There has been a great deal of hype surrounding Austrian economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s ‘Libertarian and the Alt-Right’ speech that he delivered for his 12th annual Property and Freedom Society conference that took place last month in Bodrum, Turkey. The speech was finally released for the public yesterday, and it packed a serious punch. Eschewing political correctness, Hoppe delivered a brutal excoriation of social justice warriors, saying that it is incumbent upon libertarians to “crush the anti-fascist mob.”
“Public anger must be aroused, and there must be clamoring far and wide for the police to be unleashed and this mob beaten into submission,” Hoppe said, mincing no words in his rebuke of the leftist threat.
After sharing this controversial sentiment, Hoppe rushed to address obvious concerns that more left-leaning libertarians would have regarding compulsory government policing being used to crush leftists.
“Do you also object… that the police arrest murderers or rapists?” Hoppe asked his critics. “Aren’t these legitimate tasks performed also in a libertarian order by private police? And if the police are not allowed to do anything about this mob, isn’t it ok then that the target of these attacks – namely the so-called racist right – should take the task upon itself of giving the social justice warriors a bloody nose?”
The hour long speech featured many highlights that will be sure to resonate through the libertarian community as well as the alt-right. Hoppe listed many pillars on which a realistic libertarian movement can be built, and derided Jeffrey Tucker, a former ally, and the Students for Liberty for embracing leftism and political correctness.
“We must speak out whenever and wherever… against anyone affronting us with the – by now only all too familiar – politically correct drivel and left egalitarian balderdash,” Hoppe said.
I like Hans. But I don’t think that’s profitable. They want to provoke a reaction. The best thing to do is to keep spreading the message of liberty. Most people, if they have an opinion at all, are looking at Antifa as a bunch of loons. There’s no need to engage them.
I feel the same about the the alt-right as well.
I agree with Hoppe that the alt-right has no guiding principles and is defined by what they are against rather than what they are for, and that they have a lot of unlibertarian ideas.
“They want to provoke a reaction.”
I think you’re mistaken. They never expected to provoke a reaction. They didn’t want Gamergate. They didn’t want Trump. They didn’t want the Alt-Right. They thought that they were already dominant enough that they could strongarm the right into submission.
The Leftists have taken over governments in the past which have killed over 100 million people. They need to be fought with everything we have. They have to be physically removed so to speak.
That doesn’t work. If you get to the point where you’re fighting them physically they have already won. The battle is not about who can bring the most force to bear. It’s about whether force will be brought to bear at all.
Their goal is to tear down voluntary civil society and our goal is to build it up. So do it. That’s the way to fight them. Build private alternatives. Talk to your neighbors. Set up a neighborhood watch. Start local charities that help those in need. Start a business providing education or healthcare without government or cronyism.
They feed off the sense that civil society is failing. Go prove them wrong.
” If you get to the point where you’re fighting them physically they have already won. ”
If you win, you lose. If you lose, you win.
”The battle is not about who can bring the most force to bear.”
” It’s about whether force will be brought to bear at all.”
Force will be brought and is brought every minute of the day. I think you’re advocating to surrender in submission and resist no law or force so that it appears to fantasy that ”no force has been brought to bear”
The way to build up voluntary society is to eliminate things that stand in its way and create things that found it. This includes victory by force.
Pacifism is not libertarianism. Pacifism is immoral and suicidal (read about the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands.)
Jason Clouse According to you we have already lost. Just look at Berkeley, if the Right wants to speak out violence is use against them.
Ahren Tuathail We have lost. Or rather, we’ve been losing. It’s not too late to turn it around. But it’s going to require a change in culture. And that’s something that requires distributed action that seems pointless by itself. That’s how the Left got the power they have now: by seemingly futile efforts that gradually changed society.
We have not lost yet.
We already don’t like them, we just don’t like fascists either.
Great video! Dr. Hoppe is right
https://youtu.be/cAhIZu3gl5k
Libertarians are PART of the facist mob.
Says the guy with Fed Cruz on his profile.
Sorry that you don’t have the life experience necessary to see the error of the propaganda you have been taught.
How can a think tank Crush punks?
Delusions of grandeur?
Herman Hoppe just clarified what Paul was talking about in Romans 13. That instead of blindly condemning an occupying armed force that enforces restrains the worst “fellows of the baser sort” (a phrase in Acts about false witnesses against Christians).
Paul used the Roman sword for protection against an enraged Jewish mob in Jerusalem, invoking his right to appeal to Caesar as a Roman citizen.
But remember also, in another epistle, he warned Christians away from trusting in the secular authority.
Like it says in Isaiah, learning is “precept upon precept, line upon line”.
We must first of all see Antifa for what they are – violent fascists. Fascists are a strain of socialism. Antifa mobs are using fascist methods to fight “fascism.” Who are they kidding?
I think it’s entirely appropriate that violent Antifa mobs are met with force whether that force be the police or a response from their victims. Libertarianism is not a pacifist suicide pact. Furthermore Antifa activists should be hit where it hurts – in the pocket book. They should be fired from their jobs whenever they make their SJW presence felt and they should be shunned socially even by family members. Most important of all, Antifa’s base – universities – should be starved of private funding until administrators can grow a spine and restore civilized behavior on campuses.
Hoppe is entirely wrong about private ownership of scarce resources resulting in no physical clashes. International relations is already anarchic and all land can already be said to be privately owned by each State. Unlimited claims to private ownership of land which oppose and deny natural rights to movement and equal access to economic opportunities is the root cause of conflict.
Hoppe is entirely wrong about democracy. Democracy has been an essential part of classical liberalism and libertarianism since the beginning, and is nothing more than a firm in which the residents of territories in which courts and armies operate are the voting shareholders which own them.
Eliminating democracy in favor of an alternate system in which the public no longer holds voting shares would promote rampant rent-seeking, as profit maximizing private courts and armies can increase profits for shareholders by coercively transferring wealth from non-owner residents to owner residents, and any move by a private justice system to suppress political competition to coercively increase profits for shareholders would result in nothing more than the immediate establishment of an authoritarian state.