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I wish liberalism would just be liberalism instead of erase-the-whites-while-masquerading-as-liberalism.
There is no libertarian to fascism pipeline. The "libertarian" tech right like Thiel and Musk is not and has never been libertarian in the sense that any legacy American would use the term: everything these people do increases the centralisation of power, especially in ways that enable control over mass media and surveillance to direct public opinion. Nothing about that is libertarian, regardless of whatever nice things they say in interviews or whether they share our annoyance with shrill blue-haired activists. Twitter raced to implement Age Verification via State ID before this was even a topic of public discussion! Racing to implement censorship and surveillanceware before any government can even get around to mandating it is not, in fact, what libertarians do.
And obviously the reason all the governments across the planet began mandating it in sync is because the big tech companies are paying them to. "Oh, no, Mr. Government, don't force all my users to hand me their government IDs to access my platform! Stahp!" Unfortunately, we're ruled by people with room temperature IQ, who will blissfully hand over their populations to megacorp control without even realising what's been done.
Of course, that's also part of the game: anyone with above room temperature IQ will be primaried: the ads will be fed to the district voters via the mass media control towards a foolish candidate that can be controlled with "advisors."
There is effectively no libertarian policy presence because there is basically no libertarian constituency. The “low social control and low economic control” quadrant of the political spectrum is effectively empty among the non-elite, which is basically what you’d expect since it doesn’t really benefit most of the population as much except in extremely diffuse ways and it harms them in very visible ways.
And of course implementing private surveillance is exactly what libertarians do, along with most other opportunities to leverage technology to their benefit. The fact that a small number of elites will be able to do such things if not prevented by government is part of why it’s such a popular belief among elites and is one of the bog-standard criticisms of it from the rest of the political world.
I say all of this as someone who deeply desires an extremely libertarian society. You have to take the good with the bad. The viable political options in society are dependent on the substrate, and I don’t know that America has the requirements to sustain liberty to its historical grand extent any more without serious costs. Much like firearm regulation, the ability to own any weapon is very different in a world where the most powerful thing is a warship versus a world with McNukes. I’d take the McNuke world, but I can’t blame the public for not liking that idea.
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