Note #1: I have multiple goodies up behind the green door this week. The schedule going forward will be two written pieces a week and one podcast. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Note #2: If you are looking for a book to read, you may want to buy the book A Walk in the Park: My Charlottesville Story. It is a first person account of the events by a couple of good guys who deserve your support. it would be a great Christmas gift.

In the novel Invisible Man, an important bit of symbolism is a paper doll, called a Sambo doll, that was popular in the middle of the last century. It was often a paper doll made up with exaggerated features of back people. In the novel, black street sellers would attach the doll to a string and include a stereotypical song and dance performance as a way to sell the dolls to passersby. Of course, the passersby were white people who bought the dolls because it appealed to their racism.

Obviously, the black people selling the dolls were profiting from the promotion of what the writer saw as a negative stereotype. One interpretation is that the reason black stereotypes persisted was that some blacks profited from them. The black people selling the dolls made money from the suffering of their own people. They were willing to degrade themselves and their people to make a few dollars. These selfish acts were a part of the problem facing blacks in America.

It was not cut and dried for the narrator. He could see that the black men profiting from these stereotypes were simply adapting to reality. They made money for themselves and their family, which by extension benefitted the community. Black stereotypes, in effect, created a moral dilemma for back people. On the one hand, they kept black people down relative to white people. On the other hand, profiting from these stereotypes allowed black people to prosper despite their condition.

Later on the novel, the narrator tries to burn one of the Sambo dolls for heat and finds it difficult to do, symbolizing the difficulty of overcoming the stereotype. He is eventually able to burn the doll. In the process he realizes that it may be difficult to overcome the cultural framing that the Sambo doll symbolized, but it is possible if one accepts the reality of his condition. The individual can only transcend his condition by creating and maintaining his own individual identity.

Invisible Man was written seventy years ago, but the problem facing black people described by Ralph Ellison has not changed. You see it in this interview of Jared Taylor on the Young Turks channel. Dr. Rashad Richey is playing a stereotypical black character, which has been lampooned for generations. He gets to make a nice living doing it, but like the characters selling Sambo dolls in the novel, he is profiting from the perpetuation of negative stereotypes of black people.

An extreme example of this is the Kanye West story. His career has been built around selling the stereotypical black cultural items, things like sneakers and expensive lifestyle items, to an audience primarily of white suburban youth. His own struggle with this reality seems to have broken him. His most recent interviews suggest he is a man rolling around in a struggle with own personal Sambo doll, one that he created and that looks striking like Kanye West, despite the name change.

This moral dilemma applies to anyone who exists outside the moral consensus and this Kanye West stuff is an example of it. Nick Fuentes has signed onto what he used to mock just a few years ago. He was the guy in the so-called optics war who insisted that presentation was important. He mocked the alt-right people for praising Hitler and throwing Roman salutes. He is now flying around with a guy who praises Hitler and makes the alt-right sound philosemitic.

Fuentes, faced with the dilemma described in the novel Invisible Man, the choice between playing the stereotypical role for money and attention or rejecting that role in order to create and maintain an individual identity, has chosen the former. Like so many before him, Fuentes is volunteering to play the role of cartoon Nazi that the system he claims to oppose needs in order to perpetuate itself. Like the character in the novel, he is perpetuating a stereotype for profit.

The counter from his fans is that these publicity stunts get attention and therefore expose people to this material. It brings attention and resources into the community that lies outside the moral consensus, which helps the community. In this case, by signing onto the Kanye West circus, Fuentes raises his profile, which he then uses to promote the ideas and opinions of his followers. Like the character selling Sambo dolls in the novel, Fuentes is degrading himself to support his community.

Here is where the comparison breaks down. Black people in the middle of the last century faced genuine economic hardship. A man trading his dignity to feed his kids is making a rational choice. Similarly, refusing to trade his dignity, even if it means his family suffers, is also a rational choice. That is the moral dilemma. Both choices are rationally defensible. Playing the cartoon Nazi for the mass media, on the other hand, lacks rational support.

The reason is the argument in favor of “getting the word out at all cost” has been proven false over and over for generations. George Lincoln Rockwell got the word out by dressing up as Hitler. David Duke was the preppy Klansman and got a whirl on the big stage in the 1980’s. Most recently, the alt-right was front page news for a while and nothing came of it. No minds were changed. It was just another version of the white Sambo act for the benefit of the people in charge.

Like the narrator in the novel, the only way forward is to step outside the moral framework and create a new and independent identity. In the political context, this means a stand alone argument in favor of some alternative future. There is the list of complaints about the current system, every cause has a bill of indictment, but it is followed by a plausible alternative. There is a vision of a future independent of the current moral framework, not just opposed to it.

Blacks in the middle of the last century were faced with a choice. They could find a way to live within the system or find a way to live outside the system. The choice was the former, which has often required a sublimation to the same sorts of stereotypes that allegedly motivated the civil rights movement. Agreeing to be one of the forty-two black people living in the white nationalist enclave of Brattleboro Vermont is no different than selling those paper Sambo dolls on the street corner.

In this age, white people are faced with a similar dilemma. One can simply play the role of suburban peasant until that is no longer permitted. One can play the white Sambo role pretending it is something other than theater. Alternatively, one can seek to live outside the world of racial coercion, looking to a world free of racial coercion. That is a genuinely break from the past and present. It leaves the Sambos and the enablers to the dustbin of history.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Note: It is the time of year when people feel generous. If you are looking for someone that would appreciate a small donation, consider kicking in a few bucks to our friends at The White Art Collective who are making a film. They want to make a movie, but they need your help!  Click here for more info.

At the heart of libertarianism is the claim that in order to fully enjoy your natural rights you must be free of coercion. That is, you are not subject to the claims of other people either directly or indirectly. The only direct claim a person has on another person is the enforcement of a contract. Similarly, you can demand that whole society respects your autonomy and property rights. Otherwise, no person in a libertarian society has a claim on any other person in the society.

Simplifying it, the libertarian society assumes you have absolute dominion over yourself, outside of the narrow exceptions for the enforcement of contracts and the defense of private property. More important, maybe most important, members of a libertarian society have an obligation to respect the autonomy of others. The social contract, if you will, gives members the maximum liberty, in exchange for the maximum amount of minding your own business.

Hans Hermann-Hoppe identified two unsolved problems within libertarian theory that he has spent a long time trying to solve. One is that there is no way within libertarian theory to go from our current societies to a libertarian one. The other problem is there is no way within libertarian theory to police a libertarian society. The non-aggression principle rules out coercion as a way to keep people from straying from libertarianism into something like socialism or even communism.

It is the first problem that has occupied the minds of libertarians. How can we get from where we are now to even a few steps down the road toward paradise? One effort has been to convince people to become libertarians. Proselytizing has always been a central part of the movement, which is why many people outside of the libertarian subculture view it as something like a cult. The libertarian, like the vegetarian, is always ready to announce his membership in the cause.

The proselytizing has always come with an eye on politics. In theory, libertarians must reject the premise of liberal democracy. The closest they can come is some sort of democratic process for settling direct and indirect claims. Otherwise, there is no role for the state so there is no reason to have elections. Even so, libertarians have tried to use the democratic process to change the law in their favor. The legalization of drugs, for example, has been a main cause of libertarians.

A lot has been made about the effect this has had on conservatism. Way back in the last century, Frank Meyer cooked up a new formula for the American right that brought libertarians into an alliance with traditionalists and neoconservatives. This Cold War coalition would make up what was called the conservative movement. After the end of communism, this coalition fell apart. Today it is nearly impossible to see the difference between libertarianism and mainstream conservatism.

Something else happened during the last century. The contact with mainstream liberal democratic politics deranged libertarianism. Some libertarians, the left-libertarians, transformed into corporate libertines. In exchange for a comfortable lifestyle, they promote every degenerate fad of the left in the name of freedom. The left-libertarians have been enthusiastic for every subversive cultural fad, as long as it came with fat donations from corporate sponsors.

Right-libertarians have largely avoided the cultural issues, instead focusing all of their energy on the power of the state. Ron Paul has been the best known of the bunch, fashioning a political career as a platform to promote libertarianism. At the heart of his argument is the assumption that once the state is removed from the lives of people, the cultural questions will answer themselves. It is the state that puts its thumb on the cultural scale, creating the culture war.

It is a nifty bit of logic, which turns the old Marxist formulation on its head. Marx said that once you get the morality right, there is no need for politics. That is, once everyone has the same morality, there is no need to debate public policy. The friend enemy distinction goes away as we all share the same goals. Ron Paul argues that once you get the politics right, the moral issues settle themselves. Without an active state, there is no need for culture and therefore no culture war.

The last ten years has provided a test for that theory. It has also brought us back around to that second conflict within libertarianism identified by Hoppe. Over the last decade, corporations have assumed greater power over the lives of citizens and they have become active in directing the culture of society. On the one hand we have non-government elements of society that are trying to coerce others. On the other hand, that coercion is specifically over cultural issues.

For left-libertarians, this has not been a problem. They sold out to corporate interests long ago so this works fine. If you do not like Apple sexualizing your kids and funding grooming gangs, just start your own trillion dollar tech company. Interestingly, this approach was aped by neocons like Ben Shapiro. He was a leading voice in the “just build your own internet” phase of the crisis. The neocon – libertarian nexus is something that warrants further exploration.

Putting that aside, the right-libertarians have had a dilemma. You cannot on the one hand put personal independence at the top of your moral hierarchy and at the same time ignore or excuse the grotesque abuse of basic rights by corporations. The solution has been something like what you see in this Ron Paul post. You see, the tech giants are not rampaging through the culture and trampling your rights because they want to do it, they are doing it to please the state.

After a long story about Ed Markey howling for censorship, Paul writes, “Big tech companies silence their users to curry favor with politicians and bureaucrats, often after “encouragement” from politicians and bureaucrats. Therefore, to end big tech’s censorship, Americans should demand that all government officials — including the president — not violate the First Amendment.” You see, that army of scolds hired by Twitter was to please the state, not the shareholders.

The reason Ron Paul and other libertarians cling to this ridiculous idea that corporations are unwilling participants in the culture war is that they have no answer to the problem of corporate activism within libertarian theory. In fact, to even acknowledge such a thing as corporate activism blows a hole in libertarianism. The whole point of libertarianism is the maximizing of freedom. If it has no way to defend your freedom from powerful members of society, then why would anyone be a libertarian?

Of course, this is the problem Hoppe identified years ago. Individualism is a wonderful concept as long as it exists within a collective outer shell. In other words, the extreme individualism expressed by libertarianism works only if everyone has been so thoroughly conditioned by a pre-existing cultural framework that no one within the libertarian society would ever consider coercion. Libertarian man must be the result of severe cultural programming.

This is why Marx still matters and von Mises does not. Marx was wrong about many things, but he was correct about one big thing. If you get the morality right, then everything else falls into place. Politics is therefore about getting the morality right, even imposing morality on the whole, in order to make it possible for the citizens to maximize their life within society. Put another way, the point of political struggle is to define “who we are” and then put an end to the debate.

In the fullness of time, the 20th century will be viewed as a long human experiment with the ideas of the 18th and 18th century. Various forms of socialism, communism and libertarianism were put through their bloody paces, only to see all of them fail as an answer to the only question that matters. “Who we are” is the question every civilization must answer. That is a moral question. Perhaps the 21st century will be remembered for finally having answered that question properly.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Note #1: There will be no more Taki posts. I decided to bring that to a close in order to focus on other things. There is only so much time and I was stretched too thin so something had to go. I want to focus more on the pay-per-view content which has a steadily growing audience. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

Note #2: I have received a few suggestions about other platforms like Gum Road and Locals, which is a Rumble creation. I am interested in any feedback from people familiar with these sites. RamZPaul is on Gum Road and the Duran guys are on Locals, but I know nothing about these platforms.

Given the current trajectory, it is reasonable to think that in the not too distant future some alien race will be digging through the rubble of humanity trying to figure out what happened to this strange species. Just as modern archeologists dig through ruins of ancient societies, trying to figure out what happened, those aliens will be doing the same with earth. They will dig through whatever is left, things like buildings, tools and cemeteries, piecing together the story of man.

The thing they will not find among the decaying buildings, rusting vehicles and collapsed bridges will be piles of human rights. They will not open a door of some oddly preserved building and find a bunch of skeletons who had found shelter along with their sacred human rights. In fact, they will probably find no trace of human rights or any discussion of the concept. Given that most of our knowledge is now digital, these sorts of things will be impossible to detect.

The main reason for this is human rights do not exist. They are a thing that humans invented late in the history of mankind. People say that human rights are real and point to various authorities to support the claim, but rights are not real things. They exist only as a figment of our imagination, like the concept of lust. No other species has this concept so it is possible the aliens will not understand it either. It will be as alien to them as our entirely made up concept of human rights.

That is something to keep in mind when people of the so-called “new right” go on about the importance of natural rights. Here is an example from Michael Anton where he addresses the idea of historicism. This is the argument that all human thought is the product of its historical moment. Men in one period accept certain things to be true that men in a different period would not accept as true. Loosely put, mankind and its mental constructs are a product of time and place.

What we think of as conservative in North America rejects this claim. It starts from the assertion that all men come into this world with natural rights. The right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is the pithy expression of this. The very loose argument here is that the natural world, including the human place in it, operates from fixed and observable rules. The laws of nature and nature’s god. From these rules we can tease out things like the rights of man.

A quite simple example is ownership. You are born into this world as the property of your parents who created you and raised you. At some point, you leave the ownership of your parents and become a free man. You own you. Because you own you, you must own your activity, your labor. If you own your labor, it stands to reason that you must own the fruits of your labor. Hence the concept of private property. Ownership traces to the laws of the universe, which is its authority.

There are similar arguments for all sorts of things we consider to be natural rights, like equality before the law and self-defense. Some of these rights have a strong connection to observation of nature. The right of self-defense is something we can see in all of nature, not just mankind. The right to a speedy trial and a jury of our peers takes a few leaps to find some root in the laws of nature. Regardless, the claim is natural rights are rooted in the authority of nature.

Michael Anton makes two important claims in his response to Paul Gottfried that are critical to the current crisis. One is that this idea of natural rights is not time bound as Gottfried claims, but universal and timeless. Even when we were not aware of them, we had these natural rights. The other claim is that America, as currently constructed, can only exist if it is structured around the concept of natural rights. It is the only way a disparate people can coexist in a single society.

The first argument is what is called a gratuitous assertion. The logic of natural rights may be timeless, but it has always rested on something that is not timeless and that is a Christian concept of God and man’s relationship to God. In fact, it depends on a specific version of Christian belief. Many Christians reject the idea of a universe defined by fixed and unchanging rules. Other types of Christian reject that we can understand these rules, even if such a thing even exists.

The very loose foundation of the natural rights argument is that God is perfection and therefore he created the world without making mistakes. This means he has no reason to tinker with the rules. They never change. Further, when he created the world he had a purpose, just as a carpenter has a reason to make a cabinet. The world as we see it is not just random pointlessness. It is a world created with a purpose by God and it operates by a fixed set of rules.

If you reject this concept of God, then you reject what naturally flows from it, which is why the concept of natural rights is a cultural artifact. It is peculiar to European people, especially those west of the Hajnal line. Eastern Europe does not have a strong natural rights tradition, because they have a different conception of God. Muslims have no concept of rights because Allah is unknowable. Islam accepts that the rules of the universe are unknowable and therefore unpredictable.

In other words, we have no evidence that natural rights are universal and timeless, because the foundation lies outside of the realm of proof. If you accept the narrow idea of God and the universe he created, the natural rights arguments make sense, but if not then these arguments are nothing more than convenient inventions. The reason the phrase “I know my rights” means nothing in China is the Chinese lie outside the timeline of the people who invented the concept.

This brings us to the second point, which is that the only way America can function is if we all agree on this mental framework. This is the social contract argument updated for a modern audience, the people who now live as strangers in their own lands. Instead of the claim that we voluntarily came together and agreed to live by a set of cultural and political rules in the same society, the argument now is we better convince the new majority that we have to live by these rules or else.

In this regard, Anton is correct. The demographic revolution is already leading to a cultural and political revolution. The only way America returns to something like its former self is if the new people embrace the old rules. If Nikki Haley, Hakeem Jeffries, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib embrace the logic of Thomas Jefferson, then maybe we can continue to function by the old rules. If they reject natural rights theory, then we will need new rules to accommodate the new people.

The fact that we have to have this discussion is bad news for the natural rights crowd as it assumes the new majority is not embracing Thomas Jefferson. In fact, they have been busy toppling his statues and erasing his name from the history books, along with all the other people responsible for the natural right tradition. Whatever claims one wants to make about the universality of natural rights, it is clear that the new people and their enablers are not embracing the concept.

Inadvertently, Anton is confirming Gottfried’s central claim. What we think of as our natural rights are a product of a specific people living in a specific time. They are no more universal than conception of God. Natural rights may be more than just a fad, like powdered wigs or waistcoats, but they are tied to a people. Like all traditions, they live on in the memories of the descendents of the people who invented them and once there are no more descendents to carry on the traditions, they are gone.

The fact is, natural rights are a thing that come naturally only to Western people, so they are no more universal than blue eyes. Sure, some people outside of Europe will have blue eyes or green eyes, but most will not because the genes for these things dominate only among Europeans. The same is true for the European understanding of the universe and man’s natural place in it. Natural rights are the product of traditions peculiar to European people.

The unanswered question in Anton’s piece and the entirety of the movement calling itself the “new right” is this. What happens when the new people reject the Western tradition of natural rights? Should they be forcibly removed? Should they be compelled to change their ways? Maybe give up their old gods and go through a rigorous training in Calvinist religious doctrine? After all, the concept of free choice is part of the natural rights tradition. What if they choose to reject this concept?

That brings us back to where we started. If those visiting space aliens arrive and find natural rights, it will be because they find societies based on them. Those societies will necessarily be controlled and dominated by people who invented the concept and make it their purpose to maintain them, no matter what. Survival of the fittest is just as much a part of natural law as free speech. More so, in fact. In order for rights to survive, the people who created them must survive.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.