The Libertarian Party of Texas has been the topic of much drama this past week as screenshots were released showing a plot by conservatives to takeover the party and change it’s platform at the LP Texas’ convention to be pro-life, pro-border control and pro-Texas secession.

“A group called the Freedom Texas Political Party, who apparently created themselves around four months ago around November, who has stated a purpose of taking over the party through getting people in delegate spots, changing out leadership, changing our platform to fall in line with their goals and changing out our county leaderships to the people they preferred has been revealed,” stated Libertarian Party of Texas Chair John Wilford.

Seeing this plan for takeover, a Facebook page called Keep The Party Libertarian was started. The group began after screenshots of the above Facebook post were published Thursday and immediately asked Texas candidates to pledge to be a part of their coalition.

According to Timothy R. Martinez, an editor of the page and Chair of Comal County Libertarian Party, Tommy Attaway, member of the LP Texas’ Platform Committee and the main organizer of this movement, was elected to the governing board of the Texas LP in 2016 and “was supported by a republican faction within the party who has ever been a thorn in the side of the NAP libertarians here.”

Chair Wilford confirmed this and explained “Tom Attaway had a history of working with the Reform Party and working within right-wing organizations and the Republican Party, and I’m pretty sure he’s a writer for Raging Elephants Radio.”

The Texas Chair also stated that there is a current motion to amend the Platform committee after the recent revelations.

Then, the story was broken by Dramatarians of Attaway’s response that the backlash from this plot “shows that they are afraid, and we need to press on to success” and that the secret group had created a list with the intent of “improving” or “replacing” party members who weren’t pro-life, pro-border control and pro-Texas secession.

Tommy Attaway was reached out to for a comment, but did not reply.

According to Dramatarians, those listed as “replace” are those who do not believe in the three ideas above, those listed as “improve” could go either way and “keep” are those who are pro-life, pro-border control and pro-Texas seccession.

Martinez says that the push to stop this takeover had brought together most of the party and that “Factions that are normally bickering (anarchist vs minarchist) and members that had “checked out” are activated and uniting.”

“It’s really has been a uniting force,” Wilford believes. “This tends to be a time when libertarians are kind of battling over looking to the platform looking forward. There seems to some much broader agreement that whatever the platform comes out to be that if some organization wants our ballot access, we’re going to fight them for it.”