Libertarianism

Jewish Involvement in Libertarianism

  1. Is libertarianism a ‘Jewish intellectual movement’?

In his influential study The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald analyses a number of 20th century intellectual and social movements that were led by Jews and often centred around some charismatic Jewish leader, including Boasian anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis and Critical Theory. Approaching them from an evolutionary psychology and social identity theory perspective, MacDonald argues that they exemplify ‘group-evolutionary strategies’. In brief, he contends that these movements are stratagems used in Jew-Gentile competition: they function to ‘critique’ and undermine the ethnocentrism of Gentile societies so as to make them more hospitable for Jews and Jewish advancement, and to combat resistance to this advancement (labelled ‘anti-Semitism’). MacDonald never claimed to provide an exhaustive list of such movements, but a question this article will consider is whether libertarianism could be placed among them. Though some other authors have suggested or argued this before[1], I have a different take on things to them, as will be explained in due course.

Why might one suspect this of libertarianism? Libertarianism developed from classical liberalism. Though the founding fathers of classical liberalism were gentiles (with the exception of David Ricardo, who converted to Unitarianism against his family’s wishes), the successor ideology of libertarianism has had many Jews as its major figures. In fact, libertarian economist Steven Horwitz describes the Jewish role in libertarianism as pivotal:

It is not a coincidence that among the leading libertarian thinkers of the 20th century, we have a large number of Jews, starting with Mises, Milton Friedman, Israel Kirzner, and Robert Nozick. And despite the [fact that they] rejected their Judaism, we should not forget Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard. They are only the tip of the iceberg of the disproportionate number of Jews who have been instrumental in forwarding the ideas of classical liberalism in the last century. It is no exaggeration to say that the modern libertarian movement would not exist were it not for these Jews.[2]

Apparently, libertarian ideas have had a magnetic pull for many Jewish intellectuals; but is libertarianism a ‘Jewish intellectual movement’ in MacDonald’s sense? To answer this we should look to the preface of The Culture of Critique, were he gives four criteria he’s looking for:

1) The movement must be dominated by Jews.

2) There should be evidence that these Jews strongly identify as Jews and believe that they can advance Jewish interests through the movement (though they might deceive themselves about their having this motivation).

3) It should have an influence on gentile society, helping to make the society more hospitable to Jews.

4) It should provoke some response from gentiles, particularly an anti-Semitic response.

Now if Horwitz is right, we can take libertarianism to satisfy the first condition (Walter Block has provided a longer list of prominent Jewish libertarians[3]). Consider next the third criterion—that libertarianism has influenced gentile society and in a way that’s good for the Jews. Though it has had other popular political ideologies and forces to contend with, classical liberalism has certainly been deeply influential in the West, to the extent of being part of the Western identity or self-conception. Moreover, although its successor libertarianism is often regarded as a fringe movement, in the US especially it is promoted by an energetic ecosystem of institutes, political parties, law firms, publishers, journals, magazines and websites. And regarding the Jewish connection, it is often said that Jews have flourished the most in liberal, individualistic countries. Liberal ideas led to Jewish emancipation in Europe, and the US, which perhaps has most approximated to the libertarian ideal, was spoken of as a ‘promised land’ for the Jews. So the influence of (classical) liberal ideas has been ‘good for the Jews’, though perhaps not good enough, with most Jews nevertheless favouring a left-wing, progressive political orientation that campaigns for equality rather than liberty, to the dismay of many Jewish libertarians.[4]

However, it might be argued that liberalism is not good for the Jews at the expense of gentiles, but rather is just good period, that is, for everyone. Jews are not attracted to it for specifically self-interested reasons. Relatedly, it is sometimes said that Jewish overrepresentation in libertarianism is of no special significance since Jews are also overrepresented in the ranks of libertarianism’s arch-enemy, communism. As one writer put it, ‘if Communism and Libertarianism are both great for the Jews, you have to figure that probably just about anything can be construed as good for the Jews.’[5] Mises concurred: ‘these contradictory charges [blaming Jews for both laissez faire capitalism and communism] cancel each other.’[6] Being an urban, intellectual people, Jews will be overrepresented in most intellectual movements.[7]

However, this argument emphasizes the differences between libertarianism and communism while overlooking what they have in common: their shared cosmopolitan or internationalist outlook. Ludwig von Mises described the cosmopolitanism of liberalism as follows:

The ultimate ideal envisioned by liberalism is the perfect cooperation of all mankind, taking place peacefully and without friction. Liberal thinking always has the whole of humanity in view and not just parts. It does not stop at limited groups; it does not end at the border of the village, of the province, of the nation, or of the continent. Its thinking is cosmopolitan and ecumenical: it takes in all men and the whole world. Liberalism is, in this sense, humanism; and the liberal, a citizen of the world, a cosmopolite.[8]

Replace ‘liberalism/liberal’ with ‘communism/communist’ in this passage and it wouldn’t look out of place in any Marxist tract. We could thus suppose that it’s their shared cosmopolitanism, with its de-emphasis on national borders and ethnic or racial identity, that makes both ideologies attractive to a dispersed, diaspora people like the Jews. And we could then suppose that they would be much less enthused about and much less represented in non-cosmopolitan political orientations like conservatism, nationalism, royalism and theocracy (outside the Israeli context).

Next let’s move on to the fourth condition. It is more difficult to see this one being satisfied, since it does not seem that libertarianism, or Jewish involvement in libertarianism, has provoked any defensive, anti-Semitic responses on the part of gentiles, and the issue of Jewish overrepresentation in libertarianism has not even attracted a great deal of notice or comment. But satisfaction of this seems to be just for bonus points, since MacDonald doesn’t treat it as a necessary condition. For instance, in his discussion of Boasian anthropology, he doesn’t show that it provoked an anti-Semitic reaction but just standard scientific criticism. So it seems that the answer to whether libertarianism is a Jewish group-evolutionary strategy comes down to whether the second condition is satisfied: are Jewish promoters of libertarianism motivated by strong Jewish self-identification and the belief that libertarianism advances specifically Jewish interests (perhaps at the expense of Gentile interests)?

Jewish libertarians can indeed be found who explicitly attribute their adherence to libertarianism to Jewish concerns. For instance, the Jewish American legal scholar Randy Barnett has explained how ‘being a contrarian Jew has affected my academic agenda, my scholarly commitments, and the future direction of my work’. His libertarianism, he tells us, stems from a belief that ‘the reason Jews have thrived in the US is because it was fundamentally a republic that puts a primacy on individual rights rather than a democracy that unduly privileges the will of the majority’, and he criticizes progressive Jews for being ‘short-sighted about what is good for the Jews.’[9] However, Barnett is not a major figure and we should turn our attention to the big Jewish libertarian luminaries. Accordingly we will focus on two main intellectual strands, the Ayn Rand strand and the Mises-Rothbard strand. Different answers, I believe, will be obtained for each.

  1. The objectivist strand of libertarianism

As was mentioned, some have previously argued that libertarianism is a ‘Jewish intellectual movement’. Trudie Pert, for instance, argues this in relation to the Mises-Rothbard strand but doesn’t discuss the Ayn Rand or ‘objectivist’ strand. The view taken here, however, is that a much better case can be made for this claim in relation to the objectivist strand.

Ayn Rand was the founder of objectivism, which combines a libertarian, individualistic political philosophy with some other ideas including an ethics of selfishness. Shortly before the publication of her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, a coterie of admirers began to form around and meet regularly with her, which they jokingly named The Collective. This group formed an institute to promote Rand’s philosophy and was entirely Jewish: as Rothbard, who briefly associated with this group, said, ‘each and every one of them was related to each other, all being part of the one Canadian Jewish family, relatives of either Nathan or Barbara Branden [born Blumenthal and Weidman respectively].’[10] The group believed that Rand was of messianic significance and it has been described as a cult.[11]

In these respects the objectivist movement in its beginnings appeared similar to a paradigmatic MacDonaldian Jewish intellectual movement. But despite the Jewish makeup of The Collective, there is little to suggest that Rand or her group were significantly motivated by Jewish interests. Rand was from a young age introverted and independent. She rarely spoke or wrote about her Jewish identity and showed little interest in it. As with her familial relationships, she didn’t place much importance in it because it was unchosen and therefore not expressive of one’s values: ‘one is simply born into a family. Therefore it’s of no real significance.’[12] Feeling pride (or shame) in one’s family or ethnic background was for Rand irrational and a kind of ‘racism’. It only makes sense to feel pride in one’s own achievements, and anything else is ‘a quest for the unearned.’[13] (Perhaps Rand is looking at this the wrong way. Taking pride in, say, one’s ancestors might not be an attempt to, illogically, claim their achievements as one’s own, but rather to see in their achievements one’s own potentialities; they show to us what we might be capable of.) There is some evidence, however, that later in life Rand developed more of an attachment to her kinsfolk, as she donated to Israel (her first act of giving to a cause) and vehemently defended its right to bring civilization to a ‘primitive’ region. However, she similarly defended European colonialism,[14] so this might have partly stemmed from a universal principle as much as from ethnic loyalty.

Rand was not very interested in leading a movement, and saw her objectivism as a philosophy to be taken up by individuals. The institute associated with The Collective was formed by her main disciple and was called the Nathaniel Branden Institute, and it ended after Branden’s acrimonious break from Rand. It wasn’t until 1985, three years after Rand’s death, that another significant attempt was made to get a movement going, when Collective member Leonard Peikoff, who Rand made heir to her estate, established the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI). Peikoff was more concerned with typical Jewish bugbears, and wrote a book called The Ominous Parallels that attempted to explain the rise of Nazism in Germany with a familiar It-could-happen-here trope.

Next in the line of succession was Yaron Brook, who was appointed by Peikoff as Executive Director in 2000 and who has led the institute since then. Brook is a dual American-Israeli citizen and served in Israeli military intelligence before emigrating to the US at age 26, where he gained an MBA and PhD in finance. Brook got into Rand’s ideas in his teenage years, but before joining the ARI he was reportedly not very well known in objectivist circles. Brook said that he left Israel because of the ‘socialist policy, ridiculous political system, constant external threats.’[15] Nevertheless Israel remained close to his heart, and under his directorship at the ARI, Israel advocacy was ramped up.

The gold-standard for establishing whether Jewish activists are sincere in their principles or are just using them as a gambit to advance Jewish interests is perhaps to find evidence of a double-standard, where those principles are pushed on gentiles but not on Jews. Now objectivists are, generally speaking, in favour of open borders and Brook and his colleagues say that this policy is entailed by objectivist principles. But what do they say about the borders of the Jewish state?

In his regular podcast show, after expressing concern about rising nationalism in Europe after the Brexit referendum, Brook said the following:

Now look … any time I mention immigration, any time I mention nationalism, people bring up Israel. … I don’t have time to cover the Israel example. But Israel is an exception.  You heard it here.  Israel is an exception.  Not a good exception.  Not an exception that is ideal.  But it is an exception.  And, uh, why is Israel an exception? … [that’s something] we will get to on a future show, but not now.”[16]

Objectivists advocate not only for the free movement of people but also of goods and money. Brook’s remarks above might now make us wonder whether these other beliefs would hold firm in relation to the Israel case. Brook denounces EU agricultural tariffs but would he also denounce Israeli agricultural tariffs, which protect struggling Israeli farmers who work difficult, dusty land, from global competition?[17] Would he accept Israel being dependent for its food supply on non-Jews, that is, potential anti-Semites? And would he make an exception for the shekel when it comes to currency controls, which might protect it from manipulations by foreign speculators in certain circumstances?

Brook eventually returns to the same topic in another show, but only when the issue is raised again by a caller.

There’s a bunch of people out there that are calling me a hypocrite … because Israel doesn’t allow open immigration. … It’s built a wall, and Mexicans are invading America so — I mean, that’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. Israel is defending itself against a constant military threat from people who wanna wipe it out. They wanna use weapons to kill every Jew in Israel. They say this; they announce it publicly; they do it whenever they have an opportunity. It’s fought multiple wars against armies that have invaded it from these borders, against at least six different Arab-Muslim countries. … [But] Mexicans are coming over the border to get a job … to try to make their lives better lives … how can we be against that? It drives me nuts.[18]

As I’m sure Brook knows, these days there are such things as aeroplanes which can transport people to Israel from countries who are not hostile to it, people who might just want to improve their lives by settling in Israel and contributing to its economy. (Such people might include, for instance, recent non-Jewish African migrants to Israel, who were expelled and resettled in Canada.) How can he be against that? Notice also how Brook raises an altruistic consideration in defence of Mexican immigration, which should carry no weight with an objectivist since they subscribe to an ethics of selfishness. Why should an American objectivist care about a Mexican’s quality of life?

Interestingly, the ARI has a branch in Israel. Though the immigration issue features as a major topic on the U.S. ARI website, this writer, armed with a translator program to translate the Hebrew, could not find any mention of it on the Israeli website, which focuses on more anodyne economic topics about capitalism versus statism.

The Ayn Rand Institute’s Israel advocacy goes well beyond the immigration issue. Under Brook’s and Peikoff’s leadership, the ARI has advanced an agenda barely distinguishable from that of neoconservatism. It has defended the War on Terror, torture, and Israel’s right to ‘exist’ (i.e., expand), and it has called for U.S. military action against Iran. (In fact, Brook has criticized neoconservatism, but his main complaint is that it’s too soft: his line is that the US should dispense with the altruistic nation-building and democracy promotion stuff and just unapologetically pursue its ‘self-interest’ and smash ‘threats to America.’[19]) This agenda, and the hypocrisy implicit in it coming from objectivists, has been meticulously documented by the website ARI Watch. Similar agendas can also be found in other objectivist institutions like The Atlas Society and The Objective Standard, which were founded by people associated with or expelled from the ARI.

Objectivism, then, is led by Jews with a strong sense of Jewish identity and mission. We can therefore conclude with some confidence that the objectivist movement is a Jewish intellectual movement á la MacDonald, though it might not have started out as one. For Brook and his colleagues, objectivism is for thee but not for me. Principles of individualism, liberty and selfishness are selectively applied to accord with Jewish interests. When Israel is considered, suddenly the evaluative frame of reference changes: Israel might violate libertarian and objectivist principles by being statist, socialist, collectivist, having conscription, initiating aggression and so on, but it must be defended because it’s still so much better than what the Arab ‘savages’ (as Rand once called them[20]) have created there. I know of no evidence whatsoever that Brook is still working for Israeli intelligence in some capacity, but it is interesting that his behavior is entirely consistent with this hypothesis.

  1. The Mises-Rothbard strand

Next let’s consider the much more popular Mises-Rothbard strand of libertarianism. Murray Rothbard, the student and follower of Mises, is greatly respected in the libertarian movement, and Walter Block has said he is the closest thing you could find to a guru figure in libertarianism besides Ayn Rand.[21] However, the characters of both were opposite in many respects. In contrast to the austere, intense, authoritarian and haughty Rand, Rothbard was by all accounts affable, gregarious, humorous and down-to-earth. Ideologically he also differed from Rand by advocating the more radical anarcho-capitalist version of libertarianism, which sees no need for government whatsoever, in contrast to objectivism which holds a minimalist theory of the state.

Rothbard rebelled against the communist Jewish milieu he grew up with in New York. But did he retain a strong sense of Jewish identity, or animosity towards gentile culture? In support of this, Pert alleges that Rothbard and Mises were hostile towards Christianity.[22] However, Mises’ attitude to Christianity softened with age,[23] and Pert’s claim is not at all true for Rothbard. Many who knew him personally have said that while being an agnostic he greatly admired the Catholic Church.[24] He had expertise in Church history and theology, loved Baroque Church architecture, and believed that liberalism developed from Christian ideas.[25] Rothbard was also affiliated with the Old Right led by Senator Robert Taft in opposing the ‘welfare-warfare state.’[26] He criticized pillars of Jewish power like the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking, and had trouble getting his PhD because of this opposition. Later in his career he tried to form an alliance with paleoconservatives. He even began to sympathize with ethno-nationalist concerns and took seriously Jean Raspail’s anti-immigration novel The Camp of the Saints, though he believed that anarcho-libertarianism could accommodate those concerns.[27]

This leads to the issue of immigration: what was Rothbard’s position on it? Initially Rothbard held the standard libertarian position. As one of his followers expresses it, ‘Libertarians, for the most part, will support immigration. There’s nothing special about the territory of a particular state. If someone is willing to hire or sponsor an immigrant that should be the end of the matter.’[28] In particular, by rejecting the concept of public property as an absurdity, libertarians often consider public property to be up for grabs (though there are exceptions here: Hans-Hermann Hoppe considers it the property of the taxpayers).

However, Rothbard came to change his attitude to immigration from reflecting on the ideal anarcho-capitalist state.[29] In such a society, all land would be privately owned and therefore there would be no automatic right to enter that territory. Someone wanting to hire an immigrant would need to get the agreement of those whose land the immigrant would need to traverse to reach his business and use thereafter. Anti-immigration views will perhaps gain more traction in libertarian circles; though it’s often said that most libertarians are for open borders, three of the most respected libertarians, Rothbard, Rockwell and Hoppe, have come out against the idea.

This libertarian solution to the immigration problem would hardly be appealing to an ethno-nationalist however. The difficulty is that such restrictions would apply to everyone, not just ‘foreigners’. Without public land, nobody would have an automatic right to roam. It would be a paltry kind of freedom that can only be automatically exercised on one’s private plot. One might think that the landowners could agree to grant such rights to ‘compatriots’ and not ‘foreigners’, but this very distinction presupposes the existence of a state and state borders, which anarcho-libertarianism rejects. (Rothbard’s vision of society also shows a lack of appreciation for the value of wild land, valuable for its beauty and ecological importance.)

What the Ayn Rand Institute is to Rand, the Mises Institute, established by Rothbard’s colleague and friend Lew Rockwell, is to Mises and Rothbard. But one does not find the selective application of libertarian principles there to advance Jewish interests. Israel receives no special favors at the Mises Institute,[30] nor at Rockwell’s website LewRockwell.com or at the ideologically similar Ron Paul Institute. Anti-war and anti-interventionist positions prevail at these forums, in contrast with the ARI.

We can thus conclude that while the Ayn Rand strand of libertarianism is a Jewish Intellectual Movement in MacDonald’s sense, the Mises-Rothbard strand is not. However, there are other strands one might consider and this article makes no claim to completeness. Milton Friedman and the Chicago School haven’t been discussed. This school ascended to become part of the Establishment, and Marco de Wit has already persuasively argued that it is a MacDonaldian Jewish Intellectual Movement.[31] Other strands one could investigate include the Washington-based Cato Institute and the Libertarian Party, though I will leave that to other investigators.

Though many libertarians of the Mises-Rothbard stripe are sincere and principled people, in the rest of this article I will argue that, despite their valuable contributions to economic thought and to the defence of peace and freedom, their doctrine comes to grief with its inability to reckon with the Jewish Question.

  1. Libertarianism and tribalism

The increased Jewish involvement in the development of liberalism coincided with a radicalisation of that tradition, for libertarianism is arguably more extreme and individualistic than classical liberalism. This is partly because while classical liberalism is associated with the Harm Principle (HP)—roughly, that force can only be legitimately used against a person to prevent him from harming others, libertarianism is associated with the Non-Aggression Principle (NAP): that force can only be legitimately used against a person to prevent him from using force or threatening to use force against others or their property.[32] And the latter seems more licentious than the former. For instance, laws against blackmail could plausibly be justified by the HP but not by the NAP.[33] (However, matters are complicated here by the fact that libertarians typically stretch the meaning of ‘aggression’, to include things like fraud or walking through someone else’s property.) The more moderate nature of classical liberalism can also be seen in the willingness of classical liberals to make exceptions to their principles. J. S. Mill, for instance, said that an individual may be compelled by government to do certain positive acts to support the community, such as ‘to give evidence in a court of justice; to bear his fair share in the common defence, or in any other joint work necessary to the interest of the society of which he enjoys the protection; and to perform certain acts of individual beneficence, such as saving a fellow-creature’s life, or interposing to protect the defenceless against ill-usage.’[34] These policies cannot be derived from his Harm Principle. Libertarians, on the other hand, pride themselves on their ‘logical consistency’: their unflinchingly accepting the implications of their limited number of principles, no matter how ‘counterintuitive’ they may seem. But what they applaud as logical consistency others see as dogmatism.[35] Libertarian rhetoric sometimes also has a revolutionary flavour, advocating black-market dealing and tax evasion, and taking or occupying public property, though typically rejecting the use of force.

It is not surprising that members of an ethnic minority like the Jews would be attracted to libertarianism, since its radically individualist philosophy undermines the ethnocentrism of the ethnic majority and thus lowers the drawbridge, so to speak, into that society for outsiders. But is this not a double-edged sword? Wouldn’t an individualistic libertarian order prohibit or at least undermine Jewish ethnocentrism just as much as gentile ethnocentrism?

This question was addressed, at least obliquely, in a recent book by Alan Krinsky[36] that argues for the compatibility of traditional Judaism and libertarianism. Judaism is the polar opposite of a system of thought like libertarianism in many ways, for instance it is extremely non-individualistic or ‘collectivist’. It is difficult to think of a statement more at odds with the libertarian spirit then one from a leading Rabbi quoted by Krinsky, which affirms that the Jewish community is ‘not just an assembly of people who work together for their mutual benefit, but a metaphysical entity, an individuality; I might say, a living whole,’ or a ‘juridic metaphysical person.’[37] Nevertheless, Krinsky argues that this strange kind of entity would be accepted in a libertarian society, because it is ultimately a ‘voluntary association’ and in libertarianism everyone has the right to form such associations as they see fit. Libertarianism has nothing against community, he says, so long as it’s not held together by force.[38]

There is a naivety, however, in conceptualizing Judaism, or the Jewish community more generally, as a mere voluntary association, as if to put it on the level of a local board-game or toastmasters club. Society is not just a site of mutually beneficial interactions but is also an arena of competition for power and resources, and Jews compete in this arena as a group (the existence of a vast, integrated and international network of Jewish advocacy and campaigning groups puts this beyond question.) Their commitment to ‘work[ing] together for their mutual benefit’ manifests itself, for instance, in covertly practiced ethnic nepotism and tactics of collusion and exclusion used in the spheres of business, politics and culture, which non-Jews see as discrimination and unfair competition, just as collusion between players in a poker game is regarded as unfair and is prohibited. But such collectivist tactics are allowable in a libertarian order since they don’t involve using force or the threat of force. They are in accordance with the letter, though not with the individualistic spirit, of libertarianism. This can then lead to a collectivist ‘arms race’, where non-Jews band together as a self-defensive response,[39] which would ultimately destabilize a libertarian system. Interestingly, Krinsky expresses some doubts about libertarianism’s sanguine attitude towards voluntary associations, since they could include ‘discriminatory associations’ like ‘sexist and racist groups.’[40] But he seems to lack the introspective powers necessary to realize that his own Judaism might also be such a discriminatory association.

The sanguine attitude of libertarians towards ‘metaphysical entities’ like the Jewish community points to a fatal weakness with their doctrine. Misguided political ideologies usually end up dashed against the rock of human nature, and libertarianism is no different from Marxism in this respect. But whereas Marxism ignored our ‘selfish’ nature, our tendency to be motivated primarily by personal profit, libertarianism ignores our ‘tribal’ nature, our tendency to identify with and collude in groups. Tribalism runs counter to the individualism that is a key part of libertarianism, and an excess of it would destabilize a libertarian society. Libertarians will, no doubt, acknowledge the existence of tribalism, but then why are they so unworried by it?

One reason is that they seem to treat tribalism not as a deep feature of human nature but as more like superstition: an archaic, irrational tendency that man will grow out of in civilized society. We are left to infer this, at any rate, from their nonchalant attitude towards the immigration of very illiberal tribes into liberal countries, which betrays a naïve confidence that they will give up their old ways of thinking and become good liberal individualists in short order. The point is doubtful, however, as there seems to be no inverse relationship between intelligence/educatedness and tribalism. Jews and North East Asians, for instance, are known for their high IQ and high ethnocentrism.

There is also a strong Rousseauian trend in libertarianism that might explain its attitude towards tribalism. Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that men were naturally good and lived contentedly until society corrupted them. Life in the State of Nature, Rousseau imagined, was not solitary, nasty, brutish and short as Thomas Hobbes believed. It was solitary, yes, but it was also a state of contented independence living off nature’s bounty, comparable perhaps to how orangutans live, the semi-solitary apes. Libertarians, especially anarcho-libertarians, also hold romantic notions about the State of Nature, imagining it as characterised by harmonious interactions.[41] Man then became corrupted, not so much by society as Rousseau believed but by government. Indeed, there is intellectual pressure on those who believe government to be the root of all evil to have a rosy-eyed view of the State of Nature, since the alleged horrors of the State of Nature have been the main justification for government in much of Western political philosophy. Tribalism, then, could be seen by libertarians as part of this corruption, something artificial that is stirred up and reinforced by the state to further its own agenda, and not as something native to man when left alone.

Implicit in the Rousseauian and libertarian view is the idea that sociality and hence tribalism is not natural or instinctive to man. Men lived naturally solitary lives, and then decided and made a rational calculation (indeed, a miscalculation in Rousseau’s view) to live together under a leader and in a hierarchy. Thus man’s sociality is derived from reason rather than instinct.

Serious reflection on human nature will, however, lead to the conclusion that sociality and tribalism are instinctual and ineradicable. Tribalism may be partly based on the rational calculation that it is better to band together with others to survive and compete, but it is also positively reinforced by elemental feelings like love and affection, pride, attachment to one’s own kind, the desire for recognition, approval and connection, as well being negatively reinforced by feelings of loneliness and insecurity. Further, for most people, living for their own private pleasure like a Randian egoist, however heroically, is not sufficient to give their lives meaning. Most people need to identify with something greater than themselves, and the libertarian individualist is in danger of becoming a shallow libertine. There is little reason to think that humans ever had a solitary way of life that they made a rational decision to leave. If we evolved from apes as the evolutionists say then we likely evolved from social apes, so that man has always lived in social and hierarchical groups and has a nature geared to that mode of existence. The chimpanzee is, after all, our closest relative, not the orangutan.

Libertarianism condemns ethnocentrism and downplays its importance in social life, but ethnocentrism is like weaponry: it would perhaps be nice to live in a world without it, but so long as one group refuses to give it up it would be foolish for others to do so. The libertarian individualist is one who by renouncing tribalism has, as Fredrick Nietzsche might say, ‘strayed most dangerously from [his] instincts.’[42]


1] Lote, S. 2011. Libertarianism: Ideals and reality. The Occidental Quarterly 11(1), pp. 45-50. Pert, T. 2011. Austro-libertarianism, Catholicism, and Judaism. The Occidental Quarterly 11(1), pp. 69-86.

[2] Horwitz, S. Libertarianism rejects anti-Semitism. Foundation for Economic Education. https://fee.org/articles/libertarianism-rejects-anti-semitism/

[3] Block, W. 2017. Are All Jews Socialists, Progressives, Communists, Left-Liberals, Bernie and Hillary Supporters, Democrats? No! Lewrockwell.com. https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/jews-socialists-progressives-communists-left-liberals-bernie-hillary-supporters-democrats-no/

[4] E.g., Friedman, M. 1972. Capitalism and the Jews. https://www.law.uchicago.edu/recordings/milton-friedman-capitalism-and-jews. Block, W. 2018. Is it permissible to criticize Jews? Lewrockwell.com. https://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/permissible-criticize-jews/

[5] Lindsay, R. 2015. Jews created libertarianism. https://beyondhighbrow.com/2015/09/30/jews-created-libertarianism/

[6] von Mises, L. 1974[1944]. Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Liberty Fund, p. 209.

[7] Cofnas, N. 2018. Judaism as a group evolutionary strategy: A critical analysis of Kevin MacDonald’s theory. Human Nature, 29, p. 138.

[8] Von Mises, L. 1985. Liberalism in the Classical Tradition. Trans: R. Raico. Foundation for Economic Education, pp. 105-6.

[9] Barnett, R. 2015. The making of a libertarian, contrarian, non-observant, but self-identified Jew. Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 1330.

[10] Rothbard, M. The sociology of the Ayn Rand cult. https://www.lewrockwell.com/1970/01/murray-n-rothbard/understanding-ayn-randianism/.

[11] See Ibid. Also see Block, W. 2000. Libertarianism vs objectivism: A response to Peter Schwartz. Reason Papers 26.

[12] Rand quoted in Branden, B. 1987. The Passion of Ayn Rand. Anchor Books, p. 72. Also see p. 6.

[13] Rand, A. and Branden, N. 1961. The Virtue of Selfishness. Signet.

[14] Burns, J. 2009. The Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. Oxford University Press, p. 266.

[15] Arfa, O. 2007. ‘You don’t fight a tactic’. Jerusalem Post.

[16] The Yaron Brook Show, episode 62. Brexit: What’s on the horizon?

[17] See Katsman, H. Why Israeli farmers are struggling – and government policies aren’t helping. Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. https://jewishstudies.washington.edu/israel-hebrew/israeli-agriculture-farming-government-policies-tariffs/

[18] The Yaron Brook Show, episode 65. Live from FreedomFest ask me anything.

[19] See Brook, Y. and Epstein, A. 2007. Neoconservative foreign policy: An autopsy. The Objective Standard. The difference between Brook’s approach and the neoconservative one might be smaller than this suggests. Brook either fails to or pretends not to appreciate that the neoconservatives are Straussians who believe in the ‘noble lie’. Was the high-sounding talk of spreading freedom and democracy merely for public consumption? One should not dismiss such possibilities when dealing with neoconservatives.

[20] See video clip, ‘Ayn Rand on Israel and the Middle East.’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uHSv1asFvU

[21] Libertarianism versus objectivism, p. 45.

[22] Pert, p. 71.

[23] See Hülsmann, J.G. Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. Mises Institute, pp. 982-986 & pp. 437-443.

[24] See Rockwell, L (ed). 1995. Murray N. Rothbard: In Memoriam. Mises Institute.

[25] Rothbard in Memoriam, p. 80.

[26] Rothbard in Memoriam. p. 65.

[27] Rothbard, M. N. 1994. Nations by consent: Decomposing the nation-state. Journal of Libertarian Studies, 11, pp. 1-10.

[28] Casey, G. 2012. Libertarian Anarchy: Against the State. Continuum. p. 8.

[29] Rothbard. Nations by consent. pp. 1-10.

[30] See Halbrook, S. P. 1981. The alienation of a homeland: How Palestine became Israel. The Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 5, pp. 357-374. Rothbard, M. N. 2016[1978]. ‘Little’ Israel. https://mises.org/library/never-dull-moment/html/c/467.

[31] Marco de Wit. 2021. Did Milton Friedman’s Libertarianism Seek to Advance Jewish Interests? Occidental Observer.

[32] Some libertarians claim that their entire system is based on the NAP, while others believe it is just one of a number of principles informing libertarian thinking (see Zwolinski, M. 2016. The libertarian nonaggression Principle. Social Philosophy and Policy, 32(2), pp. 62-90.

[33] See Casey, p. 47. This does not mean libertarianism condones blackmail (libertarianism is not a complete theory of morality).

[34] Mill, J. S. 2003. On Liberty. Yale University Press. p. 82.

[35] E.g., K. MacDonald. 2011. Introduction to the special issue: libertarianism and white racial nationalism. The Occidental Quarterly, vol. 11(1), p. 12.

[36] Krinsky, A. D. 2020. Running in Good Faith? Observant Judaism and Libertarian Politics. Academic Studies Press.

[37] Joseph B. Soloveitchik, quoted in Krinsky, 2020. p. 155.

[38] It should be noted that libertarians often engage in crude black and white thinking about force. To promote community life and consciousness, for instance, governments have more options at their disposal then using force, such as various sorts of carrot or stick incentives and disincentives, but libertarians often classify such tools as the use of force (e.g., ‘No third road is possible here; one must choose compulsion or liberty’ (Casey, p. 54)).

[39] This process is described by MacDonald in Separation and its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism (2004).

[40] Krinsky, p. 171.

[41] See Casey, p. 32.

[42] Nietzsche, F. The Antichrist. §14.

Blasphemy and Bullshit: Muslim Migration and Leftist Malice Fuel Islamic Intolerance, Not “Liberal Cowardice”

Regicide — the killing of a king — is at the heart of chess. But most people don’t know that. When a victorious player announces “Checkmate,” he’s really saying “Shah mat,” which traditionally means “The king is dead” in Persian.

Slater self-slaughters

The Trotskyist libertarian Tom Slater has recently got it the other way around. He knew he was saying “Shah is dead,” but he didn’t realize that he was also announcing “Checkmate” for himself and his comrades. What am I talking about? Well, seven years after it happened, Furedi’s fanatical freedom fighters have finally given the horrible murder of Asad Shah a little of the attention that it has always deserved. Tom Slater is the editor of the web-magazine Spiked Online, where cognitive clones of the Jewish sociologist Frank Furedi gather to demand the greatest possible freedom for the greatest possible number. Inspired by the mass-murdering Jewish megalomaniac Leon Trotsky, they are particularly vocal about free speech. They want lots more of it, but they can’t be honest about why there’s lots less of it in the modern West.

Frank Furedi’s ferocious freedom-fighter Tom Slater

Some of the Muslims whom Tom Slater wants to enter Britain in unlimited numbers (Photograph: EPA)

Slater’s recent article at Spiked was a good example of that dishonesty and of the bullshit peddled by libertarians who warmly welcome mass migration from the Third World, but don’t welcome its inevitable consequences. The article is called “The shameful story of Britain’s backdoor blasphemy laws.” It should be called “The entirely predictable story of Britain’s backdoor blasphemy laws.” Slater wrote well and reasoned woefully as he finally broke Spiked ’s “shameful” seven-year silence on the horrible murder of a gentle and tolerant Ahmadi Muslim called Asad Shah. He described how Shah was stabbed and stamped to death by the mainstream Muslim Tanveer Ahmed in 2016, but he wasn’t honest about why the murder happened. Slater said that the Ahmadis are “a small Muslim sect deemed to be heretical by many Muslims.” In fact, they’re deemed heretical by all orthodox Muslims, and in Pakistan Ahmadis are forbidden by law from referring to themselves as Muslim and practising the standard Muslim faith. Slater didn’t mention any of that, for obvious reasons. I give him credit for finally discussing Shah’s murder, but he is still being dishonest and evading the truth. The subtitle of his article ran like this: “Liberal cowardice has fuelled Islamic intolerance — and cost lives.” In fact, the only role played by “liberals” in the murder of Asad Shah was that of allowing Tanveer Ahmed to enter Britain. He came here with his “Islamic intolerance” fully formed and was ready to accept any judicial consequences for putting it into practice.

Islam + free speech = Islam

In other words, no amount of “liberal courage” would have stopped him stabbing and stamping Asad Shah to death. After doing that, he waited calmly at a bus-stop to be arrested, put on trial and sentenced to life in prison. In the eyes of other orthodox Muslims, he was now a ghazi, a “hero” who had defended the honor of the Prophet against a blasphemous Ahmadi. If Britain still had the death-penalty, he would have accepted execution just as readily. That would have made him not just a ghazi but also a shahid, a “martyr” for Muhammad. After all, Pakistan still honors the sacred memory of Ghazi-Shahid Ilm-Deen, a Muslim saint who stabbed a Hindu blasphemer to death in 1929 and was executed under the British Raj. A few years later, in 1938, Muslims living in Britain “ceremoniously committed to the flames” a copy of H.G. Wells’s A Short History of the World (1922), because it contained what they considered to be offensive references to the Prophet Muhammad. Muslims attack free speech because they are Muslims, not because they are emboldened by “liberal cowardice.”

Slater did not mention any of that highly relevant history in his article about Asad Shah. Nor did he explain why leftists have imported Muslims into Britain in such large numbers. If he’d done that, he couldn’t have pretended that “liberal cowardice” was to blame for Islamic intolerance. And why have leftists imported Muslims? Because they want to use Muslims as footsoldiers in the leftist war on the Christian West, of course. That’s why leftists don’t want to challenge Muslims in any way. The rape-gangs of Rotherham operated with impunity under a Labour council and a Labour MP called Denis MacShane. When MacShane was jailed for fraud in 2013, he was saluted at the Jewish Chronicle as “one of the [Jewish] community’s greatest champions.” In other words, he’d done what he became a Labour MP to do: serve rich Jews and spit on working-class Whites. As its very name proclaims, the Labour party was founded to champion the White working class, but it was long ago subverted and taken over by Jewish money and Jewish ideology. Now it hates the White working-class and works to harm their interests, even as it works to import and privilege non-Whites from the violent, corrupt and diseased Third World.

Cognitive controller Frank Furedi

Tom Slater and his comrades at Spiked haven’t merely celebrated Third-World immigration: for decades they’ve demanded open borders for Third-Worlders to flood in without limit. That’s why they have to pretend that “liberal cowardice has fuelled Islamic intolerance.” It hasn’t. Leftists hate free speech and have imported Muslim enemies of free speech as allies in their battle to censor and silence their right-wing and race-realist enemies. Libertarians have played the role of useful idiots in all that. And when Slater complains about “state multiculturalism” encouraging Muslims “to see themselves as separate and distinct,” he fails to mention that leftism in general, just like Trotskyism in particular, feeds off division and separatism. Migration and multiculturalism go together as naturally as Marxism and mendacity, because the same anti-White elite that imposed non-White migration on the unwilling White majority was, naturally enough, eager to begin privileging non-Whites over Whites. When Slater’s cognitive controller Frank Furedi celebrated the resistance of his birthplace Hungary to “all the crap” of wokeness, he didn’t mention that Hungary resists wokeness because Hungary is still overwhelmingly White.

And Hungary intends to remain that way, because it isn’t ruled by lovers of open borders like Frank Furedi. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán believes in “procreation, not immigration.” That’s why he’s denounced as a racist and anti-Semite by minority-worshipping leftists in the ethnically enriched West. The Whiteness of Hungary explains why subversive, anti-White organizations like Black Lives Matter (BLM) aren’t able to take root and metastasize there. There aren’t enough Blacks and other non-Whites in Hungary to provide fertile soil for pernicious Jewish ideologies like Critical Race Theory (CRT). But there are more than enough non-Whites in Britain for CRT to take root. And more than enough Muslims for “Islamic intolerance” to flourish here. Indeed, Slater inadvertently explained another big reason for Muslims to be “intolerant” in defense of their faith:

Freedom of speech would not exist without blasphemy, without radicals and troublemakers who dared to say heretical, rude and offensive things about Gods and prophets. This is what freedom of speech is built on. To throw all of that out in an attempt to shield a religious group from offence is not caring or anti-racist. Quite the opposite. It smears all Muslim Brits as hardline and intolerant, incapable of having their views challenged, incapable of being full and equal citizens in a modern liberal democracy, relegated to the status of overgrown infants or volatile brutes who must be tiptoed around forever. (The shameful story of Britain’s backdoor blasphemy laws, Spiked Online, 12th March 2023)

Muslims and the leftists who import them don’t want Muslims to be “full and equal citizens.” They want Muslims to be superior to Whites and Christians. And Muslims don’t believe in “modern liberal democracy.” They can see very clearly what has happened to Christianity thanks to free speech and secularism. Christianity has degenerated and now grovels before secularism and before other religions. Here, for example, is the degenerate Justin Welby, the current archbishop of Canterbury, literally groveling before non-Whites in Hindu India:

Justin Welby grovels before non-Whites in India (Photograph: Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images)

Justin Welby, “the definition of all that is wrong in modern Man”

As Andrew Joyce has said of Welby at the Occidental Observer: “At the heart of this disease [of GloboHomo in Christianity] is the Archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the Church of England, Justin Welby, a man who looks [as if] ten minutes of manual labor would actually kill him. He is the definition of all that is wrong in modern Man.” Compare Welby with the imam who sat beside a white policeman performing the kaffir krawl in the latest case of “liberal cowardice”:

A black-clad imam secretly laughs beside a krawling kaffir

Would that imam grovel before non-Muslims? Of course not. Would he apologize for any of Islam’s numerous crimes? Of course not. Unlike the vast majority of modern Christians, he would happily die for his faith. It’s also obvious that he would happily kill for it, like these energetic and enthusiastic Muslims in his Pakistani homeland:

A mob in eastern Pakistan stormed a police station on Saturday [11th February 2023], snatched a Muslim man accused of blasphemy from custody and lynched him, in the country’s latest religion-linked killing. Muhammad Waris, in his mid-30s, was in police custody in Nankana Sahib, in Punjab province, for desecrating pages of the Qur’an.

“The angry mob stormed the police station using a wooden ladder, dragged him out and beat him to death,” Waqas Khalid, a police spokesperson, told the Guardian. “After lynching, they were still not satisfied and tried to burn his body,” he added.

There have been a number of cases in Muslim-majority Pakistan of angry mob killings of people accused of blasphemy, the most high-profile among them the lynching of a Sri Lankan citizen in 2021. Blasphemy is a highly sensitive issue in Pakistan, where even false allegations can stir violence. Under Pakistani law, charges of blasphemy carry the death penalty. Video of the incident posted on social media showed hundreds of young people surrounding a police station. There was footage of people dragging a man by his legs in the street, stripping him naked and beating him with metal rods and sticks. (Mob storms Pakistan police station and lynches man accused of blasphemy, The Guardian, 12th February 2023)

That kind of thing happens regularly in Pakistan: see Wikipedia’s “List of blasphemy cases in Pakistan.” But you won’t see any mention of such things in Spiked, because Tom Slater and his comrades prefer to ignore how Pakistanis and other Muslims behave on their home-ground. After all, it’s embarrassingly clear that “liberal cowardice” in Britain does nothing to “fuel” “Islamic intolerance” in Pakistan. The same kind of Pakistani Muslims are now destroying free speech in Britain because of mass migration, not because of “liberal cowardice.” The only way to avoid conflict with or capitulation to fanatics like that is not to let them enter your country. Leftists, of course, want to collaborate with fanatics like that in the leftist war on the White West and its Christian heritage. And how have the libertarian Tom Slater and his comrades responded as, decade after decade, leftist enemies of free speech have imported Muslim enemies of free speech? They’ve warmly supported it. Now Slater is lamenting the entirely predictable consequences. He’s also asking: “Did we learn nothing from Asad Shah?”

Well, Tom, it’s difficult to learn lessons from a murder if for seven years you never acknowledge that it took place, let alone discuss it and stress its horrible significance. In all that time, Slater and other senior writers at Spiked never did acknowledge the murder of Asad Shah. By contrast, I’ve been discussing it at the Occidental Observer and stressing its horrible significance ever since it happened: see here, here, here, here, here, here and here. To his credit, Tom Slater has now broken the “shameful” silence at Spiked. To his discredit, he is still refusing to be honest about Asad Shah’s death. It was not the product of “liberal cowardice,” but of Muslim migration and leftist malice. You cannot protect blasphemers with bullshit. The self-proclaimed libertarians at Spiked support both free speech and open borders. That’s not merely stupid: it’s suicidal.

The Cult of Stupid: Libertarianism, Leftism, and the Murder of Free Speech

It’s one of the great truths of human existence: Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens – “With stupidity the Gods themselves battle in vain.” So said the great German writer Schiller (1759–1805) more than two hundred years ago. A lot has changed since then, but not the power of stupidity in human affairs. You can see stupidity at work 24/7 in Western politics and culture, for example. But occasionally it flares up in what you could call a stupernova — a glorious explosion of jaw-dropping dumb.

Migration to the max!

Stupernovas regularly dazzle the eyes of readers at the libertarian website Spiked Online, which is passionately in favour of both open mouths and open borders. That is, it wants both the maximum possible free speech and the maximum possible migration. “Let them in!” Spiked cries in favour of unlimited immigration from the most anti-libertarian cultures on earth. It then adds: “But don’t let them bring their culture with them!”

German genius Friedrich von Schiller

In other words, Spiked thinks that the West can have Third-World people without Third-World pathologies. All we need do is talk loudly enough and long enough about Enlightenment values, and bingo! The Third-World folk in our midst will suddenly leap forward centuries or even millennia in cultural development. Back in Pakistan, for example, Muslims rape children on an industrial scale, commit massive electoral fraud, and machine-gun politicians for dissing the Prophet Muhammad. In Britain, they’ll embrace the Enlightenment instead. They’ll stop raping children and committing electoral fraud. And in no time at all they’ll be erecting statues to Voltaire and forming reading-clubs to probe the collected works of John Stuart Mill.

Chop till they drop

But only if we wise Whites guide them out of their backward brown-skinned ways! That’s the implicit (and racist) message behind Spiked’s incessant wailings about how, against all the odds, Third-World people continue to exhibit Third-World pathologies in First-World settings. The latest wail at Spiked – and the latest stupernova – is about a Christian woman called Hatun Tash who was stabbed at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park in London. What had she done? Well, she’s a member of a group that tries to convert Muslims to Christianity, she was wearing a T-shirt in support of Charlie Hebdo, and she was criticizing Islam. Can you guess who might have attacked her? Indeed, her attacker may even have been trying to enact that fine old Islamic tradition of head-chopping for Muhammad.

Face-slashing for Muhammad: Islam-critic Hatun Tash is stabbed at the home of free speech (note Charlie Hebdo T-shirt)

As you’d expect, Spiked were disturbed and dismayed to see a Third-World pathology once again marring Britain’s march towards multi-racial libertarian Utopia. Their headline came in the form of an incredulous question: “You can be stabbed for criticising Islam?” Yes, fancy that! Britain imports millions of Muslims who believe strongly in Islam, and suddenly people are being stabbed for criticizing Islam. Who could have seen that one coming?

Competing traditions

Not the high-powered intellects at Spiked, it seems. But Brendan O’Neill’s article about the “bloody events in Hyde Park” did get one thing right. It said that Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park is “traditionally the one place in the UK where you can express pretty much any belief you like.” Indeed. But whose tradition is that, Brendan? It’s a fragile and recently created tradition of the White British. But what about head-chopping for Muhammad? Whose tradition is that? It’s a sturdy and deep-rooted tradition of Third-World Muslims whom you and your comrades at Spiked want to see entering the country in unlimited numbers.

Brendan goes on to blame the “woke” White left for “emboldening … Islamic extremists.” He’s once again plugging the highly racist line that Muslims and other non-Whites have no true agency and must rely on Whites to rescue them from their backward ways. In fact, Muslims are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves to love the Prophet and hate free speech. It isn’t the woke left that emboldens Muslims in Pakistan to machine-gun Muhammad-dissers or sentence innocent people to death on ludicrously vague and unjust charges of blasphemy.

The liberty-loathing left

But it is the woke left that campaigns passionately for maximum migration by Pakistanis and other Third-Worlders. And that should give Spiked a clue about how bad Third-World migration is for all the libertarian causes they claim to care about so deeply. The biggest enemies of free speech, from the Labour party in Britain to the Democratic party in America, have also been the biggest facilitators of mass migration from the Third World. Is that a coincidence? No, of course not. It’s been a coherent and perfectly rational strategy to strengthen the power of the liberty-loathing left.

Third-World people vote overwhelmingly for leftist parties, so more Third-World people means more power for authoritarian leftists. And Third-World pathologies like terrorism justify an ever-stronger security and surveillance state. That’s simple enough to understand, but some people resolutely refuse to understand it.

Here’s another stupernova at Spiked, written in support of the White teacher in Yorkshire who was driven into hiding by Muslim death-threats:

At the heart of our political culture is a commitment to free speech, free expression, freedom of thought, and tolerance of difference. People come here from every corner of the globe to enjoy our liberties and to fit into our peaceful and respectful democratic life. If this is to endure, it is essential that those in authority push back against any effort to undermine these vital norms. If we are to keep the freedoms we’ve enjoyed, we must show solidarity with the teacher and his family. (Freedom is on the line in the Batley by-election, Spiked, 30th June 2021)

No, Third-World people come to the West to exploit the high trust and wealth of societies that they could never have created for themselves. And at the heart of “our political culture” is a commitment not to freedom, but to the service of Jewish interests. Tony Blair was funded by Jewish money and obeyed Jewish orders, appointing a Jewish activist called Barbara Roche to massively (and malignly) increase already high levels of Third-World immigration.

Whites create free speech, Jews destroy it

Now the so-called Conservatives are in power and are doing nothing to slow, let alone end or reverse, the Third-Worlding of Britain. Are you surprised to learn that the current Conservative treasurer is a little-known Israeli Jew called Ehud Sheleg? You shouldn’t be. And you shouldn’t be surprised to see who is behind yet another attack on the free speech bequeathed to America by the White Founding Fathers:

PayPal Holdings Inc is partnering with non-profit organisation the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) [the most powerful and well-funded Jewish organization in America] to investigate how extremist and hate movements in the United States take advantage of financial platforms to fund their criminal activities.

The initiative will be led through ADL’s Center on Extremism, and will focus on uncovering and disrupting the financial flows supporting white supremacist and anti-government organizations. It will also look at networks spreading and profiting from antisemitism, Islamophobia, racism, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Hispanic and anti-Asian bigotry.

The information collected through the initiatives will be shared with other firms in the financial industry, law enforcement and policymakers, PayPal said. (PayPal to Research Transactions That Fund Hate Groups, Extremists, American Renaissance, 26th July 2021)

If you’ve got Jews, you’ve got implacable enemies of free speech and Western civilization. That’s why Jews have always worked so hard to close mouths and open borders. With Third-World people come Third-World pathologies that justify ever more authoritarianism and ever less freedom for the Whites who built the West. Libertarianism, which supposedly fights for freedom, is in fact another front in the Jewish war on Western civilization. For example, the libertarian fanatics at Spiked are devout disciples of the Jewish sociologist Frank Furedi, who is himself a devout disciple of the tyrants Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

Lenin was part-Jewish, Trotsky was fully Jewish. That was a very bad sign for the White Christians over whom they began to rule. And so is the Jewishness of Joe Biden’s government in America and Boris Johnson’s government in Britain. Bad times are ahead, goyim. So brace yourselves. But one thing will surely survive the wreck ahead: stupidity. It can’t be eliminated from human affairs, but we can try our best to minimize it. The stupernovas at Spiked are, by contrast, written by people who want to maximize it.

A Reply to Jordan Peterson

Celebrity intellectual Jordan Peterson has written a blog post, “’On the So-Called ‘Jewish Question’,” the inner quotes indicating he doesn’t think this is a real issue—something that only “reactionary conspiracy theorists” would propose.  His blog includes a link to Nathan Cofnas’s criticism of The Culture of Critique. No links to my replies—which may provide a clue about his intellectual honesty.

Indeed, one must wonder about the seriousness of someone who thinks he can settle an issue that has gotten the attention of some of the most celebrated thinkers in Western history with an 1100-word blog post.

Peterson has become popular because of his courage and knowledge in opposing political correctness. He stands up for men and for individual responsibility. To his credit he achieved celebrity status via social media, not as a creature of the mainstream media. Much of his stature rests on his use of scientific data in his arguments.  I and many others certainly appreciate this approach; he is particularly cogent in discussing sex differences and gender politics. There is not enough of this in public discourse.

However, my confidence in Peterson’s trustworthiness was shaken by his shoddy treatment of the Jewish Question, including name-calling directed at my own work. This is part of his broader offensive against identitarians, people who defend their group interests. For Peterson there are only individual interests (a bit strange for someone who approves of evolutionary biology, a subdiscipline that encompasses kin selection theory and, for humans, cultural group selection). For Peterson to admit there is a Jewish Question would be to concede the reality of group interests—not only families but religions, ethnic groups, and nations.

In the West, failure to acknowledge group interests is suicidal for its traditional European-derived populations. As a result of the imposition of massive non-White immigration and multiculturalism by elites unresponsive to popular attitudes, the traditional populations of these societies are slated to become minorities in lands they have dominated for hundreds, and in the case of Europe, thousands of years. In the West, these migrants have typically established identitarian groups intent on pursuing their group interests and with increasing power to do so as the traditional European-derived populations (which uniquely produced individualist societies) dwindle. While I would love to live in a European-derived individualist society, under such circumstances it is suicidal to pursue an individualist strategy as things are now. And unless there is drastic change, it will only get worse in the future.

Those preaching an individualist ideology fly under the radar of political correctness because they eschew White identitarianism. But, if present trends continue, the individualist culture of the West will become a distant memory as these new peoples assume power in collaboration with White social justice warriors who are already championing the very policies that Peterson abhors. Already in the U.S. the non-White voting share of the Democrat Party is 44%, and this will only increase in coming years as the Congressionally approved yearly influx of more than one million continues. The faith of the individualist is that these newcomers will readily become good Westerners and that the ethnic politics that looms so large now will become a thing of the past—a fateful gamble that will end in disaster as politics becomes increasingly racialized (~60% of Whites vote Republican, and Whites account for 90% of GOP votes), achievement differences among the various groups become a potent source of political friction, and there are declines in social cohesion and willingness to contribute to public goods. These changes are disastrous for the traditional White majorities of the West. Read more

The Alt Right Is Right, FEDERALIST’s Tracinski Wrong, About American History (And Donald Trump)

anyconservativewhowavestosupporters

 

Previously posted at VDARE.

The Alt Right is busting out all over (two more Main Stream Media attacks today, here and here)! Some of of this is because Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, made the wise move of having high-profile public meetings in Washington, DC. But I think it’s more than that.

Donald Trump’s candidacy has resonated deeply with voters, to the point that his supporters are famously immune to the hostile MSM barrage. Mainly these are the (white) people who have been left behind by both parties—the Democrats and their Rainbow Coalition of the racially and sexually aggrieved advocating ever more immigration, multiculturalism, Political Correctness, and LGBT privileges; the Republicans with their unholy alliance between neoconservatives  traitorously promoting the interests of Israel, and the Chamber of Commerce/K Street/wealthy donors promoting free trade, outsourcing, cheap labor, Open Borders, etc.

That leaves the Alt Right as the only identifiable segment of the political spectrum with any kind of theoretical or ideological grounding that supports Trump.

To combat this new menace to Conservatism Inc., we have hit jobs like Robert Tracinski’s Yes, The Alt Right Are Just a Bunch of Racists in The Federalist [April 4, 2016] specifically professing to refute two articles that “run interference for the Alt Right”. [The Intellectual Case For Trump I: Why The White Nationalist Support? By Mytheos Holt, Federalist, March 30, 2016 and An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right, by Allum Bokhari & Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart, March 29, 2016]

For all his intellectual pretensions, Tracinski [Email him] really depends on the knowledge that his audience can be stampeded by the “racists” smear. No need to do any heavy lifting. Nevertheless, I think his arguments, however disingenuous, are worth deconstructing as a case study in cuckservatism. Read more

The First Leftist Genocide of the Twentieth Century

There is good reason why President Obama avoids using the word ‘genocide’ to describe the killing of one-and-a-half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

This is because if you scratch almost any methodical mass killing in modern times, you are almost certain to find Liberals and Leftists pulling the strings. So it was with the first major holocaust of the twentieth century, the massacre of the Armenians and other Christian minorities that started about one hundred years ago today.

This prolonged atrocity, which included countless acts of rape, torture, and even crucifixion, and which saw tens of thousands taken out into the Black Sea and drowned, while many more were marched out into the deserts to die of starvation and disease, was carried out by the Ottoman Empire. This superficial fact conjures up an image of Oriental despotism of the sort we normally associate with the likes of Tamerlane or even Ivan the Terrible.

In other words, the implicit image of these massacres that exists in the popular mind is of dark deeds carried out at the behest of an absolute monarch, embodying the forces of traditionalism, conservatism, and even ethnic nationalism. But nothing could be further from the truth. By the time of the genocide, the Ottoman Empire of popular imagination had ceased to exist. The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire at the time of the genocide was Mehmed V, a gentle and ineffectual man, who has been described as follows:

The very appearance of Mehmed V suggests nonentity. Small and bent, with sunken eyes and deeply lined face, an obesity savoring of disease, and a yellow, oily complexion, it certainly is not prepossessing. There is little or no intelligence in his countenance, and he never lost a haunted, frightening look, as if dreading to find an assassin lurking in some dark corner ready to strike and kill him. The Near East from Within

By 1913, he had been reduced to a mere figurehead and pawn by a series of coup d’états, which had placed the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) in absolute power. Read more

On Jewish-Inspired “Patriots”

On 11 February 2015, Craig Stephen Hicks, age 46, of Chapel Hill, North Carolina — to all appearances, a White man — killed three Muslims living in his apartment-complex, execution style, one bullet in each head.

The father of two of the victims, a psychiatrist, was quick to declare that it was a “hate crime.”

While Hicks appears to be a White man, contrary to what some might expect, he is in no way a racist.

Yahoo News reports:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, a national civil rights organization, told Yahoo News that Hicks is not in its database of known extremists. According to his Facebook page, Hicks is a fan of the Alabama-based hate watchdog group. [Jason Sickles, Yahoo News, 11 February 2015]

Hicks’ wife Karen confirmed this, telling CBS News that Hicks “believed everybody was equal.” What then could have been Hicks’ motive for shooting the three Muslims, if he was not a “racist”? This does not fit the usual news-media template for such incidents. Perhaps the police have arrested the wrong man?

What we are told about Hicks is the following. In addition to being an anti-racist, he was a self-proclaimed atheist. He was a Constitutionalist. He was studying to become a paralegal. He would post rants on Facebook about what he felt were transgressions against his individual rights. All of this suggests something about Hicks’ way of dealing with the world around him. Read more