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We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

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It’s the corruption, stupid.

We still have time to mess this up!

White supremacy is terrorism.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

All hail the time of the bunny!

The willow is too close to the house.

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Jesus watching the most hateful people claiming to be his followers

Republicans want to make it harder to vote and easier for them to cheat.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

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Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls 2 years from now.

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You are here: Home / Archives for Politics / Glibertarianism

Glibertarianism

Monday Morning Open Thread: Ground *Down* Day (Every Damned Day)

by Anne Laurie|  February 3, 20257:46 am| 258 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republican Venality

Monday Morning Open Thread:  Ground *Down* Day

(Walt Handelsman via GoComics.com)

Thank all the gods for the warriors who still fight back:

Republicans came for Social Security in 2005 — we stopped them. They came for the ACA in 2017 — we stopped them.

Now they’ve come for your PRIVATE Social Security and Medicaid payment data to take health care — we WILL stop them again!

Share YOUR Story:https://t.co/paFvALd8ZJ pic.twitter.com/JnOyzspnk2

— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) February 1, 2025


Doing something!

Jasmine Crockett: "The problem is that Americans thought it was okay to take a full fledged criminal and make him the President of the US and then they want to act aghast when he does criminal things. Let me tell you, we have a thug in charge of the US and if we don't wake up we may not have a US"

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) February 2, 2025 at 3:31 PM

The Republicans, on the other hand: Mammary glands on a male bovine.

I dunno, Mitch. Why didn't you end his political career after J6 when you had it in your power?

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— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 7:56 PM

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#MoscowMitch, meet Musk/Trump’s Manlings of the Hour!

The men carrying out Musk's coup are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran.
Make them famous. And, eventually, when possible, arrest them and charge them with multiple felonies. www.wired.com/story/elon-m…

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— Craig Calcaterra (@craigcalcaterra.bsky.social) February 2, 2025 at 2:08 PM

They’re (no doubt) doing amazing jobs, and being recognized more and more:

… WIRED has identified six young men—all apparently between the ages of 19 and 24, according to public databases, their online presences, and other records—who have little to no government experience and are now playing critical roles in Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project, tasked by executive order with “modernizing Federal technology and software to maximize governmental efficiency and productivity.” The engineers all hold nebulous job titles within DOGE, and at least one appears to be working as a volunteer.

The engineers are Akash Bobba, Edward Coristine, Luke Farritor, Gautier Cole Killian, Gavin Kliger, and Ethan Shaotran. None have responded to requests for comment from WIRED. Representatives from OPM, GSA, and DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

The six men are one part of the broader project of Musk allies assuming key government positions. Already, Musk’s lackeys—including more senior staff from xAI, Tesla, and the Boring Company—have taken control of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and General Services Administration (GSA), and have gained access to the Treasury Department’s payment system, potentially allowing him access to a vast range of sensitive information about tens of millions of citizens, businesses, and more. On Sunday, CNN reported that DOGE personnel attempted to improperly access classified information and security systems at the US Agency for International Development and that top USAID security officials who thwarted the attempt were subsequently put on leave. The Associated Press reported that DOGE personnel had indeed accessed classified material..

Bobba has attended UC Berkeley, where he was in the prestigious Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology program. According to a copy of his now-deleted LinkedIn obtained by WIRED, Bobba was an investment engineering intern at the Bridgewater Associates hedge fund as of last spring and was previously an intern at both Meta and Palantir. He was a featured guest on a since-deleted podcast with Aman Manazir, an engineer who interviews engineers about how they landed their dream jobs, where he talked about those experiences last June.

Coristine, as WIRED previously reported, appears to have recently graduated from high school and to have been enrolled at Northeastern University. According to a copy of his résumé obtained by WIRED, he spent three months at Neuralink, Musk’s brain-computer interface company, last summer…

Farritor, who per sources has a working GSA email address, is a former intern at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, and currently a Thiel Fellow after, according to his LinkedIn, dropping out of the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. While in school, he was part of an award-winning team that deciphered portions of an ancient Greek scroll.

Kliger, whose LinkedIn lists him as a special adviser to the director of OPM and who is listed in internal records reviewed by WIRED as a special adviser to the director for information technology, attended UC Berkeley until 2020; most recently, according to his LinkedIn, he worked for the AI company Databricks. His Substack includes a post titled “The Curious Case of Matt Gaetz: How the Deep State Destroys Its Enemies,” as well as another titled “Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense: The Warrior Washington Fears.”

Killian, also known as Cole Killian, has a working email associated with DOGE, where he is currently listed as a volunteer, according to internal records reviewed by WIRED. According to a copy of his now-deleted résumé obtained by WIRED, he attended McGill University through at least 2021 and graduated high school in 2019. An archived copy of his now-deleted personal website indicates that he worked as an engineer at Jump Trading, which specializes in algorithmic and high-frequency financial trades.

Shaotran told Business Insider in September that he was a senior at Harvard studying computer science and also the founder of an OpenAI-backed startup, Energize AI. Shaotran was the runner-up in a hackathon held by xAI, Musk’s AI company. In the Business Insider article, Shaotran says he received a $100,000 grant from OpenAI to build his scheduling assistant, Spark…

I wouldn’t hire any of these trust-fund glibertarian kiddies to water my garden for a week, but then I’m a Cynic.

Thinking of the young air national guardsman who illegally shared classified material on Discord to impress people he played video games with online.
If he had waited a few years, he could’ve been placed high in the Office of Personnel Management, downloading US secrets with White House permission.

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— Nicholas Grossman (@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 12:42 AM

Monday Morning Open Thread:  Ground *Down* Day 1

(Clay Jones via GoComics.com)

Monday Morning Open Thread: Ground *Down* Day (Every Damned Day)Post + Comments (258)

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Trump Is Objectively Pro-Criminal

by Anne Laurie|  January 21, 20259:44 pm| 79 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Trump Crime Cartel

This is the guy who started the Silk Road dark website which was used the facilitate major global drug trafficking. Was serving life in prison. But when Trump wanted the Libertarian Party endorsement he promised them this. He never heard of Ulbricht. Even spelled his name wrong.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 7:06 PM

The only thing Trump loves almost as much as money is hanging around with monsters & sociopaths. Feeling that he’s one of the Made Men is probably as close to pure excitement as the old felon is capable of reaching.

"The scum that worked to convict him," as President Trump puts it, were the FBI, federal prosecutors and the GOP-controlled Supreme Court (which denied his ultimate appeal.)

— Dan Murphy (@bungdan.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 7:24 PM

annnnnnnd there's the Ross Ulbricht pardon.
Even if you've got mixed feelings about Silk Road, his sentencing was based, in part, on evidence that he ordered the murder of an witness, an informant, and three others.
www.wired.com/2017/05/silk…

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— Justin Ling (@justinling.ca) January 21, 2025 at 7:34 PM

Just a cherry on the sh*t sundae of his Jan6 insurrectionist releases…

All these women who turned in January 6 terrorists are in danger tonight

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— Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 11:55 PM

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Sergeant Gonell @sergeantaqgo.bsky.social sent me this picture. This is his call log. Each call is an automated Dept of "Justice" notification saying "The defendant you testified against is being released from the dept of corrections."
Each defendant assaulted him.

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— Harry Dunn (@libradunn1.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 10:15 AM

This is the kid I was talking about. And if I'm in his shoes I probably don't feel great about the prospect of the Justice Department keeping me safe under Trumphttps://t.co/sWRoWt3bkf

— The okayest poster there is (@ok_post_guy) January 21, 2025

Sympathy for the devils!

REPORTER: You would agree it's never acceptable to assault police officers?
TRUMP: Sure
REPORTER: Among those you pardoned is a guy who used a stun gun on a police officer. Why does he deserve a pardon?
TRUMP: Well, I don't know

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) January 21, 2025 at 5:40 PM

Jake Chansley, the Arizona actor who called himself the QAnon Shaman and who became one of the most recognized J6 figures, said tonight in a post on X that he received a pardon from Trump. He added: "NOW I AM GONNA BUY SOME MOTHA FU*KIN GUNS!!!"

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— Nick Martin (@nick-martin.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 9:32 PM

Tuesday Evening Open Thread: Trump Is Objectively Pro-CriminalPost + Comments (79)

Late Night Open Thread: Down, Amongst the Libertarians

by Anne Laurie|  May 29, 20242:43 am| 33 Comments

This post is in: Elections 2024, Glibertarianism, Trumpery

Don't blame me I voted for Ben Dover https://t.co/VgKPT11dgO

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) May 26, 2024

He's the one scrambling for that 3% because he knows he's at his ceiling and Biden isn't. https://t.co/pFtpOESliv

— Alito Vexillological Apologetics Society (@agraybee) May 26, 2024

I guarantee the only thing the Mises Caucus learns from this is they need stricter security at the next convention https://t.co/0c6xT6BDMn

— Environmental Services Weedle (@PartyWurmple) May 26, 2024

Even the Terminally Savvy John Heilemann, now at Puck, feels free to dump on TFG — “Donald Trump and R.F.K. Jr.’s cringe-inducing, partly hilarious, and ultimately failed forays into Libertarian Land”:

… Taking place at the Washington Hilton—best known as the site of another legit shitshow, the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner—and bearing “Become Ungovernable” as its official theme, the Libertarian convention unfolded over four days, the last of which, Sunday, revolved around the selection of the party’s presidential nominee and was televised live by C-SPAN. On the (I hope and trust entirely safe) assumption that no one reading Impolitic was batty enough to watch much, if any, of the proceedings live, I offer this account…

The truth is, both Trump and Kennedy had thoroughly beclowned themselves with their forays into Libertarian Land long before Oliver finally, blessedly, brought the convention to a close. The Trump incursion was billed by his people as another in a series of high-profile attempts—the meeting with the Teamsters in January, the visit to SneakerCon in February, the rally in the South Bronx last week—to court voters beyond the confines of the MAGA base.

Instead, the appearance turned into a uniquely Trumpian spectacle, in which the former president was roundly booed, heckled, and mocked by the delegates (some in t-shirts reading TRUMP/FAUCI 2024: GIVE US ANOTHER SHOT), prompting him to march through a series of increasingly desperate moves to try to quell the hostility he encountered: first, gratuitous pandering (“I’ve been indicted by the government on 91 different things, so if I wasn’t a libertarian before, I sure as hell am a libertarian now”); then, attempted favor-trading (vows to appoint a Libertarian to his cabinet and to commute the life sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the infamous dark web drug clearinghouse Silk Road); and, finally, frustrated mockery of the very people he was there to court: “I’m asking for the Libertarian Party’s endorsement, … [but] only do that if you want to win. If you want to lose, don’t do that. Keep getting your three percent every four years.”

The pièce de résistance, however, didn’t come until the next day, when the party chair ruled Trump ineligible even to compete for the party’s nomination because his campaign had failed to file the necessary paperwork. (In an impressive showing of grassroots strength, he still received six write-in votes in the first round, five more than Stormy Daniels, Denali—the cat mayor of Talkeetna, Alaska—and both Sean Ono Lennon and Afroman.) Undeterred as usual by either reality or the words that had issued forth from his own pie-hole the night before, Trump attempted to explain the pratfall with a post on Truth Social: “The reason I didn’t file paperwork for the Libertarian Nomination, which I would have absolutely gotten if I wanted it (as everyone could tell by the enthusiasm of the Crowd last night!), was the fact that, as the Republican Nominee, I am not allowed to have the Nomination of another Party.”…

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Difficult to imagine as it might be, R.F.K. Jr.’s face-plant in front of America’s third-largest political party was, in its way, more embarrassing—and potentially consequential. Unlike Trump, Kennedy has been flirting with a bid for the Libertarian nomination for more than a year, starting even before he abandoned his erstwhile primary challenge to Joe Biden and quit the Democratic Party. In the months since then, he’s met at least twice with Libertarian Party chair Angela McArdle. And no wonder. The biggest challenge currently facing Kennedy (or any independent/third-party presidential candidate in any year) is ballot access.

To date, the R.F.K. campaign has secured a place on the ballot in just six states, though it claims to have nine more moving through the pipeline. But the Libertarian line is already established in 38 states, making the party’s nomination valuable to Kennedy on many levels, including his argument for inclusion in next month’s Biden-Trump debate…

… Kennedy delivered his own address to the convention on Friday (drawing fewer jeers than Trump but still receiving a reception no sentient being would have interpreted as warm). Meanwhile, his elusive running mate, Nicole Shanahan, was slated to address the delegates on Sunday; and when Kennedy’s name was placed in nomination that morning—an ostensible surprise—the candidate was at the ready with a warm acceptance of what he described in a social media post as an “unexpected honor” and a “high point of my campaign.”

A few minutes later, however, first-round voting began and WHAM-O—the Libertarians slammed the door right in Kennedy’s kisser, giving him just 19 votes, or precisely 2.07 percent of the total. Almost immediately, Shanahan’s convention appearance was canceled without explanation. And with that, the dream of a Cato Institute-sponsored Camelot came crashing to the ground…

LP chair McArdle said she had meant to block off chairs last night but was called out of the room to be told to block off chairs, and she said she was accountable for the chaos that ensued. “I’m going to say that error was on us.” https://t.co/qsQkIHWUPo

— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) May 26, 2024

Ron Paul: “A democracy is nothing more than a dictatorship of the majority.” The audience applauded. https://t.co/JL67SSb3Ig

— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) May 26, 2024

Story: https://t.co/UERd4NdWtX

— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) May 27, 2024

Gift link:

… Oliver is supported by the Classic Liberal Caucus, a left-leaning faction. After the last standing contender was knocked out, Oliver won with 60 percent of the vote against “none of the above.” The contest had fewer than 900 delegates voting.

The final contender was Michael Rectenwald, a former New York University professor who faced backlash and left his job after he invited controversial far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos to speak to his class. Rectenwald, endorsed by the right-wing Mises Caucus that had taken over the party in 2022, had been the front-runner for most of the day. But Oliver, who was in some ways a protest vote against the ruling caucus, ultimately surpassed Rectenwald in their final head-to-head round.

“In a weird way, this is a microcosm of where the country is headed,” said Dave Smith, a comic and Mises Caucus leader. “Things are so polarized.”…

Oliver, an openly gay man and sales account executive, ran in the 2022 Georgia Senate race against Raphael G. Warnock, the Democratic incumbent, and Herschel Walker, the Republican challenger, and won 2 percent of the vote, denying a victory to the two major party candidates and leading to a runoff…

Senator Mike Lee delivers a super cringe speech, desperately trying to fit in with the libertarians at the Libertarian National Convention.

He babbles about his Constitution shoes and then tries to do a Trump impression.

They boo him.

?? pic.twitter.com/iw3EKbYGBl

— Art Candee ???? (@ArtCandee) May 26, 2024

Only a paid agitator would boo Trump at a party convention. https://t.co/Sn4cqgQ0XO pic.twitter.com/0mTpSRWbhN

— River_Tam (@RiverTamYDN) May 26, 2024

Trump could take a dump in Mike Lee's mouth while standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue and Mike Lee would still endorse him for president. https://t.co/yhcqGwCDXM

— Ragnarok Lobster ?? (@eclecticbrotha) May 26, 2024

The MAGA cope after that disastrous Trump speech in front of the Libertarians is unreal.

?????????????? pic.twitter.com/vLYKM6qKfo

— Art Candee ???? (@ArtCandee) May 26, 2024

Rallies in NJ and NY where he has no chance, then the Libertarian Convention.

The Deep State plant in the Trump campaign is working out nicely so far.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 26, 2024

Late Night Open Thread: Down, Amongst the LibertariansPost + Comments (33)

Dank Grey Dawn Open Thread: ‘Becoming Ungovernable’ At the Libertarian Con(vention)

by Anne Laurie|  May 26, 20244:42 am| 117 Comments

This post is in: Elections 2024, Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Schadenfreude

Trump is speaking at the Libertarian National Convention this weekend.

Someone just made a motion to tell “Donald Trump to go f*ck himself”

The crowd cheered and broke out in applause.

Do Libertarians hate the criminal candidate as much as Democrates and independents? pic.twitter.com/bBdC4n3Uk2

— BlueDream (@58bugeye) May 25, 2024

This year’s Libertarian nominating convention is being held in Washington DC, so TFG’s handlers had the bright idea of sending him to speak before a pre-screened crowd with which (they assumed) he would have much in common. It’s true that we all joke about libertarians being ‘Republicans who want to smoke weed’, but as with any other schismatic cult, it’s very important to observe the exact contours of the separatist ritual.

Per Will Weissert, the Associated Press — “Trump, accustomed to friendly crowds, confronts repeated booing during Libertarian convention speech”:

Donald Trump was booed repeatedly while addressing the Libertarian Party National Convention on Saturday night, with many in the crowd shouting insults and decrying him for things like his COVID-19 policies, running up towering federal deficits and lying about his political record.

When he took the stage, many jeered while some supporters clad in “Make America Great” hats and T-shirts cheered and chanted “USA! USA!” It was a rare moment of Trump coming face-to-face with open detractors, which is highly unusual for someone accustomed to staging rallies in front of ever-adoring crowds.

Libertarians, who prioritize small government and individual freedoms, are often skeptical of the former president, and his invitation to address the convention has divided the party. Trump tried to make light of that by referring to the four criminal indictments against him and joking, “If I wasn’t a Libertarian before, I sure as hell am a Libertarian now.”

Trump tried to praise “fierce champions of freedom in this room” and called President Joe Biden a “tyrant” and the “worst president in the history of the United States,” prompting some in the audience to scream back: “That’s you.”

As the insults continued, Trump eventually hit back, saying “you don’t want to win” and suggesting that some Libertarians want to “keep getting your 3% every four years.”…

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Despite the raucous atmosphere, Trump continued to press on with his speech, saying he’d come “to extend a hand of friendship” in common opposition to Biden. That prompted a chant of “We want Trump!” from supporters, but more cries of “End the Fed!” — a common refrain from Libertarians who oppose the Federal Reserve. One person who held up a sign reading “No wannabe dictators!” was dragged away by security.

Trump tried to win over the crowd by pledging to include a Libertarian in his Cabinet, but many in the crowd hissed in disbelief. The former president did get a big cheer when he promised to commute the life sentence of the convicted founder of the drug-selling website Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht, and potentially release him on time served.

That was designed to energize Libertarian activists who believe government investigators overreached in building their case against Silk Road, and who generally oppose criminal drug policies more broadly. Ulbricht’s case was much-discussed during the Libertarian convention, and many of the hundreds in the crowd for Trump’s speech hoisted “Free Ross” signs and chanted the phrase as he spoke…

Trump had 4 years in office to pardon or commute the sentence of this drug trafficker if he wanted to. But he didn’t. But tonight he wants some libertarian votes and he will promise anyone anything to keep his own ass out of prison. https://t.co/hapEwHDZ4n

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 26, 2024

I hope Mr. Ulbricht wasn’t getting his hopes up, because even if by some evil fluke the GOP does recapture the Oval Office, Trump is not a man who forgets or forgives slights against him.

Apparently the invitation to Trump was approved by party Chair Angela McArdle (no relation to the blog’s favorite chewtoy that I can find)…

McCardle is a Mises caucus freak who has not only called for an end to all aid to Ukraine, but insisted Ukraine should cede all territory occupied by Russia in the interest of “peace”. Despicable person. https://t.co/wbty3uTyQR

— Jean-Michel Connard 좆됐어 (@torriangray) May 25, 2024

Commentor Jay helpfully shared a long Nitter thread from Pekka Kallioniemi (#Vatnick Soup) if you want more granular detail.

Angela McArdle is a MAGA Republican masquerading as an “antiwar libertarian”. Her views have nothing to do with traditional libertarianism, and @GrandTurion has even popularized a term for this type of actors – Kremlintarians.

Of course the Trump campaign accepts an invitation to speak at the Libertarian Convention then tries to astroturf in a bunch of MAGA people to pose as fake libertarians, just like he used non-union workers to pose as union in MI, & non-Bronx people turfed into the Bronx.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 25, 2024

This Trump supporter called Libertarians “entitled” because they want her to move from her seat in the front where delegates should be seated. They did not take that well and argued with her. She eventually moved. pic.twitter.com/FzimRWHPOO

— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) May 25, 2024

The Libertarians appear to have basically taken the front several rows back from the Trump supporters.

Here, they chant “@Free_Ross!” while the Trump supporters appear to mostly sit and watch.

You can literally see the dividing line in the room based on the chanting. pic.twitter.com/VCSxhQd6fA

— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) May 25, 2024

Trump gets mercilessly serenaded with chants of "Hypocrite! Hypocrite!" by Libertarians. pic.twitter.com/YdspKQH15G

— Bill Madden (@maddenifico) May 26, 2024

This may come as a shock but Libertarians *fucking hate* the NRA, considering it the domain of old Fudds who talk a hard game but fold to the government when they actually push restrictions

The joke among them is that the NRA's initials stand for "Negotiating Rights Away" https://t.co/433p92n6By

— Vaquera Elisa (@BoxElderDust) May 26, 2024

Trump commits to put a Libertarian in his cabinet and then goes off prompter and starts making fun of the Libertarian party after they boo him.

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) May 26, 2024

Trump is promising them everything now and they’re still booing him. He gets pissed and snaps at them again. pic.twitter.com/nsG9uAeeF4

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 26, 2024

he can’t help him himself from going off script https://t.co/KeWuQW8SED

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) May 26, 2024

Trump is sprinting through this speech as hecklers shout at him.

“I’ve come to extend my hand…” Trump, sparking another heated round of boos and “We want Trump” chants.

“We should not be fighting each other,” Trump says. “You have to combine with us.”

More boos.

— Steve Contorno (@scontorno) May 26, 2024

Telling the libertarians what they should do is an interesting move. I’m not sure anyone explained to him what a libertarian is.

— Karen Leavitt 🌻 🇺🇦 🇮🇱 (@kleavitt) May 26, 2024

Things got heated in the crowd during Trump’s speech at the Libertarian convention tonight. At one point, CNN’s @aaronpellish saw someone punch a Trump supporter wearing a MAGA hat. He was escorted out by security.

— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) May 26, 2024

Nor are TFG’s MAGAts the sort of people who put grievances behind them:

Imagine the audacity of libertarians wanting to attend the speech of candidates who accept invitations to their own convention. Outrageous! pic.twitter.com/y6ClhrDiNl

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 25, 2024

It was not difficult to predict that Trump’s speech would not be greeted with the usual credulous media-friendly awe:

Even Libertarians know that Trump is a fraud.

I hope their anti-Trump movement continues to grow. pic.twitter.com/SPSRMQ5dK4

— CB— (@ConservBlue2020) May 25, 2024

Secret Service agents are confiscating the rubber chickens the pro-RFK Jr super PAC handed out to attendees to disrupt Trump’s speech tonight at the Libertarian convention.

“No lighters, no water bottles, no noisy chickens,” one agent yelled out to people in line. pic.twitter.com/IVcUHzm9mb

— Kate Sullivan (@KateSullivanDC) May 25, 2024

Previously, on ‘Rage of Our Lives’…

Right-wing broadcaster announces that the squeaky rubber chickens libertarians had on the convention floor are not allowed in the ballroom where Trump is speaking. pic.twitter.com/62scfdfS6K

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 25, 2024

During the Libertarian National Convention, a member of the party says Trump can "go fuck himself." Another member calls for a motion to vacate Libertarian Party Chair Angela McArdle.

Trump is scheduled to speak at the convention on Saturday evening. pic.twitter.com/0Bhu0w9nzz

— michael (@WolfKingProphet) May 25, 2024

I’m at the Libertarian presidential debate at their nominating convention. The candidates were asked if the covid vax was safe and effective. Charles Ballay, the only doctor on the stage, said the vaccines worked and delegates booed. pic.twitter.com/OV3mPRIP4k

— Meryl Kornfield (@MerylKornfield) May 25, 2024

Dueling mobile billboards attacking RFK Jr. ahead of his Libertarian convention remarks: MAGA Inc. hitting him on guns, the environment and taxes, MoveOn highlighting his abortion views and calling him and Trump "extremist." The two ads were parked side-by-side in DC today. pic.twitter.com/exExkXRNRV

— Aaron Pellish (@aaronpellish) May 24, 2024

Slavery is when you are asked, not forced, to wear a mask to help slow the spread of a virus that killed millions. https://t.co/2l1Wjp8dns

— Jean-Michel Connard 좆됐어 (@torriangray) May 25, 2024

LOL! Vivek Ramaswamy is getting BOOED while speaking at the Libertarian National Convention. Libertarians are crazy, but even they see Ramaswamy for the grifter that he is! pic.twitter.com/dLqEOn5Mrb

— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) May 25, 2024

As the con wraps up Sunday afternoon, we leave the Capital-L Libertarians to their ancient rituals…

Nobody:

Absolutely no one:

Libertarians:

pic.twitter.com/qX6cJvYCdv

— Arlen Parsa (@arlenparsa) May 24, 2024

Dank Grey Dawn Open Thread: ‘Becoming Ungovernable’ At the Libertarian Con(vention)Post + Comments (117)

Sunday Schadenfreude Open Thread: Market Forces Finish Freedomworks

by Anne Laurie|  May 12, 20246:38 pm| 48 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, Republicans in Disarray!, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You, Schadenfreude

the market has spoken

FreedomWorks Is Closing — And Blaming Trump https://t.co/Z4RdevE2pH via @politico

— John Cole (@Johngcole) May 8, 2024

Politico says “The libertarian organization couldn’t survive the populist shift in the Republican Party”:

FreedomWorks, the once-swaggering conservative organization that helped turn tea party protesters into a national political force, is shutting down, according to its president, a casualty of the ideological split in a Republican Party dominated by former President Donald Trump.

“We’re dissolved,” said the group’s president, Adam Brandon. “It’s effective immediately.”

FreedomWorks’ board of directors voted unanimously on Tuesday to dissolve the organization, Brandon said. Wednesday will be the last workday for the group’s roughly 25 employees, though staffers will continue to receive paychecks and health care benefits for the next few months.

The development brings to a close a period of turmoil for the organization. FreedomWorks laid off 40 percent of its staff in March of 2023, and as a result of a drop in fundraising, its total revenue has declined by roughly half, to about $8 million, since 2022, Brandon said…

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After Trump took control of the conservative movement, Brandon said, a “huge gap” opened up between the libertarian principles of FreedomWorks leadership and the MAGA-style populism of its members. FreedomWorks leaders, for example, still believed in free trade, small government and a robust merit-based immigration system. Increasingly, however, those positions clashed with a Trump-aligned membership who called for tariffs on imported goods and a wall to keep immigrants out but were willing, in Brandon’s view, to remain silent as Trump’s administration added $8 trillion to the national debt.

This same split was creating headaches in other parts of the organization as well. “Our staff became divided into MAGA and Never Trump factions,” Brandon said in an internal document reviewed by POLITICO Magazine. It also impacted fundraising.

“Now I think donors are saying, ‘What are you doing for Trump today?’” said Paul Beckner, a member of FreedomWorks’ board. “And we’re not for or against Trump. We’re for Trump if he’s doing what we agree with, and we’re against him if he’s not. And so I think we’ve seen an erosion of conservative donors.”…

In an interview with POLITICO Magazine last September, an ex-FreedomWorks employee claimed that the organization under Brandon’s leadership had turned its back on its values while Trump was in office; during this period, for example, the organization issued tweets spreading election conspiracies and deflecting criticism of the Florida legislation that came to be known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. “He let a bunch of right-wing nutjobs turn FreedomWorks into a MAGA mouthpiece,” the former FreedomWorks staffer said...

In the midst of this turmoil, FreedomWorks launched an effort last fall to rebrand itself as a more centrist organization, one that could target the independent voters that its leaders believe would be more receptive to libertarian ideals. But the effort failed to get traction, Brandon said, largely because the independent voters viewed FreedomWorks as a right-wing group. As a result, Brandon and the board began discussing the possibility of shutting down FreedomWorks altogether…

Brandon said he has plans to launch a new organization focused on politically independent members of the millennial and Gen Z generations, whom he thinks will be receptive to libertarian policies. “If we started something new, you could build it from the ground up,” Brandon said. “You could build a brand that matches what these folks want, and you could get away around all the baggage [associated with the FreedomWorks brand].”

There will always be a market for artfully rewritten exegeses of ‘I got mine, forget you‘, said the professional Libertarian marketeer, hopefully…

Sunday Schadenfreude Open Thread: Market Forces Finish FreedomworksPost + Comments (48)

Bedtime Reading for the Young & Simple: An American Education: Notes from UATX

by Anne Laurie|  February 20, 20248:02 pm| 63 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Excellent Links, Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift

this is transcendent honestly https://t.co/UdhCDRAMDQ pic.twitter.com/ZYu3KE9iT6

— katie (@focusfronting) February 19, 2024

There are WOKE DRAGONS under the bed, but our WHITE KNIGHTS will vanquish them for you (and a moderate fee)…

Remember Bari Weis and her proudly, avowedly University of Austin? Noah Rawlings, at The New Inquiry, goes “Inside the “Forbidden Courses” at the billionaire-backed University of Austin, the campus of the “anti woke” commentariat”:

A revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the country’s southern reaches—in the Texas Hill Country, in the city of Austin, where already technologists and venture capitalists had swarmed, drawn by the absence of income tax and the looseness of labor regulations, pulled by the mild zoning laws and the natural beauty and the food trucks and the good vibes. Austin, because it was “a hub for builders, mavericks, and creators.” Here a new university: the University of Austin, or UATX.

Around this idea journalists, historians, technologists, and financiers had assembled. People like Bari Weiss, Joe Lonsdale, Joshua Katz, Peter Boghossian, and more. They saw a void in American higher ed. There was not, they asserted, enough free speech. Where, they wondered, was the pursuit of truth? Nowadays, those things were hard to find, but they would be abundant at UATX, an institution to be built from the bottom up, through sheer will and courage—and some backing from billionaires. The Yales, the Stanfords, the UChicagos had been overrun by hordes of “diversocrats” and woke elites. At UATX there would be none.

Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to “the atrocities of the 20th century.” And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Police—sour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to “free and open inquiry.”

To build a university you need money and time to raise it. But the founders were eager. They were ambitious, impatient. They wanted students and classes now. So in the summers of 2022 and ’23, UATX established weeklong programs where students at other institutions could attend seminars and lectures by “world-class scholars and knowledge creators”—a sort of anti-woke summer camp. Title: Forbidden Courses…

THE University of Austin is not in Austin. Not yet. It’s 200 miles northeast, in Dallas, on an office complex owned by Mr. Harlan Crow. “Old Parkland,” the complex is called. Crow, a conservative billionaire who recently made the news for funneling thousands of dollars in undisclosed gifts to Justice Clarence Thomas and his family, gives money to UATX, too. He also rents out rooms in Old Parkland to the nascent university, at what UATX founder Peter Boghossian called “a generous rate.” I would later encounter the rich Texan at several UATX lectures, squinting and smiling in preppy athleisure.

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Crow is a savvy investor, from a family of savvy investors. (His father, Trammell Crow, was thought to be the largest private landlord in the US.) He invests not only in real estate but ideology. He’s donated to the conservative magazine The National Review, conservative thinktank The Witherspoon Institute, and at least two powerful libertarian organizations started with funds from Charles Koch—The Institute For Justice and The Cato Institute. If Crow is putting money behind UATX, it can be inferred that he believes the school will promote the same values as other recipients of his patronage—privatizing social services, lambasting attempts to increase sexual and racial diversity in education and the workplace—and will lead to the same effect—maintaining power in the hands of wealthy white men…

The students’ demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room. The way these percentages diverge from national higher education averages should tell you something about what kind of intellectual community UATX is building. In practice, UATX is recruiting a student body whose racial and gender makeup resembles a pre-civil rights university.

Pano Kanelos, president, stood up. It was time for the opening remarks. Our chatter lulled, and he began to speak in gentle, benevolent tones. He told us that we weren’t starting a university; we were a university. This is what a university looks like: people coming together for conversations, much like the ones we’d been having over our complimentary chicken dinners. “Dia-logue,” he said. “From the Greek, logos.” Two rational beings, engaged in rational discourse. He smiled. We smiled. And with little further ado, he introduced Peter, whom the other students had not yet had the good fortune of meeting. Peter, Pano told us, was “kicking butt in the righteous name of freedom.”

Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”

What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions…

… I speak of the school’s true target audience, of the young neoconservatives who seemed to think trans athletes and immigrants were the greatest threat to the Union, whose high school tuition had cost 4x a degree from a public university, who nodded at UATX speakers with graduate degrees from Berkeley or UChicago as they railed against “elites” and “elite culture” on the office complex of a billionaire. At lunch or between class sessions, you could hear them say interesting things. Consider the remarks of a single afternoon. One student, bravely reviving the pseudoscience of physiognomy, said that if your index finger was longer than your ring finger, that probably meant you were gay. Someone else claimed that 20% of Gen Z identified as LGTBQ. “There’s no way a society can evolve if 20% of its population is gay,” another student added, shaking his head. “Evolve,” in this case, seemed to mean “stay the same” or “turn back the historical clock.” Later, yet another statistic was cited: “7% of France is Muslim.” “Yeah,” a peer replied, “that’s a problem because they don’t want to integrate.”

The subtext of these remarks was simple. The social capital, political influence, and access to wealth that was formerly the uncontested and exclusive prerogative of straight white men was now under question. They felt it at school. They saw it in the media. They were here, at UATX, to live out a dying dream, to vent their frustration at its loss, and to help one another cling to it as long as possible. They recommended internships in finance and tech to each other. They recommended books. “Have you read The Strange Death of Europe?” one student asked, referring to Douglas Murray’s 2017 political text which propagates the ethnonationalist Great Replacement Theory. “That’s a great book,” he heard in reply.

THE guest speakers and founders of UATX were the ideal figures to strengthen these students’ ideas—or to indoctrinate the unconverted. Each evening after class we would congregate in the Debate Chamber of Old Parkland to heed them…

First up: Kevin D. Williamson, Writer in Residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, wearing a salt and pepper beard, a pink shirt, a blue tie. He riffed on the topic of journalism for 30 minutes. He enjoined us to read the bible and to “get yourself an 8th-grade grammar book” instead of a journalism degree. He suggested, usefully, that we “learn something about something.” He threw in a few zingers. For instance, The Washington Post published “boring, dry, sterile” articles. And Bernie Sanders was not “as crazy as he seems,” he was actually “a lot crazier than he seems.” Williamson shared some inspiring historical factoids, like, “the people who wrote our constitution, these people didn’t have law degrees,” forgetting the 32 framers who were lawyers. (Ralph, back in the hotel room that same night, would ruefully describe the whole thing as “a little too irreverent.”) Harlan Crow was in the audience with us that evening, wearing a pink quarter-zip sweater and a red face, chuckling at Williamson’s tedious jokes. At the end of the talk, when some students became aware of Crow’s presence, the excitement in the room was palpable. He embodied, after all, peak success…

On the third day, we heard from Richard Hanania, who is the author of the book The Origins of Woke—blurbed by billionaire Peter Thiel as showing that “we need … government violence to exorcise the diversity demon.” Hanania is also the author of blatantly white supremacist articles, as HuffPost reported not long after I attended UATX. Writing under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste” in the early 2010s, Hanania advocated ethnic cleansing and forced sterilizations based on IQ tests. When HuffPost disclosed this at the beginning of August, Hanania claimed that his views had since changed—as would any neo-Nazi who cares about his upcoming book’s sales. The thing is, recent writing under Hanania’s own name is no less fascistic. He is the author of tweets supporting eugenics and calling for “more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people.” …

DESPITE UATX’s claims of ideological uniformity in higher ed, the regressive social politics found at the school are not much different from those you might hear as students trickle out of a data structures or financial investments class at a major university. But UATX is a “genuinely safe space,” as Weiss put it, in the sense that it isolates students from the inconvenient opposition of other peers and professors. It is a monoculture of free-market faith which provides, in the end, a venue for young people seeking success in tech and finance to network and to fortify the rightwing ideas that brought them here in the first place. On November 8, UATX announced that it had received certification from the State of Texas and would welcome its first graduating class in the fall of 2024. This month it hosted a prospective student’s weekend. While the university still lacks national accreditation, which typically takes at least five years to obtain, it is now able to grant degrees. But will the university actually get off the ground? Can its rightwing summer camp actually evolve into a four-year degree? UATX is more viable than you may think. The university’s 2021 tax returns declared over $10 million in assets. This fall, Pano Kanelos stated that UATX had raised around $200 million, or 80% of the school’s $250 million fundraising goal. That number is significantly larger than the endowment of comparably small schools, like Antioch College ($49.5 million), American Baptist College, ($11.2 million), and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts ($4.6 million)…

If anything is novel about UATX’s model, it is the creation of a rightwing monoculture in the form of a university, rather than a thinktank or policy institute. The university model carries certain advantages. Major investment firms and tech companies have long aimed recruiting efforts at select schools based on reputation and social connections. UATX could present rightwing business leaders with a new, particularly convenient recruitment scenario: they would know in advance the political commitments of the student body, making it that much easier to maintain a conservative culture within their companies. While blatantly reactionary universities do already exist, they tend to be religious or obscure or both. UATX replaces religion with a gospel of technocapitalism. It wards off obscurity by inviting noisy online extremists, like Hanania, and courting the favor of high-profile rich men, like Lonsdale, Andreessen, and Crow…

By all means, read the whole thing, for a panorama of unintentional humor among the ‘intellectuals’. I am, for some reason, convinced that Harlan Crow’s grandkids are not liable to enroll in the University of Theoretically-Austin; this seems like a holding pen for the next generation of Vivek Ramaswamys and Richard Hananias, aspiring (confused) wanna-bes hoping the grift will last long enough for them to score a ‘leadership potential’ position where they can aspire to attract a sugar daddy of their very own.

While our site is still down from all the traffic, use this: https://t.co/glaTgNP28R

— The New Inquiry (@newinquiry) February 20, 2024

Bedtime Reading for the Young & Simple: <em>An American Education: Notes from UATX</em>Post + Comments (63)

Open Thread: If Libertarianism Is the Answer, What Was the Question?

by Anne Laurie|  January 27, 20242:41 pm| 129 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Glibertarianism, Popular Culture

https://t.co/FQzrjsRhFg
This, from Penn Gillette, is interesting to ponder, and I am genuinely not sure whether I agree. I'll think about it some more, but I would love your input. pic.twitter.com/CoVJHffIXa

— Mom for Gliberty (@fakegreekgrill) January 26, 2024


 
Surprisingly good interview from Cracked — “Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out”:

… So, if it’s not A.I., what do you worry about?

Without being overly dramatic — but, I think, being accurate — there’s a small chance, but still real non-zero chance, that we’ve destroyed our country with monetizing hate and monetizing aggression and monetizing outrage. What makes you the most money is outrage and hate.

I’m beginning to think that the whole MAGA movement, it’s possible we can blame that on fiction — it’s so exciting to have that turnabout in a movie where you find out that there’s a deep state. I certainly feel the pull for that — so much of trying to live our lives to do it right is tedious. And truth is very tedious. Trying to figure out how a certain insect interacts with an environment in the tundra is a lifetime of work — whereas saying that Hillary Clinton has a pizza place where she’s blowing young boys in the basement is no work at all.

Einstein comes up with this idea E = mc² — a profound, powerful, mind-blowing idea — and he has to work forever to make people understand that and to share that reality. Woodward and Bernstein are pretty sure the president of the United States committed crimes, and they work their asses off to try to prove that. But if you’re deep in the MAGA movement, you can just type that Biden went to China and set up a secret nuclear arsenal, and you get this incredible amount of praise with seven-minutes work. Trying to get the news cycle to look as much like 24 seems to be the goal…

And yet, with all of this doom and gloom, everything is getting better by every metric we have. Things are getting better if we don’t destroy the planet with global warming and if Donald Trump doesn’t blow things up or Putin blows things up — those are the biggest “ifs” anyone’s ever said. But fewer people are starving. More girls are educated. Fewer people die at the hands of other people than ever in history. Those are big milestones. And some people argue — and they might be right — that art was part of that because the idea of reading a novel and putting yourself in someone else’s position, that (was) a huge deal…

For so long, you identified as Libertarian. What changed?

I completely have not used the word Libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown where a person from a Libertarian organization wrote to me and said, “We’re doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we’d like you to head it.” I looked at that email and I went, “The fact they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of, and I need to change.” Now, you can make the argument that maybe you don’t need to mandate masks — you can make the argument that maybe that shouldn’t be the government’s job — but you cannot make the argument that you shouldn’t wear masks. It is the exact reciprocal of seatbelts because if I don’t wear a seatbelt, my chances of fucking myself up increase — if I don’t wear a mask, the chance of fucking someone else up increase.

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Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

So how do you identify politically?

Well, let’s go to empirical evidence: I’m going to vote Democrat, maybe that’s all you need to know. I will not vote for a third-party candidate. I believe all the clichés, I believe they’re true — I believe that Trump and MAGA might make the United States unrecognizable enough that it’s not a beautiful place to be…

(Trump’s) basic idea that, in a transaction, someone wins and someone loses is the most deeply anti-American, anti-capitalist idea you can possibly have. The idea of winners and losers being said about capitalism is a gross distortion of what that’s supposed to be. The way Penn & Teller run (our) business is I want everybody to make money. When we do a show, I have many friends who are freaked out if the promoter makes too much money — (that’s) a “bad deal” — but I just go, “Fuck, I want every promoter that books Penn & Teller to make a million fucking dollars clear. Wouldn’t that be great?” I’m certainly not talking about the way blues artists were treated — I’m talking about me who gets paid very well, that’s a whole different thing. But Trump says over and over again someone has to win and someone has to lose, and the fact that that’s being seen as American and as capitalism, that is the most unpatriotic thing…

Open Thread: If Libertarianism Is the Answer, What Was the Question?Post + Comments (129)

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