Fake Libertarians, Fake Leftists, and Real Fascists

The day after Elon Musk’s infamous use of the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute in an Inauguration Day speech, Thomas Lecaque — a professor of history specializing in religious violence — pointedly observed: “Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. There isn’t a discussion, there aren’t interpretations, this isn’t a controversy, there are people lying about it and people telling the truth.” Those arguing that he didn’t, he continued, “are doing so in bad faith.” 

One of the bad faith actors lying about it, predictably, is Reason Magazine’s Liz Wolfe.  

Elon Musk is a lot of things, but Nazi ain’t one of them. . . . Elon Musk spoke and made some sort of bombastic gesture, saying “My heart goes out to you” and “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured,” noting that some elections don’t really matter very much but that this one did.

Naturally, people are losing their fucking minds over this. . . . 

“Did Elon Musk Seriously Just Do a Nazi Salute at Trump’s Inauguration?” asks The New Republic. Um, no. He didn’t. And it’s kind of insane that the media appears to be getting ready to do this whole thing again—the one where Trump, and any Trump affiliate, gets called a Nazi over and over again. Musk was kind of just gesticulating wildly the whole time, as he does when he gets excited. And, look, . . . you’re fooling yourself if you think Musk’s pattern of behavior is consistent with that of a Nazi; ethnonationalism ain’t his thing, nor is government suppression of speech, nor is rounding up political enemies and putting them in camps. Calm the hell down.

Let’s take a look at the actual record. Musk has long been obsessed with falling birthrates and the “white genocide” trope (e.g., “pushing for genocide of white people in South Africa”; people attacking Robert E. Lee statue “absolutely want your extinction”), accusing the Biden administration of facilitating illegal immigration because they “see them as future voters,” etc. This trend culminated in his explicit endorsement of Great Replacement theory. Jason Wilson summarizes this theory at The Guardian:

The “great replacement” is a racist conspiracy narrative that falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries. In many versions – such as those rehearsed in the manifestos of mass shooters in Christchurch, New Zealand; El Paso, Texas; and Buffalo, New York – the purported replacement is being coordinated by Jewish people.

To a tweet which accused “Jewish communities” of “pushing… dialectical hatred against whites” and supporting “hordes of minorities… flooding their countries,” Musk replied: “You have said the actual truth.” Incidentally, the tweet shows that Musk saw it because it was retweeted by neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

Musk also tweeted:

The ADL unjustly attacks the majority of the West, despite the majority of the West supporting the Jewish people and Israel. 

This is because they cannot, by their own tenets, criticize the minority groups who are their primary threat.

The following day, Musk involved himself in a sort of club sandwich of vile right-wing tweets starting with Jack Posobiec, who tweeted “White people are the only ones who are supposed to hate their own race in order to be considered good people.” Posobiec, in turn, was quote-tweeted by Eva Vlaardingerbroek — who proudly owns the label “shieldmaiden of the far right” in her Twitter bio — with the added comment “Everyone is allowed to be proud of their race, except for white people, because we’ve been brainwashed into believing that our history was somehow “worse” than that of other races.” Musk completed it by liking her quote-tweet.

Musk has also long been fond of sharing memes from the Venn overlap of far-right, conspiratorial, and antisemitic tropes. For example he shared the quote — falsely attributed to Voltaire, but actually from neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom — “To find out who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize” (the intended answer, obviously, being “the Jews”). He’s carried water for neo-Nazis, for example suspending the accounts of anyone who tweeted the real name — Hans Kristian Graebener — of the cartoonist responsible for “Stonetoss.”

More recently, Musk briefly adopted a Groyper avatar for his Twitter account and the handle “Kekius Maximus” (both “Groyper” and “kek” being symbols associated with alt right trolls), and repeatedly came out in strong support of the neo-Nazi AfD in Germany (e.g. “only the AfD can save Germany”).

In short, since Elon Musk started down the far-right rabbit hole a few years ago, his mind and conversation has been a mushy stew of nothing but far-right, Nazi, and Nazi-adjacent tropes like white genocide and Great Replacement, and his main activities on Twitter have been palling around with Posobiec, Cernovich, Ian Miles Cheong & Co and replying “concerning!” to their tweets. As for that so-called “bombastic gesture” of his — which he performed twice — it couldn’t have been a more exact copy of Hitler’s performance of the same gesture if he’d practiced in front of a mirror for hours. 

In other words, Liz, nobody believes you — not even you. You know you’re lying, and you know we know it. Don’t piss down our legs and tell us it’s raining.

I said earlier that Wolfe’s comment was predictable, because all this is nothing new either for her or for Reason. Wolfe herself a year ago referred to outgoing Harvard President Claudine Gay as an “affirmative action hire” — more of a racist bullhorn than dogwhistle. 

Since Trump’s election to his first term in 2016, Reason has mostly minimized Trump’s authoritarianism and has devoted more energy to dismissing and patronizing people for their fears than reporting on Trump himself. As Radley Balko eloquently stated it immediately after the 2016 election:

You know I love you, @reason, but I’m not getting your homepage right now. Lots of mocking the left, lecturing people who are scared and touting positives about Trump’s election. But just one article that I can see warning about the threat he poses. Libertarians should be directing energy at limiting power right now. Others who fear Trump should be allies, not targets of derision.

Following the 2020 election, Reason fired writer Shikha Sood Dalmia for — in the words of Andrew Kirell at Daily Beast — “speaking out too loudly and too often against President Donald Trump.” Dalmia herself, in a Facebook post, related:

My views, I was told, had become too out-of-step with those of the organization. Defending my work to donors and stakeholders had evidently made me too much of a liability. . . . I had a staunch and uncompromising anti-Trump voice calling out his authoritarian tendencies unambiguously. That this made many libertarians uncomfortable raises all kinds of interesting questions about the state of the liberty movement. 

Even with a far-right authoritarian in the White House, the supposed libertarian magazine devoted most of its ire to the alleged threats from “cancel culture” and “woke mobs,” as evidenced by the front-and-center placement of Robby Soave and his culture war stories. As Kirell noted:

The columnist’s ouster comes as the magazine has taken heat from some libertarians and former employees . . . for what they perceive to be the magazine’s peculiar Trump-era positioning: not overtly pro-Trump by any stretch, but apparently more focused on belittling, dismissing, or ignoring the left’s concerns about the president’s autocratic impulses rather than on actively repudiating his abusive governance — instead seeming to reserve its most unequivocal condemnations for campus PC and cancel-culture gripes.

Balko himself returned to the subject in December 2020, in the immediate context of Dalmia’s firing and Trump’s all-out war to delegitimize the results of the election.

So shortly after the 2016 election, I pointed out how odd it was that the Reason homepage was dominated by stories either mocking and ridiculing the left for being fearful of what was to come, or articles about how Trump might actually be good for libertarians.

Now, in 2020, we have one party so upset about the election, they’re openly fomenting a crisis of democracy. Here’s the Reason homepage today. There’s one article about all of that. There’s a hell of a lot more about the threat posed by Joe Biden. And more ridiculing the left.

. . . And I’ll add that there are people there who have sufficiently grasped the threat the last four years, despite the general editorial direction of the magazine. But it really underscores the disappointment I’ve had with my fellow libertarians in general in the Trump era. We’re supposed to be the alarmists. Proudly! We’re supposed to [be] the ones who overreact when government overreaches…. I mean, it’s still bizarre to me that the philosophy that wants to abolish the FBI, CIA, DEA, BATF, and DHS (among others) generally only had scorn for “defund the police.” The police are never going to be abolished. Yet instead of embracing the momentum, forging alliances, and converting it into useful reform, many libertarians belittled the activists pushing “defund” as impractical, radical, pie-in-the-sky. We are supposed to be radical, impractical, pie-in-the-sky!

A big part of this is that many libertarians still see the left as a bigger threat than the right. I’m baffled by this given the last four years, and what’s happening right now. With the exception I guess of regulation and (sort of) taxes, Trumpism has devoured all the areas in which libertarians are supposed to have common ground with the right.

Part of it is also probably stems from the fact that libertarians disdain politics and Sorkinesque visions of government…. But we do need to acknowledge that simply choosing to ignore politics comes from a position of — dare I say it — privilege. If you’re DACA, or have family who is undocumented, or have lived here for 20 years under TPS, you can’t just “live an apolitical life.” We seem to get this when it’s a small business owner worried about Biden’s regulatory policy. We seem far less able to empathize with people protesting racism in policing, or ICE abuses, or CBP brutality. This administration wants to zero out refugee intake, unleash the military on protesters, and has openly said any election Trump doesn’t win is fraudulent. . . . Yet I’ve had Trump supporting libertarians — prominent ones — tell me over the last two years the real threat to liberty right now is Antifa, or a Black Lives Matter leader who once said she’s a Marxist.

As Balko said in a comment to Daily Beast, the “libertarian” magazine’s previous stances against censorship were “hard to square with firing one of their own writers for being overly critical of the most powerful man on the planet.” It was also hard to square, Kirell added, with Reason’s whining about “woke scolds” firing the NYT opinion editor for platforming Tom Cotton’s call to use federal troops to suppress Black Lives Matter protests. Meanwhile, Reason’s golden boy Robby Soave — apparently representing what donors prefer to Shikha Dalmia — is mocking allegations of Musk’s Nazi salute and dismissing those concerned with right-wing power grabs as “BlueAnon.” Because, you know, the real threat to our freedoms is college professors saying “Latinx” and the Klan being banned from campuses. If I seem to be having a hard time keeping my contempt for these people from coming through, it’s because I genuinely despise them.

Reason’s rightward drift is itself part of a broader phenomenon, which has worsened since the rise of the paleolibertarian movement and Hoppeanism in the 90s, and culminated in the takeover of the Libertarian Party by the far-right “Mises Caucus” (the Libertarian National Committee is chaired by Angela McArdle, who has — among many other things — paraphrased the 14 words and referred to Holocaust deniers as “fellow truth seekers”). The Hoppeo-fascist ruling circle McArdle represents includes clowns like Jeremy Kauffman, Joshua Smith (who called for the repeal of the 13th and 19th amendment) and the Mises-affiliated Libertarian Party of New Hampshire (which tweeted that anyone celebrating Juneteenth should be deported, and accused Rolling Stone of being part of “the Cathedral” for denouncing Eric Clapton’s white nationalism and anti-vaxx batshittery).

And, to be clear, the problem is not just with right-wing libertarians abandoning the primary libertarian duty of denouncing and resisting the authoritarian state. There is also a serious problem of those on the so-called left who devote more energy to fighting liberals and Democrats than fighting actual fascists, and in some cases actually seek common ground with fascists while denouncing the center-left as enemy number one. There is an entire Dirtbag Left subculture, made up of people like Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, and Matt Taibbi, who see “shitlibs” as their primary enemy and repeat right-wing talking points like “Russiagate was a big nothingburger” or “The Jan. 6 riots were just rowdy tourists” in order to own those same libs. Zeeshan Aleem’s contrast, in the previous link, of “Dore’s eagerness to dismiss the squad as sellouts with his charitable attitude to the right” exemplifies the entire subculture. Despite occasional lip-service to “both sides” being equally bad, their response to anyone who doesn’t criticize Democrats over Trump in at least a 10-1 ratio is to accuse them of “TDS.” Further “left” — if you want to call it that — are tankies, campists, and Grayzone wankers, whose border with outright Nazbols and Duginists is, at best, blurry. They seem to be doing a speed run from Stalin’s Third Period to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

In a time of resurgence by far-right white nationalists and billionaire kleptocrats, and their attempt to impose authoritarian rule, the first duty of libertarians and leftists — if they are at all worthy of either name — is to resist. Instead, far too many are cheering on the authoritarians and doing their best to impede the resistance.

The Center for a Stateless Society (www.c4ss.org) is a media center working to build awareness of the market anarchist alternative