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alt-right

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 5 – Christopher ‘The Crying Nazi’ Cantwell, Part 1

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In this episode, we make our first assault on the mountain of bullshit, bile, and batshittery that is Christopher ‘the Crying Nazi’ Cantwell, take a swing at the ‘libertarian-to-fascist’ pipeline, and rampant transphobia / transmisogyny.

As ever, warnings apply.

Download here.

Reminder: we’re on iTunes and YouTube

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Show Notes:

Cantwell’s website

Radical Agenda

Outlaw Conservative

Random Cantwell audio clips

Cantwell stuff from A Voice For Men

Cantwell’s warning to Kricket Slick’s future boyfriends

Cantwell OkCupid profile, circa 2015

Ethan Glover on Cantwell’s long history

The Free State Project

Daily Beast on the Libertarian to Alt-Right Pipeline

Reason repudiates the libertarian to alt-right pipeline

Jack’s article on libertarianism as the ‘gateway drug’ to the alt-right

Jack’s article on the Koch Brothers and their funding of right-wing academia

Cantwell on “Free-er Talk Live, Jan 17 2019.”

Charlottesville Race and Terror

Vice checks in on Cantwell a year later

Cantwell arrest

Cantwell drunk in public

Cantwell pleads

Elmer Woodard, lawyer to Cantwell and the alt-right

Chris Cantwell pulls his gun, May 2015

Crying Nazi Raw Video

“The Free Keene Squad” on the Colbert Report

“Looking for Trouble With Strangers”

Local news story on the above

Right Wing Watch on Outlaw Conservative

Jack’s reference to Disraeli in context (from Richard Seymour’s The Liberal Defence of Murder):

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I Don’t Speak German, Episode 3 – Unite the Right, Charlottesville 2017

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In this episode, which runs a bit longer than the first two, and which goes to some very dark places, Daniel tells me all about the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, 2017.

The episode features discussions of violence, and we try to signpost when we’re getting into the painful details.  But warnings definitely apply from the start.  We’re discussing virulent racism and bigotry.

Download here.

And here’s the podcast’s own website.

Please feel free to signal boost us.

(Also, we’re on iTunes and YouTube now.)

Of necessity, we’re only glancing at this incredibly big and complex subject, so we’re going to be coming back to many of the issues, organisations, and persons mentioned.

And here are some notes, sources, and references.

(Oh, P.S. Fun fact… Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dropped into Hbomberguy’s Donkey Kong charity Twitch stream as we recorded this.)

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NOTES

Firstly, everyone interested in this should follow and support Emily Gorcenski and Molly (Socialist Dog Mom) on Twitter. 

Here’s Emily’s livestream of the tiki torch rally

Here’s Molly’s podcast The Trial of James Alex Fields

First Vigil – tracking fascist violence

Texts between Jason Kessler (UtR organiser), Richard Spencer, other UtR participants:
SPLC/Hatewatch
Document at DocumentCloud

Unite the Right poster

Enoch and The Right Stuff crew photo with Taylor Wilson and James Alex Fields (tweet from Sandi Bachom):

Jason Kessler tweets about Heather Heyer after Charlottesville

Hunter Wallace (Brad Griffin) smears Heather Heyer.

White Boner’s conspiracy theory video

Alex McNabb, the ‘Nazi EMT’

Daniel has curated a selection of clips relating to the subjects touched on in this episode.  Beware, some of these clips feature people like Jason Kessler and Mike Enoch being vile.  Here.

David Futrelle‘s blog We Hunted the Mammoth, is a good source for lots of information about the far-right in its many forms.  The blog originally tracked the ‘Manosphere’ (i.e. MRAs, Incels, etc) but has increasingly tracked online hate more generally as the Manosphere joined up with and fed into the so-called ‘alt-right’, Trumpism, etc.

Here’s his post on nazis mocking the murder of Heather Heyer in their memes…

…and here’s his post on the Daily Caller’s call for people to run over protestors. 

And here is the video we refer to in the episode, ‘Charlottesville: The True Alt-Right‘ by Shaun – excellent stuff.

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Timeline of Rallies 2017:

Feb. 1: Berkeley. Milo rally cancelled.

April 15: Berkeley. “Free Speech Event,” Nathan Damigo punches “Moldylocks.”

April 27: Berkeley. Ann Coulter speech cancelled, “Based Stickman,” Lauren Southern, et al.

April 29: Pikeville, KY. TWP/NSM rally. Village Voice article.

May 13: Cville. Richard Spencer torch rally. Charlottesville 1.0.

—–June 2017—- UtR announced.

July 8. Cville. Ku Klux Klan rally.

—–July 11—— Kessler appears at town hall in Cville, publicizing UtR and distancing from Klan.

August 11. Cville. UVA torch march, “Jews Will Not Replace Us,” assault on Emily Gorcenski and Kristopher Goad. Emily Livestream.

August 12. Cville. Unite the Right.

State of Emergency declared at 11:00AM.…

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New Podcast: I Don’t Speak German

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As many of you will know, our very own Daniel Harper has been researching the so-called ‘alt-right’ (really the far-right) for more tha two years now, listening to their podcasts and YouTube shows, documenting what they say to each other in their own spaces. 

This new podcast series – entitled (very cleverly, I think) I Don’t Speak German – will be me in conversation with Daniel, giving him an opportunity to tell us what he heard.

We’re discussing fascism and racism, so this podcast comes with big warnings.

Here’s the first episode, on perhaps the best-known representative of the ‘alt-right’, Richard Spencer, his career, style, and ideology. The episode also touches on the origins of the term ‘alt-right’, the infamous ‘heilgate’ occurance after Trump’s election, etc.

Our episodes will cover one ‘topic’ per show. We plan to keep the episodes as short as possible, and crank them out regularly (in direct defiance of our usual operating methods).

The next episode will be on a more old-school fascist, David Duke, former Klan ‘Grand Wizard’ who spoke at Charlottesville.

Please consider spreading the news about this new show.

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In other news, I’m going to be taking a bit of a sabbatical from posting so I can work on the Shabgraff book I promised Elizabeth about 100 years ago.  It’s planned to be a compilation of the best of the blog, but expanded and rewritten, and with new material.  So I’ll be absent from Fridays for the forseeable future, though I’ll still be able to post podcast updates – and the occasional piece of writing, I hope – on Wednesdays.  (I’m still planning to do the Dracula movie series.)

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If you feel like helping me with these projects, here’s my Patreon.  And here’s Daniel’s, if you feel like you want to help him with his important project.…

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The Gateway Drug

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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.) …

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Return of the Irrepressed (Part 2)

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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.…

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Return of the Irrepressed (Part 1)

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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.

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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.

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The Ron Paul Revolution (Part 2)

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Like any emerging ideology, the alt-right didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. There were forerunners crying in the wilderness who were generally viewed as harmless kooks. “The paleo-libertarian seed that Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, and Lew Rockwell planted in the 1990s has come to bear some really ugly fruit in the last couple of years as elements of the alt-right have made appearances in various libertarian organizations and venues,” writes Steve Horwitz, an economist who writes at Bleeding Heart Libertarians.

The Ron Paul Revolution might not have amounted to much electorally, but it would be wrong to underestimate the impact he has had on libertarianism and the alt-right. “In a way, Ron Paul is the guy who lit the fuse,” Nick Gillespie says. “And he embodies some of those contradictions [between libertarianism and the alt-right].” Gillespie tells me that Richard Spencer came up to him at the Republican National Convention in 2016 and said that he was activated into politics because of Paul. Gillespie sees Paul’s legacy as very mixed, as someone who was “simultaneously… positing this very libertarian worldview, but then he’s also speaking to people’s fears and anxieties.” If one were looking for the missing link to explain this phenomenon, Ron Paul (and his paleolibertarian allies) would be a good place to start.

–  ‘The Insidious Libertarian to Alt-Right Pipeline’, Daily Beast 23/8/17

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No report on Paul would be complete without mentioning certain ‘newsletters’.  And this is where we start to see Paul’s significance as a liminal, bridging figure between the ‘respectable’ and intellectual libertarianism of Austrian-inspired economic theorizing, which he has popularized in several books, and the racist far-Right.  In the process, we find a ‘way in’ to paleolibertarianism… a service Paul has rendered for many, though in a different way.

In the words of Mother Jones:

Published as far back as the late 1970s, under various mastheads bearing Paul’s name (Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, the Ron Paul Survival Report), the newsletters are, at times, virulently racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and conspiratorial.

Jonathan Chait managed to make himself useful – for once – by writing a handy little summary of (some of) the bile in these newsletters:

As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled “What To Expect for the 1990s,” predicted that “Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities” because “mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white ‘haves.’” Two months later, a newsletter warned of “The Coming Race War,” and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, “If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it.” In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC’s Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, “Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo.” “This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s,” the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter’s author–presumably Paul–wrote, “I’ve urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense.

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The Ron Paul Revolution (Part 1)

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In my opinion, any account of the rise of the alt-right, especially one which emphasizes the role of libertarianism, and thus the distal causal role of the Austrian School of economics, must begin with Ron Paul.

In his essay ‘On Social Sadism’, published in the journal Salvage, China Miéville recounts an occasion when

[a]t a debate between Republican candidates in September 2011, Wolf Blitzer, the chair, mooted the case of a hypothetical thirty-year-old uninsured man who becomes sick. ‘[C]ongressman,’ Blitzer asks Ron Paul, ‘are you saying that society should just let him die?’

‘Yeah!’ comes a shout from the audience. A smattering of applause. The shout is repeated, and again, and the applause grows.

Paul retired from politics in 2013, but his shadow is long on the libertarian Right.  After the above exchange, Paul – a former medical doctor and a fervent libertarian, indeed a ‘paleolibertarian’, a follower of the syncresis of libertarianism and far-right conservatism invented by Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell – suggested that the hypothetical man in the question should have a private medical plan.  “We’ve given up on this concept that we might assume responsibility for ourselves, that our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it,” opined Paul sententiously. He later clarified his position on Twitter saying that “[t]he individual, private charity, families, and faith based orgs should take care of people, not the government.”  Recognisably a species of the same weaselly ‘Big Society’ argument employed around the same time by the coalition government in the UK as its Tory leaders tried to find a way to reconcile lethal austerity with their claim to no longer being ‘the nasty party’. Charity as a moral imperative, supplanting the need for socialised care. Chilly Victorian workhouse morality, dressed up as a plaintive cry for us all to be nicer to each other (so no surplus value has to be diverted anywhere useless).  Paul’s iteration has a more overtly Christian flavour, as befits American politics, and a tang of his ostensible anti-authoritarianism, but it boils down to the same thing: a thoroughly neoliberal impulse to relieve the state of its responsibilities to its subjects, while framing this as asking the subjects to take back control of their responsibilities. In Cameron’s version, the emphasis was more on countering a supposed culture of dependence, whereas in Paul’s the emphasis was more on encouraging individual liberty.  But we’re splitting hairs. The difference here is, as I say, a matter of emphasis. And we learn a lot from the fact that the same argument, with tweaks for tone, can be advanced from what are supposedly ideologically distinct varieties of conservatism.

Neoliberalism is a broad church.  This has been true since its birth, since the Mont Pelerin Society included Austrians and monetarists, neoconservatives and ordoliberals.  It is key to its success. The collaboration and cross-pollination of ideas speaks to its status as a class project rather than a distinctly ideological one.  It’s one of the tragic ironies of history that the revolutionary projects of the ruling class are (or at least can be) marked by tolerance and cooperation between different branches of ruling class ideology, whereas the revolutionary projects of the working class have tended to be marked by the exact opposite.…

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