Friday, August 25, 2017

It's Good to See the Left Fretting Over the Future Soul of Libertarianism....

By this, I am referring to a new article up at The Washington Post titled: Libertarians wrestle with the alt-right.

In which Chris Cantwell, who once called himself a libertarian, is featured and who ended up being at the center of the Charlottesville unrest with his neo-Nazi ranting.

Example of a current Cantwell view: "How could Trump allow his beautiful daughter to marry a Jew."

WaPo writes:
Mainstream libertarians were worried about the spread of ideas like that.
But I can assure you that, although WaPo's concern is appreciated, libertarianism will survive. As far as I can tell, the top best selling libertarian authors at this time are Mises, Rothbard, Hayek and Block. Of the four, only Hayek is not a Jew.

It is very difficult to start a neo-Nazi movement if you are a hardcore follower of these folks. Nazi, by the way, stands for National Socialism, which all four attacked. So some crazies may pass through the libertarian movement but "pass through" are the operative words.

If you like central planning and hate Jews, I really don't see you wearing a Rothbard t-shirt.

That said, perhaps the Left should spend more time on self-contemplation.

Why are they always supporting leaders that make conditions horrific for most?

Consider Venezuela.

Actor Sean Penn met with the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, several times and claimed Chavez did "incredible things for the 80 percent of the people that are very poor."

Michael Moore praised Chavez for eliminating "75 percent of extreme poverty."

John Stossel reported:
[Noam] Chomsky, whose anti-capitalist teachings have inspired millions of American college students, praised Chavez's "sharp poverty reduction, probably the greatest in the Americas." Chavez returned the compliment by holding up Chomsky's book during a speech at the U.N., making it a best-seller.
Of course, now under Chavez's endorsed successor Venezuela is a hell hole.

Consider the Soviet Union.

From Wikipedia:
Walter Duranty (May 25, 1884 – October 3, 1957) was a Liverpool-born, Anglo-American journalist who served as the Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1921).

In 1932 Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, 11 of them published in June 1931. He was criticized for his subsequent denial of widespread famine (1932–33) in the USSR, most particularly the mass starvation in Ukraine. Years later, there were calls to revoke his Pulitzer; The New York Times, which submitted his works for the prize in 1932, wrote that his later articles denying the famine constituted "some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper."... Duranty often admitted the brutality of the Stalinist system then proceeded to both explain and defend why dictatorship or brutality were necessary.
But getting back to Cantwell, his entire personality, as judged by videos, seems remarkably different from years earlier. He really seems like a different person. Could he be taking antipsychotic drugs?

Perhaps WaPo can do some digging here. Is there a Big Pharma connection to Cantwell like there has been to so many nut jobs?

I suspect that it was likely a combination of Big Pharma and Trump (Cantwell is a Trump fan, despite what he said about Trump's Jewish son-in-law) that triggered Cantwell.

And speaking of Trump, I want to, once again, push the idea that Donald Trump should be thrown under the bus by libertarians. I see no strategic reason he should be supported. He holds no libertarian positions and support for him is not going to gain us any followers that understand libertarian principles.

At times, it makes sense to form alliances with other groups if there are particular libertarian issues we want to advance or if it will help us introduce libertarianism to new groups. But the followers of Trump have no libertarian instincts. They are pretty much idiots (Gary North calls them schnooks: "true believers, also known as schnooks, who voted...will shrug their shoulders and not miss a beat in supporting a flip-flopping politician.").

For sure, they hate Obamacare but they don't want to end government healthcare. They aren't for nation building but they are for fighting terrorists. Pretending we have something in common with these people is only going to get us in trouble.

In his unpublished strategy paper, Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change, Murray Rothbard wrote:
[T]he classical liberals were trapped by their alliance with the "practical" men into foreswearing any sort of radical general principles in striking to the practical short run details, with ultimately disastrous results....
Libertarians should not make the same mistake. The advancement of liberty is a long game. There is no strategic move that will result in a libertarian society emerging any time soon. On top of that, we are in something of a "quiet period" in terms of advancing liberty. There are no obvious groups that we should be forming alliances with. It is a time for the slog of one-on-one mental battles. Trump be damned.

 -RW

5 comments:

  1. Earlier this year, Chris Cantwell had a debate with Adam Kokesh. Kokesh took Cantwell to task for his dramatic shift in recent years. At one point in the interview, Cantwell admitted to struggling with an addiction to Meth. I would not be surprised in the least if drugs have contributed to his metamorphosis.

    I agree completely that libertarians should not be supporting Trump on anything or aligning with his supporters. It doesn't seem to me like any prominent libertarians are supporting Trump anymore, and I don't consider Alex Jones to be a libertarian in any way. I definitely think we don't want our movement to be associated with the Alt-Right.

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  2. Cantwell still believes in the non-aggression principle, as he states repeatedly in those videos. He is against initiatory violence, and is for self defense.

    As for his 'antisemitism', I don't see why that disqualifies him from being a libertarian.

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  3. Cantwell wrote some hard hitting, thought provoking libertarian pieces back in his "anarchist, atheist, asshole" days. I stopped paying attention to him after he went full retard for Trump and the alt-right. The guy is on record on a number of occasions over the about his "issues" and he seems to have a knack for finding and attracting trouble. That being said, this whole episode could stem from a desire for greater notoriety than he could achieve otherwise. As such he has embraced and become the ideological "boogie man" that he has been portrayed as by his opponents, especially recently. Either that or he's a Fed.

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  4. I used to talk with him on Google+. This was maybe 5 years ago. At that time he was not yet a white supremacist, but he had no qualms about initiatory violence.

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  5. Libertarianism says nothing about having a racial preference. You don't have to like jews to be a libertarian but you have to worship them to be a Wenzelist.

    See Alex Linder if you want an example of a white nationalist (counter-Semitic) libertarian.

    It is true however that people who develop strong racial views are likely to take an ambivalent attitude towards most of the issues libertarians obsess over (central planning, regulation, etc) and instead filter issues through a racial lens. People like Block insist on libertarianism being a akin to a religion and a personal worldview. It's just a theory about how governement should work! If you expect it to be the source of our values and priorities you are a creepy cultist.

    This is where your article displays a shocking amount of dishonor and jewish behavior. Kicking a man while he is down and psychopathologizing his actions.

    You don't even bother to mention his case, in which he used pepper spray in self defense and is now sitting in a state pen having been denied bail. Wouldn't the libertarian thing be to defend him against the state considering he followed the NAP?

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