What the hell happened to the Libertarian party? They used to have at least respectable candidates and even Jorgensen wasn't outright terrible. However, now they nominated some gay woke neoliberal who thinks the Mises Caucus and close to half of the party is racist. Trump was right the other day except the 3% part, Oliver probably won't even get 1.3%. At least on the bright side, its the best possible Libertarian candidate Trump could have hoped for.
I see in your statement a lot of the conservative criticism of Spike Cohen when he was nominated 4 years ago, when Spike was as great a messenger for libertarianism as the party has had in some time.
First, there's a decent-sized handful of people in the party that are gay and they seem driven to the party by life experience. My state party chair Evan McMahon in Indiana is gay and I've heard his story on why he's a libertarian and it revolves a lot around his experiences as a kid growing up in Bloomington, home to Indiana University and probably most liberal city in the state, and his school counselor's recommendations for him to deal with him getting gay-bashed was to quit being gay or to move. It helped form beliefs for him that the government won't help him when that's the answer from the public school counselor in the most liberal city in the state. It also helps why he's in favor of gun rights, he says "try and gay bash me when I have a 45 in my pocket". (He's said all of this publicly so I'm not outing him or saying anything held privately.)
Also if you are gay and hold beliefs like limited government, gun rights, etc., which of the 2 major parties are you supposed to join? Democrats don't want you for your policy beliefs and Republicans don't want you because of who you have sex with (and Republicans under Trump obviously don't believe in limited government anymore). There's a wannabe politician in Fort Wayne active in GOP politics there that is young, very conservative, and very gay, and there are definitely segments of the party in the area that don't want him to win anything because he's gay. (He was able to get a GOP State Convention Delegate ousted once in Credentials because the guy said on social media to not vote for him, which infuriated the other guy of course.)
I also want to point out here youth. Oliver is 37 years old, and the aforementioned Spike Cohen is 42.
Trump's best choice would've been Rectenwald, because Rectenwald was a diehard Trump supporter as close as 2 years ago (you can see it on his Twitter) and I imagine the dream was we got to late September and Rectenwald would've said "this election is too important, we cannot let Joe Biden win, I ask every person intending to vote for me to vote for Donald Trump". Mises are full of Republican operatives who since they took power 2 years ago their goal was to sabotage the party from the inside, and since they took control membership has gone down, fundraising has gone down, and election wins have gone down. 300 people voted for None of the Above to be the presidential nominee, which if it won would have irreparably harmed our party's ballot access for the future. If there were Republican operatives operating inside the party to sabotage it from the inside, isn't that what they would have wanted?
