In 2018, we had one active member of the Mises Caucus in Delaware. David Hynes, who currently serves on the National Caucus Board and recently lost a defamation lawsuit in Idaho by default, was selected by the Delaware affiliate to become a delegate. The convention was in New Orleans and no one else was sure enough at the time of the state convention they'd be able to go that we let a new guy none of us knew very well become a delegate. He was nice enough at the time and we weren't aware of his caucus affiliation or the threat the caucus would become in the coming years.
The rest of us, along with several alternates, drove down together from Delaware and stayed at a hotel near the convention site. David stayed in a group rental with the caucus. His travel expenses were paid by the caucus. While the rest of us, including the other alternates, worked together during the convention and consulted on our votes to promote our interpretation of the LPD's interests, David was often missing in action and voted his own way, in alignment with the Mises Caucus goals for the convention.
A couple of other longtime members were technically caucus members, but Delaware has never been a caucus battleground before and those 2-3 members consistently put the LPD and the broader LP first.
David left the state soon after the 2018 convention and the Mises Caucus fell off the radar in Delaware until after the first session of the 2020 convention, which took place online and led to the nomination of Jo Jorgensen and Spike Cohen. Josh Smith was engaged in his second run for LNC Chair. Then, a wild Dave Casey appeared. The Mises Caucus is irrationally opposed to Nick Sarwark. Without going out of the way to defend Nick, the rent free space he clearly occupies in their minds is an unhealthy obsession. Josh Smith's campaign for LNC Chair in 2018 was not friendly and there was clearly bad blood between Josh and Nick, and the Mises Caucus was on Josh's side.
Dave Casey came into the LPD Facebook Group and posted one of his MS Paint level memes of Josh Smith pasted onto the head of a figure assaulting someone else with Nick's face pasted onto it. The image has since been hidden or removed, but this was only the beginning of the abusive juvenile antics the Mises Caucus would bring to Delaware. That Nick wasn't even running for anything at this point makes it all the more ridiculous.
Fast forwarding several months, Dave's business was offered as a venue during the Jo Jorgensen campaign for her visit to Delaware since the usual, more professional venues were all closed or refusing large events due to COVID. In hindsight greater efforts should have been made to avoid exposing Libertarians to Dave's influence, as this was his recruiting opportunity to bring several volunteers for the Jorgensen campaign and other supporters attending the event into the Mises Caucus.
After the election finished, the campaign group for the local Jorgensen volunteers converted to "Delaware for Liberty". A deliberate choice was made by the state party not to retain state party control over this group and it quickly went off the rails with purity testing harassment from newly inducted Mises Caucus members. Several people in the group, including long time members of the Libertarian Party were told they didn't belong for not hewing to the Mises Caucus interpretation on several topics.
The local MC obsession with social media only begins there. The next part of our story is a day long thread complaining about the lack of activity on the State Party's Facebook page. This is a fair criticism, but one that applies to every member of the State Board at the time, all of whom had permission to post on the page, as well as members of the social media committee that also had posting privileges. Instead of accepting the process that existed or petitioning the entire Board to change the process or at least be more active, they focused their ire on the person who showed up to explain the process to them and demanded they be allowed to post content themselves.
Escalation was ongoing after they were refused. Several members of the State Board became more proactive in posting content, but Mises Caucus members with only a few months experience in the party were not handed the keys to social media, an insult that would not be forgiven. The next battle came in the form of a response to a concurrent resolution in the Delaware legislature. This resolution would declare gun violence in Delaware to be a "public health crisis".
Background is needed here. A concurrent resolution is not a bill. It does not amend the statute. In some situations, a concurrent resolution could be used to trigger provisions already in the code, but a "public health crisis" is not defined in Delaware Law. This concurrent resolution, if it had passed both chambers (a requirement for "concurrent") it would have had no real effect. Legislators supporting it would no doubt have received a pat on the back and campaign contributions from "Moms Demand Action" and other gun control groups, but it directed no new resources to enforcing gun control restrictions, established no new laws restricting firearms, and triggered no statutory authority empowering government to do anything. The Delaware General Assembly passes several concurrent resolutions over the course of their session and most of them are obsequious political exercises to make special interest groups feel special. Several notable examples established May 2021 as Mental Health, Cystic Fibrosis, Lyme Disease, and Healthy Vision Awareness Month. While many in Delaware are aware of these issues, the subset of the population aware that the General Assembly established an "Awareness Month" is miniscule.
To the members of the Delaware Mises Caucus though, this was no empty gesture. This was the final push of tyranny and a prelude to widespread gun confiscation and it required a "strong" response from the LPD. They were even good enough to provide one. A rambling, paranoid statement complete with anti-Semitic and anti-Black dog whistles about "roving gangs of violent thugs" in "Democrat [sic] controlled urban enclaves" and the nice families in the suburbs being left defenseless. They were told in no uncertain terms that their statement was awful. This is politics, not a kid's day camp. Not everyone gets to play. Despite being offered an opportunity to collaborate on a statement that was more realistic and less subtly racist, they found a sympathetic Board member to introduce their travesty as a motion. An amendment was immediately proposed to replace their train wreck with a substitute resolution taking a more measured stance.
Only then did they agree to collaborate, and only after the amendment succeeded was a mutually agreeable draft completed. No Board members moved another amendment to use the joint draft, and the substitute motion written without their input was adopted. The War was on. They had been slighted and dismissed and it could not be allowed to stand.
The resolution itself languishes in the House.
