Jonathan Bowden joins Richard to discuss libertarianism, anarchy, inequality, and the fascistic aesthetics of Ayn Rand.

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Back in 2008 I was excited about Ron Paul’s candidacy in the then forthcoming presidential elections.

His formula appealed to my individualism and my loathing for the system of fiscal predation and debt slavery. I also liked his rejection of neo-conservative foreign policy and his apparent rejection of America’s colonisation by Third World peoples.

I did not think he would fix everything, but he seemed a step forward.

Things look different in 2012.

I now think a Ron Paul presidency would accelerate existing trends, even if he successfully reformed the monetary system and ended America’s foreign wars.

Abolishing the Federal Reserve, rebasing the dollar, and ending wasteful wars, and government programmes would be a good step towards putting the American economy on a sounder footing.

To truly achieve this, however, he would have to decree a debt amnesty and institute a neo-mercantilist economy based on savings, investment, manufacturing, and exports.

And this, whether because of ideology or because of its impracticability, I doubt he would be able to do. At least within his allocated four years.

Yet this is not the main problem.

The main problem is the fact that, as a rationalist believer in free markets and sovereign individualism, he represents not fundamental change, but rather a more pure expression of the worldview that led the United States to its present predicament.

Americans suffer today not because they abandoned these values, but because they pursued them like no one else.

Ron Paul has grass-roots support because in American terms he is traditional. On the surface, his outlook is materialistic and secular, and the latter would appear untraditional; but this is not so, for his is a materialist theology, and in this sense he is consistent with both the English ethic of capitalism and Karl Marx, with whom he shares a common ideological origin.

Moreover, we can also conceive his campaigning brand of economism as a form of evangelical puritanism.

Ron Paul’s quantitative conception of life relies on rational arguments and empirical evidence, not on transcendent authority or spirituality, or millenarian tradition.

The modern secular bias may see this as a strength, but it is a weakness: arguments can be defeated with other arguments, data with other data. It is always possible to produce both abundantly in support of any point of view, irrespective of their relationship with the empirical world.

The radical Left has been doing this successfully for decades and having the data against has made no difference to the reigning intellectual paradigm.

Many think Ron Paul is anti-establishment because he attacks the Federal Reserve and wants to reduce the size of government. This is to ignore that the establishment has multiple facets, and his represents one that looks like change simply because it has not been dominant for a while and the popular imagination associates it with a time of prosperity.

And I say imagination, rather than memory, because many of Paul’s supporters are young and they were not around when government was small, money was sound, and taxes were low.

Many have turned to Ron Paul because, believing him to be anti-establishment, he is appealing in a time of instability, when it is clear the dominant paradigm has failed.

Yet, like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, Ron Paul’s quantitative, rationalist, individualist outlook makes sense only in prosperous, stable, racially homogeneous societies.

In times of austerity, instability, and racial heterogeneity it poses an existential threat because the collectivism and authoritarian bias of competing non-White groups enable them better to exploit the opportunities opened to them by crises and uncertainty.

The White man wants to have a civilised reasoned debate, but neither Blacks nor Hispanics are interested in that.

As Jared Taylor amply illustrated in White Identity, Blacks want and practice Black Power, Hispanics want and practice Brown Power—legal or illegal, logical or illogical, whatever advances their cause, rationality, civility, equality, constitutionality, history, or logical consistency be damned.

What is more, the Anglo-American White is an island, fiercely concerned with his independence. He resists group memberships and when he does accept them they are always loose, distant, contingent, expedient relationships based on legal, contractual, or philosophical abstractions. In contrast, the coloured man from everywhere else is much more ready to combine with others of his kin, and the relationship is nearly always essential, biological, inescapable, not soluble through argumentation.

In times of crisis and uncertainty, Whites argue with each other, while the 'wretched of the Earth' unite against them.

Worse still, in times of crisis and uncertainty, people have demonstrated quite willing and capable of sacrificing freedom in exchange for security.

Thus, crises and uncertainty benefit whoever is more rigid, harsh, and intolerant, since authority and strength, or at least its appearance, provide a sense of security, and security is always preferable to uncertainty even when that security is unpleasant.

With his grandfatherly manner, open, free-for-all proposition, Ron Paul’s ideological purity would be no match for the brutal disturbances ahead.

In fact, since the crisis we face already means every White man for himself, squared, Paul would sanction the very condition that opens the way for a more frank and ruthless level of racial and economic predation.

It would be every White man for himself, cubed.

And every coloured man for his collective, also cubed.

In some ways, the Ron Paul phenomenon represents an act of denial: the tacit wish that things are not as far gone as they seem and that by electing the right Republican candidate, a return to traditional American values of small government, sound money, free markets, and sovereign individualism will put America back on course. It also represents the erroneous belief that America has ended up where it is because it went off course, when in reality it is where it is because it is exactly on course.

What we are witnessing is not a deviation, but a fulfillment of potentialities that go back even before the founding of the Republic.

Having said this, Americans desiring change would do well not to ignore Ron Paul or the tactical value of his campaign, for with his grass-roots support he offers an opportunity to attack the system from within, even if he represents a puritanical expression of the system.

The attacks on him by establishment opponents amount to more than a squabble between two Leftist factions, even if that is what it is, for they imply a recognition by the reigning establishment faction that he represents the thin end of a wedge able to operate on an area of shared discontent between an ill-informed public and the non-authorised, alternative Right.

The Ron Paul campagin against the Fed, war on Iran, neo-conservatism, big government, and the nanny state provide popular, socially acceptable critiques that contribute to weaken and discredit the dominant faction. In turn, he provides a popular but weak alternative made inappropriate by the ever-worsening crisis.

The reigning faction both fails to understand how Ron Paul could benefit them in the long run and fears, correctly, that a free-for-all opens the way for fundamental change in our direction. After all, free-for-all conditions, laissez faire competition, also opens the way for non-authorised factions to act without restriction.

From this standpoint Ron Paul offers both denial and possibility.

The "Ron Paul Newsletters" controversy has revealed a little known conservative synthesis, "paleo-libertarianism." Paul Gottfried joins Richard to discuss the history of this coalition of writers and activists, which was quite willing to take seriously not only libertarian economics but race, immigration, and the National Question.

The brand of historiography promoted by the Mises Institute is at its best when it is revisionist, and fearless of social and political taboos. It is at its very worst when it is Manichaean: The Black Hats vs. the White Hats; The Good Guys (a term these historians actually like to use) vs. The Baddies; the Party of Liberty vs. the tyrannical Statists etc. etc. etc.

I might agree with Thomas DiLorenzo on some crucial issues, including the Federal Reserve and the Cult of Lincoln, but history-writing should not be a kind of extended op-ed, in which readers silently cheer on the Good Guys, hiss at the Baddies, judging both by the degree to which they adhere to a 2012 Anarcho-Capitalist Platform.

All this was brought to mind as I was reading what DiLorenzo surely considers to be devastating take-downs of his National Review opponents in the Beltway, regarding the Ron Paul newsletters saga.

The official National Review line has, for a while, been that Ron Paul is borderline unmentionable, mostly due to his foreign-policy positions.  If there is a strong need to go after him, the NRchiks haven't hesitated to bring up that at one point in time, Paul's newsletters promoted unfashionable views on race, as well as conspiracy theories of various degrees of crankiness—despite the fact that such views are out of tune with Paul’s more recent public statements on racial matters and the civil rights movement. 

DiLorenzo’s response is to dig up some money quotes from NR’s past and insinuate that the “neocons” are racist bigots. That is, he does EXACTLY what he accuses NR of doing. (In the process, he proves that NR was once a pretty interesting magazine!)

As if it were some kind of brazen insult to the Founding Fathers, on the 220th anniversary of the codification of the Bill of Rights, President Obama signed into law an act that, according to most civil libertarians and Constitution-thumpers, negates those hallowed guarantees of individual liberty.

Writes one LewRockwell.com columnist:

The National Defense Authorization Act will make it official. It will confer upon the executive branch and the military (increasingly, the same things) the permanent authority to snatch and grab any person, U.S. citizens included, whom it decrees to be a “terrorist” – as defined or not by the executive or the military - and imprison them, indefinitely, without formal charge, presentation of evidence or judicial proceeding of any kind. These “detainees” will have neither civilian rights in the civil court system, nor – crucially – even the minimal rights to due process and decent treatment conferred upon prisoners of war. 

The writer claims that the U.S. has “crossed the Rubicon,” that is, become something akin to the “20th century horror shows,” Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.

But has anything really changed? I don’t mean in terms of day-to-day operations of the government but fundamentally.

Most Americans are actually quite familiar and comfortable with Raison d’État (or what Alex Jones might call “black ops”), which has been around since time immemorial. Espionage, international intrigue, and state assassinations have, indeed, always captured the public’s imagination—from James Bond to GI Joe to Obama’s murder of Osama bin Laden. People of all levels of sophistication feel in their guts that the government should do things—bad things . . . illegal things . . . secret things . . . dangerous things—to “keep us safe.” 

Put in more scientific language, Raison d’État trumps legal and constitutional considerations. Only systematic libertarians and anarchists are much troubled by this fact. There are, of course, limits to what the public will tolerate in terms of the use of force, and actions must be justified in some way. But the key is that the state—and the state alone—is allowed to do such deeds.

It was my discovery of the European New Right that finally convinced me that one could be both a serious intellectual and a political rightist. My initiation came when I discovered Alain De Benoist’s and Charles Champetier’s manifesto for the French New Right eleven years ago. I had never seen rightist ideas presented in such a way before and I knew I had come upon something powerful. Previously, I had been more or less a left-wing Chomskyite. I had long found the left dissatisfying, particularly its victimological ressentiment and its PC bluenoses. Yet, when I looked at the bulk of the American right and saw the jingoist flag-wavers, Bible-bangers, Israel-firsters, plutocratic apologists, conspiracists, and knee-jerk militarists, I would wonder why would anyone could possibly want to be associated with that, for God’s sake? Murray Rothbard’s championing of the legacy of the “Old Right” notwithstanding, I considered the right to be an intellectual wasteland. Fortunately, the European New Right rescued me from such a narrow perception. It was from the European New Right that I learned one could be a progressive without being an egalitarian, a conservative without succumbing to vulgar economism, and a traditionalist without being a yahoo.

A major problem with bringing ENR ideas to North American audiences has been the fact that much of the scholarship produced by ENR writers has yet to be translated into English. For instance, De Benoist is the leading intellectual of the ENR and one of its founding fathers, yet only only two of De Benoist’s dozens of books, On Being a Pagan and The Problem of Democracy, have undergone an English translation and the latter appeared in English only this year thanks to Arktos Publishing. Two original English works surveying ENR thought have also appeared. One of these is by Tomislav Sunic and the other is by Michael O’Meara. If you are a college student and you want to shock and offend your politically correct professors and peers, then the distribution of copies of these works on campuses would certainly be an easy way to do so.

Because of the efforts of Arktos, more and more works of the ENR are gradually being made available in English as well as older works originally written by long-forgotten conservative revolutionary figures of the interwar era. Arktos also makes available works by leftist thinkers offering genuine insight and other writers whose ideas fall way outside the paradigm of what passes for “the right” within the context of U.S. style “conservatism.” Suffice to say we will not be seeing any of the plutocrat-funded and neocon-managed publishing houses of America’s “conservative movement” issuing the works of Lothrop Stoddard, Antonio Gramsci, Georges Sorel, Carl Schmitt, Michael Cremo, Andrew Fraser, or Pentti Linkola. Arktos has also issued an English version of Ernst von Salomon’s It Cannot Be Stormed. Salomon was a conservative revolutionary author whose success continued well into the post-WW2 period and earned the denunciation of TIME magazine in the process. I’m still waiting for English translations of Ernst Junger’s Der Arbeiter and of the works of Ernst Niekisch (hint, hint).

Several contemporary works by leading ENR writers, such as De Benoist, Sunic, and Guillame Faye have been given extensive review on Brett Stevens’ website. (See here, here, and here.) Sunic’s Against Democracy and Equality is particularly helpful not only as an introduction to ENR ideas on a more abstract level, but as a source of critical insights that shed extensive light on the realities behind some of the more important political and cultural phenomena of our time. As Stevens observes in his review of Sunic:

Liberalism dehumanizes its adversaries. According to Carl Schmitt as channeled through Sunic, the left abhors war — so it phrases every political action as a police action. The bad guys become inhuman because they are immoral, not nice, not egalitarian, etc. and thus can be exterminated not in a war but in the right-thinking people detaining or removing the bad ones.

De Benoist’s The Problem of Democracy subjects the most sacred of all modern pieties, the ideal of liberal mass democracy, to rigorous and unrelenting criticism. The only other contemporary work that I am aware of that offers such a thoroughgoing assault on modern democracy is Hans Hermann Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed. I gave Hoppe’s work an extensive review when it first came out ten years ago. The twentieth century’s two leading critics of modern liberal democracy, with its tendencies toward mob rule, were arguably Carl Schmitt and Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn. Schmitt attacked liberal democracy from the perspective of a traditional conservative in the mode of Hobbes or Burke, while Kuehnelt-Leddihn offered a critique rooted in a synthesis of Catholic traditionalism and a monarchist variation of classical liberalism reminiscent of Lord Acton.

Hoppe’s work is clearly influenced by and somewhat derivative of Kuehnelt-Leddihn, and employs arguments one might expect a conservative Catholic and liberal monarchist to make. De Benoist’s observations on democracy more closely resemble and are influenced by those of Schmitt. While Hoppe and Kuehnelt-Leddihn defended classical eighteenth and nineteenth century liberalism against modern egalitarian democracy and its social democratic manifestation, De Benoist like Schmitt before him sees liberalism as the root of the problem. De Benoist offers not classical liberalism but classical democracy as conceived of by the Greeks as the answer to the “problem of democray” in its modern form. Whereas Hoppe postulates the concept of a society ordered completely on the basis of private property as the alternative to modern democratic institutions, De Benoist offers suggestions that at times resemble the notions of “participatory democracy” or “direct democracy” advanced by certain strands of the Left. These contrasts should make for interesting dialogue and debate on the alternative right.

Guillame Faye’s Why We Fight differs from much of the literature of the ENR in that while Faye incorporates the essence of the broader New Right philosophy into his analysis, he also demonstrates a greater concern for on-the-ground practical politics, strategic formulations, and particular policy prescriptions in a way that is atypical of ENR thinkers with their general focus on arcane theoretical abstractions, historical interpretations, or “metapolitics.” Faye’s geopolitical outlook in some ways resembles a melding of the “Eurasianist” idea advanced by Alexander Dugin and the anti-Islamism of Western European euronationalism. This puts Faye at odds with other strands of the ENR which leans towards at least a tactical solidarity with the Third World and regards Islam as a potential traditionalist ally against globalization and Americanization.

I am inclined to regard Faye’s view as appropriate for Europeans and the latter view as more relevant to North Americans. Islam is geographically far removed from North America, and poses no immediate demographic threat. Islamic terrorism directed towards the United States and its allies is for the most part the inevitable “blowback” generated by U.S. foreign policy or, more specifically, the exercise of Zionist influence (whether Jewish or Christian) over American foreign policy in the Middle East. An alliance with Russia against both Americanization and Islamication may serve the interests of Europeans, but America would be best served by a simple renunciation of globalism and a return to old-fashioned isolationism. Indeed, domestic U.S. Muslims may well be valuable allies against domestic Zionism.

The European New Right clearly has much to offer to ordinary conservatives looking for ideas of infinitely greater substance than what is typically found on talk radio, FOX News, or the subcultures of American right-wing populsim. But the philosophy of the ENR might well prove to be the bridge that also helps many disaffected leftists to eventually find their way to the alternative right. The thinkers of the ENR have developed a critique of globalization, imperialism, and Americanization every bit as thorough and radical as that offered by neo-Marxists like Immanuel Wallerstein, indeed even more so. Likewise, the ENR possesses a critique of consumerism, recognition of ecological issues, anticlericalism and critique Christianity that avoids the shrill bigotry of the “new atheists” that at times resembles but is more substantive than that offered by the Left. The ENR emphasis on the sovereignty and self-preservation of all peoples might even appeal to non-white nationalist, separatist, or autonomist movements.

Writers of the ENR have also advanced an intelligent and sincere but measured social and cultural conservatism that lacks the “homosexual-atheist-abortionist-under-every-bed” hysteria of the American right-wing. ENR thought upholds masculine and feminine identities without sinking into crass misogyny, and De Benoist has even controversially called for solidarity with Third World nationalism against US imperialism in a way that resembles a rightist version of Chomsky, and advocated a federated European “empire” of autonomous ethnic, cultural, and national identities that is reminiscient of the Holy Roman Empire (which, as Voltaire said, was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire). Meanwhile, the ENR-sympathetic Telos journal has postulated a critique of the modern liberal-managerial “new class” that greatly resembles Bakunin’s early critique of Marxism.

If we are going to build a rightist opposition in North America that is worthy of the legacy of Nietzsche, Pareto, Schmitt, Mencken, Ortega, and Junger, and is not merely a movement of useful idiots for the neoconservatives, military-industrial complex, and right-wing of the U.S. ruling class as so-called “movement conservatism” often is, then it would appear that the ideas of the European New Right are thus far the best thing going.

Matthew Lyons is a leftist writer of  the "watchdog" variety and has in the past worked as a co-author with Chip Berlet. He currently operates a blog called "Three Way Fight" which previously featured a critique of AlternativeRight.Com from a hard left perspective. More recently, Lyons published an extensive critique of the ideas and work of yours truly on the socialist New Politics website. I have since produced a three part response. See Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. Lyons has posted a very brief reply to my reply. Readers of AltRight may find the exchange interesting or at least amusing.

Every year, Professor Hans-Hermann Hoppe hosts a conference of his Property and Freedom Society at the Hotel Karia Princess in Bodrum, Turkey, which happens to be owned by his wife. Richard was one of the speakers at last year's conference and has written about his experiences there and about Hoppe, his organization, and ideas. Every year Sean Gabb of the U.K.-based Libertarian Alliance diligently films the events of the PFS conference and makes the footage available online. This year was no exception and Sean's video record of the 2011 conference can be viewed here.

I would invite readers of AltRight who are understandably turned off by libertarianism and associate it with globalist, plutocratic, or open borders nonsense to check out the writings of Dr. Hoppe and Dr. Gabb. In the tradition of Nietzsche, Schmitt, or Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Hoppe ranks alonside Alain De Benoist as one of the the fiercest contemporary critics of modern liberal democracy, albeit from a different theoretical premise. I wrote a review of Hoppe's landmark work on the democracy question some years ago which is still available online. Meanwhile, Sean Gabb has emerged as one of the U.K.'s leading critics of Political Correctness and has produced a highly valuable book on the subject which he distributes online for free. It might be said that Sean is for England what Paul Gottfried is for this side of the Atlantic. Suffice to say that Sean Gabb and Hans Hoppe are not your garden-variety U.S.-style libertarians obsessed with conspiracy theories, drugs, and science fiction novels. Indeed, I've always thought that the libertarian movement from outside the United States is of much higher quality than what we Yanks have on our side of the pond, probably due to its smaller size. Quantity often comes at the cost of quality. The Property and Freedom Society and the Libertarian Alliance are the leading lights of non-U.S. based libertarianism and, in my opinion, two of the very best libertarian groups anywhere in the world.

Meanwhile, I would particularly recommend this video of Dr. Gottfried's talk at this year's PFS gathering. What I find personally interesting about Professor Gottfried is that while he originates from the traditional conservative, Buckleyite Right and I came from the Chomskyite Left, we have reached a virtually identical analysis and conclusion concerning the state of our civilization and what the most viable solution to the crisis might be. For those who find Gottfried's speech at PFS interesting, I would also like to suggest this talk given last year by my National-Anarchist colleague Welf Herfurth, a native of Germany who was an activist in German far Right politics in the 1980s and who now resides in Australia. Welf has likewise come to a position not dissimilar to that of Paul Gottfried and myself.

Professor Roderick Long is a Harvard grad who currently teaches philosophy at Auburn University. He is also a devout “Austro-libertarian,” an ideology that synthesizes Austrian economics with individualist anarchism in the manner championed by Murray Rothbard. He is associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the left-libertarian Molinari Society. Professor Long is someone whose work I generally respect and which contains some interesting and valuable insights into matters involving political theory, class theory, political economy, legal theory, and a number of other matters. Unfortunately, Long is also a PC lunatic on social questions who once compared pro-lifers to Guantanamo torturers during an online discussion he and I were both party to. His argument? Childbirth is physically painful, therefore denying a woman an abortion at any time she wants for any reason she wants amounts to the imposition of physical torture. Pretty thin, huh? Apparently, women who undergo abortion procedures never experience any kind of discomfort, physical or otherwise. (By the way, I generally favor legal abortion, in case anyone is wondering.)

I was therefore surprised to see Professor Long offer the following insight during a discussion of how “Austro-libertarians” might engage in outreach to the Left:

There are some left-wingers whom I call the “aristocratic left,” and whom I despair of reaching. These are left-wingers who have a particular vision of an idyllic society and are prepared to hammer into place anyone whose preferences or behavior don’t align with the vision; in effect they see other people as their property. Back when I lived in North Carolina, on the city line between Chapel Hill and Carrboro, I used to watch with mixed amusement and horror as the affluent white “liberals” who ran the city councils of those two communities competed to see which city could impose the most callous and intrusively micromanaging legislation. In Carrboro, which incredibly billed itself as the “Paris of the Piedmont,” the council thought that old cars looked unsightly, and so declared that residents would be forbidden to park in their driveways any car older than a certain number of years (I forget how many). Unsurprisingly, this law had a more burdensome impact on lower-income households than on higher; so much for the idea that liberals are supposed to care about the poor. The Chapel Hill council, with similar solicitude, forbade a local copy shop to post its (low) prices or to use words such as “discount” in its advertising, because the emphasis on low cost seemed tawdry, and clashed with their vision of an upscale community. (I am not making this up.) I have to laugh when conservatives accuse liberals of practicing class warfare, because these regulations were certainly class warfare-but from the opposite direction from the one suggested by the accusation. The Carrboro council also thought that cul-de-sacs looked unfriendly and standoffish, too much like private communities, and so proposed not only to ban new ones but to ram streets through existing ones; apparently the beloved mantra of children’s safety only applies sometimes. Mercifully, I don’t think that one finally passed. The same council also wanted to require drive-in banks and restaurants to install downward-sloping exits, thus allowing cars to turn their engines off and glide soundlessly and emissionlessly back down the street. (I am still not making this up.) What gun laws were favoured by these two hyperactive city councils I leave to your imagination. I have no suggestions on how to sell Austro-libertarianism to left-wingers of this variety; they seem like enemies of the human race.

Of course, Professor Long goes on to contrast this evil “aristocratic Left” with the good Left:

There are many, many left-wingers whose primary motivation for their left-wing political stance is the very libertarian impulse to protect people who are being pushed around. These left-wingers look at contemporary society and see an economy dominated by massive, impersonal corporations with enormous and seemingly unaccountable power; they see lower- and middle-income people disempowered in the workplace and struggling to make ends meat; they see institutions and social practices rigged against blacks, women, gays, immigrants, and other oppressed groups-and they turn to government to address these inequities, viewing the democratic state as an institution in principle accountable to the public, and thus able to serve as a bulwark against private power and privilege. Call this variety of left-wingers the anti-privilege Left. And this is the Left we can reach.

Not so fast. Taken together, the two statements quoted above represent a dizzying combination of genuine perspicacity and utter obliviousness. On one hand, Professor Long is one of the very few from what might be called the “cultural hard left” to recognize that there is, indeed, such a thing as an “aristocratic Left.” (Obviously, “aristocratic” is being used here as an adjective or metaphor for the more general category of educated, affluent or wealthy elites.)

One of the more important insights advanced by the “radical right” is the recognition that liberalism is in fact an ideology of the elite. Most hard leftists regard nearly everyone to the right of Leon Trotsky to be an “extreme right-winger” and it is not uncommon to see such people denounce moderate conservatives as “fascists” or “crypto-Nazis.” The publications of the hard left persistently lament the supposed ongoing drift of domestic American politics to the “far right” even though American society continues to become ever more liberal, and the ideas of yesterday’s loony leftists become ever more mainstream and respectable. For example, expressing support for gay marriage, which would have been regarded as insanity during the supposed Golden Age of Decadence of the 1960s and 1970s, is now just another somewhat controversial but still respectable middle-of-the-road, perhaps slightly left-of-center opinion.

Likewise, the election of the first Black president is somehow dismissed by the Left as just a cosmetic feature that hides what a horrid, racist, White supremacist society America really is, even though nothing destroys the reputation and career of a public figure any quicker than accusations racism, no matter how mild or dubious.

Further, Professor Long recognizes that the upper classes and affluent upper-middle classes are hardly consistent or even frequent proponents of ostensibly conservative economic values such as “free markets” or “limited government.” Rather the wealthy and affluent are like every other socioeconomic interest group in that they want state intervention into the economy on their own behalf, not “free enterprise” or “market discipline.” This is a sharp departure from the usual leftist habit of dismissing conservative and libertarian critics of state-managed economies as mere apologists for the plutocratic status quo. But what Professor Long is missing is the insight that perhaps many of those who present themselves as champions of the workers, the poor, minorities, women, gays, immigrants, and on down the list of the officially oppressed might also have less than honest or honorable motivations, and might in fact frequently be charlatans, crooks, scam artists, or aspiring tyrants. Nor does it occur to him that perhaps those “aristocratic leftists” whom he labels as “enemies of the human race,” and who are persistently agitating for repressive gun laws and intrusive economic regulations, might in fact be the same class of folks who are similarly pushing the vast array of attitudes, institutional policies, and bits of legislation that have collectively been given the popular label of “political correctness.”

For it is among this class of upper-middle income and wealthy liberals that Long describes that we typically find the most zealous proponents of affirmative action, amnesty for illegal immigrants, legislated “rights” for the organized gay lobby that in fact abridge the associational, religious, and economic liberties of others, radical feminists who are not downtrodden seamstresses in garment factories but tenured academics or activist attorneys or other professionals, university professors and administrators, public sector bureaucrats who oversee the managerial state, corporate executives who pride themselves on their extensive commitment to “diversity” and “sensitivity,” and so on. Might it not just be that this socioeconomic demographic, those “aristocratic leftists” who are “enemies of the human race,” are in fact the exact same people who are the most zealous proponents of PC fundamentalism? And might they indeed have sinister ulterior motives for assuming such a stance?

This is not to say that many liberals and leftists do not hold the political beliefs that they do out of sincere regard for those whom they consider to be oppressed or downtrodden. But when we see the affluent and influential classes championing things like mass immigration or the suppression of public debate concerning taboo subjects along with all sorts of other pernicious legislation, economic policies, or social practices, perhaps we should ask ourselves why this is the case?

Whenever I have presented my “totalitarian humanism” theory to seemingly sincere liberals, the main difficulty they seem to encounter in comprehending my analysis is their inability to absorb the idea that those who claim to be waging a righteous crusade against racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, et. al. ad nauseam could possibly be motivated by anything any other than a desire to do good and make the world a better place. At worst, I am often told in response, the PC zealots are guilty of mere overreaction to past injustices or excessive exuberance in pursuit of a noble ideal. Indeed, I believe that it is this same mindset that accounts for the otherwise inexplicable phenomena of why Nazism has come to symbolize the ultimate in evil, while Communism has rarely received such a treatment in the history books, and is certainly not regarded in the same manner by intellectual and cultural elites, even though its murderous and genocidal propensities certainly rival that of any of its ideological competitors. Therefore, exposing the destructive proclivities of PC for the tyrannical anti-human ideology that it is becomes one of our most important tasks.

In the early 1990s, a then-recent high school graduate named Alex Jones began hosting a cable-access program in Austin, Texas. By 1996, he had become the host of a local talk show called “The Final Edition” on Austin’s KJFK radio station. This was during the height of the 1990s “patriot” movement, which spawned the notorious militia groups of the time, and Jones’ program became a local voice for causes championed by the movement, such as criticizing the federal government’s massacre of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco in 1993 and opposing supposed plots for a “one-world government” being advanced by global elites at the expense of American sovereignty.

Jones’s antigovernment rhetoric alienated the station’s advertisers, and he was fired from KJFK in 1999. Fortunately for him, his program was picked up by the Genesis Communications Network and is now syndicated through over sixty radio and Internet outlets. Alex Jones likewise maintains two websites, Infowars.com and PrisonPlanet.com, where he disseminates his ideas and promotes his program. He has built his audience of fans into the millions.

The primary significance of Alex Jones is that he is arguably the most popular of any “alternative grassroots radio host” (his own self-description) that offers an authentic right-wing populism and takes a consistently anti-establishment line regardless of which political party is actually in power. That the most well known supposedly “conservative” talk-radio hosts like Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, and Ingraham are simply Republican Party shills and propagandists on behalf of the neoconservatives who provide the GOP’s intellectual leadership is easy enough to ascertain. Alex Jones is miles apart from the official “conservative movement” at both the leadership and rank-and-file levels.

Jones regards American political leaders as front men for shadowy international elites who are identified as hated perpetrators of the “New World Order” with electoral contests between the two major parties simply being an elaborately constructed ruse, the purpose of which is to deflect attention from the real overlords of the global order by creating the divisive distraction of partisan politics. Jones repeatedly and emphatically states that he rejects the conventional Left/Right model of the political spectrum and that not only partisan politics but the mainstream “culture wars” are manufactured by the globalists’ minions as part of their strategy to “divide and conquer” Americans and bring about their enslavement at the hands of the NWO.