This editorial is a response to a particular series of claims and question put forth by StyxhexenHammer666 during a recent debate about ethno-nationalism with Greg Johnson on Tara McCarthy's YouTube channel.
Before I deconstruct it, here it is in its entirety:
"(Revoking the citizenship of immigrants) would be an issue because it destroys the same civic structure you're utilizing in order to actually revoke those rights. What you're saying is that if those rights that have been granted are maleable... That sets a legal precedent under the system we use here that would set a precedent for being able to remove that from any group of people, which means that a future government at some decadent later date could do the same thing to people like you or I. I don't think that that's a great idea. If you wanted to use incentives... if you wanted to do... basically, an Abraham Lincoln and say, "oh, well we're gonna give people money, and you know, we'll buy them land over in Liberia or something", which was the original idea a la the slave era, and almost no one realizes Abraham Lincoln was a proponent of that. As long as it's voluntary and non-abusive, go ahead and do whatever you want. Throw money at the problem and see what happens. (laughs) The problem is, if you're removing people's rights, the precedent that is sets is basically, "hey, the state is enabled to do this!". Now, it may to that on just a racial basis and you might not care at first, but it can do it on a different basis thereafter. It could do it, you know... left-wingers could come to power in a fiscal sense and seize control and say, "okay, well now we're going to start deporting this group of people that we feel to be unproductive. We're going to begin removing these...", and and... How do you address the issue? This is the probably other big part of it. How do you address the issue of their land and their businesses, things of that nature? And again, what about people whose families, in a close sense, are of mixed race? What then do you do? You say, well for older people, it may not be a problem. Well, that's fine, but what if... again, a kid has a black parent and a white parent? What exactly.. what protocol are you going to put into place to make sure that that family is mar... is there going to be some special, like immigrant classification for non-citiz.. for non-voting citizens of mixed race awaiting the death of one or both parents, after which you have like some weird DACA? Some deferred action? And then you speak about the Spanish-speaking world. Yes, of course, there.. and you'd be dishonest not to admit this.. there are huge problems in Latin America. I ascribe them mainly to leftist policies because communism is a lie. You ascribe it, I guess, to some racial scheme even though Argentina is at this point whiter than some European nations, arguably. What about white Mexicans? What about, again, what about Argentinians or someone from Chile who's completely white? The fact that they speak a different language, if that matters, that's a civic judgment that you're making. That's not a ethno-nationalistic judgment. Again, just showing, the only way you can even bring about that ethno-nationalistic state is with a civic structure. It requires a civic understanding and can be brought about with a civic understanding through closing the border, through differential immigration policies. I think, we don't disagree on the relative virtue of that so much as the relative virtue of abusing people. As a libertarian, I can't support rescinding people's rights. I can't support forcing them out of their home at gunpoint. I can't support rescinding their holdings, their property, or sending them off to some place they don't, you know, know anything about. It's like... some people... they don't even make the connection of, "ohhh well we'll create a bla... an African-American ethno-state." They just want to send black African Americans back to Africa who've never been to Africa most of the time. And that state itself has problems. It's going to be unequal. How do you solve all of these problems? And I would point out, in maybe more, you would consider this, I guess, to be maybe optimistic, but such policies have already begun that you're speaking of, as of last year. Which is, if you look at the story of the 200 thousand people from El Salvadore that are going to have to go back to their home country, generally. Uhh... Many people have been deported. The wall, the basis of the wall, at least, has been now paid for, although.. now Trump has to negotiate for more. We already have an increasing degree of protection. I think of the reigning culture as it is. The problem is more ideological than it is pragmatic and physical, which is that you've got a bunch of social Marxists that are constantly trying to brow beat people into feeling bad about their race or appreciating their race, and they only do it to people if they happen to be white. That is inequality. And that breaks the NAP. And it's part of the civic structure that has become degraded, and that's the fundamental central problem that I myself identify. I don't think you need identitarianism at all. It doesn't even need to exist. All you need is populism. You need people to be treated fairly and they'll fall into order on their own because I believe thathumans, generally speaking, are generally capable of doing so. I mean... we've seen it throughout history."
Totally not filibustering, right? Styx justifies each of his claims by appealing to "libertarianism", but I'm going to unpack them one at a time and criticize them using libertarian theory to show that they fail by their own standard -- something that wouldn't have been possible for Greg or anyone else to do in real time, as was undoubtedly Styx's intention.
Let's begin.
"(Revoking the citizenship of first and second generation immigrants) would be an issue because it destroys the same civic structure you're utilizing in order to actually revoke those rights."
First of all, this is a tautology. If the civic structure underlying government is what protects against the violation of rights, government acts which violate rights would be prima facie evidence that that civic structure already collapsed. Second, "civic structure" is a reification fallacy. When Styx talks about a "civic structure", he's referring to attitudes about what the government should be allowed to get away with. If the government is able to get away with deporting non-whites, it's because people are already to the point that they are willing to tolerate it -- usually because the consequence of not doing so is EVEN MORE GOVERNMENT ABUSE OF INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS, especially given the voting habits of non-white demographics.
All governments are predicated on violations of individual rights. Zimbabwe didn't collapse because of an internal contradiction in state policy or because of the precedent that was set by killing, disenfranchising, and exiling Rhodesians; it collapsed because of the ABSENCE of Rhodesians, who were the most adept at farming and also the last bulwark against socialist central banking policies. It collapsed because the cargo cult mentality of the Zimbabweans wasn't enough to replicate the success of the Rhodesians. In reality, people have their citizenship revoked all the time. People get deported all the time. Deportations and the termination of citizenship alone are not enough to destroy the civic structure of a society and anyone who insists otherwise is just being hyperbolic and dramatic.
Further, there is no such thing as a libertarian right to citizenship. The scope of libertarianism is limited to avoiding and settling property disputes. Citizenship denotes a relationship between an individual and the state whereby the individual trades allegiance for protection, the provision of which is funded with the expropriated money of net taxpayers. There can be no such thing as a libertarian right to something that was funded by someone else's stolen money, except in cases of restitution. No one who isn't a net taxpayer has a rightful claim to any of the services provided by the government, nor do they have a rightful claim to any of the land or resources controlled by the government. Provoking a conflict through an act of taxation in order to avoid a conflict would be a performative contradiction, and extending "civil liberties" to anyone at the expense of taxpayers constitutes a crime against the taxpayer. There's no reason latecomers should be afforded rights if the cost of protecting them increases the degree to which the rights of domestic citizens are violated.
You're not upholding civil rights by extending them to people who reject them at the expense of their victims, or by extending them to net beneficiaries of taxation at the expense of net victims. And before you ask -- yes, I'd like to deport white welfare recipients, too.
"What you're saying is that if those rights that have been granted are malleable... That sets a legal precedent under the system we use here that would set a precedent for being able to remove that from any group of people, which means that a future government at some decadent later date could do the same thing to people like you or I. I don't think that that's a great idea."
What world does Styx live in? This is already a legal and historical precedent. If the "rights" government lets us keep weren't malleable, you'd have a recreational nuke by now. I don't have to wait for some "decadent later date" to get physically removed by the government and have my rights revoked. All I have to do is stop paying the IRS. The very existence of the state established the precedent that Styx is apparently oh-so-worried about. A state is a tax-funded territorial monopoly on ultimate decision making beyond which there is no appeal -- even with regard to conflicts involving itself. Such an organization necessarily violates the rights of individuals by definition because there is no capacity to object to taxation or the state's monopoly control of territorial decision making. If Styx wanted to avoid that precedent, it's too late. If he wants to go back before that precedent was set, he should probably be making Hoppean arguments instead of self-contradictory Lockean ones.
"If you wanted to use incentives... if you wanted to do... basically, an Abraham Lincoln and say, "oh, well we're gonna give people money, and you know, we'll buy them land over in Liberia or something", which was the original idea a la the slave era, and almost no one realizes Abraham Lincoln was a proponent of that. As long as it's voluntary and non-abusive, go ahead and do whatever you want. Throw money at the problem and see what happens. (laughs)"
What? Why should taxpayers be forced to fund a country for people who are already net recipients of taxation? Further, how could such a thing ever be voluntary if it is funded through taxation? How could it be voluntary when the consequence of not deporting them is increased taxation? We're talking about state policy. If you want for something to be 100% voluntary, you need to remove yourself from conversations about the state because that's not how the state works.
"The problem is, if you're removing people's rights, the precedent that is sets is basically, "hey, the state is enabled to do this!". Now, it may to that on just a racial basis and you might not care at first, but it can do it on a different basis thereafter."
He already tried to make this point and failed miserably. The government already discriminates against people on several basis other than race -- net income, property value, and gender, for example. Don't want to pay your taxes? We all know how you'll end up if you push it far enough: in a jail without a scrap to your name.
"It could do it, you know... left-wingers could come to power in a fiscal sense and seize control and say, "okay, well now we're going to start deporting this group of people that we feel to be unproductive. We're going to begin removing these...", and and... How do you address the issue?"
So... the status quo? The left controls the central banks of the world and most of the deep state. The left defines productivity as the amount of taxes paid by right-wingers. When you don't pay, they call you a drain on society, take your house, and throw you in a cage. Welcome to the world, my son. We're having these conversations specifically to address this issue because our failure to do so will result in us being driven from the lands our families conquered and settled, if the current trajectory of government growth is any indication. We need to slow said growth, and we can't do that by allowing any third world socialist, theocrat, or negroid who makes it across the border to stay and have suffrage.
"This is the probably other big part of it. How do you address the issue of their land and their businesses, things of that nature?"
How do the leftists who control the state address the issue when we don't pay the taxes they demand of us? We aren't in a struggle between the ideal and a minor inconvenience. If we don't restore America to its original demographic distribution, we are going to continue having a totalitarian central state, and it's going to get even worse.
"And again, what about people whose families, in a close sense, are of mixed race? What then do you do? You say, well for older people, it may not be a problem. Well, that's fine, but what if... again, a kid has a black parent and a white parent"
What about them? The practical challenges of ethno-homogeneity aren't an argument against it. People tend to self-segregate by race when the government isn't doing dumb shit like paying Mexicans to cross the border into Texas or dumping Somalis on New England. You could appeal to incredulity all day long but it wouldn't be an argument. These challenges can easily be overcome through secession and the incentivization of outbound migration, as has happened several times throughout history. If all else fails, I don't have a problem with deportations either given that the affected parties don't have a problem with taxing my children to pay the costs associated with their presence in my community.
"What exactly.. what protocol are you going to put into place to make sure that that family is mar... is there going to be some special, like immigrant classification for non-citiz.. for non-voting citizens of mixed race awaiting the death of one or both parents, after which you have like some weird DACA? Some deferred action?"
I find this line of questioning too laughable to even take seriously. He's literally just spitballing appeals to incredulity for the sake of being skeptical, as evidenced by the fact that he's not even stringing together proper sentences at this point. He knows that these people will either secede, get paid to leave, or get deported. These incredulous objections are bordering on the edge of childish.
"And then you speak about the Spanish-speaking world. Yes, of course, there.. and you'd be dishonest not to admit this.. there are huge problems in Latin America. I ascribe them mainly to leftist policies because communism is a lie. You ascribe it, I guess, to some racial scheme even though Argentina is at this point whiter than some European nations, arguably."
Why not both? It's not like all people are equally susceptible to the lies of communism. Europeans have produced the only cultures that are wary of it. Culture is transmitted through physical proximity. Physical proximity is largely an affect of genetic proximity. Preference for genetic proximity is why racial individuation exists in the first place. Culture doesn't exist independent of the people through which it is transmitted, and people don't exist independent of their genetics. It's almost as though Styx is trying to reify the mind/body and nature/nurture dichotomies. These things don't exist independent of the other.
"What about white Mexicans? What about, again, what about Argentinians or someone from Chile who's completely white?"
Just deport them. They don't belong here. No one said being white is enough to get citizenship on its own.
"The fact that they speak a different language, if that matters, that's a civic judgment that you're making. That's not a ethno-nationalistic judgment. Again, just showing, the only way you can even bring about that ethno-nationalistic state is with a civic structure. It requires a civic understanding and can be brought about with a civic understanding through closing the border, through differential immigration policies."
"Civic understanding" isn't what closes borders or enforces immigration policies. It takes men with guns and jackboots to do that, my friend.
I don't think anyone has ever proposed giving American citizenship to every white person on Earth. Likewise, I don't think anyone has ever proposed an ethno-nation where the only rule or requirement for entry is "being white". These are just stupid strawman arguments.
"I think, we don't disagree on the relative virtue of that so much as the relative virtue of abusing people. As a libertarian, I can't support rescinding people's rights. I can't support forcing them out of their home at gunpoint. I can't support rescinding their holdings, their property, or sending them off to some place they don't, you know, know anything about."
As a libertarian, I take issue with this line of reasoning. Withholding rights from people who reject them isn't abuse. Physically removing people who vote for continued and increased expropriation of your property isn't abuse. Extending libertarian property norms to people who explicitly reject them is not a consistent application of principles. These norms do not exist to protect trespassers, thieves, and expropriators, or accomplices thereof.
The cost of not deporting these people is allowing them to have suffrage. If they have a say in your hyper-inclusive mass democracy, they are going to use it against you. Their voting demographics have already demonstrated that. You can either use the state to remove them or you can get your property stolen and country destroyed by allowing them to stay and make the rules.
But hey, as long as you have your perceived moral purity, who cares about the future of your family, race, or nation? AMIRIGHT??!
"It's like... some people... they don't even make the connection of, "ohhh well we'll create a bla... an African-American ethno-state." They just want to send black African Americans back to Africa who've never been to Africa most of the time. And that state itself has problems. It's going to be unequal. How do you solve all of these problems?"
Why would it be the responsibility of white people to solve problems of non-whites when the vast majority of non-whites have already unfairly benefited from the expropriation of white countries? This is a reversal of the burden of proof. If you're so against abuse, Styx, why are you tacitly insisting that Americans should be made to endure it absent a perfect solution to these Talmudic word games?
"And I would point out, in maybe more, you would consider this, I guess, to be maybe optimistic, but such policies have already begun that you're speaking of, as of last year. Which is, if you look at the story of the 200 thousand people from El Salvador that are going to have to go back to their home country, generally. Uhh... Many people have been deported."
What's the problem then? What's the point of being so incredulous if you already know that it's possible? Let's stop arguing and get the Somalis, Syrians, and Sudanese boarded on the next flight or ship home.
"The wall, the basis of the wall, at least, has been now paid for, although.."
Through abuse and forced wealth transfers, which you're ostensibly against. I'll personally take the wall because it's less of a burden to the taxpayers than mass migration but I'm not the one arguing against ethno-nationalism on libertarian grounds -- he is.
"...now Trump has to negotiate for more. We already have an increasing degree of protection."
And rapidly shifting demographics. And an increasing degree of expropriation, tax cuts aside. An expropriating property protector is a contradiction in terms, and the ostensible protection offered by the state hasn't done anything to prevent the invasion of 60 million people over the course of the last 50 years.
"I think of the reigning culture as it is."
No you don't, you're in libertarian la la land with a flawed Lockean theory of property -- hence all the appeals to incredulity even though you know deportations are perfectly feasible.
"The problem is more ideological than it is pragmatic and physical..."
THEN WHAT THE FUCK IS THE POINT OF YOUR OBJECTIONS?
"...which is that you've got a bunch of social Marxists that are constantly trying to brow beat people into feeling bad about their race or appreciating their race, and they only do it to people if they happen to be white."
I certainly agree with this descriptive analysis, and it certainly is a problem. Let's deport the problem.
"That is inequality."
Correct.
"And that breaks the NAP."
DEAD WRONG. Inequality and discrimination do not violate the NAP. The non-aggression principle only applies to property disputes. It doesn't violate the NAP when social Marxists "brow beat" us into feeling bad for being white; it violates the NAP when they use the state to import mass quantities of economic migrants. It violates the NAP when they use the state to take our money and give it to blacks and Mexicans. It violates the NAP when they use the state to take our money and give it to Marxist professors who indoctrinate our kids. Violations of the NAP are maximized when we allow entire demographics of people who vote Democrat more than 80% of the time to live here and have suffrage.
This inadequate understanding of the non-aggression principle would have undercut his entire argument if conceding to the practical feasibility of deportations hadn't done it first. It is worth noting, however, that this is the same argument SJWs and social Marxists use when they claim to be victims of discriminatory "hate crimes". That's why you have gender-confused mental patients running around who define "punching Nazis" as free speech and the term "tranny faggot" as an act of violence.
"And it's part of the civic structure that has become degraded, and that's the fundamental central problem that I myself identify."
When was the last time the NAP was part of any government's "civil structure"? I already went over this. The very existence of the government is predicated on violations of the NAP. The question is not whether the government will respect individual rights; the question is... to what degree will the government violate them? White people are generally the only group of people who want smaller government more than fifty percent of the time, which means there's only one solution if you want smaller government and more individual liberty. Styx may have identified the problem, but he sure as shit missed the cause.
"I don't think you need identitarianism at all. It doesn't even need to exist.
But... you literally just IDENTIFIED as a libertarian. Libertarian; reject identitarianism. Pick one.
I'll remind the audience that libertarians as a group are more than 90% white and male.
"All you need is populism."
You just identified as a libertarian... who is calling for populism. Libertarianism; populism. Pick one. I don't necessarily disagree with the idea of advancing libertarian ideals through populism (as is prescribed by both Rothbard and Hoppe) but you're not going to do that in a country that is 70% white by forcing white people to share a system of government with non-whites who vote for larger government more than 80% of the time -- especially when less than 3% of the population are libertarians, 90% of which are white males!
"You need people to be treated fairly and they'll fall into order on their own because I believe that humans, generally speaking, are generally capable of doing so. I mean... we've seen it throughout history."
"People will act right if I treat them right because wishful thinking."
Styx is a smart guy but he's clearly overestimating the integrity of the anti-white left, which includes most non-whites. He has to know this isn't an argument. The people he is defending want white people to be treated unfairly. He already pointed it out. We don't have an obligation to be fair to people who use the state to treat us unfairly. If you came to America expecting white people to pay for your lifestyle and birth rates, you don't belong here and you should be deported.
We have to stop holding ourselves to standards that our enemies won't reciprocate unless we want to be erased. Styx had other ridiculous arguments during this debate (not the least of which being the claim that the absence of cultural barriers leads to conflict) and I may cover them in later pieces but this will have to suffice for now.
