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You can't be serious referencing that hack, MacLean. Too much nonsense in her "QANON conspiracy for the Left" writing but this paragraph from the Amazon page i

You can't be serious referencing that hack, MacLean. Too much nonsense in her "QANON conspiracy for the Left" writing but this paragraph from the Amazon page is illustrative: > Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. What planet is this lady on that she looks at the Republican Party of the last 8 years and sees the effective culmination of a libertarian plot? Trump's presidency can be called a lot of things but presenting it as a "triumph for libertarian ideals" is absolutely absurd. I almost feel bad for her, she published that dross in mid-2017 and probably started working on it 5 years earlier when it could at least plausibly have been claimed to be accurate but then Trump got elected and showed her claim that libertarianism was any sort of dominant belief system in the Republican party is an absolute farce. Trump was pure statist protectionism in his economics and Pence did diddly squat overall. Libertarianism is utterly dead in the Western World, both the left and right are completely onboard with the government controlling or regulating as much of the economy as possible. In regards to Australia, the govt literally banned Qatar airlines recently from opening routes to Aus because the pollies are in bed with Qantas.....how is that remotely libertarian? May as well blame Catholic fundamentalism for the world we live in as Libertarianism, both are completely dead ideologies with no support at any level of power.

dools 3y ago
Have you read it or have you only read libertarian rebuttals of it? I found that book because when Trump was ascendant I all of a sudden had this bizarre realisation that libertarians were supporting fascists. That book made a lot of outwardly contradictory concepts make a whole lot of sense. Libertarians don’t think of themselves as fascists but fascism or more accurately neo-feudalism is the purest expression of libertarianism. The most apt tweet I remember seeing on the topic was (paraphrasing) “no matter how you look at it libertarianism boils down to: the role of the state is to protect me from my slaves”.

dools 3y ago

Have you read it or have you only read libertarian rebuttals of it? I found that book because when Trump was ascendant I all of a sudden had this bizarre realisation that libertarians were supporting fascists. That book made a lot of outwardly contradictory concepts make a whole lot of sense. Libertarians don’t think of themselves as fascists but fascism or more accurately neo-feudalism is the purest expression of libertarianism. The most apt tweet I remember seeing on the topic was (paraphrasing) “no matter how you look at it libertarianism boils down to: the role of the state is to protect me from my slaves”.