A Response To A Friend: Rioting & Insurgency Brought To You By China & Criminal Justice Reform
Technology stops treason. The surveillance state is the natural outgrowth of modernity and low trust multiculturalism.
I really enjoy getting letters and I do read them all.
As Thoughts and Adventures grows I’ll continue to release some responses I have to letters here, though slightly edited and without a name. Names tend to distract.
I believe that the first duty of the statesman is to teach so let’s begin our lessons together.
Charles,
Just read your Libertarianism as an op. Your comparison to the Rajneeshi cult is striking. I watched Wild Wild Country. Great documentary. Libertarians would feel right at home. Lots of brainy people and lots of fornication. But no children. During my years in Libertarian Inc. I noticed that libertarians had no clue what to do with children. The topic came up in discussions about the Non-Aggression Principle. Would the NAP allow parents to spank their children? Lots of theory uninformed by any practical experience with their own children. They preferred to dream of realizing human flourishing through legalized drugs, gay marriage and Uber.
I’ve come to believe that Libertarianism (or really Liberalism) as practiced is really about who gets to decide who is enslaved to whom. Everyone wants slaves but no one is so direct as to put it in those words. Will you be enslaved by your passions or by another person? Globalization is that question writ large.
For most of the younger libertarians they really want you to excuse whatever recreational drug use they enjoy as somehow okay, or even not even a drug at all.
For quite a few of them there is a kind of childlike quality you encounter. They really want it all to be true. Just follow the Non-Aggression Principle and away you go! (I should know as I was once one of them.)
To say you are a libertarian is also a way of saying that you’re pro-technology without thinking too hard about the tech community’s excesses — and those excesses continue. I looked upon Uber as I looked upon AirBnb — as efficiency businesses masquerading as tech businesses. Uber’s market cap has more or less confirmed my suspicions. Sure, it beats riding around in a mobbed up taxicab. But it’s not exactly the liberation it promised.
Similarly AirBnb’s effects on housing policy I think have been woefully understudied though a natural experiment did arise during the pandemic. Friends of mine who own startups spend more on Airbnbs than on commercial real estate. If I had my druthers every mall or movie theater (or foreign owned investment property) in a major urban environment would be condemned and turned into affordable housing. No, I don’t believe in housing as an investment. It’s rather obvious that Airbnb has an effect on limiting the long term supply of rental housing in an area. Is it a blow against the mobbish hotels? Possibly but not enough of one.
A lot of libertarians fall into the fetish of anti-racism. They delight in all the ethnic foods on offer and they like low wages because as I said everyone wants slaves.
Let’s be real here: Open borders is another term for human smugglers. We wanted workers; we got people.
As for gay marriage, I confess not to having strong views. I suspected and, I think, was proven right, that gay marriage was really a plot by cynical divorce attorneys looking for a growing market share. I kid, sort of.
Once upon a time I told Peter Thiel that I thought gay marriage was more of a commentary on the overall weakness of marriages. A common refrain was that the gays deserve the right to be miserable just like the rest of us. What a sad commentary on modern marriage!
What religious conservatives should fight for are covenant marriages. The old convention of assigning the children to the man after divorces was, I think, also a good idea so as to deter women from divorcing on a whim.
Sexual liberation has led to a lot of perverse outcomes. It sure seems like we got done a whole lot more when our society was a whole lot less liberated. And so it seems to be with the libertarians. A rather pronounced thing you realize after you leave libertarian circles is how many of the men are degenerates. Matt Yglesias talks about how great it is that DC is densely settled but I think that it’s partly why there are so few children. They need living space.
(A brief Boomer footnote to the Wild Wild Country documentary. Most of the participants in the Rajneeshi cult were Boomers who had been touched by the Jesus Movement of the late Sixties and Early Seventies. By “touched” I mean that that Christian spiritual revival which produced the conversion of Charles Colson also kick started a whole host of sects and cults which fed off that spiritual energy. The Moonies were one group. Rajneeshi is another. The Moonies are still around because they got married and had children. The Jesus Movement Boomers invented home schooling and large families. There are lots of things to say about my generation, the Boomers. But those Evangelical converts powered up home schooling and had kids.)
The future belongs to those who have kids. If I have any hope for the future it’s that so many homeschooling families are realizing its cheaper by the dozen.
I had heard that the Kochs did business with the Soviets in the 20’s and 30’s. I guess Armand Hammer is not the only American businessman who got an injection from the Joseph Stalin Venture Fund. Maybe the Reds paid the Kochs with the money that Hammer got from selling looted art. The Soviets were active across a wide range of fields to acquire technology. In his On a Field of Red: The Communist International and the Coming of WWII (1981), Anthony Brown describes how the Kremlin sent teams of researchers to the Patent Office in DC to copy and translate patents. But stealing patents seems to be normal interstate warfare. While working on a research project concerning the German atomic bomb, I came across a large collection of German patents seized after WWII. Instructions from Washington to look for specific weapons and technologies. The Germans had the best stuff, I guess.
I’m more or less of the view that the Germans had better technology but weaker deviousness. They got out indicated by the Special Operations Executive, a group of a few daring Brits and their allies who understand that the real fight was irregular and psychological.
There’s this rather masterly 1984 documentary about the efforts of the British irregulars.
In my estimation we need another SOE when it comes to dealing with Chinese and Russian influence today. That fight will be more technological, more blocking and tackling.
Think a more pronounced Bellingcat.
Let me turn to another topic. Over the weekend, a mentee sent me two audio links. One to Richard Spencer’s reaction to the indictment of Ian Rhodes for sedition and the second to your Youtube interview on January 6th with Zev Shalev. Whatever you want to say about Spencer’s judgement, he can be a keen analyst. He says that the sedition charge is just one of many to come. The FBI has been carefully working on these charges for a year in order to have a solid case to bring to court. He thinks Nick Fuentes is probably next. I think that Spencer is right.
I know Nick Fuentes only slightly — we both attended a wedding in Prague of a friend and I have spoken exactly twice on the phone — and, as you know, Richard Spencer and I were friends until he started moving in weirder circles. I wonder how serious a friendship it actually was but only in hindsight. Back when I drank a lot I had a lot of “friends” that I find hard to justify in soberer circumstances. That famous photo of me and Richard at the Cleveland convention occurred when I was very drunk.
To be candid Richard’s behavior at #HailGate and Charlottesville freaked me out. I believe that Charlottesville in particular was really a fight between the Russians and the Israelis. That it took place so close to the University of Virginia — where we train a number of our intelligence officers — wasn’t coincidental. In much the same The Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely—the anti-white Jewish reporter I unmasked as a fraud — was doing the bidding of reducing the good old boys’ network that runs much of our government, so too were the Russians trying to send the message that they could cause disruptions at Thomas Jefferson’s college.
I counseled both Fuentes and Spencer to be careful around the Russian influence campaigns which I suspect had both men in their sights. (The Russians love turning true believing Americans into their puppets.)
But stylistically Richard and I have a different way of behaving. I believe in noblesse oblige and he just doesn’t. Richard is more than a tad arrogant — what was the deal with the Russian now ex wife anyway? I confess to finding Fuentes’s Christian nationalism more than a little strange. But then so much of Middle Western people’s behavior eludes me.
No, I think the January 6 committee is really a pretext to round up all the people who already have mob and/or foreign intelligence ties, an exercise I fully support.
Of course I believe in leniency and compassion where warranted. I could even be persuaded to support an amnesty, or a truth and reconciliation for the repentant.
But there ought to be zero tolerance for fighting the police.
It’s a hard job that has gotten a lot harder in recent years and that’s in no small part to the “work” of activists like DeRay McKesson, who used his friendship with Twitter execs to ban me for life from Twitter. I don’t think that erstwhile Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was kidding when he said that “riots” was Twitter’s business model. His more recent foray into NFTs reveals a lot.
We forget how much the Black Panthers were financially backed by the Communist Chinese. In 1990 the Chinese economy was 1/75th that of the US economy so there wasn’t much they could really do but now that they are a peer competitor with the United States and growing more powerful by the day we ought to be concerned.
It’s my contention that a lot of the rioting that took place in 2020 was in fact about shaking down the commercial real estate owners around Donald J. Trump.
Nor do I think it was totally a tragedy when multinational companies which pushed out middle class Americans saw their property burn. Perhaps this is the natural state of affairs.
My friend continues:
I then listened to your hour long chat with Zev about the efforts of foreign intelligence services to destabilize the US.
And I got worried.
I see the following scenario. The FBI will file sedition charges against an ever-rising number of conservative activists, with the ultimate aim of indicting Trump and his associates. The blood lust of the House January 6th Committee certainly points in that direction.
If we see that happen, and this results in convictions and long prison sentences, terrorism will follow.
For many conservatives, it is bad enough to see Capital Hill trespassers get four years in prison while the Antifa/BLM rioters and arsonists were never prosecuted. Seeing leaders like Fuentes railroaded into prison will be too much. The first step will be lone wolves conducting bombings and assassinations. A lot of them will feel like they have nothing to lose. Remember, this nation has several million Iraq and Afghanistan vets who have combat experience. The veterans of the trenches formed Frei Korps who put down the Communist uprisings in Germany in 1919.
The reason so few #BlackLivesMatter rioters were caught is that there was a lack of attention on catching them. There was no “sedition hunter” equivalent on the American right. Indeed many of President Trump’s own advisors — Brooke Rollins and Ja'Ron Smith — were actually pro-rioter!
And many of the criminal justice reformers are in point of fact actual criminals. (There’s a weird relationship between white collar criminals and violent crime.) Fun facts: more criminal activity that disproportionately affects black Africans is at the state level and therefore no federal legislation would have affected it.
Now who had a direct benefit in pushing for nonviolent criminals to be barred from federal prison?
The Antifa-BLM rioters were far more organized — one might even say “trained” — and they didn’t strike the heart of the American empire — the US Capitol.
Still, facial recognition has been used to identify some of the more menacing #BLM rioters. I suspect we will see far more uses of technology to keep the country going.
I am for building not burning. And I am for peaceful protests. No but seriously.
This morning my wife showed me a picture from her summer working at the Butlin Holiday Camp in Wales in 1968. The photo showed several young people from Northern Ireland, all Catholics. She noted that the whole summer they talked of their growing desire to fight. We know what happened. After the peaceful “civil rights movement” in Ulster was drowned by Bloody Sunday in 1972, the insurgency began. It lasted 26 years.
A year ago, I decided to read up on the Spanish Civil War after seeing a column asserting that the US is Spain in 1935. I read through about ten books, including Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Peter Kemp’s Mine were of Troubles (A Cambridge law grad who fought on the Nationalist side). Many parallels don’t apply. But a couple really do.
Both Kemp and Orwell were (of course) British spies.
Someday I may well write up all I know on Orwell’s ties to British intelligence but for now Orwell’s List gives a pretty clear indication.
Kemp was a member in good standing of the aforementioned SOE.
The Left and the Right in Spain believed that the establishment of the Republic in 1931 would allow both sides to protect their interests. By 1936, neither side believed this. Spontaneous violence between the two factions in the streets of Spain became an ongoing feature of the first half of 1936. The initial coup declared in July of 1936 was to restore order to the streets and end this violence. Instead, the move of the Nationalist forces sparked six months of gruesome slaughter. Neighbor against neighbor.
The Republican/Communist/Anarchist forces stopped the Nationalists in front of Madrid and Barcelona with Soviet help, ending the hopes of a quick finish to the war. It also allowed the Socialists and Anarchists in the two respective cities to carry through their “revolutions”, such as the nationalization of businesses and utter destruction of the Catholic Church. Faced with a stalemate at Madrid, Franco decided to march through the rest of Spain, like a chess board, exterminating the Left as he went. In March of 1939 Madrid and Barcelona fell. It would not be an exaggeration to say that every Republican who cheered the “revolutionary” measures of 1936 and 1937, was either dead, in prison or in exile by the summer of 1939.
Crucial to both sides was foreign intervention. The Luftwaffe transported the battle hardened Army of Africa from Spanish Morocco to Spain where it sliced through the Republican forces like a hot knife through butter. The Germans and Italians both sent expeditionary forces. The Germans learned the effectiveness of the 88’s in Spain. The Republic called on Soviet Russia which sent arms and advisors. Soviet NKVD agents ran the intelligence services and killed anyone they thought disloyal. (George Smiley’s nemesis, Karla, got his start running spy rings during the Spanish Civil War) The Communist International provided thousands of volunteers from around Europe and the US. The Abraham Lincoln brigade being one part of the Communist foreign legion.
The foreign intervention ultimately made the Nationalist victory possible but also prolonged the war. The coup intended to restore order turned into total war.
Where I am going with this?
If the Biden DOJ and FBI pursue a large number of Conservative activists for sedition, and send them to prison, it will produce terrorism.
And who will get involved to help turn it into an insurgency?
You told us. The Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis.
Their help would turn the lone wolves into an insurgency. Training, arms, logistics and organization. The KGB could provide all of that.
I suspect that the Deep State will react with ferocity. Interestingly, the Norwegians produced a TV series called “Occupation” in which the Norwegian government has to accept the occupation of the country by the Russians to get the oil and gas production revived. The question posed is how would the Norwegians react? As soyboys? Or Vikings. The inner Viking comes out and an insurgency kicks in. Forced by the Russians, the Norwegian government responds with bloody force.
I’ll be sure to take a gander at that.
I recall a similar movie a few years back about Australian teens confronting a Chinese invasion à la Red Dawn fashion. I loved every bit of it.
These are the fantasies, though, of weak powers with resources.
The Russians penetrated the Norwegian oil sector long ago and the Australians remain the biggest provider of natural resources to the Chinese.
Remember that the German RAF consisted of about 50 hard core members willing to use violence. They had an estimated 1000 “Sympathisanten” who would provide a safe house, a car, and money. This small group gave the German authorities fits through the 1970’s.
The IRA could conduct a successful insurgency (they got a favorable political settlement in 1998) because the whole Catholic population of Northern Ireland was their lake to swim in. They essentially fought he British Army and Intelligence Services to a draw.
What about an insurgency which could count on the sympathies of millions of people?
I am afraid that if the Biden administration pushes this too far, they will provoke millions in Red State America into supporting the insurgency. And then it will get very, very nasty, very quickly.
I know that you have people in the Biden administration who listen to you. They need to know that this can easily get out of hand.
There are always conflicts that one can project onto the American experience but I find myself more or less unable to imagine an American civil war 2.0.
The truth is that a lot of Americans will bellyache and bitch and moan but in the main we’ve never had it so good. That is not to mean that there aren’t winners and losers from the current state of affairs. Yes, I do sense a diminishing that’s taken place for much of our white middle class, particularly in the Midwest and South. And living standards are declining among the white population.
The solution, it seems to me, is to punish China for the harms it inflicts on America by seizing and liquidating their assets.
We have always been at war with ourselves. Ours is a big unhappy family that needs external enemies and threats to hold itself together. Yes, it’s going to be somewhat painful for Americans going from a bipolar to a unipolar to a tripolar world (AUKUS vs. China vs. Russia) I’m betting it’ll kick off a kind of technological reshaping where we ask whether or not the technology companies are good for us.
There’s something about the American mind that requires others to struggle against.
I recall reading in Sam Huntington’s Who Are We — Yeltsin saying that he had harmed the US by ridding it of an enemy.
I think of history as a great teacher but not as too much of a predictor. That old saw of it rhyming not repeating is basically right. I’m more focused on the biographical details of the great families. What is a race but an extension of a family?
We won’t see a civil war simply because the technological capabilities of the USA are really top notch and getting stronger all the while.
Take it from this Swamp rat: we do tech really well and we are getting better all the time, especially as the threats appear more and more real. And there’s a lot of capital around the world that wants to come to America and invest in those technical developments if only to avoid being looted in the home country.
We live in an empire and the resources flow to the metropole, which uses technology to keep everyone honest. An unruly people objects to cameras everywhere but that’s a cope. It’s done. The surveillance state is everywhere.
The NSA, which penetrates all communications on the planet, makes organizing a real insurgency quite impossible. The New York Times recently reported that the FBI had a copy of NSO Group’s Pegasus. Don’t you think they’ll turn it on Americans if ever there were a domestic threat?
How would an insurgency really work in a world of facial recognition? Of satellite technology? Of DNA surveillance? Of drone technology? I’m open minded but it’s hard to imagine how it would go down. Most Americans, I think, want to stick it out.
Libertarians often argue that the surveillance state limits their freedom but I don’t think that’s really true. The state will always use its technology to preserve itself. I tend to believe that the great powers more or less don’t change by revolution but by evolution and they more or less all wind up looking alike over time.
My concern is that the country will instead be hollowed out. There will be a great emisseration. I’d like to see the American government direct more resources to those parts of the country where housing is cheaper and more conducive to family formation. An industrial policy may well be essential. The French call it dirigiste.
We will see the Russians pick the side of the rednecks while the Chinese will back Black Lives Matters. You can already see the formation of this.
The Chinese will encourage us to do opioids, our blacks to riot, and die while the Russians will want us to get into shape so that we can join them in fighting the Chinese.
Small wonder then that I suspect we will partner with Russia. They want us in fighting shape.
"The Chinese will encourage us to do opioids." I live in Oklahoma, where there is currently a massive amount of Chinese setting up marijuana farms. In fact most growers are not American, but the vast majority of foreigners are Chinese. There has to be something to this.