Aug. 23, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
18:54
3801 Is Stefan Molyneux Far-Right?
We Need Your Support: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donateFollow Stefan on Twitter: https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneuxShowing the lack of respect they have for the intelligence of their audience, the mainstream media often attaches "bucket" labels to criticize individuals instead of using actual arguments. Stefan Molyneux looks at a recent Business Insider article which called Ann Coulter, Mike Cernovich, Steve Bannon's Breitbart and himself "Far-Right" while describing their opposition to the war in Afghanistan. Who knew that opposing war and western imperialism was a far-right position!Article: https://web.archive.org/web/20170823193054/http://uk.businessinsider.com/far-right-trump-backers-pan-afghanistan-speech-2017-8?r=US&IR=TYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
You know, it's always a tough call, to be honest, knowing whether or when or how to respond to particular things on the internet.
Stuff blows past me, people inform me.
That's right, Sam Harris, I heard about that too.
But I think this article is general and universal enough that a huge amount of instruction can be pulled out of it.
The article was published by Business Insider UK, and it's called Unlimited War, Breitbart and the far right start to turn on Trump over his Afghanistan situation.
And the article begins, This is fascinating language, and you see a lot of this, and I want to sort of draw your attention to it.
So that you can understand how language can be deployed to clarify or not.
And so supporters of Donald Trump, this is kind of one of these misdirections, really important to understand.
Nobody outside of his immediate family supports Donald Trump.
I don't support Donald Trump.
You don't support Donald Trump.
Nobody supports Donald Trump.
Because that is to say that the allegiance is to a mere flesh, meat and matter mortal individual.
No, no. The allegiance is to principles, to campaign promises, to what it is that Donald Trump promised to do and offered to do in return for the vote of the American electorate.
So, you know, saying you support Donald Trump, It's kind of a misnomer.
You support the principles.
If Donald Trump started doing the exact opposite of what he promised to do, well, I guess there's only one person I can think of who would still support him because he's down for anything.
So this idea where people say, well, you're just a fanboy, you boost this person, it's saying that you have kind of this weird fetish to support a particular person, which is kind of Strange and insulting to you and to the person that you're supporting.
It's the policies that matter.
So this article talking about people on the far right, don't worry, we'll get to whatever that means in a moment.
Ann Coulter, Laura Ingram, Rand Paul, who's quite the libertarian, they all show up in this article.
And there is something that A lot of journalists do.
A lot of people do. Which is, you know, the old tweet mine and ad hominem.
And that is, I think, a little bit on the not-so-hardworking side, to put it as nicely as possible.
I mean, I've written lots of books on political theory and political action.
I have a lot of stuff out there defining my position with regards to the ideal state of politics, with regards to what's going on in politics at the moment and how to get there and so on.
But I recognize that's a lot of work for one article and so on, but just reading a couple of tweets and coming up with a term called far-right, I don't know.
I invite everyone out there to raise the bar on their level of effort and understanding.
Of course, the goal here is to say that people on the far-right support Trump.
Now, far-right is one of these ill-defined terms, but generally it means shading towards Nazism and fascism, as far as I understand it.
Far-right! Crazy right.
Lunatic right. And so I show up in this article and it says this.
Stefan Molyneux, a far-right podcaster and YouTube broadcaster, highlighted Trump's past calls for troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, while internet personality Mike Cernovich marked the supposed influence of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and Advisor Jared Kushner on the policy.
And so what is it that I tweeted?
Well, I tweeted some old tweets of Donald Trump's, one from 2011, where he said, When will we stop wasting our money on rebuilding Afghanistan?
We must rebuild our country first.
Another one that Trump tweeted back in the day in 2013.
He tweeted, Let's get out of Afghanistan.
Our troops are being killed by the Afghanis.
We train and we waste billions there.
Nonsense. Rebuild the USA. Now, I tweeted a lot more than that just over the course of live tweeting with regards to Trump's speech, but I guess that was more work.
I put forward arguments and examples, a couple of statistics, but they didn't show up in this article at all, as you can imagine.
The article goes on to say, on a smaller scale, the split seemed to mirror the reaction to Trump's decision to launch missile strikes in Syria earlier this year.
Ha! Opposing seemingly random, futile, and sometimes bottomless military imperialism in foreign countries.
Kind of a pattern here, opposing an open-ended commitment to Afghanistan.
Just because you say it's not nation-building doesn't mean that it's not nation-building.
Hey! I'm not bald.
Anything change? Not really. So it's kind of a pattern here in terms of this opposition.
And it is to me absolutely astounding.
I should, you know, I should be used to it.
Of course I should be used to it. But occasionally, every now and then, I do get a little bit of mind-expanding blowback on this kind of stuff.
It is amazing to me what gets thrown into the bucket of this smear called far right.
To be against... Endless war in Afghanistan.
By God, that war feels endless, doesn't it?
I mean, if the war in Afghanistan was a person who was born when the war started, that person would be legally able to drive now.
If the war in Afghanistan was a person, why, by next year, that person would be able to sign up and fight in the war in Afghanistan and die uselessly in the desert.
The Afghanistan war has gone on for 16 years.
The Afghanistan war has killed thousands of Americans, maimed thousands more.
50,000 maimed Muslims in Afghanistan.
Afghanis. Killed.
It's horrifying. Of course it should be stopped.
Of course it should be stopped.
For almost four decades.
Afghanistan has been at war.
You had the communists move in.
And then you had the Soviets move in to support the communists.
And then you had the CIA-backed, trained and armed, Mujahideen, use it as a space of operations to fight against the Soviets.
And then you had America.
I mean, it's just been going on and on.
All told, there is give or take about 250 years of Western imperialism that has dominated the history of Afghanistan.
A quarter of a thousand years.
Yeah, I think it's time to stop.
As I tweeted that night, 250 years of Western imperialism hasn't solved the problems in Afghanistan, but don't worry, 251, we're just about to turn the corner.
So, I oppose a useless, destructive war that consumes massive amounts of blood and treasure and kills tens of thousands of Afghanis and Muslims on the ground.
So apparently I'm far right, because not wanting to kill Muslims, now that's far right, isn't it?
This war!
The US Pentagon spends more every single year in Afghanistan than the entire UK military budget, and it's still losing.
And why? Well, they created a Afghani army and police, 330,000, give or take.
The military advisors from America set it up in the mirror image of the U.S. army, which doesn't really make much sense.
Of course, the U.S. army and its fundamental interests.
Formation and configuration at the moment is still a leftover from the Cold War when the US was anticipating a USSR-led invasion of Western Europe.
And that's not what's happening in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, the choke points, the points that you want to hold on to, are economic.
They're not geographical. So, Afghanistan is not Europe facing the Soviet Union.
It's a whole different kettle of fish.
And you have this massive, ridiculous rotation.
What if there have been like 17 leaders in 16 years?
What happens is the U.S. trains and arms and equips massive amounts of Afghanis who then defer to the Taliban and to others.
Right now, Defections from the Afghani police and military deliver the equivalent of two trained infantry divisions every single year to the enemy.
That is not a war you can win!
It's not what happened in Europe in the 1940s.
Corruption and theft and a lack of maintenance 40% of the fixed and rotary wing aircraft in Afghanistan, only 40% of them are functional, the ones delivered by the US. That means that...
Can you get your air support?
No. Can you resupply?
No. Can you get your casualties, matter of fact, out?
No. Can you move troops in any kind of reasonably timely manner?
No. And these issues about how to stitch together...
This balkanized hiccup of a pretend country is ridiculous.
You've got dominant tribal influences.
There's massive cultural divide amongst Afghanis.
Ten or more major tribes, sub-tribes under that.
Ridiculously insane and high levels of corruption.
Government, military officials, everybody's got their hand in the pot.
There is relatively low levels of training and just having enough people for the Afghan military and police forces.
And, as you've probably heard, what is it?
Over 90% of America's opium, or the world's opium, comes from Afghanistan.
And these opium production centers are often controlled by these insurgent elements, and they take a, quote, tax from the farmers for their operational costs.
That's what I mean. It's not about geography.
It's about controlling the resources and their production.
Now, there is, of course, a trillion dollars worth of minerals sitting around in Afghanistan.
That may have something to do with it.
Trump did talk about this in the speech.
There's a safe haven in neighboring Pakistan, these tribal areas where the Taliban and their fighters can withdraw over the border of Pakistan, which is the same thing that was going on with regards to Vietnam and Cambodia.
So what are you doing? Invade Pakistan?
Of course not. It's nuclear power.
There's green-on-blue attacks by Afghan forces on American service members.
It just goes on and on.
So, this is just a very, very brief overview of some of the central problems facing Afghanistan.
These are not going to be solved by another couple of thousand troops.
There already was a surge to 140,000 troops in the past, made some progress, drew back down.
Now the Taliban controls more than half the country again.
So, apparently now, Anti-imperialism is a far-right position.
Being anti-war is a far-right position.
You know, Trump ran on a little slogan, you may have heard of it.
MAGA. M-A-G-A. Now remember the A in Make America Great Again.
The A was for America, not Afghanistan.
So why USAID is dropping a billion dollars a year into Afghani infrastructure and schools and all of that when America's schools are falling apart and the infrastructure is falling apart obviously makes no sense.
It was Make America, not Afghanistan Great Again.
So Trump made some commitments.
He made some speeches.
Made some promises, I dare say.
So apparently now, wanting people to keep their promises is also a far-right position.
It's like, hey man, you promised to pay me back that hundred dollars today.
Do you have it on you? What are you, some kind of Nazi?
I'm sorry, sir, but your renters do.
Could you pay, please? You fascists, you far-rightists, expect me to keep my commitment.
Now, the article's Money Shot, if I dare put it that way, goes something like this, and I quote, Trump's troop increase comes at a moment when some far-right nationalist personalities have begun to question whether they will continue to offer full-throated support for the presidency, particularly following the departure of former Bannon, who was seen as the primary enabler of Trump's nationalist and isolationist impulses.
And there you have it. See, apparently now, being a nationalist is far right.
So I get described as far right.
Now, I was born in Ireland, I grew up in England, I live in Canada, and I'm talking about America, but apparently it's just all about the nationalism.
Now, There are places that seem to indicate that having any opposition or any hesitancy or any doubts about the long-term virtues and values of mass third-world immigration, maybe that is what makes you far right.
The facts are pretty clear. People who want smaller government and lower taxes have problems with third world immigration because third world immigrants in general vote for larger government and consume far more in taxes than they produce in wages.
So if you want smaller government, apparently you're on the far right.
Fascism, very big government.
National socialism, very big government.
Totalitarian governments. But if you want small government, somehow you're just in that bucket too.
You want smaller government, it doesn't really fit on your scale, right?
But hey, don't let that stop you.
Just throw everyone into that bloody bucket.
So if you have any hesitation or opposition to mass third world immigration, you're on the far right, according to some.
I wonder if there are any other countries that don't encourage mass immigration.
Saudi Arabia, pretty strict on immigration.
I guess they're also far right as well.
In Mexico, it says right there in the Constitution, you can't do anything to fundamentally change the demographics of Mexico.
And it's almost impossible to immigrate there.
And by God, if you're found across the border as an illegal immigrant, you are in for a rather terrible decade.
So I guess Mexico, far right as well.
China, you know, it's almost impossible to get citizenship in China.
They don't take any migrants.
I guess they're far right as well.
Communist? But far right.
Japan! If you're born in Japan, sometimes you're not even a citizen.
Japan doesn't take any migrants, really.
Japan, I guess also, is far right.
Israel! They built a wall, not really taking many migrants and really want to maintain the ethnic homogeneity and central power of Judaism within the state.
I guess that makes Israel far right.
It's a Jewish far right.
I mean, at some point, does this bother you at all?
Are you completely immune to cognitive dissonance?
Doesn't this cause you to slow down and wonder if you got things right at all?
I would love to see an end to the drug war.
I guess that's a far right position again.
I'm very much opposed to child abuse and promote peaceful parenting and non-circumcision.
I guess those are far right positions as well.
Because it's what people do.
They just... They create negative labels and they throw people whose arguments they don't like into the buckets that contain those negative labels or are labeled with those negative labels and then they bronze around thinking they've done something other than be intellectually ridiculous.
This negative label thing, it's really ancient.
It's ancient sophistry.
It's called an ad hominem and it's attacking the person rather than the Argument.
See, this is just a bunch of words.
No actual arguments being analyzed here.
I think people are pretty tired of this.
You know, the internet, these kinds of conversations has really raised the bar in terms of the kind of productive conversations that people want to have and what they see happening in the world.
You know, as they say, the new culture war is the war between the articles and the comment section.
And It's a shame.
You know, it's just a good writer, a smart guy, verbally astute.
It could be better.
In general, reporting could be better, needs to be better.
And I think the numbers speak for themselves.
So Business Insider UK on YouTube has about 4,300 subscribers.
I get close to four times that number in new subs just every month.
And I put this invitation out to academics way back in the day to join me on the web.
Join me on the web.
Forget this editorial stuff.
Forget all of this agenda. Forget about being an activist.
Forget about having to pretend to be a reporter.
I just say this in general to everyone, no one in particular.
Just join me out here.
It's the Wild West.
It's new. It's exciting.
It's passionate. It's powerful.
You really get to engage with your audience.
You can speak the truth. You can step off the The plantation of the left-right continuum.
You can think for yourself.
You can really engage with facts and reason and evidence in a very exciting battle of wits and words and ideas.
Because this, I don't know, create a chum bucket and throw her from an end and say, well, you wouldn't want to eat that now, would you?
It's not really thinking now, is it?
It's not really adding anything other than confusion and dislike to the mental mix of the planet.
Join me on the internet, everyone.
You don't need to.
Stick and stay in the spiraling, descent, decaying orbit of the mainstream media.
Come out on the internet.
It's beautiful here.
Because everyone needs to really, really do better when it comes to engaging in ideas.