Monthly Archives: October 2017

Suicidal Prog Boomers

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Whenever there is a man-made mass casualty event, to use the term of art, there are a finite number of narratives. There is political terrorism, lone crazy guy, disaffected youth, political crazies, religious crazies and finally, the conspiracy. The 9/11 attacks were well planned political terrorism, while the Orlando gay club shootings were just a religious crazy. Columbine and the black church shooting were the work of disaffected youth. The Connecticut school shooting was an example of a nut getting loose with a gun.

One interesting thing about the recent political crazies is the perpetrators have been acting in defense of the establishment. The BLM murders were blacks motivated by President Obama to kill whites and cops. The guy who shot Congressman Scalise was a Bernie Bro. The knife wielding crazy out west was a Bernie Bro too. Even the hoaxes are done by people who are trying to defend the status quo against dissent. The last anti-government act by political crazies was the Federal building in Oklahoma.

The other interesting thing is that the stuff getting called terrorism is almost always done by crackpots and lunatics, using religion or politics as an excuse. The well organized terror attack by competent political actors is rare and increasingly rare. The West suffered more from this sort of terrorism in the 60’s and 70’s than today. The so-called “lone wolf” stuff the authorities worry about is always a lunatic getting into Islam or Progressive politics, then deciding to start killing people for the cause.

Another thing worth noting is that after Columbine, we were told by experts that this was the coming trend. Disaffected white youth would be going nuts and shooting up public places. That never happened. Shootings at schools tend to be adults and those adults tend to be known lunatics. The Columbine style event never became a trend. The closest we got was Dylan Roof. It is an example of how the people running the media have a ready supply of ways to blame white men for everything.

The thing about all of our recent massacres is the narrative was quickly revealed, even with the media trying hard to lie about it. A Muslim nutter goes crazy and the media will write endlessly about how the motive is unknown, but the truth gets out pretty quick. The same is true of the random lunatic. In all of these cases, we quickly learn that the perp was under medical care and had a long history of serious mental illness. The political crazies like the BLM guys make their reasons known on Facebook and Twitter.

That is what makes the Vegas shooting interesting. This is an outlier case in many ways, but the fact that no one seems to know why he did it is the biggest clue. This is a guy with no social media presence. In this age, which is exceedingly rare for anyone his age. For political or religious nuts, it is an impossibility. That is the thing about these events. They are almost always the denouement to a cycle of madness. The shooter becomes increasingly deranged and then finally moves to do something big.

Similarly, political terrorism is salient only when the reason is made public. The IRA took credit for every single bombing, even some they may not have committed, in order to get their message attached to the news of the bombing. It is why ISIS, and before them Al-Qaeda, took credit for every death on earth. One of the truths about most of the stuff reported as Islamic terrorism, is that it is just random lunatics who know Arabic. They find a reason to go crazy and attack the infidel on-line and then act on it.

What we have here is a guy who was financially successful, old and boring. The weirdest thing about him, beside the fact he is a mass murderer, is that his brother appears to be nutty as a fruitcake. Otherwise, the guy is a semi-retired boomer, spending his days playing video poker at a local watering hole and tending to his real estate investments. If not for his corpse at the scene, this guy would be on no one’s list of suspects. Maybe there is much more to the story, but for now, this guy is the extremist of extreme outliers.

The one thing we know so far is the guy was a careful planner. He apparently had his wits together enough to spend months planning his work and working his plan. He studied up on firearms, learned about shooting from an elevated position at a distance. The police found notes he made calculating drop and distance so he could increase is killing rate while shooting into the crowd. This is a guy who spent a long time thinking about this and planning for the right event on which to unleash his attack.

The other thing we do know is he decided to kill white people. Even taking what the media reports at face value, this guy spent all of his planning time in order to kill white people. If he had shot up a hip-hop show, one that did not shoot itself up, everyone would have made the connection right away. There are few places as white and middle American as an outdoor country show. White people go to these things to celebrate being a honky with fellow honkies. They are one of the few black-free zones in America.

The conspiracy theorists will run wild with this, but the real story behind this thing may simply be that it is another disaffected Prog Boomer. James Thomas Hodgkinson, the guy who shot Congressman Scalise, was a 66-year old Bernie Bro. Stephen Paddock was a 64-year old, who ticks many of the same boxes. His brother looks like the sort of guy who spends his days listening to NPR and ranting about the Republicans. Given the way the media tried to hide the motive of Hodgkinson, it is reasonable to think this is similar.

The news was full of cranks and quacks after Columbine, telling us that disaffected young white males were going violently crazy. That never happened because young people are very rarely so cynical about their future that they become suicidal. Old people, on the other hand, have lots of reason to fear the future. They not only face the grim reality of the actuarial tables, but the grim reality of present failures. For old Bernie Bros, these are the worst of times. Maybe the future of mass shootings is the suicidal Prog Boomers.

A Salty Mix

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This week I was feeling a bit salty. I think it is due to feeling the need to watch the news about the Vegas shooting. My Lord, our mass media is terrible. When I am ruler of these lands, once per month we will celebrate my reign by hurling a randomly selected media person into the void. Perhaps for variety, I’ll have some fed to wild beasts.

Anyway, this week I have the usual variety of items, but I’m not my easy-going self so be prepared for a little bit of edge at points. This week I have a bonus track on Gab. I’m going to use that platform for my edgy stuff, I think. It seems like a good place for it. If you are not on Gab, you should be, despite their flaws. They are the good guys fighting to keep the lamps from going out in the West.

For this week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show It appears they are not censoring me yet. Last week was some sort of mysterious technical issue.  I am now on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Great Questions (Link) (Link)
  • 12:00: Demographics is Destiny (Link)
  • 22:00: Custodial Disorder
  • 32:00: Autoethnography (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 42:00: Professor Slave (Link)
  • 47:00: Inflation (Link)
  • 52:00: The Jew Among You (Link)
  • 57:00: The Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Gab Link

Full Show On YouTube

The Disaggregation

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Living at the end of a great historical cycle, we take for granted that the way things are currently organized, is the way they have always been organized. Ours is the natural order of things. One reason we think this is that we can only really know our age. We can read about prior epochs, but we cannot truly know what it was like to be alive in those times. It will always feel alien to us. The other reason is that a product of our epoch is the linear theory of history. All of the events of the past led to this point in time.

The linear thinking of our age is why a guy like Francis Fukuyama could write a book titled The End of History and not be laughed out of the room. The truth is, the West has gone through a number of cycles, which had a beginning, middle and end. The feudal period is the easiest example. It was born out of the ruins of Rome, flourished through the Middle Ages and then collapsed in the Enlightenment. The period between the scientific revolution and the French Revolution, was the great transition from old epoch to the new.

To flesh this out a bit, think about the natural trajectory of human organization. The trend has always been for larger and larger organizational units. First settlements were a few tribes making up a few hundred people. The first settlements were small but grew into villages and then towns. The more successful became cities and eventually, the political units we call city-states. The first empires were collections of city-states, but in Europe, that model never scaled up very well, which is why counties were the maximum unit.

This is one of great forces in human history, the natural tendency for human societies to “level up” by getting bigger, taking over neighboring societies. The Han Chinese are a great example of this phenomenon. The Huaxia ethnic group is believed to be the ancestors of the Han, who formed into a tribe and slowly dominated the neighboring tribes. They moved north and south, eventually occupying most of what we think of as China today. Put another way, a bunch of small tribes combined into one big tribe.

We see a bit of this at the end of our epoch. The great industrial wars of the 20th century made war for territory unacceptable. Borders were drawn and respected. Changes to borders were to be negotiated. Then the idea of eliminating borders entirely became the default position of elites. Europe was to combine into a single political unit. Asia would slowly combine into an economic unit. North America was to be the glue, binding it all together. Human organization would be global and managed.

Just as the Bronze Age empires collapsed with the coming of the great migrations and the Iron Age, our commercial empires are showing signs of stress. That is because of the other great force in human history. Disaggregation is when a large entity breaks into its constituent parts. The simplest example is a big company splitting into a bunch of specialized little companies. Men have gotten extraordinarily rich figuring out how to break apart large companies into many smaller, more valuable little companies.

In history, the most obvious example is the Roman Empire. The Romans managed to stitch together people from the Levant to Britain, but the cost of holding it together exhausted them and it broke apart into more logical units. First the Britons, then the various German tribes broke free of Rome. Eventually, the Western Empire collapsed into its tribal parts. Even the Italian peninsular broke into its parts. The end of the Western Roman Empire was also the end of a great historic epoch.

Today, the signs of disaggregation are appearing in all over Europe. The Catalonian revolt is one good example. It has deep historic roots, going back to the Roman Empire, but it is boiling over now for a reason. The same is true of the Visegrad Group. There is more history in those lands than the rest of Europe, but that is not why they are in dissent from the rest of Europe. The reason for the break ups is that the underlying logic of these great combinations no longer makes any sense. The EU is a solution to a problem of the past.

From the Enlightenment through the end of the Cold War, the great debates were about how whites would deal with whites. How would whites organize their lands politically? How would whites describe and maintain borders between groups of whites? How would whites manage commerce in their own lands and between other groups of whites? These were the great questions. The answer was social democracy, separate borders for separate peoples and regulated markets for goods and services.

The end of an historical epoch is not just when the great questions of that epoch are answered. The end comes when new questions arise that the old answers cannot address. The EU is proving to be less than worthless in the face of mass migration from the south. The Yankee Imperium over America has no answers for the demographic challenges facing the white population. It is why the arrangements of the old era are showing stress and beginning to break.

In the European world, large countries and supra-national organizations are solutions to past problems. The new problems, like how Europe will deal with four billion Africans to their south, demand new solutions. If the current social arrangements do not address the coming problems, then those arrangement will fall apart and be replaced by new ones. That first means tearing down the old arrangements to make way for the new. The era of disaggregation will be about the old organization units breaking into their parts.

The Fear Of Disbelief

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I was looking for something I remembered Sailer posting about and I stumbled upon this post from Tyler Cowen. The post is from eight years ago and it is something I found interesting. I did some searching around in his blog to see if he had bothered to revisit the issue and the search came up dry. Cowen, who is one of those guys who likes pitching himself as a step outside the crowd, has avoided the topic for close to a decade, suggesting it was around this point when the subject was declared heretical.

Another thing I found interesting, amusing actually, was that Cowen succumbed to the claim that there is greater genetic diversity within racial groups than between them. While it is true that there is greater variation between individuals, than between groups of individuals, it does not invalidate classifying individuals into different racial groups. Traits common to one group, even in great variety, may not exist in another. Cowen was falling for what is informally known as Lewontin’s Fallacy.

Of course, what screams from the post is the hysteria induced in people like Cowen, when they are sheered between observable fact and prevailing dogma. On the one hand, their brains force them to look at reality. On the other hand, their fear of the morality police makes them want to shriek in terror. Cowen is a gold plated phony, but he is not a dunce. Even back in 2009, the evidence was clear. There are bone-deep differences between the races that go beyond physiognomy. It is right there in the mountain of IQ data.

People can be forgiven for not going against their betters. Even spergs like Cowen want to believe in the prevailing orthodoxy. You see that in the end where he writes “racism itself is far, far more harmful, whether in the course of previous history or still today.” That is the sort of thing a true believer writes, when he is thinking of maybe writing something heretical, but then grows frightened of where it could lead. That whole last paragraph is so carefully worded, it reads like it was written by a committee.

It is not just the smart guys who are tormented by this stuff. Most normal whites get weepy when they see a guy like Sheriff Clark or Allen West say the sorts of things honkies say in private. It is confirmation. When you see a gazillion re-tweets of something a conservative black posted, it is not hard to imagine the relief normies felt when they saw it and the joy with which they passed it along. A couple of generations of whites have been raised up to think of blacks as mystical moral arbiters. Black approval is the highest honor.

There is also the old noblesse oblige hook. Smart people like to think of themselves as having a duty to guide the less smart toward the correct opinions. A guy like Cowen is not wealthy and he is largely dependent on the state for his livelihood, like most libertarians. Nevertheless, he imagines himself as a member of an intellectual elite, charged with training the next generation and providing intellectual guidance to the ruling class. Promoting the blank slate silliness about the evils of racism feels like his moral duty.

On this point, there is a strange phenomenon that I have witnessed. It is not a lot different than what happens in a church when a long standing member quits because they no longer believe in God. There are members who will try to talk the guy out of it, telling him that they too have lost their faith, but they continue attending services to maintain the tradition or support those who to continue to believe. I have never seen this work. Every person who has quit their church did so in their mind long before they left the pew.

I suspect something similar goes on with our betters. They know that even entertaining heretic thoughts can be trouble. They have seen enough old white guys throw in the towel, like James Watson or John Derbyshire. They know that once that seed of doubt gets lodged in the head, it grows into a mighty oak of doubt. Then comes struggle, apostasy and finally banishment from the community of good thinkers. It is better for strangers to think you are a moron than to have your friends and colleagues say you are immoral.

Most people reading this probably belonged to the universal church of biological denialism at some point in their life. It has been dogma for a long time. Probably every white person has felt the warm glow of seeing blacks succeed at white things or showing their appreciation with public acts of patriotism. The opening ceremonies have become American’s favorite part of the Olympics, because it is where they see well behaved non-whites wearing the stars and stripes and looking proud to be Americans.

Race denialism, as John Derbyshire calls it, has been part of the official canon for generations now. Biological denialism has been official dogma for as long as I have been alive. Belief is easy when everyone else believes the same thing. Disbelief, however, is inevitable when belief is at odds with reality. When no matter how hard you try to make the belief real, it is thwarted by reality, doubt is the only option. That is where most whites are now. The question is, what will they believe in next?

The Plight Of The Edgytarian

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One of the more popular ways for people, with modest talents, to gain public attention is to be edgy. The best examples of this are the pop stars who have modest musical ability, but are willing to degrade themselves on stage, well beyond what is common. Comics used to play the edgy card, by dropping the F-bomb in their act or making increasingly bawdy sexual references. The game is to set yourself apart from the other mediocrities by saying and doing outlandish things. That way, the public pays attention to you instead of others.

You see something similar in the commentariat. There are millions of people able to talk and write about public issues well enough to succeed on stage. It is not that hard. Most TV presenters are remarkably stupid, but they can learn to read from the teleprompter and look into the correct camera. The Atlantic Magazine has shown how easy it is to create a black intellectual with the TN Coates experiment. Getting on TV or getting a perch at a big site, therefore, requires something else, something to set you apart from the crowd.

That is where the edgytarian comes in. These are the folks who stake out the turf just on the fringe of what the commentariat has deemed acceptable. Bill Maher is a good example of a Left edgytarian. He says the things that most Progs are thinking but avoid saying for fear it is over the line. There are Right edgytarians too. These are the guys who will make a joke about feminists or dissent from the orthodoxy on trannies. They are not full blown heretics, just a bit reluctant in their enthusiasm, which makes them bad boys.

Left edgytarians have always had it easy. They just needed to find the limit Progressives had set to the Left. The edgy Prog put his right foot on that line and his left foot outside the line. That way, he is outside the acceptable, but not out there where people like Jill Stein live. His only worry was the line would move faster than he could keep pace, as the line always moves in that direction. Dave Letterman went from edgy comic to creepy old man in a couple of decades, because he could not keep pace with the changing line.

Right edgytarians have always had a more challenging problem. They needed to find the line the Progs set on the right and place their right foot on that line and their left foot inside the line. This means living in fear of the line slipping inside of their left foot. That is why they make a study of Prog fashion. To suddenly be outside the bounds of acceptable is death. Inevitably, theirs is a life of defending the line between themselves and those to their Right and keeping pace with the ever changing line of what is acceptable to the Progs.

Even more troubling for the Right in general, but especially the Right edgytarian, is that the Progs can willy-nilly declare someone a heretic retroactively. That means the edgy guy can suddenly find himself being hurled into the void because of past statements, which were just inside the line back then, but are suddenly heretical. It is why conservative commentators always have rabbit ears. They are always watching for sudden changes in the zeitgeist so they can get ahead of it. It is why they love the word “zeitgeist.”

The successful Right edgytarians figured out how to avoid this problem by going into the safe zone as soon as they had anything resembling success. Jonah Goldberg is a good example of this type. When he was a blogger, he played the edgy card, but as soon as he had some success, he raced to the safe zone and became Mr. Conventional Wisdom. In the 90’s he was doing pop culture references and scatological humor. Today he so boring and tedious, he manages to make John Fund sound like a wild man.

It is the smart move though. Look at Gavin McInnes. He burst onto the scene as the hyper edgy nighttime guy on Red Eye. He was mocking the JQ, race and sex, all the while being the middle-aged wild man. Then he got named by the inquisition over heresy regarding homosexuals. Then he was seen in public with known hate thinkers. No matter how many marital aids he jammed up his rectum, he was suddenly off-limits. His choice was to go to the dark side or find a new act. He is now doing a grumpy dad act on CRTV.

What makes life suddenly perilous for edgytarians of both varieties is the old paradigm is breaking down. Progs are rocketing into fads that are essentially the habits of the functional mentally ill. You cannot be more edgy than a guy in a bloody sundress, who just castrated himself, while belting out Helen Reddy tunes. On the Right, the people who would be the audience for guys like McInnes are losing interest in chasing that shadow and are instead wandering out into the new world of new politics.

The result of all this is our official discourse is suddenly becoming very dull. Reading a modern political site feels like you are re-reading articles from the 80’s or 90’s. It is the equivalent of listening to pop songs from three decades ago, while everyone pretends it is new and original. Of course, pop culture has become moribund, as well. Hollywood does nothing but churn out remakes and sequels. Music has become so dull that even the elevator people refuse to play it. Comedy is no longer funny.

That is what distinguishes this counter-culture movement from the 1960’s version. In the old days, the game was to get to the main stage and be slightly outrageous. The hippies and radicals were all about freaking out the squares. Comics like George Carlin were all about pushing the envelope, from their perch on the big stage. Radical politics was about being radical within the established parties. The edginess was never authentic as it was simply a means to an end. The point was to eventually be mainstream.

Today, a guy like PewDiePie has fifty-seven million subscribers to his video channel and his videos average 2.5 million views. He has no interest in going mainstream. A guy like Milo was better off avoiding the official media entirely. His attempt to be an edgytarian has made him into a sad joke. Of course, the new politics is completely off the mainstream reservation. Today’s counter-culture is not a reaction to the old culture so much as an abandonment of it. It is an ad hoc, chaotic effort at something entirely new.

That is why being Mr. Edgy is a dead end street now. A guy like Gavin McInnes is smart enough to figure it out, which is why he is putting on the cardigan and scanning old shows like Leave It To Beaver for material. You cannot be edgy in a world where the gap between what is allowed and was taboo is impossible to span. You see this in comedy where guys like Andrew Anglin and The Right Stuff can never possibly “cross over” and do their thing in what is now the mainstream. They are all in on this side of the divide.

There is an old gag where a chicken and a pig talk about opening a restaurant. The chicken suggests they call it “ham and eggs.” The pig declines, saying, “I’d be committed but you would only be involved.” That is what is going in the culture. For years, the edgytarian could just be involved in fringe culture and the dominant culture. Now, everyone must be committed. you are either fully on one side of the chasm or on the other side. To mix metaphors, those who try to be both fall into the void.

The FBI’s Russia Shield

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The prevailing assumption regarding the Russian investigation is that it is a big nothing cooked up by bitter Democrats and promoted by the media to avoid facing up to the reality of the 2016 election. Once it became clear that the Podesta e-mails were causing trouble for Clinton, her people started chanting “Russian hacking” at every press conference, as if they had an exotic form of Tourette’s syndrome. It has all the hallmarks of a Clinton media fraud. They repeat something over and over, knowing the press will echo it.

The appointment of a special prosecutor has been viewed as an effort by the Trump administration to put the issue to bed. The press was never going to stop talking about and the Democrats were going to keep screaming about it. Name a special prosecutor and everyone has shut up about it. Mueller will spend a year and millions of dollars to discover there is nothing to the claims. That is the official version. What if it is something else entirely? What if the special prosecutor is just an excuse to handle some other matter?

The rule of thumb with political scandals is they fall into one of three buckets. There is the sex scandal, as with Bill Clinton. Then there are the money scandals, involving graft and public corruption. Hillary Clinton is the obvious example here. Then there is the personal scandal. This is the scandal where hurt feelings or a broken promise result in one member of the political class dishing dirt on another. Watergate was this type of scandal at its core. Mark Felt was angry at being passed over so he ratted out people to the press.

That is the odd thing about the Russia business. It has none of the markings of a political scandal. It works as a media event, as it ticks a lot of boxes for the press. They get to trade on salacious rumors for a while, without having to do any real reporting. Throw in some conspiracy theories and the Boris Badenov angle and it fills the news cycles for a few weeks. Otherwise, there is not enough to this Russian conspiracy to warrant a phone call from the FBI, much less a full blown investigation.

That is what makes the appointment of a special prosecutor so strange. The guy who convinced Trump to fire the FBI Director was Rod Rosenstein. He is pretty much a career Justice Department hand. Trump accepted his recommendation and fired Comey. Then Rosenstein ended up as the guy handling the phony Russia story after Sessions mysteriously recused himself. Trump then went on a rampage for a few weeks complaining about Sessions, even hinting that he may fire him over it.

Rosenstein then recommended a special prosecutor. The guy he recommended is a close friend of Comey and the former FBI Directory, Robert Mueller. In fact, Mueller preceded Comey in the job. Forgotten in all the excitement is the fact that Trump claimed the Obama people had bugged Trump Tower. The new was full of stories that the FBI may have a former Trump adviser on a wire. Of course, we now know that the Obama Administration was running a widespread domestic surveillance operation.

Then there are things that seem unrelated, but maybe not. Comey personally handled the Clinton e-mail probe. He is either a world class bungler or he had a reason to bungle it. Either way, he bungled it. He also appears to have perjured himself in his Congressional testimony. In one case, he later amended his testimony when it became obvious, he made false statements under oath. Maybe Comey was trying to hide something, but the more plausible answer is that he is just not good at this sort of work.

Regardless, there should be a whole bunch of attention on the FBI right now. At the minimum, they have been outlandishly incompetent over the last half of the Obama Administration. That should warrant a house cleaning. Alternatively, they may have been corrupted by the Obama Administration. It is clear that Samantha Power was abusing her authority with regards to domestic surveillance. It is reasonable to assume the FBI was compromised in some way during Comey’s tenure.

That may be what is really going on with the special prosecutor. The phony Russia scandal provided an excuse to bring in a political pro like Mueller to clean up the mess left by Comey and the Obama Administration. The FBI is not supposed to be spying on Americans without a warrant and they are really not supposed to be listening in on politicians. Someone signed off on bugging Trump Tower, during and after the presidential election. Who knows what other shenanigans have been going on?

The most likely answer for why a special prosecutor was appointed is that it was an easy way to get the whole thing out of the White House. Since the story is bogus and Mueller surely knows it is bogus, it will be a nice patronage program for a year or two and then the whole thing goes away. The second most likely answer is that Mueller’s job is to clean up the mess left by Comey and protect the reputation of the FBI, maybe even some other intelligence agencies. That way, no one gets hurt the problems are quietly fixed.

What this is not. is an investigation about Russia meddling in the election.

Sargon of Blockhead

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The reason that Buckley Conservatism completely failed to halt the advance of Progressivism is that the Buckley-ites eventually came to accept the moral framework of the Left. Libertarians have gone down the same road, embracing the morality of Progressives, while trying to find a way to carve out a place for individual liberty within that moral framework. It is why the differences between libertarianism and what passes for conservatism are trivial now. They both operate in the same narrow space.

A good way to illustrate this is with this interview Carl Benjamin conducted with Jared Taylor. Benjamin is a British provocateur who goes by the handle Sargon of Akkad on social media. He describes himself as a liberal, but to Americans that should be understood as libertarian. His views are consistent with what you see from the Reason Magazine types. That means he embraces the libertine social polices of the Progressives, but he likes getting cheap stuff from Amazon without paying sales tax.

He is also an incandescently obnoxious troll, who goes out of his way to pick fights with people on-line. His go-to move for years was to post gay porn into the twitter feed of people he was trying to provoke. He used to spend his days attacking alt-right people on twitter with this tactic, but they largely ignored him. He has also made a habit of going after feminists, who always take the bait. He styles himself as an intellectual, but he is just another shallow end of the pool libertarian, afraid to venture into deeper water.

In the video, Jared Taylor makes the reasonable point that race relations in America are at a standstill because blacks are fundamentally different from whites. Compulsory integration over the last 40 years has done nothing to improve the lives of blacks and nothing to improve relations between the races. If anything, relations are worse now. The logical solution is to junk the compulsory integration and let people do what they do naturally, which is self-segregate. At some point, a peaceful divorce will be arranged.

In theory, libertarians like Benjamin should embrace freedom of association. After all, what can be more basic to personal liberty than the right of association? If you can stuff your body with illicit drugs, because you own it, you should have the right to put your body near whomever you like. That means having the right to not be around people you do not like, for any reason or no reason at all. Places where you need to get permission from authorities to be around other people are called prisons.

There are no modern libertarians who embrace this as it runs afoul of official orthodoxy on race. Progressives have declared private discrimination to be a mortal sin. You see this in the interview at about the 10 minute mark. Benjamin starts spinning around like a top, trying to re-frame Taylor’s point as compulsory segregation. When that does not work, he then says that everyone he knows loves diversity and they want to forget about the whole race and ethnicity stuff. In other words, there is no need for freedom of association.

This is why libertarians have been forced to embrace egalitarianism. This let us them wriggle free from the vice of freedom and anti-racism, by claiming that systematic social inequity is the cause of racial differences. Therefore, fixing the social problems will let everyone be treated the same and the gaps between the races will close. Everyone will embrace diversity and multiculturalism. This is now orthodoxy with “conservatives” like Ben Sasse, as well as most libertarians.

At about the 20 minutes mark, Benjamin gives the game away entirely by trying to tie the bogeyman of Richard Spencer to the reasonable arguments in favor of freedom of association made by Jared Taylor. You can see the wheels turning as he tries to square his own self-righteous disdain for guys like Spencer with the reality that Spencer is to the right of him on the issue of personal liberty. Benjamin rattles on a few minutes trying to square that circle, but then gives up and changes the subject.

That is where is gets a bit amusing as he makes the ridiculous claim the Islam has somehow managed to overcome tribalism. This would be quite shocking to the practitioners of Islam in the Arab world, who have been in waging tribal warfare since the birth of Islam. Sure, Islam has no racial component, but the practitioners certainly do. This is the same with Christianity and Judaism. The same is true of sports and gardening. Just because tribes can have much in common, does not make them any less tribal.

Libertarians and conservatives have the same problem. They have been forced to embrace the moral framework of Progressives. Benjamin starts from the bedrock assumption that racism is evil and that race is an artifact of a prior age. From there he tries to reach classical liberal conclusions, but that is an impossibility as classical liberalism inevitably runs afoul of Progressive morality. This is why Progressives have been able to roll the opposition. They set the rules so the results are inevitable.

Benjamin lacks the intellect to grasp this reality, so he flounders around trying to self-righteously condemn race realism, while smugly pretending to be outside of Progressive orthodoxy. He is a big admirer of himself. Because there is no way to make his brand of libertarianism work while embracing things like anti-racism, he is reduced to having personal squabbles with heretics. He was unable to do that with Taylor so he just came off as a smug blockhead, which is a fairly good description of the modern libertarian.