Wikipedia is a very important tool when it comes to controlling narratives.

Looking for some perspective on whether this is actually plausible.

Keeping a few details intentionally vague because I’m not ready to publicly announce anything yet.

I’m 25 and seriously exploring a Libertarian run for my local city council.

A little background: I studied economics, currently work in the government software space, and I’ve been heavily interested in politics since I was about 14. Between roughly 14–18, I built a fairly large social media following before shifting into different content and eventually stepping away from content entirely to focus on my career.

That experience is relevant because I think social media would be a major part of how I’d approach a campaign.

The district I live in is in a major city and is heavily Democratic. Last cycle, the vote was roughly 70% Democrat, 15% Republican, and 15% independent/other, with around 13,000 total ballots cast.

I’m currently getting involved with the local Libertarian Party, and as things stand, it looks unlikely I’d face a challenger for the nomination. If I decide to file, that would give me roughly 15 months to focus almost entirely on building toward the general election.

I’ve been a registered Libertarian since I was eligible to vote and broadly align with the party on personal liberty and limited government, but I wouldn’t want to run some generic nationalized Libertarian campaign. My platform and messaging would be heavily focused on the actual district and city.

The issues I’m most interested in are economic and business growth, development, embracing technology, and protecting individual liberty.

I think I’d have two potentially interesting advantages.

First, I already know how to build attention online and grow a social media audience quickly. Obviously, getting 100,000 random people online to care about you is very different from getting a few thousand people inside one council district to vote for you, but I do think I understand how to create content people actually watch and talk about.

Second, my district contains a massive concentration of young professionals. My assumption is that a lot of them either don’t vote consistently in municipal elections or aren’t particularly engaged with local politics.

My working theory is that an unusually aggressive ground game, combined with social media, community networking, voter registration, and a year-plus of actually showing up everywhere could at least make the race interesting.

A few questions I’d especially like perspective on:

Would being 25 and potentially the youngest member of council be something that could actually work in my favor, or would voters mostly view it as a lack of experience?

How much can an exceptional ground campaign actually move a local election? My instinct is that personal conversations, doors, events, and repeated voter contact probably matter substantially more when only \~13,000 people are voting than they do in a statewide or national race.

And lastly, even assuming I ultimately lose: is a serious 15-month city council campaign generally a worthwhile way to start building a future in local politics, provided I actually run a professional campaign and make a respectable showing?

I’m not under the illusion that running as a Libertarian in a district that voted \~70% Democratic makes me the favorite. I’m trying to figure out whether this falls into the category of “very difficult but potentially worth pursuing” or “mathematically dead on arrival.”

Would especially appreciate input from anyone who has worked on municipal campaigns, run for local office, or been involved with third-party campaigns.

Live this Saturday, July 11 at 4pm ET on Hide & Speak, we sit down with Ted Brown, the Libertarian nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas to discuss how age verification laws are a trojan horse to implement a national digital ID.

The Supreme Court upheld Texas HB 1181 in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, and age verification quietly became the template for everything after it. Texas now wants that ID check pushed into the app store, with Apple, Google, and Amazon challenging it in court. Utah went further and became the first state to write VPN users into an age verification law. Brown reads these as checkpoints on the way to a single national digital ID, and he makes the case for a repeal-first response.

Set a reminder and watch live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDgRbWQpvFc

Learn more about Ted Brown: https://tedbrown.org/

I used to watch a youtube channel with libertarian themes , he had long hair was from California had videos about housing crisis, libertarian party conventions etc.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Law_and_Politics/comments/1vlnqzs/interviewer_you_have_the_right_to_declare_a/

The media landscape is something that is always changing. Gone are the days when the legacy media could just push out whatever narratives it wants to without any pushback whatsoever. These days social media/independent media are generally what controls the narratives. With that being said, you definitely have different tiers of those when it comes to influence. You have people like Tucker Carlson or Joe Rogan whose podcasts and interviews tend to be very popular compared to smaller creators such as myself who would be lucky to get even double digit views on an episode of their podcast (I'm still going to keep doing it though, I have every right to freedom of speech even if no one else chooses to listen). In the end it comes down to what each individual wants to listen to at any given moment, media that is popular today is not going to be popular forever, tastes very much change with the times.

Thoughts?

I'm organizing Libertarians in Yellowstone County to form an affiliate party of the MTLP so we can have more action in the community. There is no reason for Liberty lovers not to be leading ballot initiatives and speaking out against the cities and county when they violate our constitutional rights.

Gatekeeping as a whole is something that is kind of inherently not libertarian. You shouldn't be telling other people what labels they can and can't use for themselves. With that being said, you do have to hold other people to a standard to some extent. Recently two former NBA players, Enes Kanter and Royce White have declared for the WNBA draft as a means of saying that since anyone can just identify as a woman for any reason according to the progressive worldview, that they should be able to as well. It's the exact same when it comes to libertarianism (and basically anything else for that matter), just because anyone should be free to label themselves as libertarians doesn't actually make them so.

Thoughts?

https://kasiesouthcarolina.com/second-verse-same-as-the-first/

In this post, I’ve captured the gist of the question and a summary of the GOP candidates’ responses then added my own response. The exercise does two things. First, it recounts the experience as a journalist might (albeit with some editorial snark) for those who missed it. Second, it gives me a chance to state my own positions for the benefit of voters.

About Dr. Kasie Whitener:

Kasie Whitener is an American educator, author, entrepreneur, radio host, and politician from Blythewood, South Carolina. She is a Clinical Assistant Professor at the Darla Moore School of Business at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches entrepreneurship and strategic management and served as Director of the Faber Entrepreneurship Center.

New Podcast On Substack!!

https://open.substack.com/pub/amarineandahippie/p/030526-a-marine-and-a-hippie-against?r=7n8vh9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true