Sad to see what’s happening in the Republic of #Georgia (Sakartvelo 🇬🇪💪).

I see many large bird app accounts talk about a US-imposed “color revolution” and other kinds of insanity who know nothing about the country but want to simp for Russian interests.

It was obviously a sham election.

Anyone who’s been to Georgia understands what’s at stake and just how different it is. Its young people are some of the most libertarian and capitalistic because it’s burned in their anti-Soviet mentality. Freedom is the counterculture.

In the late 1990s and through the early 2000s, the country was a libertarian paradise: low taxes, fast innovation, no corruption, and the ability to open businesses and trade within minutes. Most of the government ministers were Hayekians who quoted Milton Friedman and even Murray Rothbard. Free market reforms were quickly imposed and raised the standard of living lightning fast.

Bitcoin mining was already a big industry by 2014-2015, and they had a huge entrepreneurial class building crypto tools.

In the last decade, Russian money and influence has streamed in and slowly eroded all these market reforms to make it a client state of Putin.

A lot of the young people I know there want to tie their fate to the EU not because Europe is some promise land, but because it’s better than being a conduit for Russian bankers and mobsters.