I Just Threw Up In My Mouth a Little*

The fact that it's a Guest Essay in the New York Times.

The fact that they're casting themselves as the wise and far-seeing "we" here, and apparently everyone else is the "you" that got it all wrong.  

The fact that about halfway through they haul out the hoariest and (surprise!) most New York Times-pleasing of all media lies to elevate themselves above Both Sides:

Each of the major parties has pulled away from the libertarian elements of their coalitions (small-government, free-market types for the Republicans and civil libertarians for the Democrats), preferring instead the instant gratification of grasping power and wielding it as aggressively as possible for the period they hold it.

The fact that it's the fucking Libertarians.

And the fact that it just ain't so.

Meet Anthony L. Fisher:

When I worked for Reason magazine during Trump's rise to power in 2016, I was explicitly forbidden by the editor in chief from writing about Trump's racism, or the violence and racism at his rallies. It was a "sideshow," I was told.

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— Anthony L. Fisher (@anthonylfisher.bsky.social) February 9, 2026 at 8:10 AM

Then there is this from The Daily Beast, which was cited further down the BlueSky thread:

A leading critic of “cancel culture” is being accused of canceling one of its own—for speaking out too loudly and too often against President Donald Trump.

Throughout the Trump era, Reason magazine, a digital and print publication published by the nonprofit libertarian Reason Foundation, has routinely sounded the alarm about the perceived threat posed by “cancel culture,” the modern phenomenon in which people are publicly and professionally ostracized for heterodox beliefs or remarks. The magazine has lambasted other outlets like The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Intercept for firing or pushing out key staffers whose views or actions were determined to have conflicted with their respective editorial missions.

And yet, a long-time Reason columnist and policy analyst alleges that the libertarian magazine dropped her over her vehemently anti-Trump views.

“After 15 years, the curtains came down for me at Reason today. My views, I was told, had become too out-of-step with those of the organization,” Shikha Dalmia announced Tuesday evening in a Facebook post.

“Reason has some amazing writers who do great work on a whole host [of] issues that I will continue to read and share. And it has been an honor and pleasure to work with them,” she added. “However, I had a staunch and uncompromising anti-Trump voice calling out his authoritarian tendencies unambiguously. That this made many libertarians uncomfortable raises all kinds of interesting questions about the state of the liberty movement.”

From The Cato Institute (yes, it makes me feel dirty just writing that, but onward):

What’s Donald Trump Doing at the Libertarian Party Convention?

The Libertarian Party presidential nominating convention is coming up this weekend, with Donald Trump as a featured speaker. This is apparently the first time in US history that a political party has had another party’s nominee at its own nominating convention. And what a choice!

The Libertarian Party was founded to “challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual” and to specifically run candidates for office on a platform of personal liberty, economic liberty, and a peaceful foreign policy.

Needless to say, that’s not Donald Trump’s platform, nor does it describe his actions as president...

To be clear, I do appreciate various Johnny-Come-Latelies (even the Johnny-Galt-Come-Latelies) finally arriving where Liberals have already been for decades

I appreciate it even though, when they finally got to the party, it was already far, far too late. And I appreciate it even though these same people mocked and dismissed those of us who were right all along as alarmist crackpots right up until they had their long overdue moments of clarity.

What I do not appreciate -- what I might even call vexing (if you'll pardon the salty language because I know how important "tone" is in determining whether someone is right or wrong) -- is that every new arriviste to where the Left has been all along carries with them the same overweening, self-aggrandizing, and very thirsty, psychological disorder, best summarized here by the character of Bert Cooper on Mad Men

*(H/T @airbagmoments.bsky.social on Blue Sky for the heads up)

I Am The Liberal Media

Also Too, There. Is. Still. No. Tea. Party.

“...they turned to prayer, beseeching
that the sin which had been committed
might be wholly blotted out.”

-- 2 Maccabees. 12:42

Ripped from the annals of "No One Could Have Predicted...", this from this Andrew Sullivan's Pot-'n-Popes-'n-Stuff blog (which has temporarily become his Pot-'n-Popes-'n-Libertarians-'n-Stuff blog since he turned it over to an entire floor of his dorm while he takes a month off to contemplate the meaning of man's existence in an indifferent universe. Or something.)

Anyway, even though this really (and hilariously) speaks for itself, I will probably risking gilding that lily and add my two bitcoin's worth at the end....

Libertarians In Name Only

AUG 26 2014 @ 1:17PM

by Dish Staff 

Tim Fernholz highlights new Pew data on libertarianism in America, which shows that only 11 percent self-describe as libertarian and understand what the term means:

The survey showed a fairly even split among Americans considering whether the regulation of businesses does more harm than good, or if aid for the poor helps or hinders, though a majority does think that corporations make too much profit. Libertarians, meanwhile, leaned strongly against any interference in business or help to the poor, though not as strongly as you might think: 41% of libertarians saw government regulation of business as necessary, and 38% supported aid to the poor.

Indeed, perhaps the most interesting finding is that self-described libertarians favor US involvement in world affairs more than the average citizen, despite their reputation for an isolationist lean. And, even more weirdly, 16% of libertarians said US citizens need to be willing to give up some privacy in exchange for greater security.

Kilgore thinks that “Pew has at the very least cast some massive doubt on all that ‘libertarian moment’ polling from Reason“:

These findings of the non-particularity of “libertarian” views, mind you, is after Pew has melted the category down from 17% of the public to 11%, since a lot of “libertarians” could not accurately distinguish “libertarian” from “communist” or—get this—“Unitarian.”

Allahpundit’s analysis:

What you’re seeing in the poll results, I think, is a bunch of doctrinaire libertarians having their brand diluted by a bunch of conservatives/ Republicans who are disgusted with those labels right now, for whatever reason, and are thus hoping to claim “libertarianism” for themselves. Do you support aggressive policing, a muscular foreign policy, and a social safety net but are disgusted with how big and intrusive the federal government’s gotten and how complacent the GOP has gotten about it? Congrats, you might be a “libertarian.” In fact, this reminds me of what David Frum said recently about the “libertarian moment”...

So, as usual, linky-love and compliments for all the usual suspects like the Washington Times, Hot Air, David Frum.

But heaven help you if, years ago, you starting writing post after post pointing that the sudden surge in self-identified "independents" and "Tea Partiers" and "libertarians" were obviously millions of Republican cowards fleeing the scene of their many, many, many crimes:

...

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

Heaven help you if you were writing back in 2009 that one of the most important lessons of 9/11 which every single person in the Mainstream Media was conspicuously ignoring was that Conservatives were now completely dependent to getting cost-free rebranding do-overs from the media every time they committed another atrocity:

...

So, for example, when you hear the same people who fanatically supported President George W. Bush when he famously told Iraq war critics to fuck off --

"Well, we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 election."

-- now insisting, less that a year after the 2008 elections, that President Barack Obama needs to:

"...scrap the current grandiose plans and to start over."

or when you see the mobs on the Right being whipped by talk of secession or revolution or spilling the "blood of tyrants" into a nearly-pornographic frenzy, understand that what you are witnessing are the echoes of political decisions made in the wake of September 11, 2001.

Political decisions that trained the Right to believe, on a visceral level, that a sufficiently bloody and horrifying disruption to the life of the country can -- if properly exploited -- wash away their eight otherwise-unforgivable years of sin and restore "their country" to its proper, wingnut default setting.

That if the right sacrifices are made to the right Gods in just the right way, then they can be virgins again.

Heaven help you if, years ago, you chose to stand apart from the credulous Media Lemmings and point out that the only fucking reason this brazen scheme to escape brutal judgement for their multiple, bloody, Bush-era treacheries, hypocrisies and lies was not being laughed out of existence was that Conservatives had turned the media into their eager co-conspirators:

...

The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.

Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.

If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".

In Latin.

Backwards.

Else how's that boy ever gonna learn!

There. Are. Four. Lights.



And. There. Is. Still.  No.  Tea. Party. 

And while nobody in Mr. Sullivan's circle is ever going to acknowledge that, once again, Liberals like me were right all along...and while the day will never come when I can afford to take a month off to think about whether the Universe is itself conscious ab ovo or if conscious is just one of the Universe's emergent properties (and if time is actually non-linear does that distinction even matter) at least I can sleep at night.

He's Your Vehicle Baby

He'll take you a-ny-where you wanna go.

He's your Libertarian vehicle baby.

And by now I'm sure you know

That he loves ya

Needs ya

Wants ya,

Got to have you child,

By Great Galt and Taggart you know he looooooooves you.

There is a large and loosely-affiliated tribe of people for whom it is not enough -- not nearly enough -- to take arms (figuratively) against a Sea of all the perennial troubles of democratic governance (malfeasance, abuse of power, wrongheadedness, incompetence, criminality, nepotism, etc.) and by opposing, end them -- or at least momentarily abate some of them (as if, for the average citizen, that weren't work enough to take up nine lifetimes' worth of available attention and energy.)

For them, the world makes only makes sense as a Philip Dick novel

in which everything the government does at virtually every level is suffused with monstrous intentions and dark designs. For them, the world is The Matrix: a massive scam built on top of a web of far-reaching and apparently infinite number of conspiracies in which everyone who is not 100% on their side is either a co-conspirator or a somnolent dupe. 

Of course, when the mundane realities of the business of government -- even government during a crisis -- falls short of proving their specific brand of vast and terrible plots, they have to back-fill or pave over all bits that don't fit -- all the chuckholes and logic-chasms and tire-shredding facts -- with, well, bullshit. 

As with all cult members, they are imperviously convinced that everyone else is the cultist. 

As with all fools, they sleep smug in the knowledge that everyone else is the fool.

And as has been true for all of human history, there will never be a shortage of con men who are more than happy to flatter them, court them and take them anywhere they want to go:



So, do you still Stand With Rand?