A man and his dream
The International Students For Liberty Conference has been an annual event for ten years now. The conference, organized (expectedly enough) by Students For Liberty, is a three-day event featuring a number of libertarian — and, let’s face it, libertarish — speakers on a wide range of topics. It’s open to the public; one doesn’t have to be a student to attend. Indeed, the conference web site positively encourages attendance by non-students, as it suggests that one of the primary goals is to connect young libertarians with established "professional" libertarians. Networking, I think the buzzword still is.
So. Aces. It’s also worth noting that Students For Liberty has anticipated the factional squabbling among libertarians; they state unambiguously on the conference web site, in response to the goofy question "Am I ‘libertarian enough’ to attend":
Definitely. Students For Liberty prides itself on taking a "big tent" approach to promoting liberty. This means not only that pro-liberty people of all types and backgrounds are welcome to join in the fun, but also that there’s no requirement to have prior knowledge of libertarian thought, economics, or any particular approach to liberty. We’re all here to learn and ISFLC is meant to bring together many different approaches to liberty. We’d love to have yours represented!
So everybody is welcome, regardless of his ideology.
Everybody except Richard Spencer, that is.
Spencer sat and spoke with passerby [sic] as they questioned his being at the libertarian event and his societal views at large. Spencer at various points supported the idea of using state force to protect the rightful citizens of his ideal utopia from "outsiders," as well as spoke very cynically and distrustfully of multiculturalism — something he apparently thinks degrades culture and is therefore wary of…
Eventually, [Jeffrey] Tucker entered the scene and immediately berated Spencer. "Fascists are not welcome at an anti-fascist conference!" He shouted. This was met with cheers from those standing around the scene. "Libertarianism is about human dignity, liberty for all, and not about fascism!" Soon, Spencer and Tucker were shouting at each other in a heated back-and-forth, and as more and more people crowded around, security was ultimately called. Spencer was then booted out of the venue.
I get it. Extemporaneous speaking can be tricky; sometimes you don’t quite get it right. "Libertarianism is about liberty for all except Richard Spencer" is what Tucker no doubt meant to say. If you’re keen to watch the entire sad display, you can see it here, complete with idiot children pretending to be libertarians while acting (and in at least one case dressing) indistinguishably from the left-wing thugs who destroyed Berkeley not too long ago.
For a man who has haunted the liberty movement as long as Jeffrey Tucker has, and who has held such high positions at significant outfits like the Ludwig von Mises Institute and the Foundation for Economic Education, the man is an embarrassingly lightweight thinker. Perhaps part of the reason for this is his obvious, displayed penchant for responding with anger and violence to contrary ideas rather than, say, thinking about them. But what should he care? He has his mindless, chanting fanboys cheering him on while he violently suppresses Spencer’s speech in the name of "liberty for all." Four legs good! Two legs bad!
Maybe I’m being too harsh on poor, clueless Jeff Tucker; I guess I’m just mad that he’s put me in a position where I have to defend Richard Spencer, a man I can’t stand. Probably Tucker’s just positioning himself for another bold career move anyhow — this time I bet he wants to be president of Antifa.
Too easy
I have a pet theory about why people have become so stupid so suddenly. Halfway through 2016, when it became clear that Trump was not a fading mirage but was, in fact, a real threat to defeat Her Righteous Majesty in the general election, the press was in a panic. They’d already called him a racist — their infallible, invincible attack! — and it didn’t work. So they kept ratcheting the crazy up higher and higher, as we gleefully documented all year long here on Last Week in Weird, making wilder and less possible accusations left and right. Those were salad days for those of us who write snotty weird news columns, but dark days for the mainstream media, who found relatively few people willing to believe the tall tales.
Relatively few people, that is, who weren’t already disposed to believe silly stories about how the number of generals endorsing Trump was a clever code pledging his allegiance to Adolf Hitler. Those people who were inclined to believe this stuff found an endless river of validation. Cutting to the chase, the operation was a failure and the patient died, but those poor fools who got themselves addicted to the crazysauce can’t get back to reality.
Amid all the tattoos of Third Reich iconography bouncing around, one thing stood out: The neo-Nazis were all drinking milk. They spat it out as they danced, letting it dribble down their chins.
Milk, the longtime staple for growing children, is now the new, creamy symbol of white racial purity in President Donald Trump’s America.
Those stupid purple pigeons can thank this insane milk rant for bumping them out of Last Week in Weird. Though I suppose it’s helpful to have them both here at once; it really drives home the point that the progressive left has travelled so far past the last outposts of reality that literally anything some stupid kid posts on Facebook becomes the smoking-gun proof of the rise of the New Hitler. Your humble narrator is left speechless in the face of overpowering evidence like this:
When the brigade of trolls at the LaBeouf installation were accused on camera of racism by Paperboy Prince, a famous Washington Wizards fan and entertainer who has since become a top target of 4chan derision, they claimed it was actually a stance against the "vegan agenda."
Judging from the eugenicist rhetoric across online hate speech communities like 4chan and 8chan, it appears that the "vegan agenda" is a potential proxy term for conspiracy theories about a globalist Jewish agenda.
I speaks volumes about the crazy coming off of this article that I’m going to let the phrase "a famous Washington Wizards fan" pass on by.
Let’s see here. Searching through my databanks for any correlation between milk and Jews… kinda coming up empty here, whereas I do believe I see a fairly robust connection between milk — an animal product — and vegans. It seems that, if one wanted to make a statement against vegans, drinking milk in public could fit the bill, yes? Adding credence to this theory is that that is exactly what the milk-drinkers said they were doing. It takes a special flavor of organic, fair-trade, vegan madcap to conclude that they were somehow secretly making a statement against Jews.
The whole milk-chugging, anti-vegan narrative is complicated by a number of factors, not least of which being that Adolf Hitler was possibly vegetarian for a short time, or that there are many places in Africa where milk is a dietary staple.
Then again, white racial purity is a fragile pseudo-science, so trying to find a sound explanation is a tall order anyway.
Dear "Jack Smith IV,"
Your right to describe anything thought by anyone else as "fragile pseudo-science" is hereby revoked.
Sincerely,
Reality
Purge the heretic
What is with this bizarre word "woke" everybody’s using? It’s like some sort of cant I’m not in on. It’s a code-word meaning "heil Hitler," I bet. Somebody should write a breathless scare piece about that.
Anyhow, whatever it means to be "woke," I’m given to understand that popular Youtube celebrity Felix Kjellberg — d/b/a PewDiePie — fits the bill. Apparently he’s so "woke" that he just got fired by Disney and Google for being a Nazi, and, if you think I’m exaggerating, here’s the Wall Street Journal explicitly accusing him of being a Nazi (n.b.: potty mouth):
What the Wall Street Journal didn’t think was worth mentioning was the reason why Kjellberg featured two random guys holding a "death to all Jews" sign. It was part of a routine he did riffing on fiverr.com — the joke was to try to come up with something so outrageous that he couldn’t find a guy willing to do it on camera for five bucks. The whole point was that Kjellberg didn’t think anybody would actually do it.
But, sure, it’s not important to tell people tiny details like that. What’s much more important is getting a valuable "insight" from some of George Soros’ pet horrible hatemongers.
Apologies can camoflage messages that may still be received and celebrated by hate groups, the Southern Poverty Law Center says. [emphasis in original and Bizarro World]
In all fairness, Felix, Vox Day warned you about that. Never, ever apologize to the thought police. They view it as a sign of weakness and will just try to destroy you twice as hard.
This just in: children are still idiots
Yale University has an all-male singing group called (and I’ll be good and not make any remarks about this) the Whiffenpoofs. This year, a record number of females auditioned for the group, each and every one failing to get in, which is probably because it’s an all-male group. Frankly, I think it’s weird that the group even bothered auditioning females, but I guess that’s part of the process of "checking one’s privilege."
Anyhow, nobody cares. I only bring this up because I want to mention this one thing:
Rebecca Young ’18 — a member of the mixed-gender a cappella group Red Hot and Blue who auditioned for the Whiffs on Wednesday — said the notion that integrating the group would undermine Whim ‘n Rhythm’s success does not take into account that many women prefer co-educational musical settings.
"My feminism doesn’t look like holding people hostage to a group that they don’t want to be in, simply by virtue of ‘girl power,’" Young said.
That… that’s gibberish, yeah? I can’t be the only one who noticed this. The school’s official paper — the Yale Daily News — ran that quote just like that, and apparently nobody bothered to consider that it’s not made of words. It presently costs an eye-melting seventy thousand dollars per year to attend Yale, and even the third-year students can’t compose coherent sentences. What on Earth is the point?