THE WAR FOR control of the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire began to escalate in the spring of 2021, when Jeremy Kauffman got the keys to the Twitter account. Kauffman, a tech entrepreneur, had arrived in the state a few years earlier as part of the Free State Project, which proposed to transform New Hampshire by convincing liberty-minded activists to move there en masse. The state was a small-l libertarian success story. It had legalized raw milk, slashed budgets, and elected dozens of Free Staters to the legislature—including the House majority leader. But the state and national Libertarian parties, Kauffman felt, were too passive and too left-wing. They were trying to fit in, instead of trying to stand out.
He and his allies made short work of that. In the months that followed, the LPNH account made national headlines with a run of deliberately provocative statements. The party tweeted that “John McCain’s brain tumor saved more lives than Anthony Fauci.” It called for child labor to be legalized and advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act to fight “wokeness.”
State party chair Jilletta Jarvis watched this shift with alarm. A group of right-wing activists was attempting a “hostile take-over,” she announced. Jarvis pointed her finger at a new and rapidly growing caucus within the state and national parties that was named for Ludwig von Mises, a 20th century Austrian free-market economist who was one of the intellectual forefathers of libertarianism and who is particularly revered by followers of the former presidential candidate Ron Paul. “Their strategy is, frankly, designed to discredit the Libertarian Party in the state and in our nation,” Jarvis warned.
So she and a group of like-minded party members staged a counterrevolution. They seized the Twitter account from Kauffman and his allies and created a new legal entity to house the party’s assets. Then Jarvis made one more announcement: “Out of respect for all of those who have been angered, threatened, or insulted by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire,” the party’s social media accounts would be going on a brief hiatus.
BEING THE third-largest party in a duopoly can sometimes seem like a dubious distinction, like being the second-deadliest maritime disaster involving an iceberg. The Libertarians are big enough to be ubiquitous, but rarely substantial enough to stand out. For decades their nominees have oscillated between people you’ve never heard of and those you vaguely remember. The Libertarian Party is America’s weakest strong brand.
In 2016, the Libertarians had their best-ever presidential
