Good points. I do often wonder about the why when "the establishment" suddenly targets one of these fringe groups.

I think to those of us who are further out here on the fringe, it's odd that some of our brethren are constantly trying to ingratiate themselves with establishment statists, since supposedly we're united in thinking that's a dangerous crackpot ideology.

In practice, all that's really going on most of the time is that those libertarians live in DC or NYC or LA and their friend group is made up of mainstream Democrats who they don't want to alienate. Since they do agree that whatever "conspiracy theory" is dumb, why not bond over that?