” “All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is that good men do nothing.” And “he that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad.”
“You cannot use force or fraud against another person”
You cannot aggress in any way. Not against another. Not against nature. Not against creation. Not against God. The moment you do, you become outlawed. Every man, woman and child has not only the right, the freedom but also the duty and obligation to ensure you can never do so again. That is anarchism, the final and the purest form of libertarianism, what every libertarian strives towards.
The comment section has some wild opinions here.
LP National’s bylaws Article 10 Section 7 stipulate:
Votes cast for “None of the Above” in voting on the Party’s nominees for President and Vice-President, the Party officers, and at-large members of the National Committee, shall be considered valid. ?????? ? ???????? ?? ??? ????? ?? ???? ??? “???? ?? ??? ?????” ?? ??? ???????????? ?? ????-???????????? ?????????, ?? ????????? ????? ?? ????????? ??? ???? ??????.
That means that if NOTA had won, “?? ????????? ????? ?? ????????? ??? ???? ??????.” There is no ex-post facto solution, after that phrase is triggered. To fix the problem, a motion to suspend the rules would have been necessary prior to the final round of voting.
Someone making a point of personal privilege is legitimate. It would have been up to the presiding officer to call it out of order. It wasn’t. In previous conventions, candidates who lost were given the opportunity to speak for 2 minutes after being knocked-out to give endorsements. Otherwise, the multi-round balloting serves no purpose and the process should be switched to RCV to accomplish the same procedure without losing candidates speaking between rounds, as they are knocked out of contention.
Chase was the nominee. In the final round of voting, Chase defeated NOTA and became the party’s official nominee.
The party’s trajectory has been downward for years, since just before the Reno Reset as people saw what was coming and walked away. There is natural attrition in the party, so there must be active efforts to grow. Those efforts have failed on every metric for a political party; membership, donations, growth, number of candidates, number of elected officials, etc. Hopefully, Nekhaila will treat the LP like a Wendy’s, as his detractors often stated, that is under-performing, and he’s been brought in to fix it.
And everyone that disagrees with one faction isn’t automatically in another faction. That’s a false dichotomy.
As to the other person’s question of what libertarianism is, I try to sum it up like this: You’re an adult. Adults are free to make choices, provided the person lives with the outcome of those choices. You cannot use force or fraud against another person. Real personal success comes from your own efforts and achievements, not hand-outs. The sum of all of those individual decisions make up the marketplace. A free market, without force or fraud, is the best marketplace; providing opportunity for each person.
“Big government is about the worst way possible to try to ensure economic fairness or public morality. If you want total economic disaster and the most immoral people in history, just put government in charge of everything.”
That’s a golden nugget of libertarian ideology right there. 🙂
—
“I voted for Chase Oliver because he was the party’s nominee.”
He wasn’t. Ergo, you didn’t.
Oliver was never legitimately nominated. He was only fraudulently faux-“nominated” by a very slim margin, after first only beating Rectenwald thanks to ter Maat seizing the microphone to illegally make an illegitimate point of personal privilege/parliamentary procedure in which he endorsed Oliver in return for usurping Kristin Alexander as his running mate; and after then only beating None of the Above thanks to delegates being lied to that many state affiliates would lose their ballot access if NOTA won.
The national party having made no effort to amend the situation, state parties took it upon themselves to actually nominate a presidential candidate properly, as is their right. E.g., the LPCO legitimately nominated RFK Jr and Nicole Shanahan; the LPNH nominated Trump and Vance (which was at the time unfortunately against the bylaws, Trump not having LP membership)…
In addition to nominations, endorsements were made to rectify the intolerable situation. E.g. the chair of the LPTN endorsed Clint Russell and Josie Glabach; the chair of the LPCO stated she would vote for Trump and Vance…
So no, you voted for Chase Oliver because you chose to vote for Chase Oliver – whatever your reasons for doing so – and that’s your prerogative. But you did not vote for Chase Oliver because you were blindly “voting yellow, no matter what fellow” – which is itself already an inane thing to do.
Rick,
I voted for Chase Oliver because he was the party’s nominee. He wasn’t my first choice (that was Hornberger), or my second choice (that was Mapstead), but he wasn’t bad. It was mostly his statist/non-platform position on immigration that I had a problem with.
Nick Sarwark and I have had many disagreements. Several of them concerned COVID and the party’s absence of libertarian messaging on COVID. And several of them have been conducted in public on social media. And he doesn’t live rent-free in my head as he does yours.
The next person in the libertarian movement I blindly follow will be the first person in the libertarian movement I blindly follow. I’ve had plenty of disagreements with many good friends in the movement and in the party over the last 30 years. I always try to take Jefferson’s admonition (pointed out to me by my friend the late R. Lee Wrights), “I never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.”
Knapp:
If this is true, why did you vote for Chase Oliver? I didn’t even mention his support for censoring speech.
You blindly follow Nick Sarwark, who of course agrees with this.
Coverage elsewhere:
https://reason.com/2025/02/04/libertarian-party-gets-new-national-chair-after-angela-mcardles-surprise-resignation/?comments=true#comments
Big government is about the worst way possible to try to ensure economic fairness or public morality. If you want total economic disaster and the most immoral people in history, just put government in charge of everything.
Unimportant,
Perhaps I do not understand what I recently read about “small l libertarianism” – you must forgive me, I only researched it very briefly and recently, after first hearing of it here in this blog.
The world suffers from the lack of authority being imposed by force, particularly as a result of the influence of western global culture in tandem with western multinational corporations on the heels of western colonialism and imperialism.
Children must be brought back under greater parental authority, wives must submit to their husbands, civil authority must do much more to regulate public morality and economic fairness, and civil authority must be paired with and subject to religious authority. Above all, everyone must be forced to submit to Allah by any and all means necessary.
Western culture pushes us in the opposite direction and libertarianism as I read on it is the idea that civil authority must be divorced from religious authority and minimized if not altogether abandoned entirely.
Without strong civil and religious authority fused into one, it’s a race to the bottom of public immorality for corporate profit, husbands can’t control their wives and children as they see the bad example of others all around them, wives are allowed by the infidel governments to leave their husbands at will and take the children or abandon them as they wish, and parental authority is ineffective because of the children of all these other families being out of control. Since wives work outside the home and electronic devices are everywhere there is just not enough parents can do without the help of civil authority.
The only way I can see libertarianism being useful is if they can succeed in helping the weakening of the west to the point of being conquered by Islam, Inshallah. Hopefully sooner rather than later.
It’s not nice to lie about me, Rick.
I oppose authoritarianism, COVID mandates, and sex changes for children, and have been publicly vocal about the first one of those for decades and the second since COVID became a thing (I opposed vaccine mandates in general before that as well).
Vis a vis transgender issues, I support parents and doctors, rather than politicians, making medical decisions for children, but prefer to see “sex changes” — that is, surgeries — occur later rather than sooner (somewhat like Chase Oliver, but unlike Donald Trump, who has publicly stated that he’s fine with such surgeries “with parental consent”). I say “prefer,” because there’s nothing on the planet that government ordering people around actually improves for those people. Like Harry Browne said, if government declared a war on abortion, pretty soon men would be having them.
“a man of superior Egyptian ancestry”
The name isn’t Coptic, but Arabic. So I doubt there is a drop of Egyptian blood in him, “superior” or otherwise. Gr8 b8 m8 I r8 8/8.
“I’m not convinced there’s any such thing as a libertarian ideology.”
Despite all the room that exists for disagreement – which, for better or worse, necessarily comes with the territory, in particular with the liberty to pursue truth and justice – there is an objective core that all libertarians can agree on, set down by such undeniable libertarians as, for example, St Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, James Madison and Lysander Spooner, to name but a few.
“Them” can mean those who self define as libertarians or wish to argue over precisely what if anything is or is not libertarian ideology. I went down that rabbit hole twice, twenty years apart, and I don’t believe there’s any actual varmints down there. And even if there are, it ain’t no way they could be worth the trouble it’d take to ever catch one of them pesky fellers.
They disagree with each other about anything and everything, so I’m not convinced there’s any such thing as a libertarian ideology. It may appear to exist from a distance, like a mirage in the Sahara, but there’s no oasis, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no there there, and no point in arguing about it. They can continue to tie themselves in endless Gordian knots fighting over it, which might serve a useful purpose to the extent that it gives them something to do.
Libertarians have a horrid, evil ideology, but kudos to them nevertheless for choosing a man of superior Egyptian ancestry to lead them. Furthermore, they no longer suffer the indignity of a woman holding a man’s place, although they have not renounced doing so again in the future.
If government authoritarianism, covid mandates, and sex changes for children is libertarianism, then I don’t want to be involved. That’s what the Sarwark wing (of which Nekhalia and Darr are clearly part of, so is Knapp) supports. Actual libertarians don’t want this.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the ship has been turned back toward libertarianism, but it at least feels like the start of that process.
I just re-instituted my small monthly pledge to the LNC. I clicked the button to stop that pledge within seconds of McArdle’s election in 2022.
Worse and worser.
Two of the biggest totalitarian statist cronies on the LNC.
Somehow even worse than Amash and Redpath. Only Harlos and Nanna would be a worse pair.
Not that this is that much different: they are all controlled by the same puppet master.
And that after McArdle gave such an excellent farewell address explicitly including advice against exactly this sort of nonsense:
https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1MnGnDPyzVXxO
Well, that’s it then. The LP’s last and only slim chance of survival recklessly thrown away and spat on.
The national party is now doomed to disintegrate, just as Seebeck intended when he initiated the standoff between the JC and the LNC, and just as Harlos envisioned when she ordered him to do so.
Hopefully some of the better state parties, like the LPCO and LPNH, can disaffiliate and cling on a little longer – perhaps start a new grassroots party that is actually interested in libertarianism.
But as far as a national network goes, state parties now might as well affiliate with the Liberal Party USA – in fact, any actual libertarians that remained in them would be off a lot less bad if they did. SMDH
The party is now swinging heavily back to the left, meaning anti-libertarian.
Is Sarwark back in control behind the curtain?