In 2017, the president of the Mises Institute, Jeff Deist, gave a speech at the Mises University conference, where in his concluding remarks he stated that the ideas of "blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people". Deist's use of the phrase blood and soil, originally used by the Nazi party as a call for racial nationalism, was alleged by some to be an explicit signal to Neo-Nazis and other white nationalist groups. In particular, Nicholas Sarwark and Arvin Vohra, then the chair and vice-chair of the United States Libertarian Party, condemned Deist's speech, with Vohra stating that "the Mises Institute has been turned into a sales funnel for the White Nationalist branch of the Alt Right". Vohra further accused the Mises Institute as a whole of being "authoritarian, racist, nazi".