Category Archives: libertarianism

Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist

Free Speech, libertarianism, Paleolibertarianism, Race, Racism, Republicans

“Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist” introduces WND readers to the dark world of a racism-sniffing bloodhound. “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem” is topped with advice from libertarian extraordinaire, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. An excerpt:

“You’re a racist.” “No, you’re a bigger racist.” “No way; you hang with the Hoppe, Rockwell and Ron Paul crowd of libertarians; they’re ‘known’ racists, so you’re racist.” The tiff is between defenders of the anti-establishment libertarians, aforementioned, and an establishment libertarian, or a “regimist,” as Mr. Rockwell likes to say.

The “regimist” in question is Cathy Reisenwitz, a sally-come-lately libertarian, whom Justin Raimondo, a life-long, creedal libertarian, has “smoked out” for libeling Paul, Murray Rothbard, Lew Rockwell and Hans-Hermann Hoppe as racists.

Mercifully, Reisenwitz, the S.E. Cupp of libertarianism (light and fluffy), is not on a mission to rearrange the income curve. But like any member of the egalitarian project, she vaporizes about the obligation to vanquish so-called endemic, structural and institutionalized inequalities in America. Thus her fee-fi-fo-fem’s expedition to sniff out “homophobes,” “sexists,” “xenophobes” and “racists.”

So what on earth is going on here? Why have serious libertarians succumbed to a tit-for-tat spat? Are libertarians as dazed and confused as Republicans? The latter have certainly dignified the rival gang’s Stalinist show-trial tactics, with more holier-than-thou racial one-upmanship: “Democrats are the real racists; Republicans are the party of Lincoln, the liberator of blacks. We’re against abortion and welfare because we love blacks. … Blah, blah, blah.”

Reisenwitz adduced no documentary evidence to support her claims. However, what will Mr. Raimondo do if, in a fit of pique, Reisenwitz retracts the apology she’s issued and ferrets out unkosher quotes attributed to the men maligned? Res ipsa loquitur. Intelligent men (and a few women) invariably give voice to reality. Consider, for instance, tracts from Murray Rothbard’s splendid December 1994 essay about “The Bell Curve.” These are bound to send Cathy into one of her fee-fi-fo-fem frenzies. Therein Rothbard writes …

Read on. The complete column is “Fee-Fi-Fo-Fem, I Smell The Blood Of A Racist,” now on WND.

UPDATED: Fee-Fi-Fo-Fems (Who Smell The Blood Of A Racist)

Free Speech, Gender, libertarianism, Propaganda, Race, Racism, Reason

“You’re a racist.” “No, you’re a bigger racist.” “No way; you hang out with Lew Rockwell, Hans Hoppe and Ron Paul; they’re racists, so you’re racist.” What on earth is going on here? Why are serious libertarians engaging in tit-for-tat spats with a twat? She is Cathy something or another, a sally-come-lately libertarian. Justin Raimondo, a life-long libertarian, has been credited with “smoking out” this woman—who has libeled Paul, Murray Rothbard, Rockwell and Hoppe as racists.

Are libertarians as dazed and confused as Republicans? The latter have certainly dignified the rival gang’s Stalinist show-trial tactics, partaking in the same silly tit-for-tat: “You’re a racist, I’m not. Democrats are racists; we’re the party of Lincoln.” Blah-blah.

And what will Mr. Raimondo do if the bimbo in question produces some “iffy” quotes from the men she has maligned, quotes that fail the politically correct test?

Libertarians should not partake in this dance done by the political establishment. By going on the defense—allowing themselves to be drawn into such a deeply silly exchange—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from “polite” company.

(Incidentally, allow me some latitude here when it comes to the liberal use of ad hominem, having already proven, I hope, that Cathy Whatshername is the dim bulb she is. It was hoped that “Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises” would have provided “brutalists” with a temporary reprieve from her ilk. Alas, this is the “Age of the Idiot.” You can’t keep ’em down for long.)

JUNGE FREIHEIT, a German weekly, recently interviewed this writer. One of the questions was this: “Have you been blamed for racism because of your book “Into the Cannibal’s Pot”? What would you answer?”

The reply, taken almost verbatim from “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” (pp. 41-42), ought to help in warding off the fee-fi-fo-fems who sniff out the blood of speech offenders and thought criminals:

No, not really. The book is concerned with reality, not race. Res ipsa loquitur (the thing speaks for itself). Most intelligent readers can tell the difference. One individual from Media Matters failed, but he could hardly be called intelligent. In order to accuse me of racism, he needed to lie about what I had written. My answer to those who’d fault me for daring to make broad statements about aggregate group characteristics, vis-à-vis crime, for instance, would be as follows: Generalizations, provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources—one’s life and property—are best invested.

UPDATE (5/11): Comments harvested from the Facebook thread:

Jack Kerwick (Catholic, conservative philosopher): “‘Tit-for-tat spats with a twat.’ Vintage Ilana.”

Ilana Mercer: “From the fact that some dude is dumber than Cathy Whatshername, it doesn’t follow that CWHN is smart, Christoph Dollis. The Jeffrey Tucker I once knew was way too bright to have written the crap I critiqued in “Libertarian Feminists Make A Move On Von Mises”. Cathy Whatshername is the ‘brains’ behind it. The woman is the SE Cupp of lite libertarianism.”

The adorable Kathy Shaidle: “Libertarians should not partake in this dance done by the political establishment. By going on the defense—allowing themselves to be drawn into such a deeply silly exchange—libertarians are, inadvertently, conceding that speech should be policed, and that those who violate standards set by the PC set are somehow defective on those grounds alone, and deserve to be purged from ‘polite’ company.” (From the post above)

Exactly. Many so called libertarians just seem like low tax liberals whose big priority is getting to smoke dope without a helmet, and who have bought into the fashioable leftwing “multiculural/race/gender/transphobia” narrative. No thanks.

Ilana Mercer: “The inimitable Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe once told me: ‘If you are not called a racist, then, it seems to me, you are in intellectual trouble and it is high time to reconsider your own thinking.’ Professor Hoppe was attempting to console me, after someone marked us both with that Mark of Cain”.

Why The Land Belongs To Bundy

Justice, libertarianism, Natural Law, Private Property, States' Rights, Taxation, The State

The current column, now on WND, applies the doctrine of natural law and Lockean homesteading to explain “Why The Land Belongs To Bundy.” (Cliven Bundy is the farmer from Nevada who is “in mutiny against the federal government”) The essay exposes “both political factions” for “siding with the state and against natural law,” and explains why, ethically and logically, there is no such things as “government grass.”

Here’s a short excerpt from the (middle of) the essay:

NO SUCH THING AS ‘GOVERNMENT GRASS’

Unlike the positive law, which is state-created; natural law in not enacted. Rather, it is a higher law—a system of ethics—knowable through reason, revelation and experience. “By natural law,” propounded McClellan in “Liberty, Order, And Justice,” “we mean those principles which are inherent in man’s nature as a rational, moral, and social being, and which cannot be casually ignored.”

Tamara Holder, another Democrat, grasps the natural law not at all. “Can I go into your house and steal stuff; can I trespass onto your land?” she hollered at Sean Hannity. Holder, of course, was implying that the disputed land belonged to the state and was as good as the government’s house.

In siding with the heroic homesteader against the BLM, Mr. Hannity’s heart is in the right place. He and Fox News colleague Greta Van Susteren probably staved off a Waco-style massacre, in Bunkerville. When the militarized BLM, SAWT teams and all, trained sights on the Bundy family and their supporters; the two turned the cameras on the aggressors, who then retreated.

In the course of butting against buttheads like Holder, however, Mr. Hannity has refused to engage his head. (The anchor, moreover, is performing no public service when he gives this and other prototypical TV tarts a platform from which to spread ignorance.) Ms. Holder: the government doesn’t have a house. There is no such thing as “government grass”! Not in natural law. Government cannot morally claim to own “public property,” explain Linda and Morris Tannehill, in “The Market For Liberty.” “Government doesn’t produce anything. Whatever it has, it has as a result of expropriation. It is no more correct to call the expropriated wealth in government’s possession property than it is to say that a thief rightfully owns the loot he has stolen.”

Then there is the matter of logic. “The public” is an abstraction. In logic, an abstraction cannot possess property. To borrow from libertarian political philosopher Murray Rothbard, “There is no existing entity called ‘society’—there are only interacting individuals.” To say that “society” should own property in common is essentially to say that “government bureaucrats” should own property, in our case, at the expense of the dispossessed homesteader. …

… Read the complete essay. “Why The Land Belongs To Bundy” is now on WND.

‘Putin’s Libertarians’

Foreign Policy, libertarianism, Ron Paul, Russia, The State

The proper libertarian foreign policy, in my opinion, is without the slobbering sentimentality adopted by many libertarians toward the putative push for freedom across the Middle East and beyond. Whomever—and wherever—they are, I wish freedom fighters well, but they’re on their own. Americans have their own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own. I’ve promised, moreover, that when liberty deprived peoples the world over support patriots stateside (such as the Hage and Bundy families), I’d return the courtesy. It’s safe to say, however, that the world’s statists do not care about American liberties.

Not all libertarians share my detachment. Via my friend Yuri Maltsev comes another perspective on Ukraine (to which I’ve not devoted a second thought since penning “Presstitute-Cultivated Ignorance On Ukraine”). Yuri himself has written the following:

I am glad that there is a growing opposition to Putin’s regime in Russia itself. The list of eminent Russian intellectuals against aggression in Ukraine is much longer than those confused libertarians who support “Russian national interests” (Mises and Hayek would detest such an expression). …
There is nothing libertarian in the neo-Stalinist Putin’s regime. Stalinism is an exact opposite of freedom. It is the same as to embrace Hitler just because he disliked FDR. Enemy of my enemy is not necessarily a friend . . . I think that socialists Timoshenko and Yushchenko [the Orange revolution politicians elected after mass protests in 2004] squandered Ukrainian prospects for freedom and prosperity and should be blamed for that, but the alternative (Putin-Yanukovich) proved to be way more disgusting.

Youri’s recommended analysis is “Putin’s Libertarians” by Roman Skaskiw. Excerpts:

… I have been horrified by the libertarian coverage of events in Ukraine. Much of it has been such an uncritical parroting of Kremlin propaganda, so devoid of journalistic integrity, and such a betrayal of libertarian principles, that I can’t decide whether the authors, many of whom I’ve long admired, suffer a bias toward contrarian narratives or are on the Kremlin payroll. …

Paul Craig Roberts attempted to de-legitimize Ukraine’s protests by praising the now-deposed Yanukovych regime and turning a blind eye to its barbarity. His praise includes the term “human-rights trained Ukrainian police”, this after the police had begun kidnapping injured protesters from hospitals. One such protester, Yuriy Verbytsky, a seismologist from the Geophysical Institute in Lviv and mountain climber was injured in the protests, hospitalized, kidnapped from the hospital, severely beaten, and left in the woods where he froze to death. “Human-rights-trained” police do not strip and humiliate captured protesters in -10 C degree weather.

The corruption and savagery of Ukraine’s police is neither secret nor new. Last summer, police stepped aside during a violent raid against the business interests of opposition politician. The business manager was later assassinated. This sort of corporate raiding has been fairly common, though most victims quietly give up their businesses without a fight. There was also this story of policemen connected to the Party of Regions raping a young woman and going free until a rioters sacked the police station, it was a tragic repeat of a brutal rape-murder that happened the year before, also by politically connected persons who were also released by Ukraine’s “human rights trained” police.

It’s one thing to oppose intervention. I’ve done so myself. It’s another to mischaracterize the barbarity of the Yanukovych regime in an attempt to discredit the uprising against it.

Daniel McAdams, executive director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace has made the libertarian circuit — lewrockwell.com, the Tom Woods Show, the Scott Horton Show, and of course, RT. He makes a number of ridiculous claims, including the argument that the Russian military already had free reign in Crimea: “How can you annex and invade a territory in which you are already legally present?”

I really don’t know what to make of this. Can anyone help me? I find it equally unlikely that he is this disconnected from reality or that he is deliberately spreading disinformation. Are there other explanations? …

MORE.