Lawyer killed goat, drank its blood, and is running for US Senate
Augustus Sol Invictus. Photo from his Florida Bar profile page.
A 32-year old Orlando, Florida, lawyer who changed his name to Augustus Sol Invictus and won’t divulge his given name is running as a Libertarian candidate for the U.S. Senate, which prompted the recent resignation of the chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida, who says Invictus wants to start a civil war and is bringing neo-Nazis to join the party, the Associated Press reports.
And he says Invictus killed a goat and drank its blood.
“I did sacrifice a goat,” says Invictus, in an interview last Friday. “I know that’s probably a quibble in the mind of most Americans. I sacrificed an animal to the god of the wilderness….Yes, I drank the goat’s blood.”
Invictus says he completed the ritual upon his return after walking from Orlando to the Mojave Desert, where he spent a week fasting and praying.
Invictus is currently the only candidate running as a Libertarian in the race to replace Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio in the U.S. Senate.
“He is the absolute exact opposite of a Libertarian,” says Adrian Wyllie, the now-former chairman of the Libertarian Party of Florida and its former candidate for governor. “It’s absolute insanity. We must explain to people this is the opposite of Libertarians. This guy has no place in the Libertarian Party.”
Wyllie made that argument to the LPF executive committee recently, asking them to openly oppose Invictus as the party’s candidate, but it was unavailing, according to a lengthy post on Wyllie’s Facebook page.
None of them supports Invictus, he writes, but “only a few had the conviction to stand openly against him.”
Invictus, on his law firm’s website, says he was “raised by a criminal defense attorney” and that he decided at age 23 to attend law school when he and his family “became the collateral damage of DEA aggression.” He provided no details.
His bio on the firm’s web site says Invictus graduated from the DePaul University College of Law in 2011, and while there worked at the schools International Human Rights Law Institute. The institute’s director declined to provide the ABA Journal with any information about Invictus, such as his given name.
Invictus has criticized the government in a series of YouTube videos. According to Wyllie’s posting on Facebook, he wrote in a memo to colleagues in 2013: “I have prophesied for years that I was born for a Great War; that if I did not witness the coming of the Second American Civil War, I would begin it myself.”
Invictus told the Associated Press recently that he is flattered that law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and U.S. Marshals Service have been investigating him.
“It makes me think that one man can make a difference,” he says, but explains that “You do not initiate force. If the government is waging war on citizens, we as citizens have the right to self-defense on government.”
In 2014, Invictus represented Marcus Faella, the former head of the neo-Nazi group American Front, in an appeal of a conviction on domestic-terrorism charges related to preparation for a race war, the Orlando Sentinel reported. Invictus said his client was unjustly convicted of “thought crimes.”
“We have, to this point, been convinced that no one could be found guilty in a court of law for being racist any more than for being a Marxist or Zionist,” Invictus wrote, according to the newspaper, noting that Faella was “convicted for shooting firearms on his own property because he happened to be a white racialist while pulling the trigger.”
According to Wyllie’s Facebook report, Invictus practices Thelema, a pagan religion based on the occult teaching of Aleister Crowley.
Invictus says he is not starting a civil war but that the government already is at war with its citizens, and it will escalate.
“The only question is, when are the citizens going to start fighting back?” he says.
He is running for office with the hope of getting his message out.
The Libertarian Party of Seminole County has now disbanded due to the controversy that has arisen from Invictus’ candidacy, according to the Orlando Sentinel.
Updated on Oct. 9 to report that the Libertarian Party of Seminole County has disbanded.
