Margaret H. Roberts
VDARE
January 2, 2015
![What...?](/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/rand-paul-al-sharpton.png)
So now it appears that House GOP Whip Steve Scalise did not after all speak to David Duke’s EURO group, although the news is disseminating suspiciously slowly [Steve Scalise spoke to civic association meeting, not white nationalist conference, David Duke adviser Kenny Knight says, by Julia O’Donoghue, NOLA.com, December 31, 2014]. This presumably means that the Main Stream Media will be thwarted, for now, in its obvious intent to spread the smear to Senator Rand Paul via his father [If you’re a politician and your chummy past with neo-Nazis resurfaces, don’t worry. Ask Ron Paul, by Jeb Lund, The Guardian, December 30, 2015]. But there can be no doubt that, if Paul had been brought under more pressure, he would have groveled. Perhaps the most ominous trend on the American Right today is libertarians’ adoption of prevailing “anti-racism” dogma, to the point where they can increasingly only be interpreted as overtly anti-White.
“Three out of four people in jail for drugs are people of color,” Paul wrote late last year. “In the African American community, folks rightly ask why are our sons disproportionately incarcerated, killed, and maimed?” [Rand Paul: The Politicians Are to Blame in Ferguson, TIME.com, November 25, 2014]
Unfortunately for Paul, two assassinated NYPD officers were the predictable subsequent result of the ongoing Leftist agitation to which he was pandering. He had opened the door for his intra-party rivals to run against him on the traditional Republican issue of “law and order.”
Yet even apart from Paul’s tactical misstep, if he had merely reviewed crime statistics issued by Eric “my people” Holder’s Justice Department—or even his father Ron Paul’s old newsletters—he would have seen that black crime is committed at a shockingly disproportionate rate, triggering a massive response from police.
Paul is too intelligent not to understand this. But we’re talking about the shameless politician who knowingly hired the erstwhile “Southern Avenger” Jack Hunter only to later accept his resignation. Paul patronizes the historic American nation that he is one of them until he is secure in office. But the record shows that once targeted by the MSM Megaphone, he buckles.
Instead of grassroots conservatives, Paul is aiming at a fickle but critical component of his support base—the Beltway based anti-statists whom VDARE.com calls Libertarianism, Inc. Libertarianism Inc., funded significantly by the Koch brothers, is comprised of the Left-libertarians who so annoyed Murray Rothbard because they put their social liberalism ahead of the goal of confronting the state. The defining element of left-libertarianism seems to be utter contempt for the historic American nation, especially those voters who make up the Republican base.
Needless to say, as Ann Coulter has pointed out, none of these people will stand by the libertarian position on employment discrimination—any more than Rand Paul himself. Instead, both Libertarianism Inc. and Paul are championing their opposition to the militarization of the police.
!["I gave birth to a herp. And soon, that little herp began to do a little derp." -Rand Paul on the development of his political philosophy](/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/rand-paul-herp-derp.png)
Rather than stopping the riots that were destroying private property and endangering productive citizens in Ferguson, the Libertarian Party went so far as to tell police to “stand down” and pretended the issue had something to do with drugs. [Libertarian Party: Police Should Stand Down in Ferguson, MO; End Failed Drug War, LP.org, August 14, 2014] Despite their pro forma condemnation of rioting, they’re essentially defending Anarchy — telling police to “stand down” as race riots rage does nothing to help the civil liberties of black Americans and only encourages agitators.
Besides, why do libertarians even care about police militarization? Like selective immigration enforcement, the militarized police is a tool of a state that practices “anarcho-tyranny,” using extreme force to terrify ordinary Americans while giving rioters a pass. None of that massive force that has been assembled is used, as it should have been, to ruthlessly coerce the “protesters.” The militarized police presence is a sign of weakness, not strength, because there is no will in the Establishment to use it against black rioters.
The more menacing the State’s facade, the weaker its execution. The more pointless a show of force, the more libertarians can comfortably complain about it. And no libertarian discussion of police militarization is complete without claiming the State is riddled with institutional racism.
“Sure, you and I were not there the night Michael Brown died,” Students For Liberty writer Suzanne Schaefer begins in her analysis. “We cannot say with certainty what happened.”
However, given even a basic understanding of police (mis)conduct in the United States, policemen’s current and historical tendencies towards fist and trigger-happy brutality, and Darren Wilson’s less than life-threatening state of physical well-being following his “attack,” I feel pretty damn confident that it is reasonable to conclude that Brown’s murder was unmerited.
[Reflecting on Ferguson, Students For Liberty Blog, November 25, 2014. Links in original]
In other words, because Schaefer read bad things about other police departments, she’s trusting her prejudice to inform her conclusions about Ferguson.
Why is this outrage expressed on behalf of criminals who would never vote anything but straight Democrat? Because rather than wrestle the Megaphone from leftists and risk the “racist” label, libertarians cuddle up to the Left in hopes that one of the elites will slip a favorable word about them into the latest Narrative script.
While Libertarianism, Inc. recoils from institutions not yet conquered by the Left like the military, they openly telegraph to Leftists their willingness to cooperate, even if it means putting social liberalism ahead of fighting for free markets.
Thus Stephen Horwitz of Bleeding Heart Libertarians writes:
What is promising about this opportunity is that it gives libertarians a way to talk about race that does not fall into the trap that snares so many conservatives as well as too many libertarians: blaming the victim. One reason that progressives (including the media) think libertarians cannot talk seriously about race is that progressives assume, and they are correct disappointingly often, that libertarians think blacks are responsible for the problems in their own communities.
Horwitz instead says that libertarians can change the conversation to the “structural racism” created by government policies like local police forces getting military gear. But this specific policy is actually tied to statist policies that mandate more “Politically Correct and pro-criminal polices upon local law enforcement.”
Other examples of “structural racism” cited by Horwitz: “occupational licensure and zoning laws,” “government-run schools,” and “minimum wage laws.” [The Calling: Libertarians, Victim Blaming, and Structural Racism, by Steven Horwitz, Future of Freedom Foundation, August 28, 2014]. Thin stuff.
So what is the actual purpose of Libertarianism Inc.? To prevent the mostly white grassroots conservative base from actually taking action to defend their own interest against attacks by what is a de facto Minority Occupation Government. Every time conservatives begin to defend themselves, Libertarians rush in to tell them that what they want is Not Allowed. Beltway Libertarians function like Occupy Wall Street— “Radicals for the System.”
But the amazing fact is that Rand Paul and Libertarianism Inc. stand a distinct chance of blundering into political power. On current form, the Establishment GOP and Conservatism, Inc. will collapse in much the same manner as the Soviet Union they once nominally opposed. More importantly, they will die without heirs. Recently, I was shocked to learn that a prominent, D.C.-based organization depended on donors whose average age was well over 75 years old. Libertarians will simply plunder what remains.
What happened to the old libertarianism, especially those anti-state libertarians who understood that immigration fueled the growth of the state? To quote exiled National Review editor Joe Sobran, it’s “partly the mystery of a soul.”
Libertarians used to be a self-selected group of quirky Jewish and European intellectuals who enjoyed goading the gatekeepers of Conventional Wisdom (See Prof. Walter Block’s classic book, Defending the Undefendable) in between clobbering one another in speed chess matches.
But younger libertarians, brought up under the watchful eyes of Leftist institutions, can’t imagine an alternative to the current system. Their educations, from kindergarten to college, emphasized white guilt and white privilege as a critical, core concept necessary to understand America’s trajectory. These new recruits never express much interest in anything beyond racial hectoring—the famous warmth of Rothbard never emanates from their writings and speeches. They have internalized the Left’s Narrative, and take its presuppositions for their own.
The ultimate irony is that these supposed rebels have turned a once-proud, brilliant, and dogged minority into part of the System’s Volunteer Auxiliary Thought Police, ready to abuse the Historic American Nation like a cisgendered white male during freshmen orientation.
And if there’s one thing most American voters are tired of, it’s being lectured on race: Only nine percent of whites see race relations as a problem [As a Major U.S. Problem, Race Relations Sharply Rises, by Justin McCarthy, Gallup, December 19, 2014].
Yet it’s at this moment that Libertarians have decided to ape the electoral strategy of the Democrats: mobilize the fringes of American life against the core. Unfortunately for this strategy, however, it’s the core American population—the married, content, and patriotic—who are most likely to support the values of property ownership and limited government.
Rand Paul and his Left-Libertarians have turned their back on their natural supporters at the very time they most need a champion.