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this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart 1. no you didn't, you retconning fucks 2. your decades of anti-governance "free market" "government never functions" propaganda paved the way for the complete authoritarian decimation of labor, consumer, environmental protections

I know these people intimately. I've been engaged in bickering with them for the better part of an adult life. Primarily because they repeatedly insisted, using fake pseudo-academic cack, that no oversight of telecom monopolies would result in vast, utopian outcomes

most of these "libertarian free market think tankers" were paid covertly under the table by America's shittiest companies to argue for ZERO functional oversight of corporate power, then when the corpses, rampant fraud, and mass suffering appear, they're just completely intellectually fucking absent

A lot of these free market libertarians in the last year or DID shift some of their attention to combatting Trump's attacks on free speech. But they want to pretend they didn't play a starring role in paving the way for the total destruction of the federal regulatory state by autocratic zealots

again I know a lot of them, and unless I missed it, I've yet to see a single one of these free market think tank knobs face ANY meaningful reputational impact whatsoever in the Loper Bright, Supreme Court-driven, corruption free for all their policy proposals directly enabled

these guys are kind of different from the couch-locked Ron Paul fan slanket wearing libertarian keyboard champion types, who are in a different but less destructive strain mostly fixated on weed, greed, and crypto. though there can be overlap. Most of them helped enable trumpism too.

"Ron Paul fan slanket wearing libertarian keyboard champion types" are also the most likely to just be white nationalists and/or "age of consent" freaks and between them and the corporatist shills, they make up most of the party.

I remember explaining to someone around 2012 that libertarians mostly fell into 2 camps- young men that wanted marijuana to be legal and old men that didn’t want to pay taxes. That wasn’t totally wrong, but for sure I underestimated how ‘big tent’ they actually are

there's been a lot of weird overlap in the fascist era. like the weird post-leftist people who fell for propaganda about the "russia hoax"

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Yes! And when talking to friends offline, I’m sometimes a surprised at just where we go from being politically aligned to them having glommed onto some horrible right wing podcast bro nonsense that if you start pulling at the threads a little, just entirely unravels