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When they say they are Republican. Or touch on Republican talking points promoting hate, sexism, racism, and/or ignorance in general.
Same with people who call themselves centerists, but hate everything slightly left and cheer for everything right wing. Like when the Charlottesville protests happened, and my centerist friend (not friends anymore) was defending people chanting Nazi stuff and attacking the counterprotesters.
In my experience, "centrists" are often just right-wingers who smoke weed.
Heh, that used to be the joke about libertarians, back before half the libertarians turned out to be white-supremacists and joined up with the alt-right, and the other half said "holy shit, the right wing is really bad for actual people's actual liberty."
Back in 2008 I thought Ron Paul might be an okay guy ... yeah, no, it turned out not only that he was a neoconfederate racist piece of shit, but that libertarian mainstays like Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell had been in on it all along.
Quite a lot of what passed for "libertarianism" turned out to be a fraud to get the potheads, Deadheads, perverts, and hackers to join up with the far right. Fuck that.
My old boss claimed to be a libertarian.
He would always rant and rave about the government overstepping and forcing people to get the vaccine and wear masks (which never happened, but okay) and then in the next sentence would praise the folks in power who wanted to ban abortions.
Like..... motherfucker, at least be consistent!
He also scoffed at me because "must be nice to get government money during the pandemic just for having a kid." I got like 300$. That shithead gladly got a massive business bailout and just smugly read shitty articles and conspiracy theories from with Facebook Q group at work instead of doing his job.
(Don't take this too seriously. This is a rant and I only believe about ¾ of it, but I'm not sure which ¾.)
Libertarianism at various times became a political home for —
- patriotic white American kids who had been taught lies about slavery, Reconstruction, and American history generally;
- science-fiction nerds looking to derive human society from first principles, like Asimov's Hari Seldon, and yet end up with a system that would accommodate Heinlein's Jubal Harshaw;
- philosophers of economics who wanted a laboratory to experiment with their free-market theories, from Nozick to the Friedmans (Milton et seq.);
- passionate and doctrinaire anticommunists following Ayn Rand (though she hated the term "libertarian");
- outright neoconfederates and white-supremacists, like Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul;
- post-hippie engineers looking for a safe space to sell lots of porn and High Weirdness on the Internet.
Over time, history beats philosophy. The libertarian movement fragmented. Part of it leaned into white-supremacist patriotic pisscrap and joined up with the alt-right. Part of it got woke and teamed up with the feminists, BLMs, queers, and other progressives — but only so long as it's okay to vape weed, look at porn, and argue about the legitimacy of sex work. Part of it dug into economics and techno-weirdness and morphed into the cryptocurrency bros. Other bits vanished up the asses of the atheist movement, the open-source movement, or other specific issue-driven groups.
After Bush II and Trump, there's no redeeming the Republican Party. It doesn't even have big-business capitalism or national security on its side anymore. The Bush-era fratboy MBAs hollowed it out and left it to be taken over by the Putinist-Trumpists.
The Democrats are now the party of big business; the Dow is up 17% since Joe Biden took office. The Republicans have become instead the party of hate groups, child-molesters, and thieves — losers who have nothing to offer the nation but rape, murder, and suffering.