Luke Wenke: Difference between revisions

In 2019, Wenke made it his personal mission to make the <nowiki>[[Cattaraugus County Libertarian Party]]</nowiki> the “top performing fringe third party all across the entire United States” after noticing how well received the founding meeting for the county party had went.  He made it a goal to run as many “Libertarian exclusive” candidates for local and county office as possible, having noticed that the majority of county Libertarian parties across the entire state of New York were well on their way to simply cross-endorsing Republican and/or Democratic candidates for office, thereby treating the Libertarian line like a pawn line.

Wenke ran for Cattaraugus County Coroner while serving as county chairman, knowing all the while that he was completely unqualified for the position. Using two campaign slogans, “Any Schmuck Can Run For Coroner” and “Running For County Executive From The Coroner Position” (Cattaraugus County did not and still does not have a democratically elected county executive, the county seat in Little Valley has a county legislature manager elected by the county legislators), Wenke used his local name recognition to remind everyone that as long as we have a government that anyone should be able to run and get have a chance to get elected to any office, no matter how qualified or unqualified “the armchair politicians” think you are. Wenke’s unqualified stature for this particular office immediately resulted in moderate uproar among residents in the county, worried that an eccentric personality with significant regional name recognition may have actually stood a chance at getting elected to a serious public position such as coroner. Wenke used the coroner run as a pseudo-county executive run to talk about county issues and libertarian solutions for them. Republican opposition to Wenke attempted to publicly humiliate him by digging up pictures from Wenke’s FetLife account and posting them all over Facebook. Wenke’s response was to post a picture of himself in bdsm gear, with his coroner campaign sign, and a piece of paper that read “People on welfare can’t afford expensive bondage gear!” as a way to fire back at “the haters”. Wenke ended up receiving 3% of the vote, drawing comparisons to <nowiki>[[Gary Johnson]]</nowiki>’s 2016 election turnout and the “We Are The III%” slogan.

Wenke went to Minneapolis several days after George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin. He attended several protests in the city as well. The original intention for the trip was to check up on a fellow Libertarian he felt an immediate personal connection with. Wenke stated that not one bullet was fired in his presence but that it was extremely unsafe to walk around the city unarmed. Wenke had also been tear gassed during the protests. He met several prominent members of the <nowiki>[[boogaloo]]</nowiki>, a libertarian militia movement that started to materialize across the United States once Covid-19 has swept the Earth. After returning home to Olean, Wenke was the first of this group of people whose multiple Facebook accounts had been completely eradicated from existence. Wenke has stated that he called the Buffalo NY FBI simply to clear his own name since he knew he did nothing illegal in Minneapolis, everyone including himself had weapons, and that nobody else in his presence did one single illegal activity. His further misleading dealings with the FBI over the course of several months afterwards as they continued to call him a lot unexpectedly, smooth talk him with invitations to Starbucks, and show up to his home uninvited confused him at first. In September 2020 he was asked to turn over all of his electronic devices to the Buffalo FBI because “they wanted to know if I was donating money to any groups, people, or concepts listed on legally recognized terrorist watchlists”. Two boogaloo members Wenke knew from Minneapolis several months earlier were arrested in an entrapment case “no white person had ever been arrested before”. Wenke, due to his personal affiliation with the arrestees, was publicly placed on the Cattaraugus County watchlist the day they were arrested. The specific law the arrestees were arrested under had always been used on poorer Muslim communities throughout the United States, and Wenke immediately fell into a deep sense of personal depression after learning that the United States government has it in itself to lure it’s own citizens into “socialized multi million dollar pyramid schemes during a global health and economic crisis” as opposed to helping vulnerable individuals recover, much less people Wenke personally knew. Wenke never knew anything of any undercovers doing anything to anyone he had met nor did those people discuss this stuff with Wenke over those months.