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By Hunter Wallace
Seriously, it warms the heart to read this:
“It was only a year ago that Rand Paul appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “The Most Interesting Man in Politics.” Time was hardly alone in this assessment. Paul was the subject of a lengthy front-page profile in the New York Times and came out No. 1 on Politico Magazine’s list of the 50 most influential people in politics. “Has the Libertarian Moment Finally Arrived?” Robert Draper asked in the New York Times Magazine.
Perhaps a better question is: Have the media ever been more wrong? Pundits speculated that the Kentucky senator would be a more plausible leader than his father, former Texas Representative Ron Paul, for a newly mainstreamed libertarian alliance that would bring together critics of U.S. foreign policy interventionism and government surveillance and advocates of drug decriminalization and criminal justice reform from across the political spectrum. Libertarian-leaning millennials, it was said, along with Tea Party opponents of big government, could bring about a realignment of American politics—helped along by all that money being funneled into the 2016 campaign by the libertarian Koch brothers. As Draper put it: “Libertarians, who long have relished their role as acerbic sideline critics of American political theater, now find themselves and their movement thrust into the middle of it.” …