Eruditorum Press

The trap at the end of the clickbait

Search Results for: carl schmitt

Oh Schmitt, Hayek!

, , , , , 3

Okay, so Phil is now editing the full text of the Austrians essay for Neoreaction a Basilisk, but you can read the whole thing ‘as I left it’ (so to speak) at my Patreon in return for a monthly donation of just one measly dollar, thus proving that labour isn’t the source of value. 

Meanwhile, I will continue to post sections here which were cut from the essay for length reasons.  My Patreon sponsors will get those at least a week before they’re made public.  For instance, next week’s public post will go up at my Patreon – for patrons only – later today (probably).  My patrons will also hopefully get early access to podcasts before they go up.  Daniel and I just recorded a WWA Footnote cum Shabcast (Wrong with Shabthority?) on our mutual researches into the Right.  That’ll be along soonest.  We also have three other podcasts in the works, including a WWA Footnote featuring all four of us talking about the Trumpaversary. 

By the way, I want to publicly thank those patrons of mine who stuck by me during a long period when I was finishing the Austrians piece by racing to turn huge piles of notes into (hopefully) readable prose.  During this stretch, they were basically getting fuck all for their money.  I don’t blame any of the people who jumped ship – totally fair enough – but I’m extra double fond of those who felt able to stick around.

Anyway, back to me – i.e. a nobody with a second rate degree from a third rate university – explaining why one of the foremost intellectuals of the twentieth century was shit.

 

*

Neoliberalism is not a simple reiteration of the principles of classical liberalism – a defence of the ‘market society’. It has its origins in an authoritarian reconfiguration of liberalism, beginning in the early twentieth century, specifically designed to meet the challenge of mass democracy and the welfarist demands that came with it.  The great pioneer of this shift was Friedrich Hayek… [who] obscured his real sympathies regarding the state with talk of the ‘spontaneous order’ of the market. But it is clear that he thought a very strong state necessary for various reasons. One such was to cope with the pathologies of democracy.

…

…since neoliberals recognise that human beings are not necessarily predisposed to embrace ‘the market’, the law must not only protect the market order from popular attempts to subordinate it, but also help create neoliberal subjects. People must be compelled to embrace their ‘entrepreneurial’ selves, to treat every aspect of their lives as a self-maximising quest, and to embrace the calculus of risks and rewards in the market, including the inequalities that come with it, rather than seeking to control it. Attempts at circumventing or subverting the economic order, whether through political activism or criminality, must be harshly punished. The neoliberal state is a big, interventionist state, particularly in its penal mode.

– Richard Seymour, Against Austerity

 

All law is situational law.

…

Continue Reading

Fascism, Imperialism, and Trumpism

, , , , , , 3

Fascism, of course, always had a lot more in common with classical liberalism than most people realise.  Fascism was built around the defence of private capitalism.  Far from being the ideologically ultra-statist economic nightmare of right-wing mythology, fascist economics was complex and opportunistic.  It sometimes used nationalisation as well as privatisation.  Indeed, as Germa Bel has shown, the Nazis did so extensively, to the point where one could call them forerunners of neoliberalism.  But there’s no denying that statism was a part of the Nazi economic strategy… but then so did liberalism always use the state as a way to protect and extend capitalist interests.  Indeed, fascism – being a product of twentieth century capitalist imperialism – is the product of an era when the interests of the state fuse, to a large extent, with the interests of blocs of domestic capital, thus making state-run imperialism essentially a form of public-financed ‘primitive accumulation’ on behalf of national capitalists.  Many big capitalists – generally from heavy industry, for material reasons, as Daniel Guerin pointed out – understood this and sympathised with and/or subsidised fascist movements.  But more generally, fascism emerges from the liberal capitalist epoch, and shows the family resemblances.

In this connection, a reader recently reminded me of the work of Ishay Landa.  I need to re-read, but I seem to recall that Landa makes a strong case, in The Apprentice’s Sorcerer (2012), that fascism emerges from the Western liberal – i.e. capitalist – tradition and is in continuity with it, at least as much as rupture. 

This is a good review of Landa’s book which brings out the main points.  As the reviewer says

Landa begins by identifying as a historical precondition for fascism “the inherent tension between the political dimension of the liberal order and its economic one” (21). That is, the European bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century demanded representative governments in order to free the markets from feudal protectionism, but they were followed later by the lower classes who, in turn, demanded access to the franchise themselves in order to protect their own interests, pitting the original economic liberalism against emerging political liberalism. Where John Locke defended democracy as shoring up capitalism, Vilfredo Pareto, whose works inspired Benito Mussolini, lashed out at democracy “entirely on the premises of economic liberalism,” such as “its restriction of the ‘free movement of capital,’ and its encroachment on private property via progressive taxation” (53).” Similar strains of thought were current among German thinkers of the interwar period, most notably Oswald Spengler, and Adolf Hitler’s animus against German democracy was based upon the belief that “the [Weimar] Republic signifie[d] the unlawful and pernicious political interference in the economy”…

An interesting irony that Locke, who provides the basis for Rothbard’s ethics and metaphysics of property, is in favour of democracy (broadly), instead of resolutely opposed to it like the Austrians.  And it’s also telling that Hitler’s fundamental objections to Weimar democracy were couched in terms that would be congenial to Hayek et al (via Carl Schmitt, etc).…

Continue Reading

The Gateway Drug

, , , , , , , 2

Paleolibertarianism was a consciously devised mutation of Austrian-influenced libertarianism, concocted by the late-20th century’s most prominent devotee of Austrian dogma, Murray Rothbard (and his fawning cohorts).  

Libertarianism today draws on several sources.  Ayn Rand is the best known, but the more influential is arguably Murray Rothbard.  (Rothbard’s attitude to Rand fluctuated.)  Rand is more influential for her ‘ideas’.  Rand is more accessible, despite putting up a superficial show of intellectualism.  Rothbard is harder to get a handle on.  Unlike Rand, he is a genuine intellectual – which is often a question of how one couches ideas rather than the ideas themselves.  And he develops.  And he writes long, involved, serious articles (though they get less serious-minded as he gets older).  I would argue that his influence is less in actual ideas and more in the surrounding spheres of aesthetics/style and tactics/strategy.  After all, in fusing libertarianism with conservatism to create paleolibertarianism, the libertarians consciously submerged certain libertarian ideas.  What succeeded – from the libertarian point of view – was arguably less the fusion than the style: the strategic attempt to use populist reactionary politics to further the ends of liberal economics.

Paleolibertarianism aimed to promote the relatively unpopular extreme free-market dogmas of libertarianism by joining them tactically to America’s powerful trends of post-60s reaction.  It succeeded to a great extent.  It pandered to, and (as far as possible) absorbed, extreme American cultural conservatism, racism, sexism, etc.  It took a powerful place in the ecology of American reaction.  It fed on the discontents of neoliberalism, and US imperialism, to achieve a quasi-rebellious presence in the mainstream of US politics, most of all in the person of Ron Paul.

We’ve talked about Ron Paul in previous instalments, and mentioned the publication under his name, or at least his ‘brand’, of infamous racist newsletters.  People familiar with the content of those newsletters will have been unsurprised by Paul’s recent slip up on Twitter, when he explained the troubles of modern America with a cartoon which featured racist caricatures of various ethnicities (Jew, African American, etc) uniting to punch Uncle Sam with one massive fist made of ‘Cultural Marxism’.

 

 

Some libertarians have defended Paul over the years, but others have denounced him, asserting that the contents of the newsletters is paleoconservative rather than libertarian, and that it has no connection to the great pantheon of libertarian thinkers.  There is certainly some truth to this.  Our own Daniel Harper has suggested to me, in discussion, that Paul is actually not a libertarian but rather a paleoconservative (if, I’d say, an eccentric one) with an opposition to federal regulation rather than regulation per se.  So, he’s maybe ideologically inclined towards a ‘states’ rights’ perspective which paleolibertarianism has, in my view, tended to flirt with opportunistically.  Paul, of course, formally rejects the contents of his own newsletters and new tweets.  But then a great many racists these days formally claim to not be racists.  (I often wonder if the people citing that fake Churchill quote about “the fascists of the future… call[ing] themselves anti-fascists” have ever listened to the leading lights of today’s fascist movement steadfastly and indignantly deny that they are fascists.) …

Continue Reading

Return of the Irrepressed (Part 2)

, , , , 4

The glue which gums Rothbard’s libertarianism, with its supposed veneration of personal liberty, to the politics of tyranny (white supremacy, anti-semitism, etc) is the baked-in project of conservatism, according to Corey Robin: the defence of privilege and hierarchy which is, or feels itself to be, threatened. 

Libertarianism, via its ideological justifications for the hierarchy of employees and employers (as worked out in Hayek, for instance, in a passage we looked at), is also a general theory of capitalist hierarchy. It full-blooded libertarianism (which nonetheless takes its cues from the more polite and measured coded-savagery of Hayek) tells a story of supermen and parasites. Rand – much mocked as if she is a uniquely bizarre irruption – is just an idiosyncratically unhinged, pathological, and libidinous version of this. It’s a form of panglossianism, in that everyone gets what the deserve – or at least the best any world is capable of affording them (in general). Hierarchy thus isn’t just something apologised for – it is something rhapsodised. It isn’t just unavoidable – it’s actively good. Laudable. A mark of civilisation (in the moral sense). Libertarianism fetishises commodity relations to the point where it makes its politics from an aesthetic category error: confusing the value form (in its ascendancy) with value in the moral sense (as we’ve seen elsewhere).

As we’ve seen, in ‘Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature’, Rothbard makes the quintessentially reactionary jump from the widespread historical fact of womens’ subordination to the implied conclusion that they are inferior. This same manoeuvre is practiced again and again – with sex and class and nationality – by reactionaries. Indeed, Rothbard practices it several times in the same essay. 

Libertarianism is just one mode of a wider approach which is common to all forms of bourgeois thought, but which is most vociferously practiced by the right, and more vociferously the further right you go. Celebration, reification, defence, and extension of all forms of existing hierarchy and privilege is the sine qua non of reactionary thought. Libertarianism is thus revealed (as if anyone were in any serious doubt) as a species of conservatism, or reaction. Indeed, in its degree of vociferousness it is the close neighbour to fascism. And this is hardly surprising because of libertarianism’s roots. Libertarianism draws many of its currents not only from Austrian thinkers who made accommodation (on anti-Marxist, anti-socialist grounds… i.e. counter-revolutionary grounds) with authoritarian regimes including various species of fascism (i.e. Mises and Dollfuss’ ‘austrofascism’, Hayek and Schmitt, and his alignments with Pinochet, etc.). But it also – as noted elsewhere – draws on the economic policies of the racist imperialist Andrew Jackson, and upon the rhetoric and ideology of the Old South and the Confederacy. (Remember Rothbard’s defence of John C. Calhoun, and Rothbard’s own invocations of ‘states’ rights’, and the links between today’s Mises Institute and various neo-confederates, etc.). The Confederacy was one of the precursors to fascism, just as surely as were the counter-revolutionary White armies unleashed on Bolshevik Russia by Churchill, Wilson, and Western ‘democratic’ capitalist regimes.…

Continue Reading

Return of the Irrepressed (Part 1)

, , , , , 6

We all float down here, Georgie… no government to hold us down, you see…

With thanks to @gerofalltrades for creating this post’s accompanying cursed image for me.

This article has been amended to remove an inaccurate claim that Reason magazine gave Milo’s book Dangerous a flattering review.  I got them mixed up with Skeptic magazine.  My bad.  Sorry.  BTW, for interest’s sake, the review in Skeptic was written by Dr. George Michael who received his degree from George Mason University.

*

 

Whereas many of today’s libertarians and ‘classical liberals’ like to present their doctrine as somehow above or beyond the left-right divide (even as they enable fascists and agree with everything they say), Rothbard indulged in little such pretence.  He was cynical and opportunistic.  He was inconsistent and incoherent.  But he wasn’t confused.  For him, libertarianism was, essentially, a reiteration of what he called ‘the Old Right’.

For more on this, see a flatulent, blithering essay he wrote in 1992 called ‘A Strategy for the Right’.  You can read it at LewRockwell-dot-org.  I won’t link to it (because, while the SPLC might not come right out and say it, as far as I’m concerned LewRockwell-dot-org is basically fash) but you can find it… if, y’know, you want to.

In this essay he praises the extreme libertarian anti-New Dealers such as Garet Garrett and H. L. Mencken.  Garret was a conservative who thought the New Deal was a neo-Marxist revolution against American individualism.  Praised by Mises, one of his books – an anti-government, pro-gold standard screed – was chosen to be one of the ‘twelve candles’ of the John Birch Society.  (The JBS, in case you don’t know, is an ‘anti-communist’ and ‘limited government’ advocacy group, co-founded by the Koch Brothers’ dad.  These days it gets classified as paleoconservative, but has always been as close to being American fascism as makes little odds.)

Rothbard is enamoured of the Old Right partly because, according to him, “they would have been horrified and incredulous at the accredited victimology that has rapidly taken over our culture”… which is presumably why Garret, as Executive Editor of the New York Tribune in 1918, was furious at one of his reporters for sending the paper to press featuring a photograph of a lynching in Georgia.  Too victimological, no doubt.

Mencken, of course, was – amongst other things – a social Darwinist, a militarist, a racist, and an anti-semite who admired Hitler.  Mencken disdained democracy in similar – if more vociferous – terms to the ones that would later be used by Ron Paul, saying it was a form of domination of the superior by the inferior.  He also considered all higher mathematics to be “hogwash” – a very Austrian sentiment.

Rothbard manages to work the essay around to… well, um…

And while I’m on this topic, this is the year 1992, so I am tempted to say, repeat after me: COLUMBUS DISCOVERED AMERICA!

Even though a fan of diversity, the only revisionism I will permit on this topic is whether Columbus discovered America, or whether it was Amerigo Vespucci.

…

Continue Reading

Chill Out, Hayek! – Part 2

, , , 0

Part One here.

Also, don’t forget you can now buy Phil’s new book Neoreaction a Basilsik (featuring a chapter I contributed to) on Kindle and in dead tree format (Amazon US, Amazon UK).  It’s a more enjoyable read than Hayek.  Fucking trust me on this.

*

Hayek’s position on Chile, and on reactionary authoritarianism generally, is the dollfussian logic of Mises working itself out, i.e. the Left makes a kind of temporary recuperative fascism necessary.  Mises developed this view when collaborating with the anti-Nazi and anti-Communist ‘Austro-fascist’ Dollfuss.

None of the assumptions are especially non-mainstream – which tells us something terrifying about the mainstream – but Hayek synthesises them, accepts their implications in a principled (yes, in his own vile way he is principled) and non-opportunistic way, and takes them to their logical conclusions.  If liberty is threatened by democracy leading to socialism leading to totalitarianism (Nazism being socialism too according to Dollfuss and Mises et al – another argument we still live with) then you need authoritarianism to quash democracy when it goes too far.  We’ve already seen Hayek adapting the ideas of (ironically) Carl Schmitt to this end.  And Hayek is employing the same distinction between totalitarianism and authoritarianism which provides a moral logic to those ideologues of Western imperialism who advocate supporting ‘strongmen’ against official enemies.  It’s the same logic that leads Kissinger and Nixon and the CIA to support Pinochet.  And this is just one of many examples.  Ironically, it also leads to the same rhetoric that advocates ‘humanitarian intervention’ against (sometimes) the same strongmen when they outlive their usefulness.  It’s an ancestor of the arguments of Bush II and the Schmittian-Straussians, of Bernard Henri-Lévy and the ‘Nouveaux Philosophes’, of Hitchens and the New Atheist Islamophobes and the ‘Decent Left’.  ‘Islamofascism’, etc.  Imperial praxis, in other words.  How ironic that the great philosophers of libertarianism provide a ideological bedrock for the wars libertarisns so often to profess to oppose.

Hayek is not the cause of such praxis, but he’s a synthesizer of it, and his syntheses then feed back in as ideology.  And the ideology arises from the economic system, hence the axiomatic and foundational belief in the identity of capitalism and liberty.  The class nature of the ideology is clear when you remember that Hayek lambasted left-wingers who were prepared to countenance the idea of ‘temporary’ suspensions of democracy as ‘stages’ towards socialism, etc.  Particularly egregious, since he justifies his own support for dictatorship by calling it a necessary transitional phase.  But there isn’t actually any hypocrisy here.  He sees it as fundamentally different to support a tyranny for capitalism than a tyranny for socialism, and he’s right.  In its way this is just a recognition of the often-forgotten fact that politics has content as well as form.  And he’s right that authoritarianism is necessary to support capitalism.  It always has been.  Capitalism has always depended upon state violence and the suppression of democracy.  Again, the irony.  The philosophy of free-market anti-statism reveals how capitalism and the authoritarian state are inextricable.…

Continue Reading

Chill Out, Hayek! – Part 1

, , , 3

In The Reactionary Mind, Corey Robin claimed – drawing on Naomi Klein and Greg Grandin – that Hayek “admired Pinochet’s Chile so much that he decided to hold a meeting of his Mont Pelerin Society in Viña del Mar”, the seaside resort in Chile where General Pinochet’s CIA-assisted military coup against the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende was planned.  This claim was denounced on Twitter as “made up” by none other than ‘@FriedrichHayek’ himself!  (Probably just a fan rather than the man himself resurrected and tweeting… as usual, Hayek’s admirers simply deny his complicity with the Chilean junta, when they can’t get away with just neglecting to mention it.  As Robin discovered, they have lots of excuses – he was an old man at the time, etc – all of which turn out to be so much bad faith when you look at them.)  Checking, Robin discovered that it is more accurate to say that Hayek attended the meeting where the decision to hold the MPS’s 1981 conference in Viña del Mar was made and, at least, did not oppose it.  His position in the Society was still prestigious enough that, at the very least, an objection from him would carried a lot of weight.  No such objection seems to have been forthcoming.  And indeed, we’re being scrupulously fair to the point of charity by even being this circumspect.  Nothing in Hayek’s behaviour suggests he would’ve been likely to object.

Hayek had already been to Pinochet’s Chile – a laboratory for the experimental free-market neoliberalism of Milton Friedman and the ‘Chicago Boys’ – in 1977 to receive an honorary degree, and to lecture.  Hayek spoke to the public and, says Robin, to “businessmen and government officials, including Pinochet himself”.  

He described the leaders of Chile under Pinochet as “educated, reasonable, and insightful men”.

The admiration was mutual.  Robin uncovered subsequent letters to Hayek from his hosts, business academics who were also high-ranking people in the junta, fawning over Hayek, telling him how influential his ideas were in their country, including in high circles, and proposing that the MPS hold their 1981 meeting in Chile.  

To quote from the Austrians essay, to be included in Phil’s forthcoming Neoreaction a Basilisk:

And so it came to pass.  Numerous luminaries of conservatism, free-market fundamentalism, and the dawning neoliberal counter-revolution attended.  They hobnobbed with the top brass and the big bankers of Pinochet’s dictatorship, along with the regime’s fellow-traveller intellectuals.  They enjoyed the opera.  They drank wine.  They pontificated about the much-maligned land of Chile, and – like any starry-eyed communist fellow-traveller of the 30s who’d just visited the Soviet Union and taken care to look at it only through the slim gaps between their fingers – they came away convinced that they’d glimpsed utopia.  A utopia in which thousands of political dissidents had been, and continued to be, ‘disappeared’ into a grotesque, institutionalised system of state-run torture, rape, and murder.  Not that the MPS people denied the tyranny.

…

Continue Reading

IDSG Ep102 Rittenhouse, Anarcho-Tyranny, and Blood Libel

1

In the second part of our Rittenhouse coverage, we start with a look at Kyle’s reception as a rock star messiah at Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA and follow the thread where it leads, from more on Elijah Shaffer to Tucker Carlson and his ‘Trial of Kyle’ to Mike Enoch and the National Justice Party via “a twentieth century philosopher” (who Eruditorum Press readers will remember me writing about in the past ).  In the process, we consider the currency of the concept of ‘Anarcho-Tyranny’ and how the term Blood Libel is being appropriated.  Dialectical?  Yeah, we’re dialectical AF.  And we don’t apologise.

Content Warnings.

Permalink / Direct Download / Soundcloud

Podcast Notes:

Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent.  Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes.

Daniel’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper

Jack’s Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618

IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod

Daniel’s Twitter: @danieleharper

Jack’s Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_

IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1

*

Episode Notes/Links to follow soon.…

Continue Reading

By ‘Eck, Hayek!

, , , 13

The early Austrian School was actually subject to a split.  It stemmed from the first wave of the followers of its founder Carl Menger.  Mengerians Friedrich von Wieser and Eugen von Philippovich were both a bit like Fabian socialists in their outlooks.  Wieser, for instance, seems to have believed that marginal utility (the radically subjective basis of modern mainstream economics) provided a theoretical foundation for progressive taxation.  But Wieser’s brother-in-law and fellow teacher, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, was of the classical liberal tradition.  Böhm-Bawerk was a strident anti-Marxist who developed many of his own theories – which became foundational to the subsequent Austrian School – in the course of his criticisms of Marx.  Böhm-Bawerk is still routinely credited by some with having demolished Marx… which he accomplished by systematically misreading, misunderstanding, and misrepresenting him.

The split was transmitted.  Böhm-Bawerk was Mises’ teacher, and Mises became fanatical in his rejection of state intervention (except when he wasn’t… it’s complicated).  Wieser was Hayek’s teacher, and Hayek is still thought by some hardliners to have been almost a socialist owing to his ability to countenance some welfare measures.  Hayek also believed a state was necessary… which makes him a cuck by anarcho-capitalist standards.  In Ancaptopia, law and order would be seen to by private security firms.  The principle task of ‘law and order’ (as capitalism sees it) being the protection of private property, we’d actually be talking about capitalists with private armies.  Which… would be great, obviously.

Initially, Hayek leaned in Wieser’s direction, apparently having one of those quintessential left-wing ‘phases’ in youth that inoculates a certain kind of person for life.  (You could say the same about the Austrian School as a whole.) 

Hayek then became Mises’ employee and protege, and drifted in the direction of Mises ideas, though he claimed he was never completely won over… which can be seen in his rejection of outright praxeology in favour of Popperian empiricism.

Despite being the prime mover behind early neoliberalism, an ideology devoted to attacking social provision, Hayek never completely abjured every possible form of welfare state.  In the third volume of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (published in 1979, a long time after his youthful socialist phase) he makes noises about how Universal Basic Income may even be “a necessary part of the Great Society”.  (Indeed, Milton Friedman the monetarist also refused to completely rule out some form of provision for the poor.  His ‘Negative Income Tax’ proposals are testament to that.)

But then neoliberalism does not, and will not, eliminate all social provision.  I think the neoliberals – the saner ones anyway – understand that you can’t actually have functioning modern capitalism unless there is a state that takes on some of the burden of making sure capital has a surviving workforce.  The insistence upon eliminating welfare is a tactical ideological aim more than an actual plan.  And many thoroughgoing neoliberals will defend social provision of some kind, as indeed did Hayek and Friedman, etc.

As has been noted by many left-commentators, neoliberalism is not actually anti-state except with reference to the state’s capacity to exercise any semblance of public control over capital flow.…

Continue Reading

Spare Kochs at an Orgy

, , , , , , 6

As some of you will be aware, especially those of you who’ve been following my whining about it on Twitter, I’ve recently been finishing up something I’ve been writing about the Austrian School of economics (y’know, Mises, Hayek, Rothbard, right-libertarianism, etc).  It’s my side of a collaboration with Phil for his next book.  It’s taken a long time (my fault) but I just finished.  One of the reasons it took so long was because I kept falling down rabbit holes, so to speak.  The good thing about that is that it has left me with excess material I can write up.  And here’s the first bit. 

By the way, people who give me as little as $1 per month on Patreon saw this days ago.

*

The Koch Brothers.  Billionaire reactionaries whose dad co-founded the John Birch Society, and who now act as money-pits and eminences grise for huge sectors of the US Right.  Greasers of the wheels of the Tea Party.  Suffice to say, they – along with others of their kind including the DeVos family – have also funded organisations like CPAC, the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute (co-founded by Murray Rothbard, by the way).  They’ve helped bankroll – directly or indirectly, via organisations they fund – climate change denier Willie Soon, and speaking engagements by people like Bell Curve author Charles Murray, Ann Coulter, arch-Islamophobe David Horowitz, and erstwhile alt-Right darling and Breitbart star Milo Yiannopoulos.  Relatedly, think tanks they fund and control are responsible for creating a model ‘campus free speech’ bill, complete with draconian punishments for students who protest guest speakers, which several state legislators are eying approvingly.  They have spent incomprehensible amounts of money on direct support for politicians and political candidates.  Though critical of ‘establishment’ candidates in the 2016 US Presidential race, they did not back Trump… but they didn’t exactly back out of politics.  As Salon.com notes, in 2016

the Center for Media and Democracy uncovered 58 Koch-funded candidates for state legislative seats in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. The actual number could be much larger, for the bulk of the network’s donations go through “dark money” channels that hide the names of donors and recipients.

Though some people suggest the Kochs feel distaste for Trump, the likelihood is that they’re starting to think, as InsidePhilanthropy.com put it, that

investing in libertarian ideas through think tanks and universities offers more bang for the buck [than political donations]. And they’ve recently indicated that such philanthropic giving is likely to take priority over political giving in coming years.

To see why they might think that, I want to look at some of this sort of ‘philanthropy’. 

There is much to say about the Kochs.  Google their names.  It’ll keep you busy.  Here I will follow one tiny trail.  It leads to no massive revelations, as far as I can see.  But it’s a trail I haven’t seen followed elsewhere.  It follows Koch money and influence into Austrian-inspired, right-wing, libertarian academia.…

Continue Reading