Ya' Cousin Cleon
OG COUCH CORNER HUSTLA
If you’ve paid attention to politics on the internet as long as I have, you might have noticed a worrying and confusing trend: traditionally libertarian figures transitioning into alt-right supporters. I’ve followed the ‘classical liberal’ faction of the internet since about 2014, the year I started becoming interested in politics. I was watching Christopher Cantwell before he became known as the crying Nazi , when his chant was ‘taxation is theft’, not ‘Jews will not replace us’. I remember Stefan Molyneux when he was debating whether we should have a government, not whether government should be used to promote eugenics.
This fascinating transition from the libertarian right to the authoritarian right has been mirrored in just about every single alt-right figurehead. Think Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Alex Jones, and Tim Gionet (known as ‘Baked Alaska’). The latter used to identify as “a carefree, easygoing libertarian” who “firmly opposed the war on drugs, and championed the cause of Black Lives Matter”. But now, he’s being banned from Twitterfor promoting white supremacy and ranting about how Jews control the media. The creator of the Right Stuff, a Neo-Nazi blog that hosts such unsavoury podcasts as the ‘Daily Shoah’ openly acknowledges this, saying “We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this.” Jeffrey Tucker wrote “They’re doing to libertarianism what they did to Pepe the frog, or Taylor Swift — to co-opt it. They know that no normal American is going to rally around the Nazi flag, so they’re taking ours.” But what exactly makes these people so vulnerable to conversion to the alt-right?
“We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this”
[paste:font size="4"]Friedman’s backing of Pinochet. It is clear that the these people have always been willing to put aside ideology for what they see as an end that justifies the means, even in such morally abhorrent cases as supporting Apartheid in South Africa or the Confederacy under the pretence of ‘states rights’. This lingering white supremacy in the libertarian movement carried on beyond the mid twentieth century, into the ideologies of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell. Rothbard himself wrote that “The proper strategy of libertarians and paleos is a strategy of ‘right-wing populism” Essentially, that means appealing to the racism held within the right of American society (not dissimilar to what we see in Donald Trump).
We can see this again, with strands of white supremacy throughout Ron Paul’s two presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, perhaps the clearest place where internet libertarianism flourished. Paul was the favoured presidential candidate by libertarians, and if you spent a lot of time on websites such as Reddit in 2012, you almost certainly saw massive amounts of support for him. Of course, while not everyone who supported Ron Paul was a racist, he was surrounded by racists and they had a strong place in his campaign, including future alt-right leader Richard Spencer. But it wasn’t until the collapse of New Atheism that right libertarianism would reach the peak of its internet success.
New Atheism was the primary shelter for teenage white middle-class men around 2010 (and I’m ashamed to confess I was one of them). Reddit was originally one of the biggest places on the internet for New Atheism, with /r/Atheism being one of the biggest subreddits on the site. Over time, it transitioned from hating religion to hating ‘Social Justice Warriors’, supporting Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, and fighting for libertarian issues like legalisation of marijuana. Just as we can draw a direct line between Right Libertarianism and White Supremacy, we can do the same with New Atheism and the Libertarian movement. We just need to look to YouTube to see that ‘rational skeptics’, like TheAmazingAtheist or Sargon of Akkad, transitioned from New Atheism to Classical Liberalism to the Alt-Right (here’s an interesting inside perspective on that here). All of these communities carried over a similar audience, the previously mentioned white middle-class demographic, mainly on platforms such as YouTube or Reddit. Indeed, it could be argued that part of what made New Atheism so popular among this demographic was not only the counter-culture rebellion against traditional societal values, but strands of islamophobia. Obviously, both of these traits are core components of the alt-right. So, with the transition from New Atheism to right libertarianism, the alt-right had a clear target for conversion and recruitment.
This fascinating transition from the libertarian right to the authoritarian right has been mirrored in just about every single alt-right figurehead. Think Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer, Alex Jones, and Tim Gionet (known as ‘Baked Alaska’). The latter used to identify as “a carefree, easygoing libertarian” who “firmly opposed the war on drugs, and championed the cause of Black Lives Matter”. But now, he’s being banned from Twitterfor promoting white supremacy and ranting about how Jews control the media. The creator of the Right Stuff, a Neo-Nazi blog that hosts such unsavoury podcasts as the ‘Daily Shoah’ openly acknowledges this, saying “We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this.” Jeffrey Tucker wrote “They’re doing to libertarianism what they did to Pepe the frog, or Taylor Swift — to co-opt it. They know that no normal American is going to rally around the Nazi flag, so they’re taking ours.” But what exactly makes these people so vulnerable to conversion to the alt-right?
“We were all libertarians back in the day. I mean, everybody knows this”
[paste:font size="4"]Friedman’s backing of Pinochet. It is clear that the these people have always been willing to put aside ideology for what they see as an end that justifies the means, even in such morally abhorrent cases as supporting Apartheid in South Africa or the Confederacy under the pretence of ‘states rights’. This lingering white supremacy in the libertarian movement carried on beyond the mid twentieth century, into the ideologies of Murray Rothbard and Lew Rockwell. Rothbard himself wrote that “The proper strategy of libertarians and paleos is a strategy of ‘right-wing populism” Essentially, that means appealing to the racism held within the right of American society (not dissimilar to what we see in Donald Trump).
We can see this again, with strands of white supremacy throughout Ron Paul’s two presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, perhaps the clearest place where internet libertarianism flourished. Paul was the favoured presidential candidate by libertarians, and if you spent a lot of time on websites such as Reddit in 2012, you almost certainly saw massive amounts of support for him. Of course, while not everyone who supported Ron Paul was a racist, he was surrounded by racists and they had a strong place in his campaign, including future alt-right leader Richard Spencer. But it wasn’t until the collapse of New Atheism that right libertarianism would reach the peak of its internet success.
New Atheism was the primary shelter for teenage white middle-class men around 2010 (and I’m ashamed to confess I was one of them). Reddit was originally one of the biggest places on the internet for New Atheism, with /r/Atheism being one of the biggest subreddits on the site. Over time, it transitioned from hating religion to hating ‘Social Justice Warriors’, supporting Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, and fighting for libertarian issues like legalisation of marijuana. Just as we can draw a direct line between Right Libertarianism and White Supremacy, we can do the same with New Atheism and the Libertarian movement. We just need to look to YouTube to see that ‘rational skeptics’, like TheAmazingAtheist or Sargon of Akkad, transitioned from New Atheism to Classical Liberalism to the Alt-Right (here’s an interesting inside perspective on that here). All of these communities carried over a similar audience, the previously mentioned white middle-class demographic, mainly on platforms such as YouTube or Reddit. Indeed, it could be argued that part of what made New Atheism so popular among this demographic was not only the counter-culture rebellion against traditional societal values, but strands of islamophobia. Obviously, both of these traits are core components of the alt-right. So, with the transition from New Atheism to right libertarianism, the alt-right had a clear target for conversion and recruitment.
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