The Leftwing Infiltration of the Libertarian Movement

The Mises Caucus, paleolibertarians, and libertarian-nationalists (henceforth “paleos”) often present themselves as the authentic heirs of the Rothbardian tradition – radical opponents of the state, champions of voluntary society, and enemies of left-wing social engineering.

They claim that “right libertarians” are the real libertarians.

But are the policies that distinguish the paleo faction from other libertarian factions actually libertarian? Or even right-wing?

When the paleo platform is compared to that of left-wing socialists, a consistent pattern emerges. On immigration, identity politics, trade, state surveillance, police power, free speech, sex work, drugs, and sexual equality – the paleo agenda often parallels the policies of the authoritarian left it claims to oppose.

I. Paleos Promote Socialist Presidential Candidates

The Socialist Party USA and various communist-adjacent formations have long run candidates with Marxist academic credentials as a legitimizing strategy. The Mises Caucus did the same thing, inside a nominally libertarian institution.

In the 2024 election, Mises Caucus leaders promoted the candidacy of college professor Michael Rechtenwald for the LP presidential nomination. Rechtenwald had identified as a Marxist for over 25 years before being deplatformed in 2016.

Whatever his stated political evolution, the objective result is that a major LP faction elevated a longstanding Marxist to represent the party of Mises, Rothbard, and Hayek.

II. Paleos Promote DEI Policies

Many paleo leaders advocate for legally privileging some people based on sex, marital status, parenthood, property ownership, and national origin.

For example, prominent paleos have called for:

• stripping women of the right to vote
• restoring coverture
• weighting the votes of married men, fathers, property owners, and heads of household more heavily than those of women, single people, renters, and the childless

The objective result – regardless of whether the justification is tradition rather than equity – is a tiered citizenship model in which the state assigns different rights based on identity characteristics.

This is the structural definition of DEI policy.

Affirmative action, intersectional legal frameworks, and equity-based regulatory schemes explicitly assign differential legal treatment based on race, sex, and similar characteristics. The paleo version substitutes sex, marital status, and property ownership for race and gender identity, and substitutes a traditionalist vocabulary for a progressive one. The mechanism – state-enforced hierarchy based on identity categories – is identical.

Both frameworks reject the principle that law should be indifferent to such traits. They disagree only on which traits should confer advantage and which should confer disadvantage.

III. Paleos Oppose the Right to Work

In the absence of immigration suppression laws, US companies and foreign-born workers would be free to enter into voluntary labor contracts. Paleos – via ICE workplace raids, E-Verify mandates, and employer penalties – want the government to block such arrangements.

The end result is the same whether the stated goal is protecting American culture, as the nationalist right argues, or protecting union wages, as the progressive left has argued for over a century.

Labor union icon Cesar Chavez personally organized citizen patrols along the border to report undocumented workers to the INS, framing mass deportation as labor solidarity. Socialist Bernie Sanders opposed open borders in 2015 as “a Koch brothers proposal” designed to undercut domestic wages. Progressive economist Paul Krugman wrote in 2006 that large-scale immigration of low-wage workers is “bad for low-wage workers already here.”

All three supported enforcement mechanisms as instruments of labor protectionism. The paleo position is structurally identical: use state violence to exclude a category of workers from the market. The motive differs; the coercion is the same.

IV. Paleos Support “Papers Please” Compulsory Identification

To distinguish a legal resident from an unauthorized worker at a workplace, checkpoint, or travel hub, the state must maintain a standardized tracking system. RealID provides exactly that: a federally standardized, machine-readable identity document tied to a national database, required for domestic air travel and increasingly for employment verification.

Paleo leaders who endorse RealID as a border enforcement tool are endorsing a domestic surveillance and population-tracking infrastructure – the same infrastructure used by socialist dictatorships to monitor and control their citizenry.

V. Paleos Corrupted the Libertarian Party to Serve Donald Trump

Mises Caucus LNC chair Angela McArdle and many other MC leaders worked to subordinate the LP to Donald Trump throughout the 2024 election cycle, including inviting him to speak at the LP national convention. After MC nominee Michael Rechtenwald lost the LP presidential nomination, paleo leaders funneled LP resources toward Trump and worked to sabotage Chase Oliver – the actual LP presidential nominee – by obstructing his ballot access efforts.

The objective result was the subordination of a third party to a major-party candidate. This is a textbook co-optation strategy that both major parties have used against third parties throughout American political history.

Democratic Party operatives have repeatedly used ballot access challenges, funding suppression, and primary management to neutralize insurgent candidates – the documented DNC treatment of Bernie Sanders in 2016 is one well-known example. The paleos did to the LP’s own nominee what the DNC did to its insurgent candidates: used institutional control to protect preferred political relationships at the expense of the party’s stated principles.

VI. Paleos Are Anti-Free Trade

VII. Paleos Cheer the Expansion of Federal Internal Police

Border enforcement requires the structural expansion of domestic police-state capacity: roving patrols, documentation checkpoint infrastructure far from any physical border, automated license plate readers, and biometric surveillance.

Just as the paleos have demanded the expansion of police funding, manpower, and authority in the name of border security, the post-September 11 expansion of DHS, TSA, and domestic surveillance infrastructure was supported by large Democratic congressional majorities. The PATRIOT Act passed with broad bipartisan support.

Internal enforcement infrastructure, once constructed, is retained and expanded by successive administrations regardless of party. The left built significant portions of the current surveillance state. The paleos are building more of it. The institutional result in both cases is identical: a more powerful federal police apparatus with broader domestic authority.

VIII. Paleos Are Hostile to Homosexuality, Recreational Drugs, Sexual Autonomy, and Legal Equality

Homosexuality

The stated justifications varied – decadence, counter-revolution, imperialism, disorder – but the policy outcome across all five regimes was identical: state criminalization:

Stalin criminalized homosexuality in 1934, framing same-sex conduct as bourgeois Western corruption.

Mao treated it as hooliganism under the Cultural Revolution.

Castro ran the UMAP forced labor camps specifically targeting gay men from 1965 to 1968.

Pol Pot’s regime executed people for it.

Kim Il Sung classified it as a Western bourgeois vice. | Leader / Regime | Policy | Stated Justification | | :— | :— | :— | | Stalin (USSR, 1922-1953) | Legal 1922; recriminalized 1934 (Art. 121); Gulag sentences | Bourgeois Western decadence; threat to proletarian morality | | Mao (China, 1949-1976) | De facto banned; prosecuted as “hooliganism” under the Cultural Revolution | Counter-revolutionary; Western corruption | | Castro (Cuba, 1959-2008) | UMAP forced labor camps 1965-1968; decriminalized 1979 | Bourgeois decadence; incompatible with revolutionary discipline | | Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-1979) | Execution; no legal process | Counter-revolutionary; Year Zero morality | | Kim Il Sung (DPRK, 1948-1994) | Prison camps; Art. 262 | Western bourgeois vice; foreign corruption | | Mises Caucus / Paleos | Repeal Obergefell; oppose anti-discrimination protections; frame gay and trans identity as vectors of “cultural Marxism” | Civilizational threat; Western liberal corruption |

On drugs:

every communist regime banned or severely penalized recreational use – protecting the proletariat from bourgeois corruption (Stalin), eliminating counter-revolutionary decadence (Mao), enforcing revolutionary discipline (Castro and Pol Pot), maintaining social order (Kim Il Sung).

On pornography: all five regimes imposed state censorship and criminal penalties, framing them as protecting workers from filth, eliminating bourgeois decadence, or enforcing ideological purity.

On sex work: outcomes ranged from death (Pol Pot) to Gulag sentences (Stalin’s parasitism laws) to official prohibition with elite carve-outs – Kim Il Sung’s hidden kisaeng tourism industry for party members being the best-documented example.

The paleo pattern replicates this structure with a fidelity that should be uncomfortable for anyone paying attention.

Leading MC figures have called for repealing Obergefell, opposed anti-discrimination protections for gay and trans people, and framed homosexuality and trans identity as vectors of cultural Marxism. This rhetorical move is structurally identical to Stalin’s framing of homosexuality as bourgeois Western corruption. The enemy changes – it is Western liberalism rather than Western capitalism – but the demand for state enforcement of sexual conformity, and the use of a civilizational threat narrative to justify it, does not.

The MC has been conspicuously quiet on drug decriminalization despite operating inside a party whose platform calls for full legalization. Paleo-adjacent figures like Tucker Carlson have explicitly defended drug criminalization as a public health measure – the precise framing used by every communist regime in the historical record.

The paleo right has increasingly converged on calls to criminalize adult pornography outright – not merely restrict minors’ access, but eliminate legal production and distribution entirely. The framing – protecting the family, preventing social decay, defending civilization – is culturally distinct from the Stalinist language of bourgeois decadence, but structurally identical in its policy demand: the state determines which sexual expression adults are permitted to consume, and enforces that determination with criminal penalties.

SESTA/FOSTA, which the paleo right largely supported or declined to oppose, achieved functional criminalization of sex work through an indirect mechanism – by making platforms liable for sex worker speech, it drove sex workers off the internet and into more dangerous conditions, while doing nothing to constrain elite demand. The result mirrors the communist historical pattern: official suppression, elite access continues.

Conclusion: The Horseshoe Inside the Big Tent

Both paleos and left-wing socialists want to deploy state coercion to control population movement, labor markets, trade, and sexual conduct. The only variable is which identity group is privileged or penalized, and which cultural vocabulary is used to justify it.

“Protecting workers” and “protecting the nation” are different rhetorical frames for structurally equivalent interventionist programs. “Bourgeois decadence” and “cultural Marxism” are different labels for the same enemy: individuals making choices that the movement’s leadership has decided are incompatible with civilizational health.

The communist regimes documented above were honest about what they were doing. They made no pretense of respecting individual autonomy; their frameworks explicitly subordinated the individual to the collective, the class, the revolution, or the nation. The result was labor camps, executions, forced marriages, secret police, internal checkpoints, and the systematic destruction of private life.

The paleo movement pursues structurally similar outcomes through electoral politics, regulatory capture, platform pressure, and social enforcement – but the policy demands, stripped of their cultural packaging, are the same: exclude foreign workers by force, track the population through standardized identity documents, restrict or eliminate legal recognition of gay and trans people, criminalize drugs and pornography, suppress sex work, impose tariffs and trade restrictions, and expand the internal police apparatus required to enforce all of the above.

The most significant difference is not the destination but the honesty about it. The communists knew they were building a coercive state and said so. The paleos are building one while insisting they are doing the opposite – inside a political party whose foundational document is the Non-Aggression Principle.

The horseshoe bends, but the coercion stays the same.

Call to Action

If you are a libertarian who has watched the Mises Caucus take over the LP and wondered whether something was wrong – you were right.

• Demand that LP candidates take clear positions on drug legalization, Obergefell, and sex work decriminalization. These are not edge cases; they are the test of whether someone is actually a libertarian.
• Support LP chapters and candidates who hold the NAP as a non-negotiable constraint, not a rhetorical accessory.
• When a self-described libertarian argues for RealID, deportation raids, tariffs, or pornography bans, name what it is: it is not libertarianism. It is authoritarian collectivism with a different flag.
• Share this piece with libertarians who are being recruited into paleo spaces. The comparison is on the record. The policy overlap is documented. The horseshoe is real.

The liberty movement cannot be reclaimed by people who will not name what has captured it.