Dave Smith critiques JD Tussley's August 7, 2019 Reason article and the broader libertarian stance on racism, arguing that equating cultural generalizations with moral failing ignores the non-aggression principle. He highlights Ron Paul newsletters' racist editorials versus Paul's pro-minority policies, challenges Stefan Molyneux's anarcho-capitalist labeling, and exposes hypocrisy in condemning white identity while accepting black pride. Ultimately, Smith asserts that dismissing alt-right anxieties about political power loss as garbage fuels extremism, suggesting the movement's selective enforcement of anti-collectivism is mere virtue signaling rather than genuine engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Summer Socks and Comfort00:01:28
Fill her up.
You are listening to the Gas Digital Network.
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Grab Tickets for the Forum00:07:05
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We need to roll back the state.
We spy on all of our own citizens.
Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're a safe to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Here's your host, Dave Smith.
What's up?
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am, of course, the most consistent motherfucker you know, Dave Smith.
Robbie the Fire Bernstein is still out on vacation.
He will be back for Friday's episode.
No guest this Wednesday, just me here for you guys.
I got a few things that I want to talk about.
I think we got a, which should be an interesting show planned.
Don't forget, if you are in the Los Angeles area, I will be out in LA this weekend with my brothers in arms, the Legion of Skanks, Louis J. Gomez, and Jay Okerson.
And there still are tickets available.
Very few.
I think there's like 15 tickets available for the stand-up show, which will be on the 19th out in Los Angeles.
The podcast, the live podcast is sold out.
We're going to be doing some podcasts out there as well.
And it's going to be a fun trip.
So if you're in the area and you're listening to this, move on that if you want to get tickets, because this is going to sell out.
We always sell out the shows in Los Angeles, but there are still a few tickets left.
So go get some if you want to come out, see a show and hang out afterward.
And the other thing that I wanted to remind people of is that I am now, we're closing in on just about a month out, where I will be debating Nicholas Sarwalk, the chairman of the Libertarian Party, a little less than a month, actually.
September 10th, right here in New York City at the Soho Forum.
Go to thesohoforum.org if you want to grab tickets to that.
I think there's also still a few tickets left for that.
That event also will sell out.
So if you're in the area and you want to come see it, go to thesohoforum.org and grab some tickets now.
I know there's been a lot of excitement generated about this.
I'm excited.
I'm now officially in my training camp for my debate with Nick Sarwak.
I like to manage these things like mixed martial arts fights.
And hopefully I'm better at predicting the outcome of these debates.
But I was kind of putting it out of my mind, doing some light training, some jogging in the morning.
But now I'm actually starting to get into thinking about exactly what I'm going to say.
You do have limited time at these things, and I'm excited for it.
I like doing these debates, and I'm going to try to do more in the future.
There's something cool about it.
It's like the show and the competition and the clash of ideas.
And there's something where, like when you've kind of built a career as being, you know, a person who deals with these issues and has people who listen to them, it's kind of like you put your reputation on the line when you go into one of these things.
You know what I mean?
But like if I went into this, I remember Chris Rock saying he was talking about hosting the Oscars.
And he goes, for a comedian, there's nothing where there's more high stakes than hosting the Oscars because it's live.
It's a weird environment.
And if you blow it, everyone's going to be talking about it the next day.
This was like, you know, like years back when people watched the Oscars.
And there's something where like he's like, you're like risking your career.
You're risking the heat that you have in one moment.
And I feel to some degree a similar thing about these debates.
Like if I were to go and just really blow it, I think a lot of people would look at me and go, oh, Dave, who is this guy who we thought we were listening to?
But don't worry, I won't.
I'll represent you guys well.
So anyway, I'm very excited for this debate.
Really looking forward to it.
And yeah, go to thesohoforum.org if you're around and you want to grab tickets and come on out to see the show.
All right.
So there's a couple things that I wanted to talk about on today's podcast.
The first thing that I wanted to bring up, which I just, I must say, I loved this story, or not even story.
I don't know.
I loved this video.
But I'm sure just about everybody has seen it by now.
But if you haven't, one of the CNN anchors, Chris Cuomo, who also happens to be the brother of the governor of our state, who also happens to be the son of the former governor of our state, he's an anchor over at CNN.
And he was caught in this cell phone video where he had an altercation with, I guess, what you would call some hecklers.
And it was pretty funny, a pretty entertaining moment.
People are talking about it a lot.
It's getting a lot of traction online.
And I thought it was interesting because it's one of those moments that, you know, if it wasn't 2019, we wouldn't have it.
You know, if this was like when I was a kid, if something like this had happened, it would just happen.
No one would ever talk about it.
It wouldn't be on the news.
It wouldn't be on Twitter.
No one would have it on video unless you happened to have a fucking 65-pound VHS recorder on your shoulder at the time, in which case, people would probably realize they're being recorded and not act the way they're acting.
And there would be no way to disseminate this information.
So it just wouldn't get discussed.
But because we live in the world we live in where everyone's got a camera in their pocket and everybody's got an outlet to share the video that they record, these things can catch fire.
And I don't know.
There's just something interesting about that.
For good or for bad, we get these moments because of the technology.
And have you ever seen, have you ever like looked at Twitter before and you've seen someone get a tweet that goes crazy viral?
And usually it's just because they hit on some theme, you know, that there's a lot of people who would be interested in retweeting or sharing that tweet.
But you ever see where like there'll be someone who has like 50,000 retweets on something and then you click on their name and they have like 500 followers?
The Fredo Insult Debate00:14:32
There's something about that that I find really interesting.
That somebody who doesn't have a big following can put something out there that then gets a ton of attention.
You know, it's like if you say something that people are really interested in, you can reach a lot of people, even if you're not somebody who's famous or has a platform or any of that stuff.
So anyway, I don't know anything about the people who goaded Chris Cuomo into this exchange.
I don't know that I've read several articles about it.
I haven't seen anyone say anything about them.
But evidently, they called him Fredo.
For those of you who don't know, that is a Godfather reference.
Great movie.
In my opinion, one of the best movies or the best two movies I've ever seen and one of the best books I've ever read.
I actually took a course on The Godfather in high school.
It was like senior year.
They let you take these bullshit elective courses and I was able to get into The Godfather.
You got like an English credit for it.
And that, so all you had to do was read The Godfather and then we broke it down.
It was a really, really cool book.
I'd seen the movies, but never read it.
But the book is really fucking good, I thought.
I actually, by the way, unpopular opinion, I liked the third one.
Everybody shits on the third godfather.
I liked it.
Not as good as one or two, but I thought it was a cool, cool flick.
Anyway, there.
I know I'll get some hate for that.
But Fredo, for anybody who doesn't know, was like the stupid brother.
He was kind of the idiot who fucked up, who he actually betrayed the family, and Michael Corleone ends up having him killed.
But he was like the idiot who, you know, Sonny was the hothead.
Michael was the one who took over as the Don.
But Fredo was just kind of stupid and was resentful of the fact that people didn't think he was smart, but they were, you know, in fact correct.
He was not smart at all.
And that's evidently pretty clearly what somebody called Chris Cuomo, called him Fredo.
And then, you know, here.
So let's check in on the video and then discuss.
CNN anchor Chris Cuomo got into a verbal altercation with a man reportedly threatening to throw him down the stairs.
Pause it all over.
He didn't reportedly threaten to throw him down the stairs.
He threatens to throw him down the stairs on video.
That's, you know, a little bit different, but whatever.
Let's play.
Called Cuomo by the name Fredo, referring to the fictional character from the Godfather films, which led to this confrontation.
I thought that's who you were.
He was our weak brother.
Isn't that your mother?
And they use it as an Italian aspersion.
Any of you Italian?
You're Italian?
I got it.
It's a f ⁇ ing insult to your people.
It's an insult to your f ⁇ ing people.
It's like a N-word for us.
Well, in response to the video, a CNN spokesperson said, quote, Chris Cuomo defended himself when he was verbally attacked with the use of an ethnic slur in an orchestrated setup.
We completely support him.
All right.
So that was a little bit of the exchange.
I, you know, first off, he did say they cut out the part, of course, there.
I was trying to find just the video, but all you find are these little clips from news outlets or like YouTubers and stuff.
But he says, how about I throw you down a flight of stairs at one point, which is, you know, if you're if you're being called, you know, like an Italian gangster out of a movie, maybe not the best way to disprove that argument.
But let me say, I, first off, this speaks to one of my favorite themes on this podcast, or not even themes, one of my favorite questions that I like to ask on this podcast, and I ask it all the time.
And that is quite simply, who the fuck are these people?
Who are these people?
And it's interesting that they get to hot, you know, particularly in politics and news, there's this quality that human beings don't seem to exhibit very often outside of those arenas.
I mean, to some degree, look, we're all a little bit phony.
We all have our, oh, you found the full thing?
Okay, yeah, let's play that.
Let's play the full thing.
What's wrong with you?
You're going to have a f ⁇ ing problem.
What?
What are you going to do about it?
Please do.
You don't want to sue.
You don't want to fucking take a swing.
Are you going to call me Fred?
I'm going to take a f ⁇ ing sword.
Watch your f ⁇ ing hands.
Watch your f ⁇ ing hands.
Take a swing.
Come on, boy.
Come on, boy.
So you want to call me shit?
Pull these shit.
Listen, I'm not f ⁇ ing doing anything.
I'll f your shit.
Stop.
F ⁇ ing wreck your shit.
Stop.
You are somehow tr ⁇ .
All right.
So, by the way, you know what?
Keep that video queued up where it is because I think they're going to play something else that's kind of relevant.
But I do, I find it interesting.
Look, we all have different masks that we wear.
Let's say.
You know, you go into a job interview or you go on a first date.
You're not exactly the same person that you are when you're just hanging out with your boys.
You're not exactly the same person with your boys that you are when you're just alone in your home.
People, you know, we put on different masks and we can all be a little bit phony at times and assume different personas.
But there's something about politics and news where people really put on this thing that is almost completely removed from the human experience.
You know, like how politicians, and this is part of the reason I think why Donald Trump, you know, resonated with people is that he, for as weird as Donald Trump is and as bizarre as he comes off and the way he speaks is just kind of different from anyone you've heard, there's something authentic about it.
Like that's him.
That's the way he is.
Whereas politicians do this thing like what Obama and Clinton used to do.
You know, that gesture with the thumb up and the thing and they go, and my fellow Americans and I just believe that we need rising wages and better jobs and blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, no, no one really talks like this.
And there's something about people in the news, they have that too.
You know, they always have this weird cadence that's kind of not a human cadence.
They'd be like, and then back at 11, you know, Derek so-and-so, CBS.
And you're like, people don't actually really talk that way.
And it's interesting to get a little glimpse of who this guy actually is.
You know, you see him on his CNN show and he's very, you know, proper and formal.
And this is just, you know, the hate that's being spread by the president.
It's just outrageous and all of these things.
And then you get to see, it's like, oh, okay, you're this guy.
All right, fair enough.
Fine.
You know, I have no problem with it.
To be honest, I don't have a problem with responding with this tone to somebody talking shit to you.
I actually find it weirdly refreshing.
Listen, if you're, from what I understand, what's been reported, he was out with his wife and kids, and someone starts heckling him and calling him Fredo.
I don't personally, look, he didn't assault anybody, even to throw you down a flight of stairs.
Okay, I know you could, you could maybe say it was a threat, but I get the impulse to, if someone starts talking shit to you in front of your wife and kids, to go over to them and be like, hey, what do you want to fucking do about it?
Okay, yeah, I'm Fredo.
Well, Fredo's here now.
What do you want to fucking do?
You know, like, I'm not so against that.
I have a lot of friends who have that type of mentality.
I might even be somebody who would fall into that category or maybe has a time or two fallen into that category before.
By the way, I don't think it's great.
I think I should be better than that.
And in general, people should be better.
You know, if someone isn't actually posing a threat or anything like that, you probably should be able to roll your eyes and walk away.
But I'm just saying, I don't have a problem living in a world where it's like, hey, if you're talking shit to another man, you may have to deal with a confrontation now.
That I don't particularly have a problem with.
So I kind of get that.
And truthfully speaking, it's just not my personality to heckle someone like that and then not want to do something.
I find it kind of weak.
You know, I have as much disdain for the mainstream media as just about anybody I know.
But if I saw one of them, I'm not heckling them.
Just not my style.
Something about it seems like kind of a bitch move to me.
I don't know.
I don't like it.
That being said, the thing that's just outrageous that Chris Cuomo does is that he goes, he immediately starts playing the, are any of you guys Italian?
Fredo is like the N-word to us, which is just ridiculous.
Fredo is the N-word to Italians.
And I don't even understand.
It's like, who are you trying to be here?
Which guy are you?
Are you the guy who's saying, I'll throw you down a flight of stairs?
Why don't you do something?
Put your hands on me and see what happens.
Okay, I understand who that guy is.
Or are you the guy going, that's the N-word to me?
Like, which one of these people are you?
I don't understand how you can be both.
And of course, Fredo is not the N-word.
Fredo has never been considered a like, I don't know, a racial slur.
Like, that's what the N-word is considered, not Fredo.
I mean, there are words for Italians that are like insulting words, right?
Like, what is it?
WAP or Guido?
Dago.
Dago.
Yeah.
And even those, like, they're not the N-word.
They're just not.
It's just not the same thing.
Like, you, you could say them, you know, and not worry about it.
Like, you can joke around with them if you're not Italian and it's not as much of of a triggering thing.
But Fredo isn't one of them.
Fredo's just an insult.
It's just an insult.
He's basically saying like, okay, your father was governor, your brother is governor, and you're the fucking dumb one who's lame and doesn't do shit and, you know, whatever.
Now, the funny thing is that Chris Cuomo also famously compared being called fake news to being called the N-word.
He said on CNN, I think this was a couple years ago, but that he said calling a journalist fake news is the equivalent of calling a journal it's the n-word for journalists, which is just, you know, all of it is insane, but it does, I don't know, it shows you something interesting about who these people really are.
Like, I don't care.
You know, be that guy.
Look, Louis Jay Gomez is my brother, one of my best friends in the world.
He is definitely, as everybody knows, the type of guy who, if you just started talking shit to him randomly, he'd probably come over to you and be like, what do you want to do about it?
That's his personality type.
Okay, that's who he is.
Now, as Lewis will probably be the first to admit, you know, we're all getting older.
We're parents now.
Probably it would be better if someone did talk shit and Lewis was able to just go like, yeah, whatever, dude.
I don't care and walk away.
We all probably think that would be a better way to handle it.
But any given day, if you go talk shit to Lewis, he might be, you know, he might get in your face.
But the reason why I love, well, not the reason I love it, but the reason why I respect Lewis, I love him because he's my brother, but the reason why I respect Lewis is that anybody who listens to any of his shows or, you know, watch this comedy or anything like that, when I tell you this, this is not new information to you because you're like, yeah, that's who Lewis is.
He's that guy.
And he's quite honest about being that guy.
And like I said, he'd probably be the first one to be like, yeah, I could probably tone down being that guy a little bit.
You know, I probably don't need to be that.
Maybe it's because I had a shitty childhood or whatever that I'm that guy.
And, you know, he's aware.
But he's not pretending professionally to not be that guy and then getting caught on secret video being that guy.
You get my point?
He's not on TV every night going like, this, this rhetoric is just, it's very heated and charged and could lead to violence and then threatening to throw someone down a flight of stairs.
That I have very little respect for.
That I have very little respect for.
Saying Fredo is the new N-word, that I have very little respect for.
This is complete bullshit.
And actually, if you keep playing that video you were on, I think it's about to go to something that's pretty hilarious.
Trying to hang on to the fame of his father in order to have some level of relevancy.
Steve is right.
He didn't even make the cut that his brother-in-law and sister did to be part of the Oval Office and the White House staff.
Daddy kept Fredo back home.
So who cares for Donald Trump's?
All right.
So there was, you know, somebody calling Donald Trump Jr. Fredo on Chris Cuomo's show.
He didn't seem to find, he didn't go, whoa, whoa, whoa, you just dropped an N-bomb on my show.
Oh, shit.
You can't just run around calling people the N-word.
No, he had no problem with it because there's nothing wrong with calling Donald Trump Donald Trump Jr. Fredo.
That's all fine.
It just can't be directed at you.
So if it's an insult, and by the way, there's tapes of Chris Matthews calling Donald Trump Jr. Fredo as well.
It's a movie reference.
It's not the N-word.
It's a fucking movie reference.
And it's a movie reference about the kind of dumb, ineffectual brother.
So fine, but it can't be a world where you can call everybody else this, but they can't call you Fredo.
You know, especially when you are kind of a Fredo.
This guy's a little bit of a Fredo.
Trying to get on the subway later.
I'm worried these Fredos are going to steal my wallet.
Why I Recommend Monday.com00:02:58
It's also just, it's funny that they make up a term like that and say, oh, this is somehow like over the line.
You can't call someone Fredo for a network that calls everybody under the sun a white supremacist, a white nationalist, a Nazi, literally Hitler.
All of these things.
You know, all of these words, lobbed against Donald Trump, lobbed against Trump supporters, yet Fredo is somehow, that's out of bounds.
That's off limits.
I don't know.
It seems like a little bit of a stretch.
Seems like a little bit of a stretch to me.
But, you know, you guys, you guys make up your own judgment.
You guys make up your own opinion on that one.
But it's pretty funny for all the things.
And there's something about it where, you know, there's something with the CNN mindset.
And this is true, I think, throughout political discourse, where people are so convinced that they're on the right side of history, that they're the good ones, that they don't ever look at it in terms of like an objective standard of, oh, what can I call other people or what can they call me?
They're just like, well, I'm insulting Trump's kids, so I'm fine here, but you don't insult me, a journalist.
You don't call us fake news, but you can call somebody else a racist, a white nationalist, white supremacist, whatever.
Any name under the sun.
That never seems to be a problem.
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Hate Crimes vs Nasty Views00:14:53
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Well, there was something else, a piece that I wanted to comment on.
It was an article that I saw.
And I thought it would make for an interesting discussion on the show today.
So I thought, when I say discussion, I mean I guess it's hard to call that when Robbie the Fire is not here.
It's really just me ranting.
But Anyway, I saw an article up on reason.com and it was it was from last week.
It was from last Wednesday, to be precise.
And it was an article written by JD Tussley.
I believe I'm, I hope I'm pronouncing his name right.
If not, I apologize, JD.
And it was, you know, it was interesting.
I thought maybe we'd talk about it a little bit today, kind of almost on a similar theme on the theme of race and racism, which is a topic that is really, you know, race in general has become the third rail of American.
I was going to say politics, but politics is probably not even broad enough of a term.
Just of American discourse, this has become the topic that you have to have the, you know, the approved opinion on.
It's kind of the most dangerous subject to talk about.
And it's something that, you know, I've been criticized from all angles for having the wrong views on race or for saying the wrong thing.
I've been criticized by what maybe you could call our more alt-right leaning people for not discussing race enough or not taking a bold enough stance on race.
And then I get criticized from left-leaning people for not kind of conforming to the leftist view on race.
And truthfully, if you listen to the show and you've followed me for a long time, I think you'd know that race really isn't an issue that I'm particularly interested in.
It's not something that I've like, oh, this is like a really important issue to me that I want to talk about a lot.
It's just not and still isn't.
What I'm more interested in is commenting on how everybody else speaks about it.
But anyway, I saw this title of an article and the title is White Supremacy is Alien to Liberal and Libertarian Ideals.
People are important as individuals, not extensions of some faceless mass.
And for whatever reason, and this was just probably my own narcissism, but when I first saw the article, I thought it might be about me.
And because I had just had a few weeks back, you know, if some of you guys may have listened, I was on this podcast on Thaddeus Russell's podcast, Unregistered, and it was me and Nick Gillespie, who's the longtime editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine.
He's one of the top guys at Reason.
And what had come up in it was, you know, we talked about race a little bit.
And we talked about, you know, he had brought up kind of accusations about the Mises Institute guys being, you know, I guess somewhat racist, the old Ron Paul newsletters.
And I had basically said, like, you know, I mean, look, you can go listen to the podcast to hear exactly what I said, but my point more or less, which maybe I'll say in a little different way now than I'll say there, is that I don't have an allergy to racism, if you want to use that term, in the same way that many people today on the left and in the kind of Reason Magazine,
Cato Institute, what are referred to sometimes as the Beltway libertarians.
I know they don't like that term.
I've referred to them as the mainstream libertarians before.
I know they don't particularly care for that term either.
But whatever you want to call that group of people, the Reason Magazine, Cato Institute libertarians.
I guess I just don't have as much of an allergy to racism as they do.
I have much more of an allergy to aggression, to the initiation of violence.
That I have a big problem with.
What people believe, politically incorrect thoughts that they might hold, just doesn't really quite do it for me.
And I think that for most people, at least I would think that for most true libertarians, once you get kind of, you know, once you're red pilled.
on what the state does to people, like the insane human rights violations, the amount of people who have been killed, kidnapped, enslaved, robbed from, ruined, you know, it's like someone having a mean thought just doesn't quite register as the most important thing.
And so what would happen, I think historically, was with somebody like Murray Rothbard.
Murray Rothbard, I don't think racist at all.
He, I mean, he wrote extensively.
The guy has like close to 30 books that he published, hundreds of articles.
You can't really find anything where he's writing something that, oh, this is blatantly racist.
But he didn't have an allergy to it.
What he had an allergy to was war.
Anybody who supported war, he was against you.
It didn't matter what your other views were.
He was against you if you were supporting war.
And if you were anti-war, he would kind of talk to you and listen to you.
So he was kind of like with Pat Buchanan and David Duke.
He wasn't like, oh my God, these guys have, you know, politically incorrect opinions on race.
He was like, hey, they're both anti-war.
Let's talk to those guys.
And if you really care about, you know, human suffering, I just think that the idea that, you know, somebody having a few nasty views about people of different races or somebody wanting to go bomb, you know, and slaughter people, one is pretty clearly worse than the other.
And the point that I made on Thaddeus Russell's podcast was I was just like, look, why is it that the kind of Reason Cato Institute guys who do have this allergy toward race, they're like, racism.
Anybody who's ever said anything that can be deemed racist has, you know, you associate with them and you're some type of evil person, but anybody who's associated with like a war hawk, that's not necessarily a big problem.
So that's what I reject.
I reject those moral priorities.
It's not to say that we have to choose between being war hawks or racists, but it's just like one is pretty clearly worse than the other.
And I'm not going to pretend one doesn't exist and then spend all of my time obsessing over the other.
It just that doesn't jive with my sense of moral priorities.
The other thing is the point that I've made on this show many times, and I'll get into the article in a second, but I just wanted to say this before, is that the term racist has almost lost all meaning as far as I can tell.
And it seems to me that racism covers this spectrum where it's like on one end, you have like, you know, genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, whatever.
And then on the other side, you have somebody, you know, saying like blacks instead of African American.
And there's supposed to be one word that is an umbrella term for all of this.
And you're like, I don't know.
Some of these things are not like the other.
And the reason why that the reason why I, you know, am a libertarian and the whole idea to me of like the non-aggression principle is to get really specific about what we're actually objecting to here.
So what the non-aggression principle does in kind of distilling all of this is you go, oh, well, genocide is pure evil because you're killing people.
Slavery is pure evil because you're enslaving people.
You know, like all of the any like initiation of violence is completely wrong.
But if you get to this other side of this umbrella term, where it's like just saying a different term than the politically correct one, having a theory about what you think of a group of people, just having views like every one of our uncles has had, is like, eh, who really cares?
I'm not saying I agree with it.
You know, if we're being completely honest, we probably all have some views that don't conform to political correctness privately.
But that to me is just not.
So to me, the non-aggression principle, what's beautiful about it is that it slices right through all the bullshit and gets to what actually matters.
Are you violating somebody's rights or not?
Are you initiating violence against somebody, right?
Like that's what really matters.
It's not about what you think, it's about what you do.
So if you have some thoughts, like if, you know, if you just have some feeling, like you're like, I don't know, I think Asian people are a little bit shifty.
It's like, okay, that's, you know, that might be ignorant or something that you don't really say in polite society.
You don't have to agree with it.
But that's very different than saying we got to round up these Asians.
You know, like it's a very different thought and they shouldn't all be lumped together.
So that was the point I made.
Anyway, I was wrong.
The article had nothing to do with me.
But thankfully.
But I did think it was worth reading and discussing a little bit on the show because I think it gets to the heart of what are some important and interesting, you know, topics.
So here it is from reason.com.
And you can go look up the piece.
It was written on August 7th of 2019 this year.
And the title is, White Supremacy is Alien to Liberal and Libertarian Ideals.
People are important as individuals, not as extensions of some faceless mass.
Okay.
Let's read from the article.
Amidst a grab bag of authoritarian ideas, including xenophobia, anti-capitalism, and radical environmentalism, the El Paso mass murderer was primarily motivated by a bigoted hatred for immigrants from south of the border.
His manifesto is full of denunciations of race mixers, Hispanic invasion, and cultural and ethnic replacement.
Buzz phrases for racists and white supremacists who elevate an illusory collective.
Oh, crap.
Let me start back.
Sorry, my phone glitched out there.
Buzz phrases for racists and white supremacists who elevate an illusory collective racial and cultural heritage over respect for people as individuals.
He couldn't have more thoroughly distanced himself from the liberal libertarian ideas of the pro-liberty movement if he had gone through a checklist of shitty notions.
Okay, so look, by the way, let me just say, I'm sure there will be some things that I kind of agree with in this article.
It's just that there's, you know, there's probably aspects that I also think are a little bit, you know, not really well thought out.
But look, if you're trying to say that a mass murderer is not consistent with the ideals of liberty, I mean, how far do we have to dig on this?
Yeah, that's right.
He was not consistent with the ideals of liberty.
The first giveaway was when he started murdering a whole bunch of people.
He certainly didn't seem to respect their right to liberty, right?
Like their right to life, which comes even before Liberty.
Okay, so yes, but it kind of reminds me like, you know, of what we were playing that Essie Cup clip on the last episode.
And she's like, you know, the real problem here is hate.
It's like, where do you put racism on your priorities of list, on your list of priorities?
Like, is it the absolute top?
Because it does seem like a lot of people are more offended by a racist killer than they are just by a killer.
And maybe I'm missing something here, but that, once you get to murdering people, I don't really care what your notions on race were.
You're evil because you're killing people.
It's kind of like if there was a rapist and then you said, wait, wait, but he jaywalked right before he raped this person.
And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who cares?
We're dealing with a much bigger immoral.
So you can have whatever attitude you want toward different races.
Once you're a mass murderer, we don't really need to get into the nitty-gritty about how you strayed from the philosophy of peace.
You're a killer.
And the point I was making was with Essie Cup, who's had these long-standing views about gun rights.
And then all of a sudden she's like, yeah, but you know what?
We got a problem with hate because a racist killed a bunch of Latinos.
It's like, oh, okay.
So that's bad, right?
We're all together.
I think pretty much 99% of people, like all the sane ones, are like, yeah, that's bad.
Don't go murder a whole lot of people.
That's a very bad thing to do.
But it's like, Essie, so you changed your views because we have a problem with hate?
Well, how about when Adam Lanza just murdered a whole bunch of five and six year olds in Sandy Hook?
Now, he wasn't a racist, right?
He wasn't doing it for race-related reasons.
So was that not as evil?
He fucking opened fire on a room full of children.
Who the fuck cares if it's because you were a racist or because you were crazy or because like is one less evil than the other?
No, the evil is that you killed people and killing children, you know, is probably the most outrageous.
And some children were killed in one of these recent mass shootings.
And that's the tragedy.
Group Identity and Merits00:09:53
So it just almost seems to me to be like, I don't know.
It's just very beside the point what your motivating factor was.
Oh, we have a problem with hate.
Well, does anyone ever murder someone that is unrelated to hate?
Isn't that kind of always baked into the cake somewhere?
That there was some anger inside you before you started, you know, just destroying people, destroying families, ending people's existence?
I mean, I don't know.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So, yeah, okay.
So, as I said, as I was reading, he couldn't have more thoroughly distanced himself from the liberal, libertarian ideals of pro- of the pro-liberty movement if he had gone through a checklist of shitty notions.
The liberal tradition that libertarianism inherits and extends doesn't treat people as members of some sort of Borg collective or as any other representation of a group identity.
So, look, I do there's something that I find a little bit problematic about the individualist versus collectivist argument.
And I do to some degree think that, you know, being an individualist is a good thing to be.
I certainly think in a lot of ways that, look, I mean, we are, it is undeniable that we're all individuals and we're all members of a collective.
They're both true.
To just deny one or the other to me seems kind of silly.
I mean, obviously, we're individuals, right?
Like, I am an individual speaking to you right now.
We live as individuals.
We exist as individuals.
We suffer as individuals.
However, we're also members of collectives.
I mean, I'm a part of the gas digital network.
I'm a part of my family.
And let me tell you, as somebody who's recently gotten married and had a child, that collective is pretty goddamn important to me and my existence.
Your parents are pretty important to you and your development and who you are as a person.
Your family, the people around you, your friends.
We're all members of collectives.
So, to just say the liberal tradition that libertarians inherit and extend doesn't treat people as members of some sort of collective or as any other representation of group identity, well, I mean, we all look at people as, I don't know, members of families, of companies, of neighborhoods, all of these things.
These group identities are very important to people.
That's why I don't see libertarianism, and maybe this is where I differentiate it a little bit from the more objectivist, Randian version of objectivism.
I don't think the whole battle is about individualist versus collectivists.
I think the battle is just about the non-aggression principle and private property rights.
You know, you can be a libertarian collectivist.
You can say that nobody should be forced into a group, but people have every right to, you know, opt in to a group and choose to be a part of a group identity.
And also, I think most of human history would kind of indicate to us that probably, given liberty, a lot of people will choose to be members of a group.
I mean, look at look at religion.
Organized religion, at least for the last, you know, couple hundred years in the West, has not survived because people are conscripted and forced into it.
It survived because people freely choose to join.
People like to identify as a group.
So I don't know.
I'm not sure that it's necessarily stupid.
While we're all humans and sometimes fail to live up to our aspiration, our aspirations, libertarians at least aspire to treat aspire to treat people on their own merits or lack thereof, as in the case of people who mouth the sort of nonsense espoused by Patrick Wood Cruzes in El Paso, the El Paso shooter.
You know, again, I just, I think this to me is kind of outside the purview of libertarianism.
Should you treat people on their own merits or lack thereof?
That's a nice idea.
I mean, I try to treat people based on their own merits or lack thereof, and I think that that is a good thing to do.
I would tell others they should.
I don't think that has anything to do with libertarianism, like anything at all.
And I don't mean this to come off like I'm nidpicking here, but I think this is important to kind of nail down and get right.
I don't think it has anything to do with libertarianism.
To be a libertarian and say, oh, you're not a libertarian because you didn't treat everyone based on their merit.
It's like, no, did you initiate violence against other people or not?
That's the only thing that makes you a libertarian or not, is whether you're for peace or against peace.
How you feel about somebody, it's like, I don't know.
I'm trying to think of an example.
So it's like a coach of a basketball team who benched their star player, not a libertarian now, because he didn't treat this guy according to his merit.
I think it has nothing to do with that.
All right.
Back to the article in quotes.
Racism is a particularly pernicious form of collectivism, wrote John Hospers, the late professor of philosophy and the first presidential candidate of the Libertarian Party in 1972.
Persons who cast racial slurs on others are not considering the individual merits or demerits of the person slurred.
They may not know the individual at all, except that he is a member of some racial group, Jews, blacks, Italians, etc.
I was not aware that Italians are a race, but all right.
Through the person's individual qualities, maybe though the person's individual qualities may be quite different from many other members of the group, all this is ignored.
All they know or care is that he is a member of that group.
Okay, sure.
I mean, the other thing is that, you know, look, I do believe in treating people as individuals, and that's to me the more intelligent way to treat people that you meet, that you get to know.
You know, being a comedian, a stand-up comedian, that is something that's very bred into the personality type and the whole scene of being a comedian.
It's an individual sport.
One person gets up and has the stage.
One person gets up and talks into a microphone and everybody else listens.
And you judge that person based off them.
You don't go, oh, here's a white comedian.
Here's a female comedian.
He's a black comedian.
You judge it off them.
I don't, you know, you don't see Dave Chappelle and go, oh, there's a black comedian.
You're like, there's fucking Dave Chappelle because we know him.
And so I think that's a smart thing to do.
However, in real life, you don't know everybody individually.
And so another word or another way to look at what you're talking about is just generalizing.
And I think generalizing is something that just is part of the way that the human brain deals with the world.
I don't know that we'll ever completely get rid of that.
And I don't know that, you know, if you're saying that it's like, look, let's just say, let's take, forget, look, I'm an anarchist.
I don't support the exist of a state.
But if you want to talk about different groups of people in different cultures, I mean, if you were to look at New York and Japan, you know, or New York and Tokyo, let's say.
So I look at New York City and Tokyo.
Is it unreasonable for me to say, well, these are certain qualities that New Yorkers tend to have and certain qualities that people from Tokyo tend to have?
Would you just go, oh my God, that's so ignorant.
You're not judging the person as an individual.
It's like, well, yeah, yeah, no, I know.
I haven't met that person yet.
And I'm sure there are some people who fucking don't fit that description.
But I remember there used to be this mixed martial arts organization in Japan called Pride.
And the fighters would fight and they'd be silent.
The audience would be completely silent.
They wouldn't, like you could hear a pin drop.
It'd be these fucking stadiums, tens of thousands of people, two people fighting in front of them.
And they'd be silent because they thought that to them that was like being respectful of the martial artists and like watching and really taking in what they're doing.
Fear of Race Mixing00:15:09
Now, go watch a cage fight in Philly.
You know, they're not so fucking quiet.
They're screaming their heads off.
There's fights breaking out in the stand.
It's just kind of a different culture.
And to just pretend to say, I'm going to ignore that because I want to treat everyone as an individual.
It's like, I don't know.
People pick up on trends.
Again, I'm not saying any of this to justify being a racist.
I know, like, it's like, I think when people who write articles like this, who read articles like this, a lot of times they hear what I'm saying, they're like, oh, this is, this is dog whistling for some type of secret racism or something.
Just get that out of your head for a second.
I'm just saying, take the letter of what he's writing, like the actual wording and go, there's kind of a problem to this.
All right.
The recognition of the superiority of individualism over the evils of group identity was a long time coming.
But it was also a logical evolution of basic liberal ideas that nudged advocates in the right direction, however hesitantly, and let's admit it, sometimes unwillingly, when it proved inconvenient.
Once you accepted that people were more than possessions of the church or the king and had inherent value, the path led in one direction.
All right.
The abolitionist movement grew logically out of the Lockean libertarianism of the American Revolution, notes David Boas in his 2015 book, The Libertarian Mind.
How could Americans proclaim that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights without noticing that they themselves were holding other men and women in bondage?
Okay.
So yeah, I would certainly agree with all of that.
And right, it was pretty obviously hypocritical to say we believe in individual rights and have slavery going on.
And of course, abolitionists used that.
They used the Bill of Rights and the arguments in the Declaration of Independence as evidence that we shouldn't have slavery.
And yes, once you go down the liberal libertarian line of thinking, it gets pretty impossible to justify slavery.
But that's because slavery is denying somebody their individual liberty.
So if you believe in individual liberty, it's pretty tough to square that circle with believing in slavery.
However, that does not at all equate.
This is what I was saying about the big umbrella term with racism.
That does not at all deal with somebody, yeah, just thinking blacks are inferior.
Now, you could, you can go down the individual liberty line and still go, yeah, I just think some other races are inferior.
We may find that to be an ugly belief.
We may not agree with that, but there's nothing really contradictory toward the idea of individual liberty.
You have your liberty to believe what you want to believe.
This is why we discussed the non-aggression principle, because that's what it actually all comes down to.
Back to the article.
Of course, some people did notice that and ran the other way.
They developed moral rationalizations and pseudoscientific theories to justify slavery and post-Civil War racist laws and explicitly rejected libertarian individualistic views that require equal treatment of all people.
Now, again, it may seem like I'm nidpicking here, but I think it's important to nail these things down.
Otherwise, we just get in this kind of virtue signaling spiral where it's just like, oh yeah, this guy who murdered a bunch of people was bad.
Slavery is bad.
And that's why libertarians believe X, Y, and Z.
Now, what you're saying here is that, and I'm quoting that libertarian individualistic views require equal treatment of all people.
I mean, equality under the law.
Okay, I could maybe get on board with that, but equal treatment of all people?
That's that is something that only exists in an abstraction in your mind.
And it's like the type of thing, it's like equality in general.
It's the type of thing that sounds good in your mind, but would be downright evil if it ever existed in real life.
I'm sorry, I don't treat people equally.
I don't treat my producer, Brian, the same way I treat some guy on the street who I don't fucking know.
Because Brian's my friend, who I've known for fucking years.
He works with my company.
We're like, I don't know.
I don't treat you the same as I treat someone I don't know.
I definitely don't treat my daughter the same as I treat some other baby.
Sorry, I don't treat everybody equally.
And being a libertarian does not require me to.
In fact, I don't even treat people at Reason Magazine the same I treat people at the Mises Institute because I have more respect for them.
I don't treat Nick Sarwak the same I treat Tom Woods because one's a hero and the other's a weasel.
So I'm sorry.
There's nothing about being a libertarian that requires me to treat everybody equally or equal treatment of all people.
Like, what does that even mean?
All right.
These bogus, intellectualized justifications for racism later seeped into the progressive movements in updated form, creating the basis for differential treatment and even forced sterilization.
It's true.
Yeah, the progressives believed in forced sterilization.
The problem with forced sterilization, of course, is that it's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
Also, by the way, Margaret Sanger was one of those progressives who believed in this, founded Planned Parenthood.
You know, you get into an abortion rant on some other episode, but anyway, remainders of this garbage still pollute the discourse, fueling alt-right fears of race mixing, in quotes, and other nonsense that drives modern bigots.
So if we're going to talk about alt-right fears, and I say this as somebody, you know, who's not a member of the alt-right, whatever that means, I don't think alt-writers care for me very much, generally speaking.
There might be some exceptions to that.
And, you know, I'm a Jew from Brooklyn.
I'm probably not their cup of tea.
They're definitely not mine.
But if you're going to write about what the alt-right fear is, try to at least give them an honest hearing.
At least give them an honest hearing.
Otherwise, you're actually the one who's fueling them.
Because just mocking them or just, you know, just saying, saying, let me read this one more time.
Remainders of this garbage still pollute the discourse, fearing the alt-right, fueling the alt-right fears of, quote, race mixing and other nonsense that drives modern bigots.
All right.
Well, I think what the alt-right fear is, is something more like this.
And maybe I'm not getting this completely right because I'm not one of them.
So I may not be nailing this completely.
But I think the fear goes something more like this.
Minorities have not been treated so well throughout history.
Of course, all of the, you know, all of the complaints about the history of racism that you're laying out right here, right, are the history of how a minority was treated in America in this example, right?
Like slavery and Jim Crow and all of these different things.
And minorities have many times throughout history been oppressed by the majority.
And what you have right now is a situation where whites are becoming the minority.
And that's, you know, a few decades down the down the road still, but that's what we're moving toward.
That's just the nature of the demographics and at least how they're going right now.
And I think probably inevitably will go in that direction.
And you also have a system where basically you can say things about white people that you can't say about other groups.
You can hate white people in a way that you can't really hate any other group, at least and still exist without major ramifications in any type of public position or pretty much any job.
Every single day on Twitter, you'll see some new blue check mark who's, you know, like, you know, white people should apologize for their race.
White people are a plague on society.
All that, you know, there's a lot of hostility toward white people, toxic whiteness or, you know, all of this stuff.
It's all over the place.
It's very prevalent in Hollywood, in the mainstream media, on college campuses, all over the place.
And I think the fears of the alt-right are something along the lines of like, well, do you really think all of these historical grievances, all of this anger and hatred directed toward white people is just going to stop once white people become a minority?
That just as soon as they go, oh, okay, you know what?
We're the majority now.
We'll drop all of our complaints about historical injustices and all that.
You guys are totally cool.
By the way, white people get all the protections that other minority groups get.
Do you really think that's going to happen?
That's, to me, more or less their fear.
That they go, this is going in a really bad direction, and this might be really bad for us.
So it's not just as simple as they fear race mixing.
I think what they fear is the extermination of their people.
Now, maybe that's not a legitimate fear.
Maybe you have a reason why they shouldn't really fear that.
But then express that.
Don't just dismiss it as like, you guys are stupid.
It's garbage.
Whatever else you want to say.
I mean, actually deal with what they're saying.
And then maybe you could alleviate some of their fears if you have a better, you know, case to be made.
I just don't know that.
Look, like I was saying before, I literally saw today some other blue check mark who was like, all white people should apologize for their whiteness.
Now, if you said this about any other group of people, you'd be booted off Twitter.
You'd be booted off, but that's completely fine to say about white people.
This is where their anxiety comes from, I think.
At least I think it's a big part of it.
Maybe I'm getting some of that wrong.
Maybe, I mean, I probably shouldn't speak for the alt-right.
I'm not one of them.
But I think that's more at least grasping or grappling with what they're actually concerned about than to just say, oh, this garbage, you know, they're afraid of race mixing or something like that.
It would be, back to the article.
It would be delightful to be able to report that the libertarian movement has remained entirely unpolluted by bigotry and the collectivist abuse of people who should be treated as individuals.
But that's too much to hope for of our fellow humans.
Too many, quote, libertarians and former libertarians have embraced bigotry, trying to reconcile contempt toward and ill-treatment of out-groups with some degree of advocacy of personal freedom.
Infamously, racist material appeared in newsletters published in former Representative Ron Paul's newsletters during the 1990s.
For what it's worth, Paul himself denies any knowledge of the inflammatory material published under his name.
But the writers and editors of the material certainly identified with the libertarian movement and thought they could get away with mixing up a few toxic stew, mixing up a toxic stew of libertarianism and bigotry.
All right.
Look, man, I don't know what else to say about the people who harp on the Ron Paul newsletters.
You know, like, it just, to me, it starts to show where your priorities lie.
And the idea that, look, Ron Paul was a guy who was in politics starting in the 70s.
He took a little bit of a break and came back in the 90s, but basically from the 70s through 2013, this guy was in the political world making, you know, pitching liberty to the American people.
Oh, and by the way, spreading it more effectively than any of you guys have.
But this guy, what was he advocating?
Let's say we had listened to him and done what, well, there'd be millions of brown people in the Middle East and Northern Africa whose lives wouldn't have been ruined, wouldn't have been slaughtered, displaced, destroyed because of American foreign policy.
There'd be hundreds of thousands of black and brown people who wouldn't have been locked up.
We wouldn't have this mass incarceration, mass incarceration state.
And if you believe what Reason Magazine believes, his advocacy against regulation, taxation, government intrusion into the economy would have helped lift it up millions of poor people, millions of minorities all around the country, right?
So what's really important here?
Like where should your outrage lie?
Yet you hear these fucking newsletters come up all over again.
And they never even quote them.
They just go, oh, the racist newsletters.
Because they said things like, I remember one of the quotes from the newsletters, and this was something that someone wrote.
It wasn't Ron Paul who wrote it.
It was like some guy wrote a thing.
He said the only thing that stopped the LA riots was that they had to pick up their welfare checks.
It's like, oh, okay.
He didn't say all black people are animals.
He was talking about rioters.
You know what I mean?
Like looters.
Oh, we're not allowed to insult them at all.
We're never like, it's like, have any of you guys spent any time around like people who just rob in fucking like the hood?
Yeah, a lot of them are on welfare.
I don't know.
It's like, oh, okay.
By the way, I'm not even saying he should have said that.
Maybe they shouldn't have posted those articles or printed those articles.
But like compare to the other stuff I was just like, how is this even a priority?
How are we even discussing this?
All right.
Back to the article.
Professor Hans Hermann Hoppe, associated with the paleo-libertarian movement that purports to merge conservative cultural values with individualist ideas, has long flirted with nationalists and racists who embrace collectivist visions for Western civilization.
So let me just say, when you start to say people, there's something about that word flirted.
You know, it's kind of like the word implied.
Now you don't actually have to get someone for anything they've said or done.
You can just say you've flirted with nationalists and racists.
Like, okay.
Well, look, what is racism?
Again, I kind of come back to this thing, right?
Like from what you laid out earlier in your article, you're saying that what racism is, essentially, if I'm getting this correctly, is treating people as a group rather than being an individualist and treating them as an individual, right?
Okay.
So anything where I look at you as a member of a group and not as an individual, this is the racism and the bigotry that you're against, right?
So how about the bigotry on the left?
How about the racism on the left?
Molyneux on Racism00:15:03
Have you ever, you know, anyone at Reason Magazine talked to anybody on the left who believes in white privilege?
Because, you know, that's treating somebody as a member of a group, not as an individual.
So is Reason Magazine flirting with racists?
Does that ever get brought up?
Oh, no, there's no problem with that, right?
No problem with sitting down with anybody on the left, having a discussion with them.
That's not flirting with them at all.
I've heard members of the Libertarian Party, people at Reason Magazine, you know, compliment things that they like about AOC or Bernie Sanders or other things, you know, areas where they get it right.
Are you flirting with racists now?
Because AOC talks about white privilege all the time.
Bernie Sanders said, if you're white, you don't know what it's like to be poor.
I mean, by your own logic, that's just as racist.
So it's just when it comes from the right wing.
It's just anything that comes from white people.
So really, who's got the double standard here?
That's all I'm saying.
If you want to apply this belief system, then apply it across the board.
All right.
Okay, so he flirted with nationalists and racists who embrace a collectivist vision for Western civilization.
Well, look, that's because they look at libertarianism like I do as the non-aggression principle and private property rights, not this weird collectivist.
When you say collectivist vision for Western civilization, well, what is the term Western civilization if it's not to some degree a collective?
It's not an individual, right?
So you have an individualist version of Western civilization?
Well, why is it only in the West?
Right?
That you're differentiating different groups of people.
He describes as naive the libertarian, quote, belief in the empirical equality and hence the interchangeability, substitutability, and replaceability of all people and all groups of people.
Well, yeah, people are different.
Isn't that the point of being an individualist?
That you recognize that individuals are different.
Okay, follow me on this.
If individuals are different, then why when they get into groups would they become the same as another group?
If both groups are made up of completely different individuals, why would the groups be the same?
He's saying that the interchangeability, the substitutability, and the replaceability of all people in all groups.
Do you think that, like I said before, Philly and Tokyo are exactly the same, interchangeable, no different?
No, I don't know.
I'm sure some degree of that is genetic, some degree is cultural, environmental, psychological, whatever.
But are they the same?
Is Sweden and Haiti exactly the same?
No, they're different.
How could you be an individualist, but still not recognize that there's you'll recognize that there's differences between every individual, but not that there's a difference between like the way Sweden operates and the way Haiti operates.
Now, I believe in the non-aggression principle, so I don't think you should initiate violence on any of them, but you can't recognize a difference.
See, here's the thing.
You do recognize a difference.
No functioning thinking person doesn't.
So am I supposed to just pretend and not say something because it might be unpopular?
That's just not how I work.
Canadian rabble rouser, back to the article.
Canadian rabble rouser, Stefan Molyneux, to his credit, if you want to call it that, renounced and denounced libertarianism for rejecting his white nationalist views.
So again, man, if you want to deal with any of these issues, you just, you got to be honest about them.
This is just, at a certain point, it's like, this is just dishonest and it's really kind of dumb.
Stephan Molyneux, to his credit, renounced and denounced libertarianism for rejecting his white national views.
Well, no.
Stefan Molyneux made a video called The Problem with Libertarians.
Not the problem with libertarianism.
The problem with libertarians.
And he denounced libertarians for not embracing peaceful parenting and opposing feminism, as well as some other things.
I know you don't want to write that, right?
His whole thing was don't hate your kids.
You don't want to add that in because when you're trying to paint the picture of Stefan Molyneux as being this big, bad white nationalist, the idea that his biggest concern is that people be peaceful toward their children, it just doesn't really jive with this evil image.
So we don't throw that out so much.
But Stefan Molyneux, to refer to him as a rabble-rouser, you know, whatever.
Do I even need to discuss that?
I mean, whatever.
He would call himself a philosopher.
If you want to, you could call him a YouTuber, but rabble-rouser is just kind of dismissive and disingenuous.
I guess he did denounce, or he said there was a problem with libertarians.
And it wasn't for rejecting his white nationalist views.
In fact, he's said many, many times when he's been asked that he's not a white nationalist.
He thinks it's a ridiculous thing to call him.
Stephan Molyneux, feel however you feel about him.
He is an anarcho-capitalist.
That's what he is.
And he has had a lot of people on his show to talk about differences in different racial groups and their average IQs.
Again, you can have a problem with that.
You can say that they've gotten the science wrong, or you can say that you don't think this is something that he should talk about and make your argument.
Go ahead.
But to just call him a white nationalist, to just resort to name-calling of something that he doesn't identify as, that doesn't describe him or his views at all, is just, it's just lame.
I really don't even know what else to say.
Back to the article.
But if all these, quote, libertarians and former libertarians deliberately set themselves apart from what they see as the politically correct, quote, cosmetarian, end quote, and mushy mainstream of libertarian thought that refuses to make a place for their white nationalism, racism, and collectivist treatment of people.
Yeah, I guess, I guess what might come off as mushy is when you just write an article denouncing, you know, mass murderers and then extending that to also racism is bad while you mischaracterize the people that you're attacking, don't deal with any of the serious issues.
Yeah, sorry, it does.
It comes off as just kind of virtue signaling without much substance.
So mushy is, to me, not a bad description.
Back to the article.
And good for us for making the bigots feel uncomfortable.
They're free to go elsewhere if they want to trumpet tribalist nonsense to whatever cellar dwellers will have them.
But part of being a libertarian is calling out the enemies of freedom and denouncing their ideas and their actions.
Well, I don't know, man.
I mean, I'm not a fucking bigot, so I don't know.
But, you know, I don't particularly think that Stefan Molyneux is either.
You know, I don't know him personally, but I don't know.
But the idea that you're making the bigots feel uncomfortable, let me tell you something.
I really don't think that Reason Magazine is making anyone on the alt-right feel uncomfortable.
They're fucking laughing at you.
They're laughing at you because this type of shit is a big part of the reason why the libertarian movement has really suffered over the last few years.
Because like you're, it's just lazy and shallow and disingenuous.
And I don't think you're making anybody feel uncomfortable.
This doesn't make me feel uncomfortable.
It just disappoints me.
The seller dwellers thing, I don't even know what to say about it.
It's like we've been over this a million times.
It's always a sign that you're losing an argument when you just go right to insults and aren't actually taking on what anyone's saying.
It's like, okay, is Stefan Molyneux a cellar dweller?
Stefan Molyneux is infinitely more popular than you are.
Infinitely more.
You're both in the game of trying to write and influence people and put your ideas out there.
He's doing very well.
So I don't know, is he a cellar dweller?
He's a husband and father.
You know, it's just kind of silly.
Quote, there is no pipeline between libertarianism and the alt-right.
Reasons Nick Gillespie wrote two years ago as the alt-right emerged as the latest embodiment of racist thought, such as it is.
But quote, alt-writers need to be called out wherever we find them espousing their anti-modern, tribalistic, anti-individualist, and anti-freedom agenda.
Yes, they do.
Because calling out bigots and tribalists is part of advancing the unfinished business of extending freedom, tolerance, and respect to all comers and of treating people on the basis of their personal merits and not based on some group identity.
So, okay, fine.
If you want to say that calling out bigots and tribalists is part of advancing the unfinished business of extending freedom.
Okay, fine.
But by your own standard, as I said, the anti-white racism that is just, that if anyone were to just substitute the word white for black, you would all be writing articles about, I just don't see it.
I don't see you treating those people as toxic as you would anybody who's a white identitarian.
And I'm not a white identitarian.
I'm not a Jewish identitarian.
I don't like any of it.
But I'm not going to sit here and pretend that reality is different than it is.
I'm not going to pretend that the white identitarian movement are the only ones playing this identitarian game.
Because they're not.
And in fact, they're the quietest, most marginalized voice when it comes to that stuff.
Go check out Blue Checkmark Twitter.
And, you know, when you say, you know, treating all comers with respect, well, that's just like, you know, that's like saying you love everybody or that everybody's beautiful.
You know, it's like, if you love everybody, then you love nobody.
If everybody's beautiful, then nobody's beautiful.
Because the words lose their meaning.
I don't love everybody.
There's lots of people I don't even fucking know.
I do love my wife and my daughter.
And that's different from how I feel about a random person walking down the street.
And that's what the word means.
It means that it's different, that I love them.
If I just loved everybody, what would it mean to say I love them?
Yeah, you're a person.
It would mean nothing.
Same thing with someone being beautiful.
If you see someone and you go, oh my God, that person is beautiful.
Well, if you say all people are beautiful, why would you even need to say that?
The point is that it's different.
And that's what respect is too.
Respect is not something that is a right.
Respecting people has nothing to do with libertarianism.
Respect is something that's earned.
You respect people when they're worthy of being respected.
Like, I don't have a tremendous amount of respect for this article because I didn't gain anything from it.
Other than, you know, I thought it was a good use of time on the podcast to kind of point out where the virtue signaling Beltway libertarians go wrong.
But respect is not something you give to all comers.
And if you did, then there's no such thing as respect.
All right, back to the article.
And this is the end of it.
White supremacists, racists, and collectivists of all sort are alien to libertarian thought and enemies of our values and aspirations.
And we need to take them on whenever we encounter them.
All right.
Fine.
So that's the final thought.
Let me explain to you why the bigots, as you would call them, are not made uncomfortable by this and why they just laugh at this.
Why they don't respect you.
It's not just that they don't respect all comers.
This is why they don't respect you and they don't respect articles like this.
Let me ask you, why do you use the term white supremacist, racist, and collectivists?
Why not black supremacists?
Why not Asian supremacists?
Hispanic supremacists.
See, you're saying that somebody who has white supremacist views should be taken on by libertarians.
We don't want them in the libertarian movement.
Like, okay, fine.
But if you actually go look at it, and there's a fair amount of social science that's been done on this, white people, particularly in America, are the least identitarian race.
In general, white people have less of an identitarian worldview than just about every other race.
You know, there's nothing, if somebody, if there was a black guy out there who said black pride, you would have no problem welcoming him into your libertarian circle if he was like, oh, you know, I'm against Obamacare.
Or, you know, I don't want to fight wars or whatever it might be.
I want lower top marginal tax rates.
You know, you guys would take him in in a second.
And then he could talk about black issues all day long, right?
Any black libertarian would be welcomed into Reason Magazine and go, oh, but I just really care about issues that affect black people.
I want black people to prosper and thrive in this country.
But you wouldn't do the same for a white person.
So if a white person was like, oh, I, you know, I'm against state intervention, but I also just really want to see white people thrive.
I really care about issues that affect white people.
And I have a lot of pride for being a white person.
You'd be like, no, no, no, you're a collectivist.
You see, you're the one with the double standard here.
You're treating one collective one way and another collective the other way.
Look, say Kane Velasquez, the former UFC heavyweight champion, was like, you know, I'm a libertarian.
I really think that less taxation and less government regulation is just going to lead to a better society.
Reason magazine would write features about him.
The guy's got brown pride tattooed on his chest.
Do you think that would for a second give them a problem?
I promise you it wouldn't.
They wouldn't, it'd be like, yeah, this guy's got pride in his ethnic difference, and that's what's wonderful.
We have all these ethnic differences.
Now, same example, but a guy with white pride tattooed on his chest.
You think they'd take that guy in?
So that's the point here.
This is the weird place that you end up getting in when you just use the term racist and collectivist and you're not specific about what you mean.
Who Is Actually Racist00:01:47
Who's actually the racist here?
See, this is my deal is that I try to be objective.
I try to be objective.
And what I really care about is the non-aggression principle, private property rights, ending wars, ending central banking, the evil of the state, all that shit.
I care about individual liberty, but I recognize that within individual liberty, people identify in collectives.
We're a pack animal.
We're a socialized, you know, like species that this is how we're going to work.
And if I see one group of people having an in-group preference and no one has a problem with that, and another group of people having an in-group preference and everyone says they're the most evil person on the evil people in the world, you go, who's really being the racist here?
Who is it?
I'll tell you, I don't think it's me.
And I don't think you're dealing, like if you actually want to combat any of these people, you got to actually roll up your sleeves and deal with what they're saying, actually grapple with their ideas, because this isn't going to cut it.
And I think in many ways, when it comes to my attitude about race, this is what separates me from the Reason Magazine Beltway libertarian crowd.
So anyway, I thought it was worth going over and discussing on the podcast today.
So anyway, thanks everybody for listening.
And we'll be back on Friday.
Robbie Bernstein, Robbie the Fire, the King of the Cox will be back with us, back from vacation.
And of course, come see me in Los Angeles.
Still a few tickets left.
We're going to be at the comedy store, the Legion of Skanks and friends at the comedy store.
Always a lot of fun.
And don't forget, September 10th, it's going down.
One-on-one, me versus Nicholas Sarwak, Gene Epstein moderating, go to thesohopeforum.org for tickets and information.