• DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Libertarians by their very definition cannot be patriotic.

    For starters, they want to destroy, defund, and minimize the state and beneficial services that make up a nation.

    Secondly they want to sell it off the peices to private interests.

    …and they want these things to reduce and avoid paying for their fair share, shifting their tax burden, and the tax burden for their companies to others.

    Libertarians can’t be patriotic, they by definition attack nations in the name of private enterprise, and personal profiteering.

    They seek to increase the wealth gap, exploit their fellow citizens, and disband the connection in between, reducing all to the profit motive, because they can have no other values to maintain but money. They’re nihilists, and comflict with all value systems which aren’t, including the nation and patriotism.

      • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        On the back end the Tea Party movement was always a conglomeration of Koch related organizations and think tanks, who teamed up with 'Americans for Prosperity ', Phillip Morris, and ‘Citizens for a Sound Economy’.

        https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Tea_Party

        It’s an accurate small scale model of what parts of Trumps campaign would later become, using the appearance of a “grass roots” movement to disguise the big money interests driving things just under the surface.

        • grue@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Not “always.” I believe the Tea Party was a genuine grass-roots movement for at least a few weeks or months at the very beginning, before the Koch-suckers co-opted it. Frankly, it had a lot in common with Occupy Wall Street and I was holding out hope for a while that the two movements would merge.

          • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
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            1 month ago

            Nah, sorry bud, it was always a corporate product aimed at reducing taxes on billionaires, organized by Koch organizations, and designed to look like it was grassroots as a disguise:

            In 2002, a Tea Party website was designed and published by the CSE

            CSE = Citizens for a Sound Economy, Koch offered the role of Chairman of CSE to Ron Paul… So there was some blurring of the line between Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign and later offshoots of CSE (which by that time was Chaored by Dick Cheney). CSE were doing the fundraising and organizing/publicity behind it (helps to have Phillip Morris on board for that type of thing).

            It was always the same groups of billionaires and their adjacent politicians trying to not pay taxes.

            Sometimes the PR, sentiment, and spectecal is just so good that it lasts a long time in memory… And no doubt the movement had genuine believers (I know Ron Paul did), but the whole crew were running with the same aims, sharing the same funding sources.

            It’s the whole Libertarian and Conservatives pretending to have values but actually serving billionaires. Of whoch the left has its own version. It all covers over much more serious structural and foundational issues which ideology alone can’t touch.

          • nilloc
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            1 month ago

            I don’t think so, it was a well funded group from the get go. At the time there was pretty strong consensus that there were rich organizers starting the tea party groups from scratch.

            The Koch brothers were documented backers of candidates in our district in 2009-10. Them winning so many seats after Obama was elected wasn’t just a coincidence.

    • EatATaco@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      The ideal of libertarianism is that it’s better for the individual. It’s naive and require rejecting pretty much all evidence, but the idea that they want the power to be consolidated in private companies inherently requires ignoring the ideals.

      Its just like people who support Communism. It’s good I’m theory but you have to really reject reality to convince yourself that it could actually work and doesn’t just end up in an oligarchy or other such consolidated power system.