Category Archives: Paleolibertarianism

The Colorado Cake Case: Why Such Cruelty To A Christian?

Christianity, Freedom of Religion, Gender, Homosexuality, Individual Rights, Paleolibertarianism, Private Property

Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips is a deeply religious Christian. Why would a gay couple want to compel him to decorate a cake with words his faith rejects? What kind of craven cruelty would compel such coercion? Why, David Mullins and Charlie Craig, would you proceed with force against a private property owner? What’s wrong with you?

A crude reductio ad absurdum should help:

A retail store selling Nazi memorabilia opens its doors in my neighborhood. I enter in search of the yellow Star of David Jews were forced to wear during the Third Reich. The proprietor, decked out in Nazi insignia and regalia, says, “I’m sorry, we don’t serve Jews.” “Don’t be like that,” I say. “Where else can I find a pair of clip-on swastika earrings?” The Nazi sympathizer is polite but persistent: “Ma’am, I mean no disrespect, but back in the Old Country, Jews murdered my great grandfather’s cousin and used his blood in the leavening of the Passover matzah.” “Yeah,” I reply. “I’m familiar with that blood libel. I assure you my own mother’s matzo balls were free of the blood of brats, gentile or Jewish. No matter. I can see where you’re coming from. I’m sorry for your loss. Good luck.”

There! Did that hurt?

Did I rush off to rat out my Nazi neighbor to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice? Not on your life. A principled Jewish libertarian (with a sense of humor)—who believes in absolute freedom of association and the rights of private property—would doff his Kippah and walk out.

Live and let live.

Writes Joseph Wright, in the Denver Post:

A devout Muslim with a wonderful singing voice runs a small music business featuring his CDs. A Christian couple asks this Muslim to record a song for the wedding. The song includes the words: “Jesus, resurrected from the grave and God incarnate.” The Muslim man declines, saying his sincere religious beliefs prevent him from recording the song. Would the Colorado Civil Rights Commission (CCRC) take action against him and inflict financial penalties for abiding by his convictions?

A non-religious couple asks a Jewish kosher deli with fantastic food to cater their wedding reception, but demand that ham be included on the menu. The deli refuses. Would the CCRC take action against this deli for its religious convictions?

One more question: Would legal action be taken only against Christians practicing their sincerely held beliefs or against people of all beliefs?

All strength, Jack Phillips.

On Sexism, Peter, Paul & Mary & In Praise Of Younger Men

Feminism, Gender, Ilana Mercer, Intelligence, Music, Paleoconservatism, Paleolibertarianism, Sex

Young women today don’t know squat about sexism. Women of my generation can certainly speak to it–all the more so when they still interact, on occasion, with male throwbacks: older, paleoconservative or paleolibertarian men. Why occasionally? Because such older men (or men who’ve continued the old “tradition” of sexism) indiscriminately recoil from the odd woman who is as smart as they are or smarter. In fact, these men have a hard time believing such women exist, even as we stare them in the face.

I’m no fan of things distaff, but individualism demands that one treat a female individual (who’s as smart or smarter than you are) with the respect accorded to a male colleague. I, categorically, have not found this to be the case (except with younger men).

In interacting with Old-School codgers or their acolytes, you’ll find these men talk down to you, scold you as though you were a child, and conduct themselves imperially, as if their un-charismatic, long-winded, me-me-me, solipsistic soliloquies are indisputably superior. How can people lack so in self awareness? Easily: Because many older men are pompous, grew up in an era when their superiority was a given, equate a PhD with intellectual superiority. And so on. Moreover, these Old-Timers are still fortunate enough to enjoy personal and professional support systems which reinforce their mindset.

A recent example that comes to mind (aside personal relationships which will forever remain personal) is an older radio host who asked this writer to come on his program, but not before severely scolding me for not studying (no less) the “work” of an obscure, unknown dabbler, who had recently written a book about … South Africa. The same host also demanded that the little woman (me) find a partner with whom to appear on his little-known show. Kind of like a “Cheech and Chong” duo, for I could not be expected to hold my own without a partner.

Likewise, I recall how Bill O’Reilly never invited Ann Coulter back on his show after the good lady failed to suppress her intellectual superiority and embarrassed Bill. The Fox News hosts are always more comfortable with younger, mediocre, conventional Millennials, who cannot outsmart the egos in the anchor’s chair. That’s the formula on Fox News.

I don’t praise young men enough. But the young editors coming online more than make up for their lack of literary and editorial sensibilities with a natural penchant for treating women as equals. Younger American men are the best in this regard.

The same thought, albeit applied to music, came to mind when watching the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary. Mary was the talent, the star: she had the voice, the stunning, exotic looks and the stage persona. Compared to Mary Travers’ striking looks and sonorous voice, the two strummers, Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey, sound and look anemic. Yet in many of the trio’s performances, Mary doesn’t even have a dedicated microphone and is treated as a backup singer. On her death, September 16, 2009, this major talent was still described by the New York Times as “the sex appeal of that group,” whose “voice blended seamlessly with those of her colleagues, Peter Yarrow and Paul Stookey.” Essentially, a backup singer.

Crap. Mary Travers was the star of Peter, Paul and Mary. By comparison, the two men (who?) were just plain, wimpy, bloodless warblers, with an annoying nasal twang, and a very average facility with the guitar.

President Trump And The Racism And Anti-Semitism Obsession

Anti-Semitism, Constitution, Donald Trump, libertarianism, Morality, Paleolibertarianism, Race, Racism

A friend—a brilliant scholar of Objectivism—expressed concern over my support (albeit waning support) for Donald Trump. He pointed out in an email that the president was “slowly, but surely, abandoning that outsider stance and was becoming part of the very system he fought against.”

It’s hard to disagree.

However, I had hedged my words in the book, The Trump Revolution, which stands up quite well, since I supported Trump’s “creative destruction” or “process,” more than anything else.

My friend points to Trump sending more troops to Afghanistan (“well, at least he’s committed to no nation-building”). He laments that “it was like pulling teeth to get POTUS to condemn the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville; yes, they had the support of the ACLU, just as they had the support of the ACLU when similar groups marched on Skokie”:

I’d be the first to defend their rights to march. But his initial response seemed so tepid to me; he finally was able to utter the words Obama wouldn’t: “Islamic terrorist”, but he couldn’t seem to utter the phrase “neo-Nazi” in his condemnation of those brown-shirt nutjobs who were chanting “Jews will not replace us” and who thought he wasn’t racist enough because he gave his beautiful daughter to that “bastard Kushner”. The whole thing reminded me of the Nuremberg rallies. …
Now, don’t get me wrong: “Antifa” are not interested in freedom. They are like the Red Stalinists who were for Hitler when Stalin and Hitler were “allies” and then against Hitler when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

But I’m just puzzled that you’re not concerned by this scent of anti-Semitism that keeps emerging from some of Trump’s constituency; it seems like he doesn’t want to come down hard on them because he’s starting to act more and more like a politician: afraid of alienating a group of disaffected and disenfranchised voters who most obviously voted for him, and who he will need in any bid for re-election.

My response to the last is that I’ve never looked to the Leader to utter feel-good moral fatuities. A leader in the American tradition should stick to the Constitution. Moreover, the race meme and its use in American politics sickens me. Seriously, I support people’s right to hate me, even not to serve me. Maybe I
am that radical a propertarian. I want my president to shut up about race and uphold the Constitution, which he has failed miserably to do. I’m a minimalist gal.

My friend goes on to emphasize that he’s “a little puzzled not to have read much in [my] columns about this troubling issue. For me, a lot of it came out of the Bannon wing (despite Bannon’s valuable opposition to the neocons), but for me, there is no love lost with his ouster.”

My reply: I’ve never railed against anti-Semitism. So long as your mitts stop at my face, I don’t care if you hate me qua Jew. Maybe it’s naïve, but … I confess to hating the Left even more than caring about anti-Semitism.”

My friend was sadly right to have feared

that Trump would be absorbed by the very system he opposed, because it’s just in the nature of politics. Now with his amping up of the war in Afghanistan and his tepid responses to Jew haters, I’m extremely concerned. Help me out here.

Like my friend, my concern is more with War and the Deep State. I don’t see Jews becoming targets for more than verbal aggression. I certainly can no longer look up to Trump: His nepotism; his kids in the White House, his wars, no tax reform, no free market in medicine, no wall. All those issues consume me more than his reaction to the words of a fringe group.

Paul Gottfried Ponders Richard Spencer’s Strategy (& My Paleolibertarian Take)

Conservatism, Critique, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Logic, Multiculturalism, Old Right, Paleolibertarianism

Well, at least some in the Moron Media have corrected course and are calling Richard Spencer a “white nationalist,” instead of a white supremacist.

Watching Richard’s performance at Auburn University, renowned scholar of the Right Dr. Paul E. Gottfried shared these impressions:

When I criticize him, I am not making moral judgments, except when I note his futile attempt to keep up with leftist Millennials by siding with gay rights and abortion. What I object to in Richard is his, well, strategic stupidity, not the fact that he has committed the “sin” of being a white nationalist. Since “educated” whites are taught to hate their own race, I can’t see how one can appeal to Millennials and leftist college students by calling for white nationalism. Nor does one win their sympathy by mimicking their positions on feminism and homosexuality while trying to convert them to a racialist ideology. What seems to me the only chance left to the Right to be effective is by mobilizing the “Deplorables” and then turning them against the social-cultural Left. I was delighted to see how the pro-Trump people took it to the Antifascists at Berkeley. And I knew these counter-demonstrators were on the side of the angels when David French at National Review began to rail against them.

My impressions? The young, white men in the audience seemed receptive, even enthusiastic, although Richard may be talking above their heads. What Richard was saying conjured an interview I gave, “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism.” My views are decidedly LIBERTARIAN, a slant Richard Spencer rejects:

Multiculturalism as practiced in the West amounts to top-down, centrally enforced and managed integration. Show me a historical precedent where forced integration has worked. As it works across the Anglo-American and European spheres, one group (the founding, historical majority) is forced by self-anointed and elected elites—no contradiction there—on pain of public and professional ostracism, to submerge its history, heroes, customs, culture, language, and pander to militant minorities, who’ve been acculturated by the same elites in identity-politics warfare. As a libertarian, I believe that the right to include or exclude; associate with or dissociate from, is inherent in the right of private property. Private property is a civilizing institution. How better to keep the peace than to respect the right of free private-property owners to keep their distance (or not)—to hire, fire, and, generally, associate at will? This foundation of civil society is being dismantled for the sake of militant multiculturalism and policed pluralism.
An interesting new book, reviewed by one Barnaby Rogerson, makes the point that the Levant of the 18th century was peaceful and prosperous (and surprisingly libertine), because it was made up of “a grid of self-governing communities.” Integration between disparate communities was not enforced. And surprise, surprise: communities freely chose to live in complete segregation. This freedom fostered “remarkable tolerance” among diverse communities across the cities of the Levant of that time. “Deals before Ideals, City before State, Trade before Politics,” as the reviewer puts it. This freedom of association was the source of strength. These autonomous ethnic communities were free of the top-down, punitive, forced integration that has become the hallmark of the 19th-century nation-state that usurped their authority.

See: “Self-Segregation Trumps Imposed Multiculturalism.”