Libertarian Party Picks Spike Cohen as Its Vice-Presidential Candidate
Cohen, who had been linked with parodist Vermin Supreme, identifies as an anarchist.

Spike Cohen, who runs Muddied Waters Media, won the Libertarian Party's nomination for vice-president today. On the online convention's third ballot, Cohen got 533 votes—52 percent of the total—narrowly edging out former presidential candidate John Monds.
Jo Jorgensen, a Clemson psychologist who served as the party's vice presidential candidate in 1996, was chosen as the Libertarian presidential nominee yesterday in a separate vote. Jorgensen had expressed a preference for Monds to be her vice president.
Cohen has linked himself to political satirist Vermin Supreme, who ran this year for the party's presidential nod. He has written on Supreme's campaign website that his worldview "lines up solidly with the Libertarian Party Platform, with the only exceptions being when I think it doesn't go quite far enough in promoting maximum freedom. I understand that the Platform is an attempt to compromise between different positions and I completely respect that, but as an individual candidate my policy is anarchy."
Reason covered a vice-presidential candidate debate that included Cohen last week.
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How dreadfully unfortunate. Monday lacks charisma and isn't much of an orator, but he has a certain undeniable charm and he's eminently respectable. If nothing time, he's levelheaded and genteel.
If nothing else*
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Wheeee! A self-confessed Anarchist running for VP of the US? I love it! Jorgensen and Cohen have my vote, guaranteed.
--Leslie < Fish
Yeah, I was really hoping for Monds also. Oh well... If I'm already throwing my vote away, I guess it doesn't matter which bin it goes into.
Shit, I just noticed the autocorrect to "Monday." I really need to stop posting from my phone.
I’m afraid this may have cost them the presidency.
Lol. I appreciate your droll humor.
This guy pastes his name and, ugh, body all over the place. It's really gross.
I meant FACE, not name.
Ugh, the Muddied Waters website is just an embarrassment. This is the clown the party appointed as one of their standard bearers? How can this party expect the public to take it seriously when its own delegates don't take it seriously?
Bingo. I'd love to have an third party that I could enthusiastically support but this might even be worse for libertarianism than "bake the cake" Johnson.
Ross Perot dropped out and then dropped back in to the 1992 race and still got 19% of the vote. If the LP would consistently put up good candidates and hit those kinds of numbers for two elections in a row (8 years), then they could be a viable option in 12 years. In Presidential terms, that's a short time horizon.
I supported Monds. Demanding exactly what you want before you support a ticket generally means that you do nothing. The perfect is the enemy of the adequate.
This is sooooooooo embarrassing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1752&v=R9MefK8B-QY&feature=emb_logo
Found on Muddied Waters.
+1, at least.
"Any rational human being 2020" is still a worthwhile target. I'd have voted for JoJo, and supported her financially.
Good lord, is the Liberterian party dominated by trolls? How did they escape nominating "President McPresidentFace?"
Please, for the love of all that's holy, get serious!
If your policy is anarchy then you might as well quit now. Not that the LP has a chance of winning anything but if you can’t run a serious campaign then why waste your time.
Usually, the LP's candidate for VP gets as much value as a pinch of owl dung.
Weld changed that. He pissed off the Tim McVeigh Boogaloo sect. Give him that.
"The measure of the state's success is that the word anarchy frightens people, while the word state does not." - Joseph Sobran
"Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a Great Leap Forward that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy's mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state's mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous." ~Robert Higgs
The wars and violence are all great counterpoints but freedom-destroying domestic policies are important as well:
Anarchists* have never once promoted a policy of currency manipulation through central banking, criminalizing competition to central banking, banker-bail-ous, bus-seating-segregation, banning of unacceptable books, war on people who use drugs that other people disapprove of, privileged immunity, forced sterilizations of the mentally disabled, the California State Board of Equalization (an Orwellian term for 'tax dept' if there ever was one), smoking bans, seatbelt requirements, liquor licensing, criminalizing sodomy, seizing all the privately held gold in the banks across america, rounding up all the Japanese citizens and putting them in a concentration camps, railroading countless black defendants with lies and fake evidence (and getting away with it once found), qualified immunity(FFS), the PATRIOT act, public schools.. the list goes on and on and on.
These horrible anarchists are suggesting you leave people alone and THEY are the bogey men? It's crazy.
*I'm not including the early 20th century anarchists who were actually communists calling themselves anarchists. what they meant by anarchy was "get rid of this system and put us in charge". very different.
An anarchist did assassinate a US president though.
I consider Spike Cohen becoming the VP nominee wonderful news. He superbly articulates the message of liberty, and will help the Jorgensen campaign reach out to voters who otherwise would not listen. Good luck to the Jorgensen/Cohen campaign!
Hey, Cohen as the court jester makes a fine contrast to Jorgensen as the serious candidate. If properly managed, they'd make a great team on TV ads. Think about it. First Cohen (who's rather a handsome fellow) smiles as he makes some shocking and funny pro-liberty statement, and once he's got the audience's attention Jorgensen comes on and makes level-headed statements ending with "Vote Libertarian". Ads like that would get attention and garner votes.
as an individual candidate my policy is anarchy
The every time I see someone described as an "anarchist", I assume it's just a more genteel way of saying "asshole".
see below
You really are fencepost stupid, aren't you?
I wouldn't let a stranger set up a tent in my backyard, so why would I let strangers walk right into my country? Open borders/anarchy = no thanks.
An "anarchist"? Is that code for pro-choice?
Then the fucking conservative Trump Trash Peanut Gallery here will never like this guy.
Just curious: does being a national candidate for the Libertarian Party help or hurt your resume?
It helps if you have a book to peddle or if you have a lucrative gig hawking gold to End-Timers/Doomsday Prepper types.
Guess I'm writing someone in this year
Ron Paul.
It's ok he's an anarchist. Anarchy means "without rulers" so prohibit government from initiating force and it can't rule it can only carry out its mandate to defend liberty.
An anarchist can't cash the VP paycheck if elected -- it's stolen money.
Nah that's paid from the trillion it borrows every year.
Never heard of the guy, but, um....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_Cohen
Will still vote L, though much less enthusiastically than I would if Amash was still running. Maybe they'll get 1%?
That article is going to get deleted so quickly. Nothing about Cohen passes the notability test.
Holy shit.
Really?
Cohen, an ally of performance artist and perennial candidate Vermin Supreme, is running on a platform promoting Free Ponies, Mandatory Tooth Brushing, Zombie Power, Killing Baby Hitler, and promoting anarchy.[5] He promises that should these not be achieved within the first 100 days of his vice presidency, he will resign and be replaced with baby Yoda from the Star Wars trilogy.[2]
Anarchist I can understand. The "platform" above exposes the LP as a complete joke. Jo Jorgensen must be working on a second career as a shock jock. I can think of no other explanation.
Anarchist I can understand. The "platform" above exposes the LP as a complete joke. I'm a white collar businessman and a libertarian. All I can ask is who are the lunatics who support a nomination like this.
Geez, the LP should at least attempt to put serious candidates in the running or they will actually diminish what they intend to enhance.
The job of a VP is to look boring and competent and not outshine the primary candidate.
The last thing you want is "Baby Yoda" baggage that's going to set the party back to 0.1%. land. There's plenty of room for "Baby Yoda" sarcasm on the net without degrading your presidential ticket.
This is a party that ran two popular two-term blue-state governors in the last election and got its best results ever.
Voting for the VP candidate is a stupid idea. Let the ticket-topper pick the partner for compatibility. Now she has to share the camera with a guy who's going to undermine her.
This is AWESOME. Finally, a libertarian on the ticket for the first time since 2004. No more neoliberal/neoliberal ticket that neoliberal "liberty" magazine Reason can't fawn over. Go back and cry and tell Bill Weld to read you a good night story.
You and people who think like you are an obstacle to the advancement of liberty.
Here, have your purity and 50K votes nationwide.
Kudos to the LP for finally rejecting has-been Republican retread losers and returning to their roots.
I guess it was a bridge too far to expect the LP to nominate two seemingly normal human beings to its ticket. Oh well. They're still one seemingly normal human being above the other parties.
Define "normal". Because I've found that when most people lament that libertarians aren't 'normal' what they mean is 'statist'.
I'm not going to vote for anyone of whom the first image I see is their nipple.
Even among libertarians there is a desire to be milquetoast. Don't be edgy, don't be funny and don't use satire. Be a stale and fake suit like the Duopoly. This attitude perplexes me.
Edgy, funny and satirical isn't the same as silly and his campaign website is silly and that makes all libertarians look silly.
You have thirty seconds of precious attention span to convince an average citizen why he should consider voting Libertarian.
Do you open with "there is no good reason for government to exist" (from Spike's website)?
Or do you say "Think of just about any social or economic problem that causes you to think 'Wow this is bad, we need the government to take action'. Chances are, the government has already taken action and either made the problem worse or created the problem to begin with. Before you listen to a Republican or Democrat or who wants to spend another billion or a trillion to "fix" a problem, let's peel back the exiting policies that don't work and then see where we are"?
What's worse is that he's wrong.
https://fee.org/articles/the-nature-of-government-by-ayn-rand/
Does he wear a funny hat?
You have got to be kidding me. Seriously? Spike Cohen. Give me a fucking break. The LP is quickly making itself again into a laughingstock. The LP should have listened to their standard bearer (Jo Jorgensen).
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An anarchist, huh? Well, you guys get back to me when you're serious about competing in a national election 🙁
This was a mistake. Monds was the respectable choice. And come on, let's be real, a woman and a black man on the LP ticket together? That alone would have garnered a truckload of free press coverage.
Jojo & Spike 2020
Until this party regulates itself a bit better - it's going to continue to be mocked - Monds was the OBVIOUS choice here. 2016 showed real promise to be taken seriously - this VP choice just set that back another 20 years. Ugh....
While you were debating, Spike Cohen, who runs Muddied Waters Media, won the Libertarian Party's nomination for vice-president today. grand rapids electrician
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