Project 50501 (“50 states, 50 protests, one day”) is an emergent political action movement formed in 
opposition to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Project 2025. It staged large numbers of demonstrations on President’s day. The Manchester, New Hampshire demonstration, estimated at 100 people lining both sides of the State House block, was joined by prominent local Libertarians, who sent us a few photographs of the event. We are advised that motorists were mostly — by about eight-to-one — friendly to the demonstration, offering honks and waves.
Great Libertarian opposed to cutting federal government spending….. what a concept.
The 50501 web site says their protests are to “uphold the Constitution and end executive overreach”. https://www.fiftyfifty.one/
Project 2025 has some very anti-libertarian policy positions. Examples:
On Pornography:
“Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
On Technology:
“Every threat to family stability must be confronted. This resolve should color each of our policies. Consider our approach to Big Tech. The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps. Many Silicon Valley executives famously don’t let their own kids have smart phones.2 They nevertheless make billions of dollars addicting other people’s children to theirs. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.”
On Abortion and Adoption:
“Conservatives should gratefully celebrate the greatest pro-family win in a generation: overturning Roe v. Wade, a decision that for five decades made a mockery of our Constitution and facilitated the deaths of tens of millions of unborn children. But the Dobbs decision is just the beginning. Conservatives in the states and in Washington, including in the next conservative Administration, should push as hard as possible to protect the unborn in every jurisdiction in America. In particular, the next conservative President should work with Congress to enact the
most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life and vigorously complying with statutory bans on the federal funding of abortion. Conservatives should ardently pursue these pro-life and pro-family policies while recognizing the many women who find themselves in immensely difficult and often tragic situations and the hero-ism of every choice to become a mother. Alternative options to abortion, especially adoption, should receive federal and state support.”
On Foreign Trade:
“Economic engagement with China should be ended, not rethought.”
On Immigration:
“Illegal immigration should be ended, not mitigated; the border sealed, not reprioritized.” It also calls for eliminating certain legal immigration avenues.
On free market capitalism:
“The next President should promote pro-growth economic policies that spur new jobs and investment, higher wages, and productivity. Yes, that agenda should include overdue tax and regulatory reform, but it should go further and include antitrust enforcement against corporate monopolies.”
On WMDs:
“The United States manifestly needs to modernize, adapt, and expand its nuclear arsenal.”
Project 2025 goes on at length about how US defense is inadequate to the threats and how much the budgets should be increased and how the Army needs 50,000 more personnel and whatnot but, then amusingly throws in “End USCYBERCOM’s participation in federal efforts to “fortify” U.S. elections to eliminate the perception that DOD is engaging in partisan politics.” All security is good except election security, I guess.
There is a lot there to which libertarians ought to object.
Those are all excellent positions and very well expressed, but from the media coverage of the 50150 protests I never got the sense that they were at all about any of those. Rather, they have been entirely about protecting the unelected deep state bureaucrats and waste, fraud, and abuse from bring trimmed or curtailed in any way by efforts to bring government efficiency.
The idea that the executive branch regulating itself is executive overreach seems particularly inane. And where is the deep state alphabet soup bureaucracy tended sacrosanct status in the Constitution?
A sane libertarian, such as Javier Milei, symbolically hands Elon Musk a chainsaw. Meanwhile, these “prominent local libertarians” are out protesting against any bureaucrats losing jobs or having their funding cut.
It does seem rather odd, but it’s one of the many reasons I could never call or consider myself a libertarian again.