The party chairman is Los Angeles attorney William Daniel Johnson. Kevin B. MacDonald, a retired evolutionary psychology academic at California State University, Long Beach, has been named one of the eight party directors. MacDonald is also a principal contributor to The Occidental Quarterly where his articles have claimed that traits that he attributes to Jews, including higher-than-average verbal intelligence and ethnocentricism, have eugenically and culturally evolved to enhance the ability of Jews to out-compete non-Jews for resources. MacDonald believes this advantage has been used by Jews to advance their group interests and end potential antisemitism by either deliberately or inadvertently undermining the power and self-confidence of the European-derived majorities in the Western world. A 2006 article in The Nation magazine reports that MacDonald's 2004 Understanding Jewish Influence: A Study in Ethnic Activism "has turned MacDonald into a celebrity within white nationalist and neo-Nazi circles." Writing in the Journal of Church and State, Professor George Michael noted that MacDonald's work "has been well received by those in the racialist right, as it amounts to a theoretically sophisticated justification for anti-Semitism," and that on the far-right MacDonald "has attained a near reverential status and is generally considered beyond reproach".
Electoral activities
New Hampshire state party chairman Ryan Murdough ran in the Republican primary for a seat representing the Eighth District of the Grafton County delegation to the New Hampshire House of Representatives, but he was refused support by the Republican party, which called him a "despicable racist". He placed fifth out of five candidates in the Republican primary, garnering 296 votes. Murdough was the National Political Director for the National Socialist American Labor Party, a party which espouses Nazi beliefs. In November 2009, the American Third Position Party filed papers with the office of the Secretary of State of California, with the intention of becoming a fully ballot-accessible party by the time of the June 2010 California primary election. However, the party failed to qualify and was not entered on the 2010 ballot in California or any other state. The party received enough signatures to get Harry Bertram on the ballot for the 2011 West Virginia gubernatorial special election. Bertram's campaign ran a television ad emphasizing his desire to advance the interests of white Americans. Bertram was soundly defeated in the election, coming in last place out of 5 candidates on the ballot and netting only 1,111 votes; less than 0.4 percent of the total.
Kenn Gividen was nominated by the party as its candidate for president and Bob Whitaker was nominated for vice president in March 2015. Gividen resigned from the nomination on July 26, 2015 after holding the role for 4 months; Whitaker then stepped into the role as candidate for president. Whitaker, whose favored term "White Genocide" was blocked by the AFP leadership, gave up the nomination on April 7, 2016 in protest over the party's growing support for Donald Trump and the toning down of its use of language.
2012 hacking incident
In early February 2012, members of the hacker group Anonymous released statements claiming to have hacked the website of the party and various forums and email accounts connected with the group, including that of Jamie Kelso, the website's operator. The front page of the party's website was defaced with #OpBlitzkrieg and private information about the organization's members was released.
Name change
On February 1, 2013, the party's website carried an announcement that the party was changing its name to "American Freedom Party", although the values and mission would remain unchanged.
