Storming the Citadels of Statism
by Ilana Mercer
Hardcore libertarians differentiate between pro-Trump patriots and Black Lives Matter detritus. BLM rioters trashed, looted and leveled their countrymen’s private property, their businesses. Democratic stormtroopers harassed their fellow Americans—meek men and women in eateries, in shopping malls, in the inner sanctum of their homes—sometimes forcing innocents to kneel or recite repulsive, self-incriminating racial catechisms.
These Mao-like cultural revolutionaries descended like locusts on places where their fellow Americans shop and socialize, sadistically threatening, and often visiting, physical harm upon their countrymen, unless they knelt before them like slaves. In contrast, the ragtag men and women of the MAGA movement stormed only the seat of power and corruption that is the State. Yet, despite the fact that “entire cities were burned to the ground” by the Left’s militarized BLM troops, some of the staunchest of conservatives, staffers at Breitbart, have concluded, in error, that “storming the Capitol building” is much worse than “than burning down strip malls.”
Hardcore libertarians, very plainly, think the opposite. Like us or not, the radical, libertarian propertarian—who does not live inside and off the Beltway—will strongly disagree with the contention of the Trump-blaming Breitbarters.
A certain kind of libertarian, the true kind, distinguishes clearly between those who, like BLM, would trash, loot and level private property—the livelihoods and businesses of private citizens—and between those who would storm the plush seats of state power and corruption. For the State is an entity that, by definition, forsakes the legitimate defense of the lives, liberty and property of its citizens. The State’s standard operating procedure is to fleece us without flinching, all the better to fatten its members and, reflexively, to increase their sphere of influence. Libertarians who live by the axiom of non-aggression will always prefer the man who proceeds against the State, governed as it is by force, to the man who destroys private property, rooted as that institution is in peaceful, just, voluntary transactions.
The rock-ribbed libertarian—as opposed to the lite, establishment libertarian—views the State, certainly in its current iteration, as a criminal enterprise. For it operates with force and without the consent of the governed. Think only of the meaning of the 2020 election, whereby 81,283,098 million people, or 51.3% of those who voted, not of the people, get to impose their will on 74,222,958, or 46.8% of the voters, as well as on the millions who didn’t vote. Moreover, and since we are no longer a republic in which central authorities have only limited and delimited powers—all the people in the commonwealth are compelled to do as the Permanent State and the newly minted state dictate.
Government governs without the consent of the governed, for the most, and with the backing of oft-brutal police powers. Which is why, incidentally, Tucker Carlson’s question to a guest on his generally excellent Fox News show, the other day, was so misguided. The young lady’s two small businesses had been bankrupted by her state’s brutal lockdown regimen, which targeted her tiny enterprises, but not the big-box retailers around them. So why was she still paying her taxes, Tucker inquired?
Really? Taxes are not voluntary. The State is not based on the principle of voluntary association. Tucker ought to try to withhold his taxes. Fail to fork over the shakedown funds extracted by the syndicate that is the State—and you’ll find yourself in a cell. Incontestably, your money, as a private individual working in the private economy, comes from the avails of your labor and is 100% yours in natural law. As such, you should be able to withdraw it from an agency that doesn’t serve you—and even harms you—to give to one that does. But you can’t. For that peaceful act of financial secession, the State will deprive you of your liberty.
Expose the Welfare-Warfare Surveillance State in all its depredations—and you’ll find yourself cast out forever, like Julian Assange or Edward Snowden (who, at least, lives free in Russia). “What I saw in the Capitol on January 6,” lamented Never Trumpkin Matt Labash, at the Spectator, “made me physically sick… I couldn’t tell the difference [between the] Red Hats [and Antifa]. They [the Red Hats] were desecrating something they pretend to love.”
Truth be told, to the non-statist libertarian, those “citadels of democracy” mean very little that is good. Loss of life we lament—but the song-and-dance about the trampling of those citadels is overheated.
Our country is not to be equated with our Capitol. Certainly, the cowardice of the garrison city-state that is D.C. is sickening. In particular, the way the political parasites who comprise it are shielding themselves from us, as they deny us the right to protect private property from them and from the evil janissaries of Black Lives Matter.
Ilana Mercer has been writing a weekly, paleolibertarian column since 1999. She’s the author of Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa (2011) & The Trump Revolution: The Donald’s Creative Destruction Deconstructed” (June, 2016). She’s currently on Parler, Gab, YouTube & LinkedIn, but has been banned by Facebook and throttled by Twitter.
Trump was a symbol. He was not up to the job that was wanted and needed. Too many faults of character and competence. The problem was narcissism not nazism. The millions of disaffected and disappointed patriots must get their act together and find more suitable statesmen who can defeat and demolish the Woke Tyranny that is being imposed on the USA. The entire “white west” depends on it.
Biden has been hailed as a “Woke Guy” whom Labour seeks to emulate by the Shadow Secretary for Foreigners, Lisa Nandy, who has endorsed an “inspiring” Labour Party report to transform British armed defence forces into a “gender balanced and ethnically diverse” human security service, including health workers, whose role would be to dampen down violence, instead of protecting the state and its borders; beliefs that Ms Nandy, daughter of an immigrant communist, shares – the “right time” for a new start “with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the US”. – Mail on Sunday, 24.1.21 & Guardian, 20.1.21.