Here we go! Conservatives masquerading as Libertarians is happening!

No, that's not the best Gadsden flag parody. Far from it. Here's some better ones:

Here's some of my set
- Thanks, those are great too! 😁
- Thought that robot one should have said "STAB!" until I looked closer.
- Appropriate account.
As a European I see these for the first time, where do they come from? Usually I see eagles, donkeys and elephants with US stuff
- It's (based on) the Gadsden flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_flag
- Bald Eagles are the US national bird, elephants are the Republican mascot, and Donkeys are the Democrat mascot. The subject here is a parody of the Gadsden Flag, which is linked in the other comment.

Libertarian? Isn't that just Conservative with extra steps?

No, in theory libertarians are pro-choice, pro-LGBT, pro-drugs, pro-open borders.
Not saying that American Libertarians believe those things, but libertarianism specifically supports things that are non-conservative social issues.
- Those "classically libertarian" values are referred to as "liberal" values today
- What about in practice?
- It's weird huh? You don't really see any Libertarians protesting police violence. Or very many up in arms when the Supreme Court said that the President is above the law. I also don't recall seeing any headlines about massive Libertarian protests when conservatives threw out decades of established law that a woman had the right to make decisions about her own body. And come to think of it, when Trump said he was going to revoke legal immigration statuses and do mass deportations, the Libertarians were pretty quiet about that too.
  It's almost like Libertarians actually like a government that treads all over them, and the Don't Step on Snek flag is only about guns.
Libertarians, at least in the US, are all about being selfish. "why should I pay taxes to fund schools, I don't have kids" types. It's all "me, me, me."
Insufferable wankers.
Republicans are like that too but they also enjoy telling everyone else what they should be doing. They want to control other people's access to healthcare, punish them for being the "wrong" faith, sexuality, race, etc.
More like conservatives who like weed.
- Without the religion

That’s been happening for decades. Libertarians have only ever existed because the Republicans used to be tacitly against racism.

There is no masquerading. Libertarians are just cons/repubs without the religion who smoke weed

Libertarians are just republicans with a better working knowledge of local age of consent laws.
- So Diet Republicans.
Politics have been irreparably poisoned by that political compass bullshit.
The opposite of conservative is progressive, not liberal.
Liberals want to "liberate" the market from regulation, which frankly, snuggles nicely with fascists who want slaves back.
- Is that why the fascists threw the liberals into prisons or murdered them?
- The problem is Americans have redefined "liberal" to mean "not liberal"

What's clear is that the Right-wing's whole thing doesn't exactly attract (good) artists. They tend to borrow and steal most of their iconography rather than make something new¹. Strangely, the whole movement also seems to be both unable to execute parody nor see the humor in self-parody, which I assert is a faculty needed to pull off good political art.

So that puts some serious creative power in league with everyone else. Should be interesting.

¹ - MAGA is a great example of this. The slogan itself is lifted from Reagan's 1980 campaign, so it's nothing new. The current slogan marketing "design" is nothing more than a white serif font on a red field, which in highly-technical graphic design terms is called: "lazy as fuck."

The slogan itself is lifted from Reagan’s 1980 campaign, so it’s nothing new
...Which in turn lifted it from the National Front's "Make Britain Great Again," which is the last time it was actually clever wordplay.
- Reagan stole it from an American as well but the theme that everything was somehow better 40 years ago predates this country as a whole by like I dunno the history of the world presumably.
- Oh wow. So it's double-poached from an actually witty slogan? These cretins really are the worst.
What’s clear is that the Right-wing’s whole thing doesn’t exactly attract (good) artists.
Not a fan of their views, but the likes of StoneToss, Tom MacDonald and Seamus Coughlin aren't exactly bad at what they do.
They tend to borrow and steal most of their iconography rather than make something new
The counter argument would be that having a visual language of common symbols and representations allows you to convey a lot with a little. One of the running bits from TheLeftCantMeme crowd is that left wing memes and comics tend to rely on walls of text to express anything, which is an exaggeration but it's not entirely wrong.

Actually, that's been the case for just about exactly 16 years. I watched it happen in real time.

I went through a libertarian phase in the 80s and 90s, mostly because I couldn't reconcile my anarchist sensibilities with the fact that humanity just isn't ready to do entirely without authority. I eventually just gave in and shifted to anarchism, since it's really the only position that's consistent with my principles, and I just treat it as more of an ideal toward which to strive than an actual immediate goal.

In any event, I knew the libertarian movement of the era. It was more right- than left-wing even then, but it was primarily libertarian, exactly as the term implies - primarily focused just on minimizing political authority.

Then came the Tea Party.

The first Tea Party protests were organized by actual libertarians and were specifically against the Wall Street bailouts in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis that Wall Street had essentially single-handedly caused. And notably, they were against the Bush administration.

But then, shortly after Obama's victory, with a suspiciously well-timed and widespread boost fron the legacy media reporting on an even more suspiciously well-timed on-air comment by Jim Cramer, the Tea Party was recast into a Republican protest against the left. And it almost immediately transformed from a series of protests against the Wall Street bailouts to a traveling right-wing carnival of hate. (And conveniently enough, the focus on the Wall Street bailouts completely vanished).

While I saw that happen I didn't recognize the near-immediate Overton Window shift it triggered until I noticed a sudden influx of libertarians on anarchist forums. And they all had the same story - they had abandoned their libertarian forums because they had been taken over by angry, stupid Republicans.

And that became the status quo. The former libertarians mostly settled into their own sub-community of "anarcho-capitalists" and the libertarian movement is now pretty much just angry, stupid Republicans who are only marked out by the fact that they lean more into corporatocracy and militarism than religious fundamentalism and social war.

It sucks having the libertarian party co-opted, the last 4 years the libertarian candidates have been even more Christo-fascist than the Republicans. Happened to the sane average Republicans, and the left wing Democrats as well. Everything is coming up Corpo-kleptocracy.
I watched it all go down too. I even read reason and thought it was reasonable. I would even use cato as a reference.
After the bail outs I was sick of the political status quo too so I started doing my own research and reading. That’s when I found the Libertarian party of US.
That year Gary Johnson was running and there was a lot of debate about open borders, pro-choice, and Just general libertarian ideology. So i soaked it all in.
Then I came across Oscar Wilde’s soul of man under socialism which really opened my eyes to post scarcity life. I was shocked to realize that capitalism wasn’t freedom at all. That we are all lied to think this is how it’s supposed to be. The word libertarian means something completely different elsewhere in the world.
That’s when everything that I thought was libertarian started to become what it is now, cesspool of hate.

Libertarians today

Don't forget

Consummate V's! I said consummate!
- Guy wouldn't know majesty if it came up and bit him in the face...

Gadsenflagge

Realizing that libertarians were just conservatives lampung as anti establishment was a sad realization.

But libertarians are conservative. They just also like weed and bitcoin

A similar shitty Gadsden flag parody was in a protest flyer I saw recently -

I was really confused about libertarians when I was younger because the way it was described to me was being for freedom. So I thought it was pro-lgtbq, prochoice, for religious freedom, anti-hoa kind of stuff right?
Turns out it was vehemently antitax, anti universal healthcare, religiously driven, gun worshipping zealotry. Basically "freedum 4 peepol like me and no one else!"
That was really disheartening to learn. There's a libertarian militia cult near the town I grew up in. Cut off from everyone else, had shootout in the 60's with the police. They're still there in the same compound in the woods. They don't bother anyone these days, but still. It's kinda disturbing to know there's some very angry people armed to the teeth living out there.

Wait, "Gadse" is used outside !ich_iel@feddit.org ??

It's a typo. The original "Don't tread on me" Flag is called the "Gadsden Flag".
Maybe you were joking, I didn't know this and I think it's pretty funny how well the typo fits!
- I wasn't joking. I always assumed it was just a joke on mispronouncing Katze in a funny way.

Edgy leftists forget that the "treading" in question is state oppression and ergo "I'll tread where I please" is openly signaling your intention to be the boot in an authoritarian nightmare country part 83,737,478,392,929.

Look I find the gadsen spamming as annoying as anyone else but for the fucking love of god stop pretending like them being media illiterate is a valid excuse for y'all to act media stupid.

Where's the gator version that makes it into F.A.F.O? Why don't we get more turnabouts like that anymore‽ Just anything that implies the maker actually goddamn understands what they're working with and isn't just going for the perceived easiest "no u!" to an annoyingly overused piece of media?

Your “state oppression” is my “collecting taxes, enacting gun legislation, providing public services and enforcing age of consent laws” and to tell you the truth that sounds pretty good to me
- No, my state oppression is the police sanctioning my family being killed for not being right wing enough you fucking gaslighty lunatic.
  Especially right now, not everyone worried about this country becoming an authoritarian hellscape is worried about common sense gun reform or minimum standards of medical care, some of us are worried about the fact that the guy who set a lynch mob on the capital is a breath away from having the legal authority to do it next time, and being so damned flippant about Anti-Authoritarian messages really doesn't make me think you're taking that very real threat seriously enough.
  Fuck all the way off and choke on it if you're gonna go out of the way this hard for the sake of defending a stupid turn of imagery that doesn't signal anything except that you feel smug about identifying yourself as a probable bootlicker to be clinging this much to "Imma step on the snek all I want!"
  It's not clever. It's not cute. Especially in today's day and age, it's just fucking tone deaf.
- Username checks out.

r/libertarian was mildly pro-Biden 4 years ago. I guess the astroturfing and corpofication of reddit have taken their toll.

Libertarians denying their conservatism so they can act wicked online while propping up Christian nationalism in the real world is happening!

Libertarians have abandoned the principles of liberty since as long as I’m alive

Ok but what's the "quiet part" he's referring to?

That democrats tread on your rights. I don’t think it’s a real sign because of that implication, so it’s probably just another case of fake outrage
Basically they’re taking what is meant as a
‘I can make more clever use of the traditional symbols you shitheads like to pervert and make a crack about the weak ass fuckin cat lady line yall tried at the same time’ clap back
as a
‘holy shit she’s going mask off and telling us she’s going to start the new world order and have us all murdered for not falling in line with the trans-dem-groomer-hatebuzzword-reich!’ What do you mean I used a reference to Nazism unnecessarily?

Here's a parody by me, made when I was much more naive and Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid just came out.

As a liberal, and individualist, this is cursed.

These boots were made for treading,

And that's just what they'll do.

One of these days these boots are gonna tread all over you.

I mean conservatives have always been masquerading as (L)ibertarians since 1971 here in the US.

Just a sign that they are easily manipulated

Actual libertarianism is open border like you know people who want to do business here have every right to, and for those “illegals” that commit crimes you have the guns.