From Ancaps and Ancoms, to Syndicalists and Individualists, Mutualists and Agorists, Voluntaryists and Market Anarchists, Panarchists and Anarchists without Adjectives, and other self-identified radicals – this talk is aimed at those who are against Authoritarianism, Statism, and Oppression in all forms. This talk is aimed at those who recognize the power of the Individual and seek to work together as a whole. On Sunday October 11th Derrick Broze spoke at Libertyfest in NYC about the history of the word Libertarian, the history of alliances between radicals on the left and right, a highlight of the work of Karl Hess and Samuel Konkin III, and the need for less ego and dogma in the interest of building new alliances between radicals across the political spectrum. Radical means taking a direct action approach to your activism.
More…
Dave Rubin on the Left’s Drift, and Striking Out on His Own Reply
Dave Rubin is interviewed by Tom Woods. Listen here.
Rubin talks about how the Left has become a totalitarian monolith, while conservatives and libertarians are now the free speech/diversity of ideas camp. I’d argue that this is because the Left is an ascendant force, and the Right is shrinking demographically, culturally, and generationally. The groups who are out of power are usually the ones who are the most pro-freedom. During the period between the 1950s and 1980s, it was the Left that tended to be the pro-freedom forces. That started to change with the ascendancy of neoliberalism in the 1990s, and the rise of PC on the Left during the same period.
——————————————
Dave Rubin, host of the hugely successful Rubin Report, alienated former colleagues (e.g., at The Young Turks Network, where he had been an on-air host) when he openly disapproved of what he saw as an authoritarian, anti-free-speech drift among the Left. Today his YouTube channel has nearly 567,000 subscribers and his show reaches an enormous audience.
The Greatest Mass-Death Regimes in History Reply
Some more interesting comments from Dick Moore. I would agree that US imperialism at present is far more pernicious than anything the Russians or Chinese are currently doing. For one thing, it has a much, much wider reach. Russia’s present foreign policy is a traditional Russian foreign policy, i.e. maintain buffer zones in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and formulate a Eurasian/Global South alliance for the purpose of countering Western imperialism and moving towards multipolarity. Chinese foreign policy is also fairly traditional Chinese foreign policy, i.e. maintaining buffer zones and avoid cultural contamination, with an additional emphasis on economic development. American foreign policy at present is also a fairly traditional American, i.e. aggressive expansionism and domination of international trade.
————————————–
Even if you leave out actual shooting and bombing people, the US Empire is one of the greatest mass-death regimes in history. The political-economic kleptocracy uses its hegemonic power and military threats to alter the legal and economic environments of foreign nations from Panama to Formosa. It regularly uses both its own military and its puppet agencies such as the United Nations to blockade and sanction foreign countries, and to prop-up thuggish regimes who are compliant with the needs of the Corporate Super-Class. The indirect effect this has on domestic regimes’ political and economic environment has resulted in the deaths of literally tens of millions of people who are being deprived of access to medical, food and other resources that would otherwise have been available to them. Even if you think some ‘alternative’ source of starvation and tyranny would have filled the vacuum had the USA not been the one doing it, they are still responsible for what they actually are doing.
If one counts the Ukraine famine and the actions of the Kyrgiz Socialist Republic in the death total of Stalin, I don’t see why we shouldn’t count these murder-by-sanction and murder-by-proxy against the US Empire. Which would make the USA right up there with Chairman Mao for total body count – if not higher. The difference is that the USSR and Chinese Communist death totals were largely confined to the domestic spheres of the old Russian and Chinese empires, whereas the USA is murdering and starving people on a global scale.
Why State Provision of Social Services is a Bad Idea, Even in the Context of Corporate Plutocracy Reply
Some interesting comments from “Dick Moore” on Facebook.
I wanted to write a little bit about the question of ‘social services’ provided by the State as alleged ‘alternatives’ to for-profit systems.
To start with I will admit (as more sophisticated libertarians do) that really-existing capitalism and its major appendages – the international joint-stock corporation – benefit in a myriad of ways from state intervention, both direct (subsidy, tariff and government contracts) as well as indirect (the creation of ‘friendly business environments’ in foreign lands through political pressure by the American state, intellectual property, and so forth). Existing corporations, even if they provide really valuable services, are almost certainly far more profitable and extensive that would be possible in a market of free competition and without State control of access to credit and so forth.
Many liberals and socialists demand, as an antidote, that many social services should be provided by the government rather than left to the whims of the corporate oligarchy.
‘Obamacare’ has resulted in the funneling of money into huge insurance companies and a further disconnection between patients and care providers, with no apparent improvement in the cost or availability of medical care. After the failure of Obamacare (which even some leftists admit) the solution usually offered is a single-payer system, that is full state operation of medical services, or at least a system of free state-run hospitals for those who cannot afford private services.
Yet is this really an antidote? The almost entirely state-operated school system provides billions a year to corporations – through construction contracts, purchase of computers, purchase of Microsoft Windows, purchase of internet access through FCC-regulated-and-connected agencies such as Time-Warner. And because of this these corporations are raking in huge sums of money without being responsible, while schools can draw potentially infinite funds without any reference to outcomes.
President Trump’s 2017 Report Card (first draft) Reply
When Trump was running for President, I predicted that he would govern about like a moderate Republican in the Nixon-Rockefeller tradition, or as a centrist Democrat in the style of Bill Clinton. Apparently, I was right. It’s rather embarrassing that so many in the various “anarchist” camps have bought into the anti-Trump hysteria. Trumpism is an enemy, but only a peripheral one. The real enemy is the establishment center. Serious anarchists should be just as opposed to neoliberal and progressive Democrats as they are to conservative or populist Republicans.
By Scott Adams
As we approach the holiday season there will be much debate on how President Trump has performed for his first calendar year. As a populist president, I think the best way to judge his performance is by focusing on the issues voters say are their top priorities. Pew Research polled voters to determine their political priorities for 2017. Let’s see how President Trump is doing so far on the top ten priorities according to the public.
Terrorism (76% rated top priority)
ISIS is on the run, thanks in part to President Trump’s loosening of the rules of military engagement, as well as pivoting from a Whack-a-Mole strategy to a total annihilation strategy with no withdrawal date. Both moves are good persuasion. And while President Trump’s “extreme vetting” is unpopular with many citizens, it has probably reduced risk to the homeland. And General Mattis is widely considered to be a strong hire.
Grade: A
Economy (73% rated top priority)
I’ll give President Obama 75% credit for the strong economy. But I think consumer confidence and the stock market tell us there is optimism about the current administration. That confidence is buoyed by Trump’s reduction in regulations via executive orders, his tough talk on trade, and his persuasion toward a higher GDP that is already becoming self-fulfilling. If people believe the economy will be better next year than this year, they invest this year, thus making next year better. We might see something good come out of tax reform, but I don’t think it will matter as much as people assume.
Grade: A
The danger of race-based politics Reply
Kotkin’s class analysis, his recognition that progressives are just as bad on class issues as conservatives, and his stating the obvious fact that racial demagoguery is a bad idea are all spot on. However, he seems to retreat into a naive civic nationalism that’s likely to prove increasingly untenable as class, cultural, racial, political and other divisions grow. The United States of the future will likely continue to be a wealth, technologically advanced society that is increasingly diverse in terms of population demographics. The society will become increasingly integrated as well (more Buddhists in Congress, etc). However, the emerging class system is one that resembles the kind of class structure traditionally found in Latin America, and social conflict between contending demographics will likely continue to escalate as well. The role of the increasingly all-pervasive public administration state will be in part to manage that conflict, largely through unprincipled means like buying off the loyalty of some groups, suppressing others, playing different groups off against each other, negotiating or forcing settlements between rival groups, etc.
By Joel Kotkin
Orange County Register
Overall, perceptions of worsening racial relations have been building since the Obama years. And now, with everything from the Kate Steinle murder verdict to President Trump’s dog-whistling Muslim tweets, they see destined to worsen further.
Ironically the strongest demand for racial exclusion comes mostly not from traditional racists — still not extinct — but from a campus left determined to address the evils of “whiteness” through policies of racial separation not seen since Jim Crow days. At some campuses, events are held that whites are excluded from and racially separate dorms are being developed. Even at the high school level, there are attempts to be “racially conscious” towards students, essentially teaching them to their racial “profile,” with dubious educational benefits.
President Trump’s unfortunate tendency to go out of his way to offend non-whites, whether they be Navajo war heroes, Hispanics or inner-city African Americans, makes this all worse. The president and the radical racialists both seem to find common purpose in the creation of kindling for racial bonfires.
Race in not the fundamental problem — class is
8 numbers out of Alabama that should terrify Republicans Reply
This is an interesting analysis of Roy Moore’s defeat from CNN.
Some of this polling data would seem to bear out what I have been saying for quite some time. For around 15 years, I have been arguing that conventional “right-wing” politics of the kind associated with racism, religious fundamentalism, social conservatism, Chamber of Commerce types, or traditional WASP social norms is slowly being killed off by cultural, demographic, and generational changes. Instead, this older form of “conservatism” is being replaced by a new kind of “conservatism” rooted in newer, high-tech industries and a rising upper middle class that is ostensibly “liberal” or cosmopolitan in its cultural outlook but no less to committed imperialism, statism, and capitalism than its “right-wing” predecessors. Obviously, this rising class of New Elites is already dominant in the Blue Zones. However, the influence of the Blue Tribe continues to expand, even in surprising ways. My own state of Virginia was once one of the reddest of the Red Zones, but has now turned Blue.
National Precious Metals Company Announces Sound Money Scholarship Winners Reply
By J.P. Cortez
December 13, 2017 (Eagle, Idaho) — A national precious metals dealer has selected four outstanding students to receive tuition assistance from America’s first gold-backed scholarship fund.
Beginning last year, Money Metals Exchange, a national precious metals dealer recently ranked “Best in the USA,” teamed up with the Sound Money Defense League and well known members of acedemia and freedom-minded non-profits to offer the first gold-backed scholarship of the modern era.
The groups set aside 100 ounces of physical gold to reward outstanding students who display a thorough understanding of monetary policy, sound money, and the damage caused by the Federal Reserve system.
After a blue-ribbon panel examined nearly 100 applications submitted this year, Money Metals Exchange & Sound Money Defense League today revealed the 2017 winners:
Social Class and State Power: Exploring an Alternative Radical Tradition Reply
This looks to be quite good. Available at Amazon.Com.
This book explores the idea of social class in the liberal tradition. It collects classical and contemporary texts illustrating and examining the liberal origins of class analysis―often associated with Marxism but actually rooted in the work of liberal theorists. Liberal class analysis emphasizes the constitutive connection between state power and class position. Social Class and State Power documents the rich tradition of liberal class theory, its rediscovery in the twentieth century, and the possibilities it opens up for research in the new millenium.
How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship Reply
By Joe Lauria
Consortium News
At the end of October, I wrote an article for Consortiumnews about the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paying for unvetted opposition research that became the basis for much of the disputed story about Russia allegedly interfering in the 2016 presidential election on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The piece showed that the Democrats’ two paid-for sources that have engendered belief in Russia-gate are at best shaky. First was former British spy Christopher Steele’s largely unverified dossier of second- and third-hand opposition research portraying Donald Trump as something of a Russian Manchurian candidate.
And the second was CrowdStrike, an anti-Putin private company, examining the DNC’s computer server to dubiously claim discovery of a Russian “hack.” In a similar examination of an alleged hack of a Ukrainian artillery app, CrowdStrike also blamed Russia but used faulty data for its report that it was later forced to rewrite. CrowdStrike was hired after the DNC refused to allow the FBI to look at the server.
My piece also described the dangerous consequences of partisan Democratic faith in Russia-gate: a sharp increase in geopolitical tensions between nuclear-armed Russia and the U.S., and a New McCarthyism that is spreading fear — especially in academia, journalism and civil rights organizations — about questioning the enforced orthodoxy of Russia’s alleged guilt.
Posting or Hosting Sex Ads Could Mean 25 Years in Federal Prison Under New Republican Proposal Reply
More creeping Stalinism.
By Elizabeth Nolan Brown
Reason
Looking forward to a future when federal agents monitor Tinder? We won’t be far off if some folks in Congress get their way.
Under a proposal from Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R–Va.), anyone posting or hosting digital content that leads to an act of prostitution could face serious federal prison time as well as civil penalties. This is obviously bad news for sex workers, but it would also leave digital platforms—including dating apps, social media, and classifieds sites such as Craigslist—open to serious legal liability for the things users post.
In effect, it would give government agents more incentive and authority to monitor sex-related apps, ads, forums, and sites of all sorts. And it would give digital platforms a huge incentive to track and regulate user speech more closely.
Goodlatte’s measure was offered as an amendment to another House bill, this one from the Missouri Republican Ann Wagner. The House Judiciary Committee will consider both bills on Tuesday.
Wagner’s legislation (H.R. 1865) would open digital platforms to criminal and civil liability not just for future sex crimes that result from user posts or interactions but also for past harms brokered by the platforms in some way. So platforms that followed previous federal rules (which encouraged less content moderation in order to avoid liability) would now be especially vulnerable to charges and lawsuits.
The bill currently has 171 co-sponsors, including ample numbers of both Republicans and Democrats.
Neocons Seek War with Iran, Ethic Cleansing of Palestinians Reply
As a I have long suspected.
William S. Lind
Traditional Right
Those of us who supported President Trump in last year’s election because he promised a less interventionist foreign policy need to be aware of a rising danger. Neo-con influence in the Trump administration seems to be on the increase. Rumored high-level personnel changes could put neo-cons into key foreign policy positions. Just as their neo-con predecessors led President George W. Bush into the disastrous Iraq war, a gift that keeps on giving, so today’s neo-cons want a war with Iran.
The obvious question is, how could anyone be so stupid? War with Iran is a lose-lose proposition. If the Iranians defeat us, we lose. If we defeat them, we also lose because there is a high probability the Iranian state would disintegrate and Iran would become another stateless region. That would be a huge victory for our real enemies, Islamic non-state entities such as Al Qaeda and ISIS that wage Fourth Generation war.
The neo-cons refuse to see this because they are playing another game, a game driven by the misconceived interests of a foreign power. To put it bluntly, many influential neo-cons are part and parcel of Israel’s Likud party. Years ago, around the beginning of the George W. Bush administration, they helped Likud devise a strategy for Israel. That strategy called for the United States to destroy every Middle Eastern state that could be a threat to Israel. That was why the neo-cons pushed the Bush administration into war with Iraq.
Overcriminalization: Criminalizing the Everyday 3
Overcriminalization – When Doing the Right Thing Isn’t Enough Reply
Our Eternal Enemy Reply
Another False Dichotomy? Reply
The Racist Right Looks Left 2
I get an honorable mention in this, although I am incorrectly identified as a “white nationalist.” If I am being denounced by The Nation and Breitbart within a few days of each other I must be doing something right. I used to think that leftist articles that mistakenly describe me as WN were just a matter of sloppy thinking and lazy research. But increasingly I am seeing people of color, including friends of mine, being attacked at WN as well. It just seems like WN is an all-encompassing smear word that’s used nowadays, now that “communist” and even “terrorist” have lost their bite. There always has to be some category of “official bad people” that dissidents can be relegated to.
By Donna Minkowitz
The Nation
In the way to Richard Spencer’s top-secret white-supremacist conference on November 19, a young African-American woman drove me in her Uber from Washington, DC, to the rolling hills of Maryland horse country. On the peaceful drive past large, beautiful estates, she told me how she’d had to work three jobs—as a DHL courier, Amazon-warehouse deliverywoman, and Uber driver—just to continue to live in ever-more-expensive DC, where she’d grown up. When we finally got to the winery that Spencer’s National Policy Institute had booked, Mike Enoch of the Daily Shoah podcast, who promulgated the slur “dindu nuffins” for African Americans, was holding forth on the horrors of “corporate neoliberalism.”
Then Eli Mosley of the campus group Identity Evropa, who calls Jews “oven-dodging…kikes,” took Enoch one further: “We need to be explicitly anti-capitalist. There’s no other way forward for our movement.” As 60 mostly young, male racists gathered around him, Mosley, whose real name is Elliott Kline, confidently predicted, “Twenty eighteen is going to be the year of leftists joining the white-nationalist movement!”
A Small Revolution Reply
By Jeff Deist
Mises Institute
Dr. Robert Murphy and I enjoyed a robust discussion of the current political landscape this past weekend at the University of Central Florida. A significant percentage of attendees, maybe half, agreed with the proposition that the US is past the point of political solutions. Everyone agreed, regardless of their age and background, that the possibility of America breaking — violently or voluntarily — is very real.
My talk focused on the value of smaller polities. Given the stubborn tendency for governments to emerge and endure in human societies, we should focus our efforts on creating smaller political units that more closely allow for a Misesian vision of democratic self-determination. This may not satisfy libertarians and anarcho-capitalists, but neither will trying to persuade a winning electorate of 70 million Americans to vote for even a reasonably liberty-minded presidential candidate.
Mass democracy, in a decidedly diverse nation of 320 million people, is a recipe for disaster. And we’re seeing that disaster unfold in the cold civil war known as the Trump era. Increasingly federalized state power, combined with our winner-takes-all, top-down rule by DC, creates terrible zero-sum outcomes for millions. Five people on the Supreme Court wield an extra-constitutional power that creates deep and lasting cultural divides. 535 members of Congress have the ability to spend, tax, regulate, inflate, and war us into oblivion.
A few salient points from my presentation:
How to Build a Better Government: Smaller, Consensual, and Decentralized Reply
By Trey Goff
Mises Institute
[Your Next Government?: From the Nation State to Stateless Nations by Tom. W. Bell]
When I first met him, Tom W. Bell seemed more like the successful lawyer/entrepreneur type than he did the type of guy to write an intensely well-sourced book synthesizing information from a variety of fields. On that front, he pleasantly surprised me: this book is an excellent, abundantly well-sourced paean to consent, choice, and competitive governance.
Bell begins the book by explaining how smaller, consent-rich and decentralized government is creating a “bottom-up, peaceful revolution” in the way governance is organized around the world. He cites the usual examples of Chinese special economic zones and SEZs all around the world generally as evidence of this. All of this has been surveyed extensively by other authors as well, but Bell does an excellent jo of succinctly re-presenting it here. However, Bell forays into a field I’ve not seen broached elsewhere by examining previous examples of special jurisdiction-type entities within the United States. Specifically, he details the extensive use of foreign trade zones (FTZs) throughout the United States as an example of special jurisdictions closer to home. These zones exempt the businesses within them from many aspects of US customs, excise taxes, and import taxes. These zones are ubiquitous and play host to a sizeable portion of US foreign trade. He closes this survey of the evidence of special jurisdictions by dedicating a chapter to some interesting examples: Henry Ford’s spectacularly failed attempt to make a massive city in the middle of the Brazilian rain forest (Fordlandia), Honduran ZEDEs, and seasteads.
Libertarian Organization Fires Student After Resisting Leftist Bias 2
Todd Lewis recently told me that a libertarian society might well be an actual civil war between the “fascist” Hoppean militia, the “communist” C4SS militia, with the centrist Walter Blockian milita began attacked by both sides as a traitor for collaborating with the enemy. I suspect Todd is probably correct. Eventually, an anarcho-Lucky Luciano would have to step in, create an anarcho-Commission, and put end to the nonsense by carving out different territories for warring factions.
Liberty Hangout
On Wednesday, December 6th, 2017, Students for Liberty fired Noah Mickel, a student activist, and a campus coordinator for SFL since Mr. Mickel graduated high school (Correction: “since Mr. Mickel completed his first year in college”). The official reason for this firing is “violating the respectful communication policy,” but there is ample reason to doubt this justification.
To start, Mr. Mickel is a right-libertarian who unapologetically supports libertarian theorist Hans-Hermann Hoppe, whose works Students for Liberty has banned at their events. Mr. Mickel wasn’t exactly quiet about his views, and he has caused other SFL staff members to engage in what many would call disrespectful communication. Take the example of SFL’s Academic Programs Senior Chair, who went off on a Twitter tirade against Mr. Mickel, myself, and five other libertarian students (three of whom are recently resigned SFL Campus Coordinators) because they took a picture with Dr. Hoppe. See the thread here. But perhaps here is my favorite response from this major figure in Students for Liberty. You tell me if this is “respectful communication.”
Cultural Marxism: One of Those Legitimising Ideologies that Come and Go Reply
Totalitarian humanism is only the latest manifestation of a more traditional enemy. Ultimately, our enemy is not any one ideology but the state itself, as Albert Jay Nock pointed out.
By Sean Gabb
Last month, I wrote a defence of Charlie Elphicke, my Member of Parliament. He had been suspended from the Conservative Party while the Police investigated him for an alleged sexual assault. He has still not been arrested or charged. He has still not been told the nature of the complaint against him. It may be that he is about to be unmasked as a serial sex-murderer. More likely, the sinister clowns who direct law enforcement in this country have found nothing that even they regard as an assault worth prosecuting. But, if the former of these possibilities might embarrass me, the general reflections I made on his case stand by themselves. What I wish now to do is to elaborate on these reflections.
I begin by granting that ideologies are in themselves important. They are sets of propositions about the world that are true or false in much the same way as a scientific hypothesis is true or false. They are true or false regardless of what motives people may have for adopting them. This being granted, every person is born with a set of dispositions that draws him to accepting a particular ideology. Some of us are born with a dislike of pushing others around. This will not invariably make us into free market libertarians. But it will incline us to less intrusive formulations of whatever ideology is accepted. There are liberal Catholics and liberal Moslems. There have even been liberal Marxists. Others are born with a will to dominate. These will gather round the most fashionable intolerant ideology on offer.
Last month, I used the examples of Calvinism and Cultural Marxism. These were and are legitimising ideologies. Each has different formal propositions. Each has different enemies. Each has different effects on the character. But their essential function, so far as they can be made hegemonic, is to justify the gaining and use of power by an authoritarian élite – or by “The Puritans.”
If you want to see this case made at greater length, I refer you to my earlier essay. The case briefly stated, I turn to what may follow from it.
This is to suggest that direct argument with the Puritans is of limited value. Our own Puritans are Cultural Marxists for reasons other than the truth or falsehood of Cultural Marxism. Because its surface claims about treating people as individuals, and not being rude to them, are broadly in line with public opinion, it is an ideal legitimising ideology. If our Puritans had, after about 1970, taken up traditional Calvinism, or Orthodox Marxism-Leninism, or National Socialism, they would have got nowhere. The social liberalism of the previous two decades would have rolled straight over them. Instead, there was the combination, in Britain and America, of a large cohort of those inclined to Puritanism and an ideology, or set of ideologies, that could be shaped into a powerful legitimising ideology. It may be that the universe as a whole is locked into a rigid scheme of cause and effect. In this case, what happened was inevitable. But looking only at those parts of the universe we can understand and control, I think there was an element of contingency here. We are where we are because of a largely accidental discovery by the Puritans of a legitimising ideology that worked for them.
Keith Preston: Trump Most “Pro-Zionist” U.S. President Ever Reply
I got a mention in Breitbart, lol. Listen to the original interview with Press TV here.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel renders him the “most pro-Zionist” commander-in-chief to have ever held the high office, declared Iran’s state-controlled news agency Press TV, citing an analyst.
State sponsor of terrorism Iran does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and has continually threatened to destroy it. The Shiite powerhouse joined various predominantly Muslim countries, jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL), and Pope Francis in condemning President Trump’s decision.
On Wednesday, Trump announced that the U.S. will recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and has directed his administration to move America’s diplomatic mission from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
“I have determined that it is time to officially recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,” declared Trump. “While previous presidents have made this a major campaign promise, they failed to deliver. Today, I am delivering.”
Soon after Trump made his historic decision public, Keith Preston, director of attackthesystem.com, told Press TV:
This is not surprising that Trump would make this announcement. One thing that needs to be recognized about the Trump administration’s foreign policy is that the Trump administration is zealously pro-Israel.
The Trump administration is ardently pro-Zionist, even more, pro-Zionist than many past administrations have been, arguably the most pro-Zionist administration in U.S. history.
