Libertarian Party of New Hampshire Digs In Amid Backlash and Law Enforcement Scrutiny After Appearing to Glorify Political Violence

A controversial social media post by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire (LPNH) has attracted the attention of state and federal law enforcement agencies, local media have reported, as the political group that has previously developed a reputation for riling Democrats, Republicans, and even other libertarians has dug in and embraced the attention it’s receiving.

LPNH posted on X on Sunday: “Anyone who murders Kamala Harris would be an American hero.” Amid backlash, the account deleted the post, citing the social media platform’s terms of service but asserting: “It’s a shame that even on a ‘free speech’ website that libertarians cannot speak freely” and “Libertarians are truly the most oppressed minority.” (X’s rules prohibit content “explicitly threatening, inciting, glorifying, or expressing desire for violence.”)

“The point of the second amendment is to shoot and kill tyrannous politicians,” reads another post from Sunday that is still up on the LPNH account.

The post about Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Harris, which was deleted hours before former President and Republican nominee Donald Trump was the subject of a second apparent assassination attempt, drew criticism from politicians and commentators across the spectrum. New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman Chris Ager “condemned [it] in the strongest possible terms,” writing on X that “there is no room for this type of dialogue. PERIOD.” Libertarian Party presidential candidate Chase Oliver said the post was “abhorrent and should never have been posted.” He added: “As Libertarians, we condemn the use of force, whether committed by governments, individuals, or other political entities.” (LPNH responded to Oliver’s statement by calling him a “leftist” and a homophobic slur.)

The New Hampshire Department of Safety, which includes the state police, and the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office told New Hampshire Public Radio on Monday that their agencies were “in communication with our federal law enforcement partners” about LPNH’s posts.

“We are aware of the tweet,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for New Hampshire told NBC10 Boston on Monday, adding that “although the department generally will not confirm or deny any specific investigation, threatening violence is a crime and those who do this will be investigated, prosecuted, and held to account in a court of law.” The Secret Service similarly told the outlet that it “is aware of the social media post made by the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire, and as a matter of practice, we do not comment on matters involving protective intelligence. We can say, however, that the Secret Service investigates all threats related to our protectees.”

Jeremy Kauffman, a member of LPNH believed to be behind the party’s X account, posted a video on Monday showing two men who said they were with the FBI visiting his house. (Just hours earlier, the LPNH account claimed no one affiliated with the group had been contacted by the Secret Service or the FBI “because nothing we said was illegal.”) “All I want to do is talk to you about a post that was made and if you happened to be the one who made the post,” one of the men said. Kauffman, in his own retelling, “mocked them until they left” and could be heard in the video saying “Nothing we did is against the law…I hope you go home and are embarrassed.”

Kauffman—a blockchain Technology entrepreneur, former U.S. Senate candidate, and a member of the Libertarian Party’s Mises Caucus, which NPR describes as “a more hardline, edgy and sometimes iNFLaMMAtory take on libertarianism that is more compatible with the Republican Party under Trump”—was reportedly given access to LPNH’s then-Twitter account in 2021 amid a fracturing of the state’s Libertarian Party. 

Since then, the LPNH account has come under fire on several occasions, including when it called for child labor to be legalized and compared former President Abraham Lincoln to 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, and when it mocked the death of former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). Kauffman’s personal account, which has over 130,000 followers and was temporarily suspended in 2022, and the LPNH account, which has over 70,000 followers, have also been frequently criticized for posts considered racist, anti-LGBTQ, and antisemitic.

While jokes or comments about violence befalling presidential candidates are for the most part, according to legal experts, protected by the First Amendment, this campaign season has spotlighted free speech limitations when it concerns the personal safety of presidential candidates. In July, a man in Florida was arrested and charged after posting about wanting to kill President Joe Biden; in August, another man in Virginia was charged for making online death threats against Harris. And in the wake of both apparent assassination attempts targeting Trump, Trump and his allies have blamed Democrat’s rhetoric for allegedly promoting violence. (Kauffman, as recently as last week, highlighted posts that he labeled “death threats” from his critics.)

Hours before Kauffman shared the video of his purported encounter with the FBI, LPNH posted a lengthy statement claiming that the party would “never advocate for the assassination of a tyrannical President” but that it was “merely acknowledging how some members would react to one.”

“Libertarians are not pacifists,” the statement continued. “It is morally correct to use violence to stop aggression.” Assumingly addressing a like-minded audience, the statement explained: “If you celebrate the Pine Tree Riot, the War for American Independence, or the assassination of past tyrants like Abraham Lincoln, you believe that violence is sometimes necessary to advance or protect freedom.”

LPNH explained in the statement that it wants “progressives, socialists, and democrats to be embarrassed to live” in New Hampshire. “While we won’t be initiating violence against them, it’s good when authoritarians feel unsafe or uncomfortable,” it added, saying its posts “are frequently explicitly intended to advance this cause.”

The group describes itself as “the vanguard of the Free State movement” and, in the recent statement, invited people to move to New Hampshire, where it said “You can be as radically libertarian as you want here. You can be your uninhibited libertarian self and still have lots of friends and an active social life. You can raise your children in a culture soaked in these values and propagate them to the next generation.”

Kauffman was, until he was expelled last September over his social media posts, a board member of the Free State Project, a non-profit organization founded in 2001 that aims to get libertarians across the country to migrate to New Hampshire “to prove that more liberty leads to more prosperity for everyone.”

Libertarians elsewhere in the U.S., however, think Kauffman is doing more harm for the political philosophy than good. “The LP of New Hampshire acts specifically in a way that makes libertarianism look like the shittiest possible ideology, just a circle jerk of the worst people alive doing the stupidest shit ever and not doing anything else,” former libertarian journalist Jane Coaston posted on X on Sunday. “Like if the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire were a CIA plot to destroy the Libertarian Party writ large,” she wondered, “what would they be doing differently[?]”

LPNH did not immediately respond to TIME’s request for comment for this story.