The Masculine Preconditions of Individualism, the Indo-Europeans, and the Modern Hegelian Concept of Collective Freedom Part 1

                      By Ricardo Duchesne

        

Libertarian freedoms are not incompatible with a strong commitment to in-group white identity politics. On the contrary, Europeans can preserve their attachment to individual liberties only by living inside nations with a strong sense of collective ancestry in opposition to mass immigration. 

This is hard to understand because individualism by its nature is a form of separation or differentiation of the self from the surrounding environment, from that which is external, the I from the not-I. It is hard because the individualism of the West is always contrasted to the collectivism of the Rest.

Some say the “idea that the individual is sovereign” is a “miracle”. This is inaccurate wording. Europeans became individuals through a long drawn out effort, not in one fell swoop or in one historical period.  The detachment of the self from the ensemble of the surrounding world, including one’s own body, manifested itself in different degrees by different sides of the human personality in multiple cultural ways. There is a biological starting point, however, a necessary biological precondition, which consists in the fact that a man is not born a man but must become a man. Throughout history, across all cultures, men became men only by proving their masculinity in risky contests with the surrounding environment and with other adversarial men. It is this struggle to become a man in the eyes of other men that brings forth the conscious differentiation of the male ego from the enveloping womblike environment. But this differentiation cannot be seen as the first cultural sign of an emerging human personality; it is only a necessary precondition, a very important one, in making us realize that we must avoid looking at some religious experience, some intellectual or artistic movement, for the first ushering of individualism. We must look instead for what is today seen as the least civilized aspect of human nature: the contesting and violent struggle of men to become men.

This struggle for a  male identity is only a precondition, an always present one, but not a sufficient condition, for the appearance of self-awareness, the emergence of the first inklings of human individuality. The first signs of individualism are to be found in history only with the horse riding Indo-European aristocratic warriors who came storming out of the Pontic Steppes in the fourth millennium BC. Indo-European societies were uniquely ruled by aristocratic men living in a state of permanent mobility and adversity for whom the highest value in life was heroic struggle to the death for pure prestige. It was out of this struggle for renown by aristocratic men seeking recognition from their aristocratic peers that the separation and freedom of humans from the undifferentiated world of nature and the undifferentiated world of collectivist-despotic societies was fostered.

This struggle for recognition against the biological fear of death in the name of glory and honour, which are immaterial goals, deeply interiorized within the ego of the contesting hero, nurtured among men an awareness that each hero is not just a body with appetites and limbs but also a character, an individual with an immaterial psyche that is risked in battle, and with a thymos that is “spirited” and causes intense emotions, and with a noos that represents a separate faculty of thinking. While the distinction between the soul, the intellect, and the bodily organs, are not well crystallized in Homer’s Iliad, individuals with outstanding feats associated with their particular names are beginning to be recognized, and not just in the Iliad, but in all the earliest sagas, myths, and heroic accounts of Indo-Europeans. We find in these heroic tales individuals with private grudges, private frustrations, and private internal spaces, even if we have to wait for Plato to witness a clear distinction between bodily appetites, thymotic emotions, and mental faculties. In Oriental societies only the despotic ruler boasts of his deeds and his power, and even then only as a messenger of mysterious gods ruling over humans, unlike the gods of Indo-Europeans, who are human-like with human attributes and flaws.

The first distinctions between the I and the not-I come through the deeds of prehistoric male aristocrats ceaselessly contesting with each other for recognition. This Faustian Man stands behind the restless and expansionary energies of European conquerors and behind the cognitive maturation of European peoples. It is the active subjective agent behind evolutionary trends toward more rationality and more intelligence, increased differentiation of social functions, against traditional superstition and ignorance, the rise of the modern sciences, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. We can see early on in history how the individualism of aristocrats was democratized in the Greek hoplite citizen soldiers who defeated the Persian invaders, the independent farmers who owned their land and “suffers no master, speaks his due, fights his own battles, and leaves an imprint of self-reliance and non-conformity, a legacy of independence that is the backbone of Western society” [1]. This legacy continued through the small holding farmers who made up the Roman legions and fought as citizens, the free peasants of Medieval Europe with their self-governing communes, to the citizens of modern states demanding representation.

This individualism is now faulted for much that is wrong in the West today, including the liberal bourgeois philosophy that came to justify it in the modern era. It is said that liberalism prioritizes the abstract individual, regardless of race, nationality, and sexual orientation. Many on the Alt Right, followers of Alexander Dugin, to be sure, are calling for a Western world that is more in line with the way non-European societies are organized, with their authoritarian governments and strong collectivist values. But this is impossible. Europeans are innately individualist. This does not mean that their liberalism inherently precludes them from recognizing the importance of collective identities, shared values, and ancestries. A few decades ago all the settlers states of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and America were full blown liberal states with strong collective identities in open exclusion of non-European outsiders. These settler states, as well as the nations of Europe, were all conceived as nations with a strong ethnic identity, an identifiable territory, a language, myths and symbols, and common ethnic lineage.

At the same time, Carl Schmitt’s assessment in the 1930s that liberal states have an inherently weak understanding of their collective political identity cannot be denied. European liberals wrongly imagine that their nation states were created through contractual arrangements by abstract individuals without deadly contests against outsiders and without a strong ethnic identity. Liberal theory has a progressive inclination, Utopian hope, for a world in which all peoples will peacefully come together in pursuit of their natural right to life, liberty, and comfort. It imagines a world in which there will be no in-groups and no out-groups, in which the friend-enemy distinction, which Schmitt viewed as inherent to political relations between nations, will somehow vanish.

   

     Carl Schmitt: The Philosopher of Conflict

But a distinction should be made between the Anglo-American version of Western liberalism, which emphasizes “negative liberty,” and the Germanic model of liberalism, which emphasizes “positive liberty”. The Anglo version is more libertarian in focusing on individual agents and a “minimalist” state that concentrates primarily on the security of individuals and their freedom to engage in contractual arrangements without obstacles or constraints imposed from above by state bureaucrats who think they know what is best for citizens. The Germanic version admires the heroic ethos of aristocratic freedom as well as the role of the state in encouraging the realization of one’s highest potentialities. It accepts the value of negative freedoms —  freedom of thought and assembly, equal treatment under the law — but without neglecting the fact that in the modern era individuals from different ethnic groups were coalesced into distinctive nations with shared collectivist values. The Germanic version recognizes that humans have a need to belong to a group, a Volk, and that the state is the one agent capable of ensuring this need.

This German conception was once very influential in Europe and the United States, but after WWI and WWII this model was thoroughly discredited. Meanwhile, around the same time, the Anglo model came to embrace the notion of positive liberty (that the state should play a role in the nurturing and sustaining the cohesiveness of the citizens making up the nation) from a leftist, Keynesian perspective, while still adhering to the principles of negative liberty. Among those associated with this Germanic conception, I would identify Hegel as the thinker who offered the best argument reconciling the tendency among Europeans for individual liberty with the need humans have for communitarian values. Hegel, it seems to me, was the one thinker who recognized both the value of negative liberties and the need for shared values or for “positive” freedoms.

Note

[1] Victor Davis Hanson, The Other Greeks. The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (1999), pp. 5-6.

Source: https://www.eurocanadian.ca/2018/05/masculine-preconditions-of-individualism-indo-europeans-hegelian-concept-collective-freedom.html

Liberalism is Suicide; Suicide is Liberalism

                          By Hubert Collins

        

Anthony Bourdain and his daughter, Ariane, in 2008.

In his seminal work, Suicide of the West, James Burnham wrote:

Liberalism is the ideology of western suicide. When once this initial and final sentence is understood, everything about liberalism – the beliefs, emotions and values associated with it, the nature of its enchantment, its practical record, its future – falls into place.

His point is understood and often reiterated by the Right, especially by Pat Buchanan, but the aphorism is worth considering on a personal, as well as civilizational, level. If liberalism is the ideology of Western suicide, it stands to reason that Western liberals might be inclined towards suicide on an individual basis.

When food and culture critic Anthony Bourdain killed himself, Left Twitter made special note of his politics in their mourning for him. Here’s anti-white Left-anarchist Malcolm Harris approving of Bourdain’s self-flagellation over his role in “meathead culture:”

On his most recent series, Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Bourdain had gone out of his way to chastise Western intervention in Africa, and in South Africa, he paid special attention to urban blacks, as opposed to urban Anglos or rural Boers. The same series also featured President Barack Obama in an episode set in Vietnam. Bourdain was a fan of both Obama and Southeast Asia, and years earlier had expressed his burning desire to kill Henry Kissinger. After he took his own life, article after article fawned over Bourdain’s “empathy” and “humanity.”

What often went unmentioned was that for all his empathy and humanity, Bourdain hung himself when his daughter, and only child, was eleven years old.

Which brings to mind another prominent Leftist who committed suicide recently: Mark Fisher. Fisher was a British Marxian theorist best known for his dubbing of the current neoliberal status quo as “capitalist realism” – which he begged humanity to reject in favor of whatever dreamed-up utopia. Whereas Marx claimed that industrialism was alienating, Fisher claimed neoliberalism was depressing, and he devoted a lot of work to framing contemporary mental health issues as a political problem caused by capitalism. In the end, Fisher lost his battle with capitalist-induced depression and killed himself. Afterwards, Fisher’s friends set-up a crowdfund in an attempt to support the wife and “young son” Fisher had left behind to fend off neoliberalism by themselves. For all his talk about solidarity against capitalism, Fisher opted out of helping those closest to him.

Kurt Cobain is a more famous, though less recent, example of this phenomenon. He was a kind of proto-Social Justice Warrior who hated what he saw as a cruel and unjust world, but then one day decided to cruelly and unjustly cheat his toddlerout of having a father.

In all three cases, it is difficult and haunting to imagine a child coming of age knowing that his famous father strove for justice in the public sphere, but in private could not keep it together for the sake of his own family. (Karl Marx was the other side of the same coin. Of his seven children, only three survived to adulthood, and of those three, two committed suicide. If you knew a neighbor or a co-worker for whom this was the case, how seriously would you take his moral vision of how the world should be?)

Contrast this with the most famous suicide by a Rightist suicide of our time: that of French veteran and historian Dominique Venner in 2013. While he did have children, all were well into adulthood by the time of his death. Consider that Venner was 78 when he died; Bourdain was 61, Fisher was 48, and Cobain was just 27. Whereas Bourdain, Fisher, and Cobain all killed themselves in private agony, Venner’s suicide was a calculated political act. He chose to shoot himself in the Notre Dame de Paris three days after France legalized gay marriage – though, importantly, he noted that France’s forthcoming Muslim majority would soon illegalize it again, and that this fate was worse than legalization itself. Venner sought to protest this in a manner as public and shocking as possible. It made a statement in a way that Fisher could have accomplished had he killed himself outside of a bank, or if Bourdain had done so in front of President Trump’s White House. On the one hand, you have a determined message; on the other, a selfish exit.

The same is true of Yukio Mishima’s suicide. His death was planned, part of a political act and a cultural statement worthy of a man of the Right. Senator John P. East, on the other hand, was being ravaged by the miserable effects of polio and hypothyroidism when he took his own life. Whether you believe horrific physical ailments justify suicide or not, they certainly are more of a justification than doing so when you are healthy and have familial responsibilities.

Bourdain, Fisher, and Cobain all decried injustice, inequality, and the like, but could not tough it out for the betterment of their own families. The excuse that depression and mental disorders distort one’s reality to such an extent that these men cannot be held responsible for their actions is just that: an excuse. We should not forgive or idolize any parent who flagrantly abandons their most sacred duty. In a sense, even putting duty aside, these men also abandoned love itself.

Tragically, though, there is an appropriateness to these suicides. The aforementioned book by James Burnham asks why any people would want to establish racial preferences in both the workplace and schools that would run contrary to the interests of their own children. Why flood your nation with hostile races that will be antagonistic to your descendants? Why bring about wealth redistribution that will keep you from ensuring the comfort and security of your grandchildren? His thesis, that “liberalism is the ideology of western suicide,” answers all these questions at once. And if you’re willing to kill your nation with your politics, and leave it to the next few generations to try and sort out the mess, why not just kill yourself as well, and leave your kids to get over it?

Libertarian Fake Psychology & Other Thoughts on Recent YouTube Debates

                         By Aedon Cassiel

             

Good and Evil

One of the most popular lines of argument against our recent arguments in defense of paternalism (see here, hereand here) goes something like this: “If evil doesn’t meaningfully exist as a choice, then neither does good.”

Where does anyone get off with such nonsense? I don’t need to have the “freedom” to be able to molest children in order for it to be a good thing for me not to molest children. Moreover, even if the state passes laws to deter child molestation, one can still choose to molest children. Other people will simply choose to punish you if you do. And they have declared their intention to choose to punish in advance, in hopes that you will choose not to molest. If attempting to sway others’ choices through your own were somehow illegitimate, then literally all forms of communication would be off limits.

Furthermore, if one really believes this, then it is completely and totally self-defeating. So you believe that paternalistic laws are bad laws? Then your love for this weird and arbitrary conception of “freedom” has to compel you to support our right to implement them if we wish—because according to your rule, we are not “truly free” if we cannot make bad choices. So, if crafting paternalistic laws is, according to you, a bad choice, then your own principles compel you to allow us a “meaningful” ability to make that choice, or else you are opposing “freedom” too. Thus, this is really a notion of “freedom” that drives itself into a ditch and ends up nowhere.

Fake Psychology

A similar point goes for the argument that prohibiting people from making certain choices just increases the psychological temptation for them to indulge in those choices, and therefore results in more of it. But I’ll get to why this is self-defeating in just a minute. Greg Johnson’s opponents in his recent debate on Warski Livewere just horribly uninformed about the basic facts.

As I detailed in my article clarifying the real history of prohibition, we know that it wasn’t until the 1970s that alcohol reached the levels it had been at prior to the implementation of national prohibition. Prohibition resulted in significantly less alcohol consumption, period.

Likewise, Libertarians and mainstream fake news are simply wrong when they claim that the war on drugs has failed to curb drug use. Here’s James Q. Wilson, writing in the Wall Street Journal:

Another shift that has probably helped to bring down crime is the decrease in heavy cocaine use in many states. . . Between 1992 and 2009, the number of [hospital emergency room] admissions for cocaine or crack use fell by nearly two-thirds. In 1999, 9.8% of 12th-grade students said that they had tried cocaine; by 2010, that figure had fallen to 5.5%.

What we really need to know, though, is not how many people tried coke but how many are heavy users. Casual users who regard coke as a party drug are probably less likely to commit serious crimes than heavy users who may resort to theft and violence to feed their craving. But a study by Jonathan Caulkins at Carnegie Mellon University found that the total demand for cocaine dropped between 1988 and 2010, with a sharp decline among both light and heavy users. . . . Drug use among blacks has changed even more dramatically than it has among the population as a whole. As Mr. Latzer points out—and his argument is confirmed by a study by Bruce D. Johnson, Andrew Golub and Eloise Dunlap—among 13,000 people arrested in Manhattan between 1987 and 1997, a disproportionate number of whom were black, those born between 1948 and 1969 were heavily involved with crack cocaine, but those born after 1969 used very little crack . . . The reason was simple: The younger African-Americans had known many people who used crack and other hard drugs and wound up in prisons, hospitals and morgues. . . . This shift in drug use, if the New York City experience is borne out in other locations, can help to explain the fall in black inner-city crime rates after the early 1990s.

Greg Johnson made a very good point against this fake psychology by noting that it is ironic that libertarians, who constantly harp on the laws of supply and demand, will pivot on a dime when it comes to prohibiting vices and claim that making a product like heroin or cocaine more expensive (more costly, more risky) by banning it will actually increase demand for it.

If this theory is true—if prohibiting people from making certain choices just increases the psychological temptation for them to indulge in those choices, and therefore results in more of it—then the anti-paternalists and anti-prohibitionists had better be extremely careful about arguing against paternalism. Why? Because according to their own fake psychology, it follows that they’re only going to increase the psychological temptation for us to indulge in paternalism by trying to prevent us from doing so, and thereby create even more paternalism. Right?

“Assimilation”

We keep seeing the topic of the history of Irish immigration to the United States come up in debates on immigration policy, as we did during Mike Enoch’s appearance on Andy Warski’s show. The argument is supposed to win by triggering the obvious sense that white people in the United States today, though having originally come from vastly different particular ethnic-national backgrounds, have generally come together to adopt “American” as their new shared identity.

Here’s the thing, though: I don’t know why we keep granting this premise.

My argument for ethnonationalism goes like this:

1. People tend to get along better with others who are behaviorally and psychologically more like themselves. This is a finding proven by research.

2. Since behavioral and psychological traits are heavily influenced by genes, people therefore tend to form deeper friendships with others who are genetically more like themselves. Indeed, studies have confirmed that people tend to form close relationships with people who are about as genetically similar to them as fourth cousins.

3. Since a member of a given race is genetically more similar to the average member of his race than he is to a non-member (Lewontin’s fallacy notwithstanding) ethnically segregated societies will have proportionally more people with a greater degree of genetic relatedness between them. They will therefore have proportionally more people with a greater degree of behavioral and psychological similarity between them, and they will therefore tend to have more social trust and civic participation, as well as stronger interpersonal bonds and relationships. Indeed, a whole mountain of studies have proven that increases in racial diversity do in fact result in decreases in social trust, civic participation, and co-operative social norms.

Since these are all positive values that we all ought to encourage, for everyone’s sake, peaceful movement towards ethnostates is something that members of all races have very good reason to support.

Well, there is genetic distance between, let’s say, Irishmen and Italians. There is less distance than there is between Irishmen and African Pygmies, but more than there is between Irishmen and Irishmen. Have the Irish “assimilated”? Yes, in the sense that most no longer actively identify themselves foremost as “Irish” in contradistinction to other white groups in the United States.

But the lines between the political Left and Right in this country run deep, and there have always been steep political divisions. If one reads David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed or Colin Woodard’s American Nations, it becomes very clear that the divisions in this country over ways of life, social and political policies even among whites align strikingly well with the history of migration patterns of these different founding populations into the United States.

The Scots-Irish who founded Appalachia are to this day the primary adherents of classical republican philosophy. Bill O’Reilly is quite literally more closely related ethnically to Andrew Jackson than Rachel Maddow is, and it shows in his worldview and philosophy. The Quakers who founded Pennsylvania and led the charge against slavery still to this day lead the charge against, say, the death penalty.

What were the American Founders’ solution to these differences?

Why, it was quite literally ethnic segregation between whites! Specifically, it was the ideal of “the” United States as “these united states” with the emphasis on the plural, and the ideal of the states as “laboratories of democracy” which should be given as much leeway as possible by the federal government. This would result in “red states” and “blue states” being allowed autonomy to implement “red” and “blue” rules, and as little interference from the federal government as possible.

But it just so happens that these differences in social and political values correlate extremely well with ethnicity. There are always outliers, of course. But as a rule, the social and political trends established in the very first waves of migration into the United States still persist to this day—whether people no longer consciously identify themselves by their ethnic origins in this way or not. So the anti-federalist philosophy’s solution to different visions of self and future among whites in the United States is quite literally exactly what we propose as the solution to these same differences in visions of self and future between whites and non-whites.

The upshot of biting the bullet on this argument and denying that all of these different white populations ever truly “assimilated” without costs to social trust and a sense of belonging is that my enemies cannot accuse of me of being driven to my views by hatred of non-whites unless they want to insist that I hate basically all white people as well. But hatred of non-whites isn’t the real motivation for ethnonationalism, any more than hatred of whites was the motivation for anti-federalism and for founding the United States as a laboratory of regional democracy.

Furthermore, in the past we had far more regional variation and diversity in the United States than is seen today. It is my view that this was an incredibly good thing. The transformation of the United States into a monoculture, where every state has the same McDonald’s for fast food, the same Starbucks for coffee, and so on is truly a disaster. Maintaining regional independence and intra-white ethnic division would, and still does to some extent, form a bulwark against this form of cultural destruction. And yet, this type of monoculturalization is what our enemies are (intentionally or not) threatening to do to the entire globe.

“Parasites”

Mike Enoch also got flak in his debate on Warski Live for claiming that refugees who enter a country they do not historically belong to and go on welfare are “parasites,” while poor whites on welfare are not. He defended his stance with valid points, for instance, that these welfare institutions were literally founded by our ancestors for the sake of their posterity, and not for the benefit of the world at large—and that they would have found this idea absurd. But I think we can defend this with arguments much closer to peoples’ everyday experience.

Suppose I live in a household with a wife and two kids. Those children are going to cost me somewhere around $500,000 by the time they turn 18. We make ends meet, but there are plenty of opportunities we’d like to afford for our children and can’t. Now suppose a friend of a friend of a distant relative comes to live in my house while he recovers from a work injury or an awful break-up.

Not only do we have to change our lifestyle to accommodate him, but he costs us—let’s say even just a third of what either of our children cost. Ay normal person asked about this scenario on the street would feel perfectly okay about me deciding to kick this person out so I can devote my resources to my own children.

What sort of bigotry would allow me to think that my children are more valuable than random strangers? Aren’t we all equal in the eyes of God? And yet, absolutely no one would call me a bigot for “arbitrarily” deciding that this person was being a “parasite” on my household, while refusing to use the same word for my children. They wouldn’t even object to me saying that it is more important to me to give my children a luxury like expensive guitar classes than it is to give this stranger a place to live while he recovers from breaking his leg.

It frankly baffles me that it is considered a greater sin to want to preserve welfare institutions for one’s ethnic group than it is to be a libertarian who advocates the wholesale abolition of these institutions. Indeed, one can say things like, “Honestly I feel like . . . fuck everybody and fuck your skin color because even if you were gold I still don’t give a fuck about you,” and be approved for it in modern society. In fact, this a direct quote from a top-rated comment I saw in a thread online. And yet, if one took this same sentiment and added the caveat that he did not feel the same way about members of his ethnic group, one would be on a fast-track into social and professional destruction. Is selfish nihilism and hatred of all humanity really morally superior to “racism,” in which one prefers some people over others? If not, then why does modern society punish the latter while rewarding the former?

Bring Back Prohibition!

                          By Aedon Cassiel

                   

We all know the story.

Maybe we heard it in our high school history class.

Maybe we went through a libertarian phase where it was repeated ad nauseam as an argument for legalizing marijuana, cocaine, meth, and other hardcore substances—even if you dislike the substances themselves and would rather see them disappear from the face of the Earth.

Maybe we even repeated it ourselves! 

As the argument goes, no matter how much you might like to see these substances disappear from society, prohibition simply doesn’t work—and we know this because, you see, we tried it already with alcohol. After a few years we had to stop the experiment, because it didn’t stop people from consuming alcohol. The only thing it did was cause people to blind themselves from bootlegging it poorly, and fuel crime by giving the mafia the opportunity to seize the black market in production and distribution. The message implicit in the very story itself is, of course, that that’s all we’re doing by prohibiting any drugs now: making consumption of those drugs more harmful for those who consume them, without reducing the total amount of consumption at all; and fueling black market crime.

Well, you’re reading an Aedon Cassiel article, so you probably know what you’re in for already. Isn’t this how it always seems to go with this kind of thing? The standard narrative we’ve been given is wrong. Alcohol prohibition was, in fact, successful. It most certainly was not responsible for an overall increase in crime. And the reason the experimented ended is not because it had failed!

In the February 2006 edition of the American Journal of Public Health, we can read the true story:

Death rates from cirrhosis and alcoholism, alcoholic psychosis hospital admissions, and drunkenness arrests all declined steeply during the latter years of the 1910s, when both the cultural and the legal climate were increasingly inhospitable to drink, and in the early years after National Prohibition went into effect. They rose after that, but generally did not reach the peaks recorded during the period 1900 to 1915.

Cirrhosis death rates, which were at almost 30 per 100,000 in 1911, fell to just under 11 in 1929. Admissions to state mental hospitals for alcohol-related psychosis declined from 10.1 per 100,000 in 1919 to 4.7 in 1928. If the goal of prohibition was to reduce the ills associated with excess alcohol consumption, then it most certainly did in fact succeed at that aim.

The effect that Prohibition had on American culture even had benefits after Prohibition ended.

After Repeal, when tax data permit better-founded consumption estimates than we have for the Prohibition Era, per capita annual consumption stood at 1.2 US gallons (4.5 liters), less than half the level of the pre-Prohibition period. . . . Beer consumption dropped precipitously. Distilled spirits made a dramatic comeback in American drinking patterns, reversing a three-quarters-of-a-century decline, although in volume spirits did not reach its pre-Prohibition level.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that alcohol consumption finally reached back to its pre-Prohibition levels.

So what about crime? According to the University of Pennsylvania Department of Criminology’s Associate Professor Emily G. Owens, increases in racial diversity and urban concentration were the real reason for rises in violent crime over the years of Prohibition: “Americans, especially black Southerners, were moving into cities at the same time as immigrants from Europe and China.” The increase, in fact, occurred predominantly in the African-American community—and African-Americans at that time were not the people responsible for alcohol trafficking. Furthermore, any increases in death were entirely concentrated to individuals in their 20s—deaths unequivocally fell for those 30 and older. Crime rose because of urban yoots, not because of prohibition. Or as Owens puts it, the “relative increase was largest” in “urban states with large foreign-born populations.”

Owens points out that national prohibition didn’t introduce any sudden or drastic change: by the time the federal government got involved in prohibition, it was already illegal to sell alcohol in a full 32 states—and it remained illegal in many states even after repeal; Mississippi did not legalize alcohol until 1966. What this means is we can actually track the effect of prohibition on crime rates by looking at the states individually, one-by-one. When we do that, we find that “depending on the model, the actual effect of going dry ranges from a 5 percent increase to a 13 percent decrease in state homicide rates, with margins of error of 4 percentage points.”

But again, even these broad national numbers conceal the pattern which is evident in who dies. Even models that show an overall increase in crime still show that prohibition made life safer for children and mature adults, whereas any conceivable increase took place solely in young adults—and once again, even this increase is predominantly found only “in states with large immigrant and urban populations.”

To put it plainly, a child who dies from a beating given by an alcoholic parent, or a person innocently walking on the sidewalk who is hit by a drunk driver, is not equivalent to someone killed in a shoot-out during a drug deal gone awry. Prohibition may not have prevented all people from exposing themselves to heightened risk through their own choices, but it very, very probably lowered violent crime overall—and it most certainly lowered it for everyone younger or older than their 20s.

So why did Prohibition come to an end?

[H]istorians are fond of invoking widespread cultural change to explain the failure of National Prohibition. Decaying Victorian social mores allowed the normalization of drinking, which was given a significant boost by the cultural trendsetters of the Jazz Age. In such an atmosphere, Prohibition could not survive. But it did. At the height of the Jazz Age, American voters in a hard-fought contest elected a staunch upholder of Prohibition in Herbert Hoover over Al Smith, an avowed foe of the Eighteenth Amendment. Repeal took place, not in the free-flowing good times of the Jazz Age, but rather in the austere gloom 4 years into America’s worst economic depression.

Thus, the arguments for Repeal that seemed to have greatest resonance with voters in 1932 and 1933 centered not on indulgence but on economic recovery. Repeal, it was argued, would replace the tax revenues foregone under Prohibition, thereby allowing governments to provide relief to suffering families. It would put unemployed workers back to work. . . . it was not the stringent nature of National Prohibition, which set a goal that was probably impossible to reach and that thereby foredoomed enforcement, that played the leading role in discrediting alcohol prohibition [but] instead, an abrupt and radical shift in context [e.g. the Great Depression] . . .”

Prohibition did not end because it was a failure. It didn’t even end because the general population came to believe it had been a failure. It actually ended because people became desperate for work, and the alcohol industry was seen as a way to provide jobs. And the question of whether or not the alcohol industry does create jobs will be addressed even further below.

So what lessons should we learn from prohibition?

Currently, the CDC links alcohol to 88,000 deaths every single year in the United States, making it the third leading cause of preventable death after smoking and the combination of junk food and lack of exercise.

This adds up to 2.5 million years of potential life lost, which in turns means 2.5 million years of work that never gets done. The economic costs associated with this are estimated at $249 billion dollars. And that’s only counting the loss of productivity caused by death from alcohol—not all loss caused by alcohol in general, such as that owed to exacerbated symptoms of depression and anxiety caused by moderate alcohol consumption.

Nor does any of this include deaths due to alcohol-fueled violence, car crashes, or other problems.

Altogether, 40% of crimes for which we have convictions involve alcohol consumption. This number rises to 60% in cases of sexual abuse, 70% in cases of child abuse, and 86% in cases of murder.

If anything, we can now make a serious case that the repeal of prohibition has been an abject, disastrous failure resulting in wildly inflated rates of violence.

According to a National Institute of Health surveyfrom 2016, a whopping 28% of the American adult public drink at heavy or at-risk levels—defined as more than 4 drinks on any given day, or more than 14 drinks in any given week. That’s 43% of all people who ever drink at all.

According to another nation-wide survey, whites are more likely to fall into each category of severity of alcohol use disorder (AUD) than blacks, Asians, or Hispanics, and less than 20% of people with lifetime AUD ever get treatment.

Furthermore, in men, alcohol lowers testosterone and raises estrogen: “In a four-week study, normal, healthy men who consumed 220 grams (7.7 oz) of alcohol daily saw their testosterone levels decline significantly after only five days — and continue to drop throughout the whole period of the study.”

And also raises activity of the enzyme responsible for converting androgens into estrogen: “Increased aromatization may be a mechanism for feminization of [male drinkers] . . . Over the long term, the oxidative stress of drinking also causes erectile dysfunction.”

In short: alcohol causes beer guts, bitch tits, sexual dysfunction, anxiety, and depression. It also plays a massive role in sexual degeneracy, sexual assault, child abuse, and a vast majority of all murders. And it has these effects on whites much more than it does on blacks, Asians, and Hispanics.

Obviously, we shouldn’t be raiding people’s homes on the suspicion that they might be brewing alcohol inside. We could, however, easily ban the industrial scale production and sale of alcohol without requiring draconian enforcement in order to reap tremendous social gains from doing so.

A further benefit of requiring that alcohol can only be produced domestically for domestic use is that for the most part, only those households which are stable enough to afford to keep domestic production going will have access to alcohol. As a tendency, this would help ensure that only those who are responsible enough to use alcohol would be capable of consuming it—without requiring anyone to decide on a case-by-case basis who is responsible enough. This would be inherently self-enforcing.

It may be politically unfeasible to re-implement a full-scale ban on commercial alcohol production overnight. But a 2010 review of the evidenceshows why we wouldn’t need to in order to start reaping gains from treating alcohol like the serious and harmful drug that it is:

Nearly all studies, including those with different study designs, found that there was an inverse relationship between the tax or price of alcohol and indices of excessive drinking or alcohol-related health outcomes. Among studies restricted to underage populations, most found that increased taxes were also significantly associated with reduced consumption and alcohol-related harms.

Another 2010 review finds that: “doubling the alcohol tax would reduce alcohol-related mortality by an average of 35%, traffic crash deaths by 11%, sexually transmitted disease by 6%, violence by 2%, and crime by 1.4%.”

And as far as those Depression-era concerns about jobs go, modern research (here’s one study, and here’s another) finds that the spending shift away from alcohol towards other goods in fact usually lead to more jobs. As Frank J. Chaloupka, PhD, distinguished professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago put it: “Money not spent on alcohol coupled with the newly raised tax revenues will be spent on other goods and services which will create jobs in non-alcohol sectors, offsetting any losses experienced in alcohol sectors.”

Think of this article as entry #2, after my last article about Murray Rothbard’s “non-aggression principle,” about why I am no longer a libertarian. The libertarian story of prohibition is, as a historical matter, just simply false — and there are in fact some taxes which should actually be implemented not just to raise revenue but because they would be socially beneficial in their own right.

Libertarians tried to tell me that I should read about Prohibition, because the things I would learn would convince me to want to legalize cocaine, meth, and other hard drugs as well. But their reading of Prohibition was based on myths and lies. I have these myths and lies to thank, however, for the fact that they inspired me to investigate the real story of prohibition for myself.

The libertarians wanted to convince me to support legalizing the industrial sale of drugs like heroin—instead, they helped me realize why it actually would be an amazingly good thing for society as a whole if we could keep meth and heroin illegal, and go back to prohibiting the industrial sale of alcohol too.

To repeat, this article is not calling for a full-scale “Puritanical” attitude towards alcohol. I would not prohibit personal consumption, or even small-scale local production of alcohol (and neither did historical Prohibition).

People should be free to brew their own alcohol. They should be allowed to bring their homebrewed alcohol to private events. This allows responsible consumption of alcohol, but by design does not allow anyone the option to run their life into the ground with alcoholism, because as soon as you start to do that, you can’t afford to keep brewing.

However, there is a very real dilemma here with how to handle the “double standards” argument. If alcohol is legally produced by corporations, why not weed? Why not LSD? Why not ecstasy?

These substances are less harmful than alcohol — usually at the individual level, and most definitely at the societal level, which is the level that matters most when deciding drug policy.

So if you oppose legal corporate production of drugs like LSD and ecstasy and you support the alcohol industry, the legalizers will call you a hypocrite — and they’ll be right. As documented in this essay, legalized corporate production of alcohol has been more destructive than legalization of weed or LSD would ever be. No matter what judicial stance we take towards weed or LSD, no study will ever find that weed is a factor in 84% of all murders or that LSD is a factor in 70% of all cases of child abuse.

My stance towards all of these substances is this:

1. Individual consumption should be judged on a case-by-case basis. Whether we’re talking about alcohol or LSD, there are at least some people who can consume responsibly with little or no ill effects. Nobody should be knocking on anyone’s doors or breaking in their homes in no-knock raids to check their fridges and closets or cars if they aren’t otherwise causing trouble.

But absent no-knock raids or warrant-free car searches, if you’re even capable of being arrested with any of these substances in the first place it probably is because you were doing something to justify your arrest, even if only scaring people while being publicly intoxicated with more alcohol or LSD than you could handle. If you can’t handle a substance well enough to know your own limits, then you aren’t responsible enough to consume it.

2. Legal industries devoted to the mass production and sale of any of these substances are absolutely bad news for society as a whole. And we are all better off as a rule when we reduce the availability of drugs in society in general.

This is a position that holds consistent to core principles regardless of what my personal biases about any given substance are.

The only other position that holds the same consistency is the far-left or radical libertarian option of simply legalizing everything.

And unless you take an equally consistent position that strikes at the root of their false historical narrative that begins in Prohibition, the drug pushers will exploit your hypocrisy for propogandic effect — and they will win.

Forced to be Free: The Case for Paternalism

                          By Greg Johnson

                    Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Paternalism means treating people like children. Children lack the maturity and wisdom to make their own decisions. Thus they need parents — or people playing the paternal role — to tell them what to do and, on occasion, to force them to do it.

Most people have no problem with paternalism when dealing with actual children, as well as the retarded, the senile, and the insane. But normal adults bristle at paternalism, even though we all act like children from time to time. Paternalism, they think, is incompatible with freedom.

I wish to argue, however, that there is no conflict between paternalism and freedom, provided that both terms are properly understood.

First of all, real paternalism has to be “for your own good,” i.e., in the actual interest of its object. People might claim to be abridging the liberty of others to help them, when in reality they are concerned to benefit only themselves. But that is fake rather than real paternalism. Real paternalism must be in the interest of its objects. Real paternalism is a kindness. Fake paternalism is merely a crime.

Second, there are true and false forms of freedom as well. Most people will agree that freedom is doing what you want to do. But what do we want to do? On this matter, I follow Plato and Aristotle, who argued that we all want basically one thing: the good life, happiness, self-actualization, or well-being (eudaimonia). That is the ultimate aim of every particular action. Every choice, whether we know it or not, is made in pursuit of the good life as we see it.

Thus if freedom is doing what we really want, and we all really want a good life, then living a good life is freedom. This implies that if we choose to do things that are not conducive to the good life, we are not acting freely, for doing things we don’t really want to do is unfreedom.

In other words, not every voluntary act is a free one. We are free when we pursue the good life (what we really want). We are unfree when we fail to pursue the good life (which we don’t really want to do).

There are two basic causes of unfreedom. First, there is ignorance of what is really conducive to happiness. We might think that smoking 20 cigarettes a day will make us happy, but it won’t. Second, there are occasions when we know perfectly well what will make us happy but we fail to do it because we are overcome by our emotions. We fear doing the right thing, or we find doing the wrong thing too pleasurable to resist.

We might choose to act out of ignorance or passion. We might even feel free when doing so. But if such actions are not conducive to the good life, they are not free, they are a form of bondage. Paternalism, therefore, can restore freedom by forcing us to stop throwing away our happiness out of ignorance or passion. Since freedom is doing what we really want, and we can be forced back onto that path, man can be forced to be free, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau put it so memorably.

This means that libertarianism, which claims that freedom is incompatible with paternalism, and that force is always the opposite of freedom, is simply wrong. If you really care about freedom, then the state should, in principle, have the power to paternalistically intervene when people are throwing away their freedom out of lack of knowledge or excess of feeling. One can debate the grounds and scope of such paternalistic interventions. But the principle is clear: paternalism is not an enemy of real freedom but one of its necessary guardians.

On Liberty

                         By William Pierce

   

Eugène Delacroix, "Liberty Leading the People," 1830

“Is life so dear or peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”

Patrick Henry’s impassioned words, nearly two centuries old now, are perhaps the best known and most cherished ever uttered in America. No true American—that is, no American of Henry’s race—can read those words today without being stirred by them.

Love of Liberty in Our Blood

It matters not how “liberal” an education we have had, nor how much of the propaganda of surrender and weakness and defeat has been crammed into our skulls. The appeal of Henry’s words finds its response in our blood—in our genes, where it has lain these past twenty thousand years and more.

The freeborn farmer-warrior, who typified what is best in our race throughout long ages past, may have little place in today’s slick, conniving world, but as long as his blood still flows, relatively unpolluted, in our veins, even the most democratically acclimatized urbanite among us must feel the gooseflesh rise along the nape of his neck when the call to take up arms against a tyrant rings out.

Perversion of Liberty

But what has that to do with what today masquerades as “liberty”? What connection has the sentiment so eloquently expressed in 1775 by Patrick Henry with the puling, smirking insistence on freedom to “do his thing” by every imaginable brand of degenerate and pervert today? What has it to do with the raucous demand for “Freedom now!” voiced by Blacks who want a bigger slice of the welfare state—or else?

The Latin root from which the word “liberty” has sprung is prolific; it has also yielded “liberal,” “libertarian,” and “libertine.” All these words share a general implication of “lack of restraint.” The range of meaning given to them is enormous, however.

For what a gulf stretches between the “liberty” of Patrick Henry—meaning freedom from political and economic domination by a foreign tyrant—and the “liberty” of our present-day libertarians—meaning the freedom of the individual from every restraint imposed by society. In the one case it is one of Western man’s most cherished and valuable possessions; in the other, simply a manifestation of the sickness called liberalism which is carrying Western man swiftly toward his extinction.

Liberty Not an Absolute

As liberty has no absolute meaning, it has no absolute value. To be free from an alien tyranny, so that we can give expression to our own cultural and social forms rather than those not ours—that is good. To carry the quest for “freedom of expression” to the point where we reject every social norm and every cultural tradition in favor of a formless, normless chaos—that is not good.

Freedom to inquire, to explore, to experiment, to invent—that is both good and necessary if our race is to advance and fulfill its destiny. Freedom to ignore every authority, to escape every obligation, to indulge every whim—that is neither good nor progressive.

Libertarian View Simplistic

The great over-simplification of the libertarian is the assumption that freedom is an absolute—that man is either free or he is not free—that if we want freedom of inquiry, for example, then we must also accept as a necessary concomitant total freedom for self-indulgence.

Thus, the familiar spectacle of Senators, editors, and educators calling for the military defeat of our nation; of Black criminals calling for the murder of our race; of anarchists of every hue calling for the destruction of our culture while we smile tolerantly, if a bit nervously, for we have been taught that to silence a traitor is to strangle liberty. Even to punch a McGovern or a Kennedy—or a Nixon—in the mouth and denounce him for what he is makes us suspect as enemies of free speech.

Semantic Trick

What nonsense! The argument that if we approve of free speech we must tolerate subversion is a semantic trick.

A variation of the same trick goes like this: Racial loyalty, racial pride, racial idealism are a form of “collectivism,” in that emphasis is shifted from the individual to a larger entity—the race of which the individual is only a component part. To insist on individual sacrifice or individual restraint in the interest of the racial community is to restrict the scope of individual prerogative—i.e., to limit individual freedom. Hence, if we are for freedom, we must be against racial idealism.

Atomization of Society

The logic is flawless. And the same argument can be applied to patriotism or any other form of idealism which requires the individual to subordinate his own interests to those of a larger social, national, or racial whole. Libertarianism thus leads naturally to an atomization of society.

To the libertarian the race, the nation are merely assemblages of individuals, nothing more.

From this viewpoint, any social structure—a government, say—is justified only insofar as it provides a convenient framework within which a multitude of human atoms can expeditiously gratify their individual desires and ambitions with a minimum of friction with one another.

“Freedom” Under the System

Liberty, pursued to such lengths, is elusive, and the pursuer deceives himself. Our masters, the men who run the System, are not such fools. They better understand the nature of “freedom.” They know that in order to compel us to do their bidding it is seldom necessary these days to resort to the whip and the chain.

So they let us run about freely, say what we want, vote for whom we choose. The United States is a “free” country. All the System cares about is that the net aggregate of our opinions, the result of our elections, shall be what they have predetermined they should be.

It is no more possible to put a truly anti-System man into the Presidency by the democratic process in this country than it is to talk the System into cutting its own throat. But the System men don’t mind if we fool ourselves into thinking it is possible. In fact, they prefer it that way.

Donkeys and Men

One can get a donkey from point “A” to point “B” by tying a rope around his neck and pulling hard enough. Or one can accomplish the same thing by placing the donkey’s oats and water out in plain sight at point “B,” taking care that no other source of provender is readily accessible.

Is the donkey really any “freer” in the second case than in the first? It is idle to argue that in the second case the donkey could have decided not to go to the oats. The fact is that one is able to predetermine the donkey’s behavior, almost with certainty, by a simple manipulation of external stimuli.

When dealing with people instead of donkeys one must be more subtle, but the principle remains the same.

Compulsion of Necessity

We like to think that we make our own decisions, form our own opinions, but in most cases we don’t. Even outside the realm of politics and the public-opinion manipulators, man’s supposedly “free” choice is subject to a thousand determinants beyond his control.

Even a sole inhabitant of the earth, free of every social constraint and inhibition, would remain a slave to the weather and all the other limitations on his will imposed by Nature. Such limitations are just as effective in reducing man’s freedom—in restricting the scope of his actions—as are the walls of any man-made prison.

Division of Labor

Thinking of freedom in these terms, it is easy to see that a sole inhabitant may be considerably less free than a member of a social group. Although membership in a group inevitably carries with it certain restrictions, it may, for a properly constituted group, result in a far greater scope of action than is possible for the unaffiliated individual.

As an example, a sole inhabitant may wish to devote his life to music or to the study of mathematics. But the daily necessities of providing himself with food, clothing and shelter would certainly leave him little time for indulging such whims. And it is quite clear that these natural restrictions just as truly limit his freedom of choice as, say, “repressive” parents or a “totalitarian” government.

Only the division of labor made possible by social organization, with its accompanying channeling of individual energies into rather restricted areas, can open up for anyone the choice of a career in music or mathematics.

A Dangerous Illusion

Thus the libertarian ideal of man as a free spirit, making rational choices independently of conditions around him, is sheer illusion.

Perhaps all this should be self-evident, but apparently it is not. There are alarming numbers of young people today, nominally on the right as well as on the left, who talk and act as if liberty were an absolute thing that would be within their grasp were it not for various “collectivist” or “repressive” tendencies in the government and in our present society.

The prevalence of this libertarian derangement may only be a reflection of the too-permissive child-rearing methods of the last couple of decades, but whatever it is it must be overcome.

Whole More than Sum of Parts

The doctrine that a society is no more than the sum of the individuals comprising it must lead first to the atomization of that society and then to its complete destruction. The Western world is now rushing headlong in to this last phase, where, ironically, an obsessive mania for ever more liberty promises a final end to all liberty.

The great social genius of Western man has been his skill at so ordering his society that it has provided close to the maximum possible yield of true liberty—that is, the maximum possible scope for human endeavor. By and large he has avoided both the extreme of social disorganization which we call anarchy and the extreme of social over-organization which results in the ant-heap societies characteristic of the Orient.

Neither Atoms nor Ants

He has understood, during the great periods of his history, that maximum freedom—maximum social potential—is achieved when a careful compromise is made between anarchy and the ant heap.

To go too far in the direction of totally unrestrained individualism—that is, to approach an atomistic society—is to sacrifice the scope of action which exists only when the will of a whole people can be unified and concentrated on a common goal.

To totally ignore the qualities of the individual—that is, to approach a society based on Marxist equalitarianism, where individuals are completely interchangeable economic units—is to sacrifice the great potential for innovation, for creation, for leadership which exists not in the mass but only in exceptional individuals.

We cannot make either of these sacrifices and still hope to emerge victorious from the struggle for existence which now rages, and will rage, between the various races of man on this planet until one is supreme and the others have yielded.

A Lousy Compromise

Today we suffer from the worst of both extremes. We live in an oppressively overcrowded environment with ever-diminishing privacy, solitude, peace, and quiet. We feel totally impotent and insignificant in the face of the impersonal bureaucratic monstrosity with which Big Brother rules our lives.

But at the same time we are totally lacking in solidarity—racial, national, or otherwise. We have no common purpose, no unity of will as a compensation for the loss of our privacy. Instead of selfless idealism, egoism and materialism reign.

America today is an atomized ant heap.

The cure for this unfortunate state of affairs is to be found neither among the libertarian egoists nor the Marxist collectivists. Peculiarly enough, however, both these factions have draped themselves in the banner of “liberty”!

Race and Personality

If we seek true liberty, what we must do first is establish among ourselves, the men of the West, or among some carefully selected portion of ourselves, a common purpose based on true idealism. Then we must smash the present System, which thwarts that purpose, and build a new society in which the individual achieves self-fulfillment through service to the whole, and the whole advances by giving the widest possible scope for such service to each individual.

From Attack!, no. 5, 1971

Overton Window Warriors

                                     By G

         

As of late, the New Right has been butting heads with the so-called “skeptic” community; with notable names such as Kraut and Tea, Sargon of Akkad, Thunderfoot, and so on. The so-called “skeptic” community prides itself on a supposed platform of pure rationality backed by evidence, plausibility, and emotionless logical deduction. Putting aside the necessary discussion over whether or not these criteria, alleged to be utilized by the “skeptics,” are in fact the best ones by which to judge socio-cultural norms and philosophies, it must be pointed out that these alleged criteria are, in fact, a simple pretense.

Anyone with an open mind paying close attention to these so-called “skeptics” will notice a peculiar phenomenon. They are, in fact, not “skeptics” at all. This isn’t merely true in the philosophical sense, but in layman’s terms as well. The honest thinker may find it strange that when a “skeptic” confronts a feminist, he will eagerly and smugly cite the latest data relevant to sexual dimorphism and sociological behavioral patterns, and yet at the same time, he will pretend to “skepticism” when confronting the solid data of Bowling Alone, J. Philippe Rushton, or Charles Murray.

This selective “skepticism” is not skepticism, but reluctance and fear. First, understand that the “skeptic” community surrounds specific figures who are little more than egotistical jesters entertaining prideful and spiteful laymen. Their personas entirely consist of smugly showcasing the latest in nutty and irrelevant individuals confined to whatever ideological community they are involved with to the popcorn-readied audience of men and children alike. The funnier the insults and critiques they assault the insane ideologue with, the higher the subscriber count and YouTube views.

This comfort-driven egoism is at the heart of the so-called “skeptic” community. It is no mystery why these individuals take up the most comfortable and safe positions imaginable, and eagerly defend them tooth and nail for the satisfaction of the audience. The audience laughs, they click a “good job” button, and the ego of the “skeptic” inflates a bit more, prompting more of the same.

So what exactly dictates the behavior of the “skeptic” community? It is a smug centrist mob mentality. In other words, where the Overton window lies, is where the contemporary “skeptics” of the now exist. While feminism is certainly promoted by the elites of the world, for average people it is to the ‘left’ of the Overton window. Race realism is loathed by the elites of the world and currently considered undesirable by individuals at large, and is therefore ‘right’ of the Overton window. While one is ideological in its entirety and the other is entirely based in reality, how is the “skeptic” justified in equally dismissing both?

The “skeptics” are the opposite of what they claim to be. They are self-centered, egoistical, safe-thinking simpletons with the coordinated will of the mob directing their beliefs. They couldn’t be less “free thinking” if they tried. If Sargon of Akkad lived in 1930s Soviet Russia, he would publish a newspaper article titled “Yes, the bourgeoisie must be dealt with, but must we use so much violence?”

Internet Bloodsports

                          By Travis LeBlanc

       

January 2018 was truly a historic month for White Nationalism as we saw our movement break out of the echo chamber in a big way.

For as much attention as White Nationalism gets from the mainstream media, it is rare to see an honest representation of our ideas. Even the Alt Lite avoided them. To hear our ideas, people still had to seek them out. You had to go to a website, go to a message board, download a podcast, etc. They had to step into our world. Into our echo chamber.

But suddenly White Nationalists have successfully colonized a small corner of YouTube and have encountered normies. We find ourselves battling stubborn CivNats and slippery libertarians as we push inland towards lush parts of the internet outside our echo chamber.

If you are a White Nationalist, you are probably now of the belief that there is a greater than 50% chance that YouTuber Andy Warski is the Chosen One as prophesized by the ancients who has been appointed by God to save the white race in our hour of desperate need. I leave that one to the theologians.

But one could be forgiven for thinking that because in just a few short weeks, Andy Warski and his YouTube show Warski Live have revitalized and re-energized the movement and has caused a persistent buzz throughout the greater alt media universe.

I can only imagine what it must be like to be one of the people who started following Andy Warski when he was still a normie-friendly comedian/commentator doing funny videos and innocuous chat streams with other equally normie-friendly e-celebs. This was in fact only a couple months ago.

Then out of the blue, Warski hires race realist biologist J. F. Gariepy to be the co-host of his show and in the space of one month, introduces his audience to virtual “who’s who” in White Nationalists: Millennial Woes, Richard Spencer, Mike Enoch, Greg Johnson, James Allsup, Nick Fuentes, the Alternative Hypothesis, Jared Taylor, and more.

I have to say that I envy Warksi’s normie followers. It took me years to discover all those people. Warski’s normie fans are getting a serious crash course in White Nationalism.

And if you are a White Nationalist, you are probably also of the opinion that internet bloodsports is the greatest thing since . . . well, ever.

Andy Warski’s “internet bloodsports” model for political debate is in many ways truly revolutionary. Warski has pioneered a discussion format that makes “big brained politics” fun, exciting, intense, and raw. It is neither a Crossfire-style shoutfest, nor is it a gentlemanly Oxford affair. Rather, it’s like an intellectual Fight Club. A sort of demolition derby for smart guys.

Throughout the month of January, a series of high-profile YouTube debates occurred, the most noteworthy being JF vs Destiny, Richard Spencer vs Sargon of Akkad, Greg Johnson vs Styx, Mike Enoch vs Antifa, and Mister Metokur vs Laura Loomer.

Consensus opinion is these debates were White Nationalist victories, and it’s hard to deny that they’ve had a noticeable effect of pushing the Overton Window and shaking up the playing field to our advantage. All of a sudden, liberals and libertarians are talking about race realism and ethnostates. Not flatteringly, mind you, but it is a sign that White Nationalists are driving the discussion and choosing the topics.

Consider, in the last week Paul Nehlen appeared on Alex Jones’s InfoWars channel, David Duke’s podcast, and was interviewed by Rebel Media. That is quite remarkable when you consider that a year ago, only David Duke would have gone anywhere near someone with Paul Nehlen’s views. Alt Lite figures Tree of Knowledge, StyxHexenHammer, No Bullshit, Ricky Vaughn, and Jesse Lee Peterson held discussions with White Nationalists throughout January.

That people outside our movement are becoming more willing to engage with us is an encouragement development. The movement has been in an “Us Against the World” siege mentality for so long that some had forgotten that having allies was even a possibility.

With the “Branding Wars” settled, I see no reason why we cannot have better relations with the less disagreeable figures outside our movement. There was a time when one could make an argument that associating with moderates might confuse the media and public about what we believe. But at this point, I think most of the public is aware that there is a difference between the Alt Lite and White Nationalism. And no one is trying to co-opt the “Alt Right” label anymore either.  Everyone knows what “Alt Right” means, and ain’t no one’s gonna call themselves “Alt Right” that doesn’t mean it.

Additionally, our own platforms are under assault all over the internet, so it’s probably a good idea to have some access to other platforms. Plus, there’s also the obvious consideration that if you want to normalize your ideology, you have to go where the normies are.

Perhaps this is a sign that the Overton Window is shifting, possibly (at least in part) of the result the impact internet bloodsports has had demonstrated White Nationalism’s ability to get views and generate buzz for the platforms that host them.

“Bloodsports” is an appropriate name for this phenomenon because in these sort of debates, one can do more than merely lose the debate. You can completely wreck your reputation, social standing, or even career by looking like dishonest, uninformed, or just plain stupid.

The definitive example here would be Sargon of Akkad whose dismal performance and dishonest arguments in a bloodsport against Richard Spencer had far-reaching consequences. The embarrassment of Sargon’s loss was so great and the damage to the Skeptic brand so extensive, that Sargon and his community are in the process of re-branding themselves as “Liberalists” (because they believe in classical liberalism, you see).  The Liberalists are not so much a movement or an ideology as much as they a think tank of white kids trying to come up with reasons not become White Nationalists.

Another example would be SJW YouTuber Omni Destiny. His loss to J. F. Gariepy in a debate over race realism appeared to trigger a mental breakdown in the lad. This resulted in him going on a libel and slander spree all over social media. This culminated in Omni getting banned from Twitter and is now facing a lawsuit for slander.

Making the world safe for people who can’t tell a fedora from a trilby

Likewise, Styx was the consensus loser in his debate with Greg Johnson. This apparently provoked some serious soul-searching in Styx who the decided that maybe centrism wasn’t for him after all. So internet bloodsports is not just a nice tool for winning converts. It’s also great for discrediting your rivals.

And this is what makes internet bloodsports thrilling: that they are in a way “for real.” They are great entertainment but have so far shown that they can have actual real-world consequences. Whereas mainstream media figures can say ridiculous things every day of their life without any detrimental effect to their career, self-employed alt media figures need their credibility to thrive.

To get the full effect of internet bloodsports, you have to watch them live because YouTube’s Super Chat feature serves as the audience for these gladiatorial spectacles. This allows the people watching live to inject commentary into the discussion and influence the conversation. They’re still enjoyable on replay, but to get the real “bareknuckle prizefight in an abandoned warehouse” experience, watching live is recommended.

To add an extra layer of unpredictability, new participants can enter or leave the debate throughout the course of the stream, often at the Super Chat audience’s request. If one person is being ganged up on by other debaters or if one side if performing stronger than or if the conversation gets stale, an additional debater may be thrown in to shake things up.

While these matches are indeed great fun, what really intrigues is their obvious potential as a propaganda tool and as a means of redpilling normies.

How effective internet bloodsports are as a tool for redpilling and recruiting normies remains to be seen. It’s normal for there to be a digestion period between one’s first contact with White Nationalist ideas and finally embracing them. Seeing that the bloodsports trend is barely a month old, we may not see the full benefits for a few months.

But the potential for bloodsports to be an effective propaganda tool is clearly there. One of the things bloodsports have done is bring a lot of the various factions of the greater Alt Media universe together.

Case in point is the January 22 stream on Baked Alaska channel. The stream featured over the course of +3 hours Mike Enoch, Laura Loomer, Lauren Southern, Andy Warski, and Mister Metokur. That would be two people from the Alt Lite (Loomer and Southern), two people who emerged out of the Skeptic Community (Warski and Metokur), and a prominent White Nationalist (Enoch). Seeing that everyone was drawing from slightly different fanbases, all the participants are sure to get new eyes on them and has an opportunity to win converts. Assuming they don’t say something stupid, that is.

And there is reason for optimism. According to Coach Red Pill’s monthly YouTube rankings, White Nationalists who had recently participated in a Warski bloodsport (JF, Richard Spencer, Millennial Woes, Alternative Hypothesis) had all shown significant growth. It’s also worth noting that the #1 channel on CRP’s YouTube rankings is Kronos, an account that aggregates Alt Right content for easy YouTube consumption.

And indeed buzz they have generated.

Throughout the month of January, it has been like the Super Bowl was happening every few days in my Twitter feed. Whether it was Spencer vs Sargon or Enoch vs Antifa, my feed was full of people live-tweeting the debate, giving play-by-play commentary, and of course, heckling rival fans. Post-match analysis comes later and then the memes. The glorious memes immortalizing all blunders and absurd arguments of losing debaters.

Internet bloodsports has already produced some classic memes. Of course, there’s also Sargon’s infamous appeal to authority “Haven’t you even read Locke?” and Styx’s progressively preposterous “You can’t have an ethnostate because what if…?” scenarios have been lampooned into oblivion. Murdoch Murdoch, White Nationalism’s answer to South Park, devoted an entire episode ridiculing Sargon of Akkad’s abysmal debate performance.

It’s much the same on WN message boards where the last bloodsport match tends to dominate the conversation until the next one happens. If nothing else, internet bloodsports have given people in the movement something to talk about other than infight.

While I’ve never been a sports fan, I’ve always envied how a sports fan can walk up to a completely stranger, start talking about sports, and have instant rapport. It’s a shame professional sports has become hopelessly degenerate, as there is some real social value to sports as something for people in a community to bond over. The effects of internet bloodsports has had on morale is immeasurable.

So what is the future of internet bloodsports? Well, I could see it becoming the next big thing, but I could also see it becoming a fad.

The biggest problem with internet bloodsports so far is the shortage of quality opponents willing to debate White Nationalists. After Sargon’s debate drubbing and the weeks of public ridicule that followed, most Skeptics appear to be are afraid to debate White Nationalists, and I don’t blame them. And many liberals refuse to debate White Nationalists in principle, believing that even engaging us legitimizes our positions.

When Jared Taylor appeared on Warski Live on January 31, Andy Warski said that he asked 12 people to debate Taylor, but they all declined on the grounds that they needed to do more research first. In other words, they were saying “I know Jared Taylor is wrong. I just need to figure out why first.”

But this issue presents a problem for White Nationalists. Warski Live has been an asset to the movement precisely because it hosts discussions outside our own echo chamber. But if people become too scared to debate us, then Warski Liverisks of turning into another echo chamber.

The ideal bloodsport opponent for our purposes would be someone of a different ideology with a large fanbase and high name recognition. The issue is that a person like that would not have much to gain by entering into debate that could severely tarnish his image. We got lucky with Sargon of Akkad, because while he had all the ingredients for a good opponent, he also lacked the self-awareness to realize that debating the Alt Right was a very bad idea.

It would be hard for White Nationalists to create their own version of Warski Live because liberals and moderates would be less inclined to debate White Nationalists where they believed we had home field advantage. The bloodsports model depends on the perception of Andy Warski as a centrist and Warski Live as neutral ground for a debate.

Surely there must be some SJW comedians in the world of standup willing to step up to fill the void. Comics tend to be serious attention whores, and most could use the exposure. Surely, there must be a few out there willing to debate some racists in order to plug their web series.

Another danger is that internet bloodsports could become low-brow.

In the aforementioned Baked Alaska stream, various alt media figures spent over three hours crucifying Laura Loomer over her various boneheaded misdeeds (the tire, the doxxing, stalking allegations). While this was a very amusing stream and good times were had by all, but you couldn’t help noticing light it was on intellectual substance. It was fun but only in a dirty pro wrestling sort of way.

Warski’s bloodsports model is simple enough that it would be easier for someone else to steal it and then just make it dumber. Seeing that the insults are some of the best remembered moments, why not just forgo the intellectual sparring and just make bloodsports about insults, gossips, and scandal?

And of course, there is the ever-present possibility of censorship. Liberals have become aware of internet bloodsports, and the SLPC recently posted an article on the trend.

Whatever the future holds for internet bloodsports, they are for the time being fresh and fascinating spectacles. Hopefully they will continue until there is only one ideology left standing. But even if internet bloodsports do turn out to be just a fad, that’s all the more reason to enjoy them while you can.

Answering Sargon of Akkad

                           By Greg Johnson

                    

Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one above or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.” To subscribe to the CC podcast RSS feed, click here.

Millennial Woes leads Greg Johnson through YouTube Skeptic Sargon of Akkad’s eight questions for White Nationalists. The questions are:

1. Are Jews Oppressing White People?

2. Should Interracial Couples be Forced to Separate?

3. Should the Government Prevent Citizens from Leaving the Country to Preserve the Race?

4. Should the State Control Education?

5. Should the State Control the Media?

6. Should the State Control the Economy?

7. Do the Decisions of Individual White People Matter to the Alt-Right’s Goals?

8. Should Women Have a Role in Public Life?

Articles mentioned:

Travis LeBlanc, “The Skeptic War”

Greg Johnson, “The Slow Cleanse”

Greg Johnson, “Hegemony”

The Skeptic War

                          By Travis LeBlanc

       

2017 was a year when nothing went right for the pro-white movement. It was year of doxings, shuttenings, and corporate censorship across all of social media. But just as Twitter was revving up its purge of pro-white voices, the Alt Right scored a strange victory so perfect that one could not have written a screenplay better than what actually happened.

On December 19, YouTube Skeptic Kraut and Tea announced that he would be leaving the internet forever. This declaration ended the strange episode of a demented man’s quest to debunk race realism and put an end to the surging Alt Right menace once and for all. His spectacular failure to do so will become the thing of internet lore for years to come.

The story of Kraut and Tea’s downfall had everything. It had heroes and hilariously incompetent villains. It had lies and innuendos. It had double agents and double crosses. It had underdogs emerging triumphant and pompous elites getting their comeuppance. And somewhere mixed in all that, there was a debate about race realism going on.

Kraut and Tea was not just any YouTube Skeptic but seen by many as the top “intellectual” in the Skeptic community and Sargon of Akkad’s heir apparent. So when Kraut and Tea announced that he would be releasing a four-video series debunking race realism, expectations were understandably high. The Great Kraut and Tea, top gun of the Skeptic Community, would be stepping into the ring with the Alt Right to show them who the real smart guy in the room was. Unbeknownst to most of his fans in the Skeptic community, Kraut was not an intellectual at all but in fact a narcissistic sociopath with a posh (and likely fake) accent.

Kraut’s videos attempting to debunk race realism were bad. Embarrassingly bad and at times even bizarre (Millennial Woes thinks he’s a fish). The videos are filled with strawmen, shifting goalposts, and all the basic errors you would expect from laymen with no real grasp of what they are talking about. Response videos from more science-literate YouTubers the Alternative Hypothesis and French Canadian biologist J. F. Galiepe were brutal and revealed Kraut to be a man far out of his depth. But Kraut soldiered on.

Having lost the scientific debate, Kraut assembled a Discord server dedicated to (among other things) doxing and smearing Kraut’s critics and other popular Alt Right figures. Of course, when recordings of the discord server leaked (as they always seem to) and faced with insurmountable evident, Kraut was at last forced withdraw from the internet.

In the end, not only did the race realists win the debate, but the race-denying skeptics were exposed as liars, frauds, and fools. The story could not possibly have played out better.

Mister Metokur gives a detailed breakdown of the Kraut and Tea saga here and here. Mouthy Buddha gives a much shorter one here.

The Alt Right has always had a presence on YouTube, but YouTube has never been where the action was. All the movements big debates, big ideas, and drama were going on in the podcasts, blogs, social media, and message boards. So when Kraut and Tea, darling of the YouTube Skeptic Community, declared war on the Alt Right, many in the movement didn’t know hear about it until the battle was already over.  Many didn’t even know who the Skeptics were.

The Skeptics are a YouTube community of pseudo-intellectual liberal arts poseurs. You know the type. They’ve read some Dawkins and taken an Intro to Philosophy class, and now they think they know everything. They self-describe as “radical centrists.” They think “Communism and fascism are basically the same because they are both collectivists, dontcha know?” and all that. They are the kind of people who put “Atheist” prominently in their bio just hoping that you’ll ask them about it.

The Skeptics YouTubers made their names and built their audiences debating and debunking creationists, feminists, SJWs, radical Islam, anti-Vaxxers, etc. In other words, things that even a dumb person can look smart arguing against because being a Skeptic is all about trying to look like the smartest guy in the room.

However, there actually is a large demand for watching people shoot SJWs in a barrel.  Popular YouTube Skeptics Sargon of Akkad and Armored Skeptic have over +740K and +420K subscribers to their channels respectively. By comparison, the Alt Right’s Red Ice has only 166K subscribers and Millennial Woes slightly over 40K.

It was only a matter of time before the Skeptics would have to come face to face with the subject of race realism, and when that happened, it was certain to cause a crisis. If there were two things the Skeptics care about, it’s social acceptance and being taken seriously as intellectuals. Race realism presents a problem in this regard. To embrace race realism is to become a social pariah, but to deny race realism is to inevitably made to look a fool and lose one’s credibility as an intellectual.

Of all the Alt Right’s red pills, race realism is the most important. It is the red pill that makes all other red pills not only possible but inevitable. In addition to this, it’s a debate we always win because it is based in hard science and cold realism. For a while, Skeptics were able to avoid the issue of race realism, but events of late have rendered that impossible. Radical centrism is dead and now Skeptics must choose a side.

Race realism is not just a pillar of the identitarian worldview, it is also toxic to the worldview of other ideologies. Both CultMarx racial egalitarianism and colorblind libertarian individualism dissolve like vampires in sunlight once touched by the light of race realism.

The ongoing war with the YouTube Skeptic community is worth examining because it is a microcosm of what will happen once our ideas start to break through into the mainstream, and the media establishment must defend the truth of their worldview. They will throw every dishonest strawman, guilt trip, and gotcha question at us. And when that does not work (which it won’t), there will be doxes and smears. We have already seen this.

Sargon of Akkad recently issued an 8-question challenge to the Alt Right that they justify their positions to the satisfaction of his own high moral standards. The queries include “Should interracial couples be forced to separate?” and “Should women have a role in public life?” As nauseating as it is, they are questions that we need to get used to answering.

Another lesson from the Kraut episode is that we need to be prepared for people who come from outside our movement. As more Skeptics drift into our camp, some of them will not be as hardcore as we might like them to be or “not there yet.” Few become full-blown White Nationalists overnight, and some patience is required for new converts.

After initially being allied with Kraut, ex-Skeptic Andy Warski has been very generous in giving race realism a fair hearing on his popular YouTube stream. By allowing identitarians a platform, Andy Warski is risking the wrath of Antifa and the SPLC, not to mention the YouTube censors. He is not /OurGuy/, but he deserves our respect nonetheless for taking risks and helping us get our message to new ears.

The war with the Skeptics has produced a few heroes from outside the movement. One such hero of the Skeptic war is J. F. Galiepe. JFG identifies as libertarian and was largely unknown to the movement but has emerged as a valuable authority on race realism. Since Kraut’s resignation, JFG has appeared on The Daily Shoah and Red Ice.

However, Rage After Storm, the YouTuber who kicked off Kraut’s odd journey, was quickly disowned by her Skeptic friends after declaring herself a White Nationalist and bullycided off social media before many in the Alt Right knew what is going on. In my opinion, it looks bad for the movement for this to happen. People need to know that if they come out as pro-white that White Nationalists will have their back. Skeptics will slowly start to defect to White Nationalism, and they may not be as hardcore as we would like at first but they should have our support nonetheless.

In the end it was the moderates, not the purists, who won the day here. The main heroes of the Kraut Wars were people like JFG, the Alternative Hypothesis, and Millennial Woes. None of these guys can be described as edgelords or purists. Solid arguments and quality content, not trolling, is what has brought the Skeptics to the brink of collapse.

Finally, the Kraut and Tea debacle is a cautionary tale of how destructive narcissistic sociopaths can be if allowed into positions of influence in a movement. There’s a lesson here for the Alt Right.

Kraut’s downfall was not brought about by a man’s stubborn defense of a strongly held (but incorrect) conviction but by a man’s desperate attempt to protect his fragile ego and fraudulent image as a YouTube bigshot and smart guy.  It was 100% about his ego from the beginning. And what an ego it is . . .

Kraut was delusional to think he could defeat Ryan Faulk in a debate about race realism. That suggests a confidence in his talents far out of touch with reality. But the really twisted part of Kraut’s downfall was his refusal to concede defeat once it was clear that he could not win. His ego simply would not allow him to admit that he made a mistake and correct course. So he kept doubling down again and again.

Kraut was like the Black Knight in Monty Python’sHoly Grail. As he took grievous wound after grievous wound, he only became more arrogant and boastful. Just when you thought “Surely he must give up now!”  Kraut charged forward again only to lose another limb.

Kraut did not just self-destruct but by recruiting other YouTubers into his mad adventure, he ended up implicating many others in crime, some innocent, some not. The credibility of everyone Kraut came into contact with is now under suspicion.

To make matters worse for the Skeptics, there is the matter of the Kilroy Free Speech Event. Kilroy was a conference that was to be the Skeptics’ big coming out party. A big event where they could flex their cultural muscles. However, the job of organizing Kilroy fell into the hands of YouTuber and con artist Based Mama who turned the event a farcical money-making scam.

Between Kraut and Tea and Based Mama, the antics of these two sociopaths have managed to take a popular and thriving online community and make its name synonymous with dishonesty and incompetence. The Skeptic brand will never recover. Will the Alt Right brand be far behind?