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This is an opinion editorial by Joe Moffett, a contributor at Bitcoin Magazine.

The Democrat and Republican parties have been wielding social movements as weapons in a culture war. Is it time the Libertarian Party wields the Bitcoin hammer in the battle against the Federal Reserve?

In the cypherpunk mailing list, Satoshi Nakamoto had a back-and-forth exchange with an unknown cryptographer:

You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. Unknown cryptographer

Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years.

Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own. Satoshi Nakamoto

Between Nakamotos emails, the Bitcoin white paper and the source code, there was probably nothing they said with a more aloof tone than this quote. I have to imagine they understood the economic ramifications that would come with developing such a system and this was likely why they remained anonymous. Then again, maybe they were blissfully unaware that there is no more dangerous enemy to the power of the state than economically free people.

Many early adopters of bitcoin were more likely software and tech gurus than they were economists or libertarians, but this comment by Nakamoto was profoundly libertarian. After all, if the government can wage war on poverty, drugs, crime and terror, why cant libertarians and Bitcoiners alike wage war on money printing? Its hard to overstate the phrasing here: [W]e can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom.

The Libertarian Party, under new management, recognizes just how important Bitcoin is in this battle. Angela McArdle, chair of the Libertarian National Committee, embraces the importance of bitcoins scarcity, self-sovereignty, and censorship resistance. On a phone interview, McArdle shared:

Inflation is being reported at 8.6%, but if you fill up the gas in your car, you know that it must be higher than that. No one knows the real rate of inflation, but what I do know is you cannot print more bitcoin. You can print dollars perpetually until its worthless like Venezuela, but you cant print more bitcoin.

Sure, the Libertarian Party is using the language, Declare your independence from the Fed, in a metaphorical way, but we can never forget that our country was founded on a very real Declaration of Independence that led to something very tangible.

We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual. The Libertarian Partys Statement of Principles

Today more than ever, the enforcement tool of the so-called omnipotent state and those in power is their monetary policy. The monopolization of fiat currency and the burden of taxes have become weapons of the state to empower Washington and disenfranchise the people. Libertarians and Austrian economists have been sounding the alarms for decades, but as Ron Paul has attributed to George Orwell, Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

At a certain point however, the truth comes out.

This inflation was either due to incompetence or deliberate debasing of the U.S. dollar, but Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve Board, admitted that he doesnt understand basic economics. I would have preferred him to come out and admit he lied.

Our favorite Bitcoiner, Peter Gold Schiff, along with every Austrian economist, pointed out how inflation works when the money printer started in March 2020 (when Schiff comes to the same realization as Bitcoiners, we will welcome him with open arms),

So here we are, July Fourth is coming up and we, the people, are in a quandary. Our leaders lie, our media covers for them, our financial institutions are corrupt and consent of the governed sounds more like a brand slogan than the foundation of our government.

So what options do we have?

Fix the money, fix the world.

Bitcoin is the greatest peaceful revolution the world may ever know. Back to that seemingly innocuous Nakamoto quote, [W]e can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. The arms race they must be referring to is power political and economic of governments versus economic power in the hands of individuals. Maybe its time to turn Rosie the Riveter into Dolores the Diamond Hands.

Libertarians and Bitcoiners are allies in the fight for sound monetary policy. Speaking of a Bitcoiner and Libertarian alliance, McArdle said, Its important for us to build a parallel economy, so in the event the dollar collapses completely, or some kind of financial crash, we have something to shift over to laterally. The more people that have Bitcoin and understand it, the better.

Nakamoto had this revelation when they said, Its very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. Im better with code than with words though. Clearly, they werent wrong. Nakamotos creation spawned a movement without a speech or catchy slogan, just code and believers. Some of us libertarians may have been a bit late to bitcoin, myself included, but the troops are coming.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more King Henry in Henry V by William Shakespeare

The Libertarian Party is hosting a livestream event at 2:00PM EST on July 3, 2022. Join the call and declare your independence from the Fed.

Declare your independence from the Fed

Join the Libertarian Chair Angela McArdle and Vice Chair Joshua Smith July 3 at 2:00 PM EST with the Bitcoin experts Saifedean Ammous, Marty Bent, Stephan Livera, Jameson Lopp and Guy Swann.

Think about doing three things in preparation for Independence Day:

I want you to buy bitcoin.

This is a guest post by Joe Moffett. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.

Read more:
We Need To Declare Our Independence From The Federal Reserve - Bitcoin Magazine

The strong right-wing offensive of recent years in Latin America failed to stabilise a new situation; social and cultural fascisms grew but did not (yet) achieve a new hegemony, and the democratic imposition that US president Joe Biden intended for the region was shipwrecked at the Los Angeles summit, while progressive proposals speak of a new wave in favour of the peoples.

By Aram Aharonian

Historically, the anti-establishment and anti-traditional parties discourse was a banner of the left, as it was marginalised from national power, but today it is also taken up by the libertarian ultra-right against the stagnant traditional parties of the vernacular right.

In the region, a new progressive wave is emerging in Mexico, Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Honduras each with its own tonality -, now Colombia and perhaps Brazil with Lula, which could replace the late neoliberalism and initiate a new cycle with a greater role for the state and concern for the great majorities.

A trend that, as former Bolivian Vice-President lvaro Garca Linera points out, is a path that, like the waves of the sea, involves high and low tides, but one of progress towards a region in which democracy ceases to be the privilege of a few and becomes the constant feature of the social and political life of our America.

For the enthusiasts, the cycle that they wanted to see ended with the parliamentary coup against Dilma Roussef in May 2016, has become a first phase of what seems to be affirming itself as a trend in the region, the advance of a democratic proposal with social justice and national sovereignty.

The failure of the ninth Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles exposed the US governments inability to demonstrate how to manage its backyard. It was a major diplomatic setback for the US and its president since several heads of state in the region ruled out participation. The result was widespread disappointment in a region whose economies have been severely affected by the pandemic and now also by the war in Ukraine.

The meeting focused on sharing responsibility for managing migration flows. Washington now wants migrant-sending countries to accept new rules of the game and cooperate in stemming the migrant surge. But Central America, whose majority of leaders did not attend the summit and which produces most of the hungry migrants, has been left out. It has no major commitments to make. Many believe it was the last Summit of the Americas.

During the last decade, the United States and the vernacular right managed to dismantle their own consolidated institutions to try, in this situation, to boost the integration process, as was the case when the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) and the expanded Southern Common Market (Mercosur), including Venezuela, were still in place.

Today, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) clearly answers to Washington, as does the Organisation of American States (OAS). The latter coordinates the actions of US intelligence and security agencies, as an institution to broker its agenda with the rest of the Americas, which even promoted the suspension of Russia as an observer of the organisation until it withdraws troops from Ukraine.

Since the emergence of anti-neoliberal governments in Latin America, the region has become the epicentre of the great political struggles of the 21st century and, at the same time, a seesaw, where governments install themselves and are defeated, return and experience great instability, some reassert themselves, noted Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader.

Recently, Colombia has elected a centre-left government, and this has become the greatest hope for change for the forgotten, the despised by a white political elite. Today, the main challenge for Gustavo Petros government will be to convert this symbolic capital of representing change into concrete public policies, to make the progressive option credible, after the rapid disillusionment with the new Chilean government.

The main challenge, as the elected vice-president Francia Mrquez has repeated before the emboldened crowds of nobodies, will be to move from resistance to power. But to do so given the dependence on the United States and a right wing that never sleeps it will have to avoid endless ambushes and build a new popular hegemony, points out Carlos Fazio.

In Brazil, the ultra-right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro announced the name of retired army general Walter Braga Netto, former defence minister, as his running mate for the 2 October elections, when he will face the progressive former president Lula da Silva and his centrist running mate Geraldo Alckmin.

While for Lula democracy is the vital component of governability, for Bolsonaro the end of democracy is the fundamental presupposition not only for the kind of governance from the bayonets he advocates, but also the key to the continuity of the military power project and the plundering and privatisation of the country.

But we must keep an eye on the provocations that will continue to follow, such as the private visit, perhaps in return for favours, of the neoliberal Uruguayan president Luis Lacalle to his Colombian counterpart Ivn Duque, just days before he leaves the government. Anyone would think it was a provocation to the next president. At least the Uruguayan Foreign Ministry put a stop to Lacalles desire to decorate Duque.

It is worth remembering that the Colombian presidential plane landed in Montevideo on the morning of 1 March 2020. Ivn Duque and the Secretary General of the OAS, Luis Almagro, along with their advisors, were on board. The Colombian president was one of the few Latin American presidents who accompanied Lacalle at his inauguration ceremony and now, two years and three months afterwards, the Uruguayan will return the gesture to his far-right friend by accepting an invitation to visit him in Cartagena.

Meanwhile, the appeal to the Armed Forces made by the Ecuadorian Minister of Defence made it clear that the policies that provoked genocide in Latin America are far from disappearing. In the speech made by Ecuadorian banker and President Guillermo Lasso in the repression of the social outbreak, the old trick of the National Security Doctrine from the times of Operation Condor was once again brought to the table.

For former Uruguayan president Jos Pepe Mujica, the regional left must communicate much more with the people and confront the lying narratives. He believes that progressivism is returning to power in some Latin American countries with less naivety but with problems that have worsened.

We are all calling for change, but we are not clear about what determines a change of era. The pandemic has undoubtedly deepened the new social dynamics, while we wonder how changes in the productive structure influence society, whether there is a redefinition of conflicts.

At a quick look, we must add the growth of confidence in religions (evangelists, Pentecostals), the disbelief in science (anti-vaccine, terraplanists), the deepening of holy wars (Zionists, Taliban, among others), the relegation of rationality in the face of the ultra-right and fascistic sensationalism of Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, the Spanish Vox, the libertarians who resurface like mushrooms with ample funding from the north, among others

And the great media operations for the imposition of collective imaginaries that facilitate the manipulation of the majorities, with the much-talked-about post-truth, fakenews, shitnews and a long etcetera, as well as the relative displacement of the great currents of ideas from the public-popular sphere.

But the self-styled libertarian far right has also gained notoriety in recent years. The more the capitalist crisis deepens, the more FORCE the more radical positions gain strength. There is nothing more unjust than social justice, the Argentinian histrion Javier Milei never tires of repeating, for whom taxing companies is theft and a crime against humanity to infringe on the property of the rich.

Another characteristic is the so-called Hispanism, which defends the Spanish conquest and the massacres perpetrated on the indigenous populations of Latin America, and is therefore against movements for indigenous rights and self-determination.

For libertarians, there should be no such thing as free public health and education. But they are not only in favour of privatising everything and ending any kind of subsidy to the working classes: many of their ideologues also defend the idea of monarchy, the conservative values of the most retrograde Christianity, and therefore oppose abortion and the rights of the LGBT community.

They also oppose multiculturalism and are therefore anti-immigrant and close to racist positions. In Europe they are all anti-Muslim and are in favour of keeping migrant refugees from wars and famine in the Middle East or Africa in concentration camps. And for all this they provide extensive funding for think tanks, cover NGOs, all on behalf of the Atlas Network and its American and Euro-Western financiers.

Fake news, manipulated videos, bots, an international network of ultra-liberal or libertarian think tanks (Atlas Network), this has been the campaign that Gustavo Petro has had to face in Colombia, as well as other progressive or left-wing candidates in their respective countries.

In addition to participating in the campaign against Petro in Colombia, these networks also massively retweet accounts from the Atlas Network such as Agustn Antonetti, Agustn Laje, Javier Milei, Jos Antonio Kast, lvaro Uribe, Mara Fernanda Cabal, Vicky Dvila, Andrs Pastrana and in Colombia the magazine Semana, Fico Gutirrez, the far-right candidate in the first round and Rodolfo Hernndez in the second round.

The Atlas network is active in each process to encourage its main influencers to write articles and videos: Agustn Laje, of the Fundacin Libre, or Juan Ramn Rallo, former director of the Fundacin Juan de Mariana; or Mario Vargas Llosa asking people to vote for Rodolfo Hernndez or Javier Milei visiting Colombia to seek the youth vote.

The libertarians are displacing the conservative parties that have become stagnant in so many years of formal democracy and dependence on Washington and the International Monetary Fund, while progressivism far from revolutionary proposals, participatory democracy or the electoral road to socialism is gaining ground in the region, which today shows a jigsaw puzzle that will be put together day by day, election after election, social outbreak after popular protest

The original article can be found here

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Change, does anything change: the progressive wave and the libertarian response? - PRESSENZA International News Agency

The Supreme Court issued a highly anticipated decision earlier today that constrains the federal governments ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. In West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the six justices who make up the courts conservative supermajority set a disturbing precedent that could limit federal agencies ability to enact regulations. The decision is particularly concerning for the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, as it leads federal efforts to zero out the planet-warming emissions causing storms, drought, and sea-level rise around the world.

The Supreme Court did not arrive at this pivotal moment by chance. For decades, ultra-wealthy conservative donors, libertarian think tanks, and their allies within the Republican Party have orchestrated a campaign to thwart the federal governments efforts to regulate corporations including efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, which threaten the profits of the fossil fuel industry. Over the years, they have paid considerable attention to the judiciary, methodically installing conservative judges in anticipation of a case that could kneecap agencies they view as overstepping their authority.

Enter West Virginia v. EPA. The specifics of the case were convoluted, but the arguments at its heart were a direct shot at the EPA, at their ability to regulate, said Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center. To say theyve been preparing for this moment for 50 years is not an exaggeration.

To understand this moment, its helpful to consider how we got here.

The 1970s marked the dawn of a new era of concern about the environment. Americans were growing increasingly alarmed by high pollution levels and environmental destruction. There had just been an enormous oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, the Cuyahoga River had caught fire in Cleveland, and a thick layer of smog regularly smothered cities like Los Angeles. Congress responded by drafting the countrys bedrock environmental laws: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act all passed with bipartisan support.

The sudden expansion of federal powers galvanized a new, hard-line libertarian movement helmed by an oil executive named Charles Koch. Koch had inherited a handful of companies from his father in 1967, including a lucrative refinery in Minnesota and a network of pipelines, barges, and trucks that shipped oil across the country. Koch was an ardent believer in capitalism and opposed any government action that went beyond the protection of private property. As he built his business into the second largest privately-owned company in the country, he also began building a network of think tanks and nonprofits to infuse his fringe views into the mainstream.

According to investigative journalist Jane Mayers 2016 book Dark Money, which chronicles how conservative billionaires shaped the radical right, Charles Koch and his brother and business partner, David, have personally spent well over $100 million on advancing a libertarian agenda. But even more consequentially, they streamlined the efforts of a small group of like-minded elites towards building what one Koch operative called a fully integrated network that has influenced every aspect of the countrys political system.

The Federalist Society, a conservative group that has grown into the most powerful legal organization in the country, became a critical node in that network. In 1982, law students at the University of Chicago and Yale formed the group to promote a deeply conservative legal perspective. The organization received start-up funding from the conservative John M. Olin Foundation, began hosting annual symposia and opening chapters at prestigious law schools, and soon attracted large donations from the Kochs and their peers.

At first, the Federalist Society was an all-volunteer group geared mainly towards law students. In the early 1990s, it hired one of its first paid employees, Leonard Leo, who expanded the organization to include lawyers, judges, and others. From the early 2000s to 2020, Leo served as the groups executive vice president, overseeing a network of approximately 60,000 members. (All six conservative justices on the Supreme Court are associated with the organization.)

The Kochs network of conservative billionaires hasnt only focused on the judiciary. As they poured money into the Federalist Society, they were also pouring money into deregulation efforts, including many related to climate change. Through the years, Koch- and fossil fuel-backed groups like the Global Climate Coalition, American Energy Alliance, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and American Legislative Exchange Council have lobbied against climate legislation and funded research casting doubt on the science and highlighting the costs of taking action.

But it has long been clear to them that the judiciary would be crucial to eviscerating the governments ability to regulate corporations and to dismantling the administrative state the government agencies within the executive branch that create and enforce regulations.

The libertarian groups judicial efforts have been focused on usurping a 1984 Supreme Court precedent known as Chevron deference with a relatively new and controversial legal argument known as the major questions doctrine. Chevron deference says that if Congress has not clearly articulated its intention in a law, courts should defer to an agencys interpretation, as long as that interpretation is reasonable. The idea is that agencies possess expertise that Congress and the courts do not, and that agencies are indirectly accountable to the people through presidential elections.

To the libertarian movement, Chevron is anathema, said Lisa Graves, a former senior official for the Department of Justice who is now the executive director of True North Research. For decades now, they have been seeking ways to reverse this precedent, to minimize this precedent.

In its stead, conservatives have put forth the major questions doctrine, which says that in extraordinary cases that could have vast economic and political consequences, the court can ignore an agencys interpretation of a broad law and prevent it from enacting a regulation unless it receives clearer authority from Congress.

The Supreme Court decided West Virginia v. EPA based on this argument. In doing so, it has undermined agencies ability to enact regulations to respond to new threats to the environment or public health if they lack clear guidance from Congress which has failed to pass any serious climate legislation or any significant new environmental laws since it last amended the Clean Air Act more than 30 years ago.

Thats radical, said Patrick Parenteau, an environmental lawyer and professor at Vermont Law School. Thats going to have massive implications for environmental law across the board.

While libertarians have long despised administrative agencies ability to regulate corporations, it took a while for them to build up enough influence on federal courts to begin whittling it away. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Justice Clarence Thomas, a Federalist Society member who has repeatedly objected to Chevron deference, to the Supreme Court. About a decade and half later, President George W. Bush nominated Justice John Roberts, a former Federalist Society member, and Harriet Miers, who was a family friend but not a member. The organization mobilized against Miers, and eventually Bush nominated Justice Samuel Alito, who had long been affiliated with the Federalist Society, instead. Roberts wrote the majority opinion in West Virginia v. EPA, and both Thomas and Alito concurred.

Another major conservative victory came in the mid-2010s, when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a Republican from Kentucky and a Koch ally led a stunningly successful effort to prevent President Barack Obama from appointing federal judges and blocked Merrick Garlands nomination to the Supreme Court, which he called one of my proudest moments. This paved the way for President Donald Trump to install more than 200 federal judges, including three Supreme Court justices.

Guiding Trump was Leo, then the executive vice president of the Federalist Society. In March 2016, Leo met with Trump and Donald McGahn, a member of the Federalist Society who later served as President Trumps White House counsel. Leo later gave Trump several lists of potential Supreme Court nominees that the Federalist Society would support, including Justice Neil Gorsuch. The Trump campaign released the lists in an effort to court the Republican base, and in a July 2016 campaign rally in Iowa, Trump said: If you really like Donald Trump, thats great, but if you dont, you have to vote for me anyway. You know why? Supreme Court judges. About a year later, Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett appeared on another list of Federalist Society recommendations.

Once Trump was elected, Leo shepherded the nominations of Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett through the Senate. According to Internal Revenue Service filings compiled by True North Research, between 2014 and 2020, Leo and his allies raised more than $580 million for conservative nonprofits that do not have to disclose their donors. The network of nonprofits used much of that to hire conservative media relations firms to place opinion essays, schedule pundits on television shows, send speakers to rallies, and create online videos all to drum up public support and pressure senators to confirm Trumps picks.

Now, decades of coordinated efforts by ultra-wealthy conservative donors, libertarian think tanks, and the Republican Party are all coming to a head. While the Supreme Courts ruling in West Virginia v. EPA could have been even more restrictive, it is still a consequential win for fossil fuel interests and a blow to American efforts to address climate change. To Graves, the Supreme Courts new direction amounts to revival of the robber baron era, when courts put their thumb on the scale to strike down laws sought by people in our democracy in favor of corporations, she said. You have a Supreme Court that has been captured by special interests.

Things could soon get even more bleak. Republican state attorneys general are pushing several climate-related cases through the federal court system. The courts could use the major questions doctrine to hobble the governments ability to restrict tailpipe emissions or to consider the social cost of carbon when reviewing new infrastructure or environmental rules. Parenteau points out that a proposed rule requiring companies to publicly disclose climate risks is now vulnerable, too.

Congress could act to stem the damage. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has called on her colleagues to expand the court. I believe we need to get some confidence back in our court, and that means we need more justices on the United States Supreme Court, she told ABC News. Congress could pass legislation to add more justices, but so far Democratic leadership has not been keen on the idea.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York, has argued that the Senate should impeach Gorsuch and Kavanaugh for misleading Congress about their views on Roe v. Wade, another radical ruling handed down by the court last week. They lied, she told NBC News. I believe lying under oath is an impeachable offense. Removing justices from the court would require a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

In a scathing dissent in West Virginia v. EPA, Justice Elena Kagan wrote: Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. In its most recent decision, the Court appoints itself instead of Congress or the expert agency the decision-maker on climate policy. She concluded, I cannot think of many things more frightening.

Link:
Supreme Court EPA ruling: A brief history of how we got here - Grist

A libertarian political advocacy group is partnering with gas stations across the country to offer discount fuel.

WYOMING, Mich. For just a few hours, some motorists in West Michigan got to capitalize on gasoline priced at $2.38 a gallon.

A privately-owned Citgo gas station in Wyoming partnered up with Americans for Prosperity-Michigan, which is a libertarian political advocacy group.

From 10 a.m. to noon Thursday, the gas station offered up discounted gas on a first-come-first-serve basis. Hundreds of cars lined up for their chance to fill up.

The group chose $2.38 a gallon because that's what they say was the national average price of gas on the day that President Joe Biden took office.

Rep. Peter Meijer stopped by Thursday morning to take part in the event.

This short event mirrored similar discount gas events across the country to highlight the increasing costs of energy. According to AAA, the average price of gas for Americans sits around $4.86 per gallon.

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Wyoming gas station temporarily offered gas for $2.38 a gallon to shine light on inflation - WZZM13.com

The US right often appeals to liberty freedom from the state as a justification for its policies. But it also seems to oppose liberty in many key political issues, particularly when it comes to the private domain of sexual relations. This seeming contradiction flummoxes liberals how can the right both defend and attack individual liberty? But there is no contradiction. The right simply has a different conception of liberty, one that, contrary to that of liberals, isnt universal but applies only to a select few, the real citizens, argues Toby Buckle.

Liberals imagine that the US far-right is incoherent on the question of freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth; it has at its heart a vision of freedom that is ancient, coherent, and compelling.

From the perspective of mainstream American liberalism, conservative invocations of freedom seem caught in a mad confusion between its libertarian and authoritarian impulses: The right identifies itself with individual freedom, particularly freedom from the state, and yet will reliably cheer on the worst excesses of state violence from police. The family, it proclaims, is a private domain, yet a central part of its rhetoric is the demonization of those in non-heterosexual relationships. These demonised groups are claimed to be a sexual threat to children, one that requires state intervention to address, yet the right also pushes to make (heterosexual) child marriages more legally permissible. Mandatory masking was rejected as a disgraceful violation of bodily autonomy by the same people who are currently rejoicing that states can now force women to carry pregnancies under pain of criminal sanction. The contradictions seem obvious.

While morally grotesque, the values underlying these positions are not incoherent, rather they are simply not coherent with liberal values. Specifically, they are not compatible with the liberal value of universality the requirement laws and norms apply equally to all persons. Because this value is so ingrained in liberalism, the assertion of other, older, values appears to us as a contradiction, but its not. For the most part, the American right does not believe in liberal universality and, to be fair, it has never really pretended to.

Theres no discrepancy to be resolved in demanding libertarian protections for yourself and defending police violence against Black men if you think that law enforcement should enforce different standards on different groups. This view, while still obfuscated to some degree, is more or less explicit in much of what the right says: when the government enforced lockdown laws it was said that it was wrong to treat small business owners like criminals. The same protest was made by, and on behalf on, those arrested after the Capitol riots on January 6 that they were being treated like criminals.

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Supremacist liberty can be defined as follows: freedom consists in the group or groups within a state who constitute the true citizenry being unconstrained both in their own lives, and in their domination of the groups who are not.

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To the liberal it may seem puzzling to say we should not treat as criminals people who are, objectively, criminals. To the right however (as with freedom) the word simply means something different: criminal is not a person who commits a crime, but a category of person thats defined by other features. The purpose of the law is to protect the (innately good) true citizens and repress (innately bad) criminals.

These terms are heavily racialized, especially in the US. Criminal is coded as Back, small business owner as white. They also convey a much more visceral fear than is commonly understood. In his account of dehumanisation the philosopher David Livingstone Smith argues that it renders the other not just inferior, or even dangerous, but monstrous. Dehumanised persons are seen as representing both a physical and a metaphysical threat, an affront to both our safety and the natural order of things. Past ages might have used terms like demonic to express this, today criminal has a similar function.

At this point we run into challenges in naming the core values that animate this ideology. To call them far-right adds little and understates their spread and acceptance. To use which I have previously the ideological label of fascist risks derailing the conversation into extended historical comparisons. Taking an intersectional approach, and labelling it by vectors of oppression, results in inelegant formulations like cishetro racist capitalist patriarchy. Authoritarian can be misleading we conventionally place it at the other end of an ideological to freedom, and US conservatism is centrally (and sincerely) about freedom. Finally, hierarchy is better, but is possibly too general.

One of the core values animating the seemingly contradictory policy preferences of the right is a specific conception of freedom. One that can be defined, and distinguished from other conceptions, such as a republican conception, or a true libertarian conception. At the risk of adding one more piece of jargon to the conversation I propose that we can usefully term this supremacist liberty.

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Whereas a republican freedom demands that there is never someone with arbitrary power above you, supremacist freedom asks that there is always someone (and not just anyone) below you, subject to your power.

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Supremacist liberty can be defined as follows: freedom consists in the group or groups within a state who constitute the true citizenry being unconstrained both in their own lives, and in their domination of the groups who are not.

From this perspective, the rights claims that anti-racism, or feminism, are existential threats to its adherents way of life are not hyperbole or hysteria, but an obvious statement of social fact. The domination that social justice opposes is ineliminable from its vision of a free society. Whereas a republican freedom demands that there is never someone with arbitrary power above you, supremacist freedom asks that there is always someone (and not just anyone) below you, subject to your power.

It is this conception of freedom that Obamas election was seen to be taking from people. It was an example of the wrong kind of person ending up with power over true citizens, an inversion of the natural order of things. This is what was behind Trumps questioning of Obamas citizenship he was not, as they clearly saw, a true citizen. When he eventually became president, there was a spate of his supporters hurling racist abuse at service workers and declaring Trump is president now. It is this vision of freedom they were reclaiming.

Those advocating for supremacist freedom will often employ libertarian language claiming that what theyre against is state intervention. This is contingently adjacent to the concepts core, but isnt contradictory as such its a useful rhetoric for asserting the appropriate norms that should govern the superior group. Unlike liberalism however, or a true libertarianism, these norms are either implicitly or explicitly bounded (we should get the government off the back of hardworking citizens, or real Americans).

One might wonder how such a conception of freedom is to be achieved in a legal system premised on universality (equal treatment under the law, and so on). A little reflection however shows just how easily it already is actualised under nominal universality. For example, the Supreme Court recently ruled in favour of the right of citizens to conceal carry handguns. Nothing in the ruling limited it to certain groups. However America is also a country in which the Police Officer who killed Philando Castile, a 32 year old black man, after being told he (legally) had a concealed weapon, was acquitted of all charges. As political theorist Jacob T. Levy recently tweeted, this obviously isnt a universal right to concealed carry:

Instead, its a recipe for asymmetrically adding a lot more armed white people in public places, including some who will feel that much more emboldened to harass and confront people they consider suspicious.

Hence, while the law is nominally universal, the social reality is one of supremacist freedom. It is expected, indeed demanded, that law enforcement, and other instruments of state power, will distinguish between groups in this way.

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While the pro-life movement is certainly steeped in misogyny, the contours between the superior and inferior groups here are best understood not as man vs woman, but Christian vs non-Christian.

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With this conceptual sketch in mind it should be reasonably straightforward to disentangle the seeming contradictions of the rights account of bodily autonomy. Mandatory face mask policies applied to true citizens, a clear violation of supremacist freedom. To add insult to injury, they were usually applied universally. Hence real Americans were being treated like criminals (the reader should by now be able to do the appropriate decoding). More generally, COVID restrictions were at their most burdensome for a group that is at the centre of the true citizen ideal small business owners. To the supremacist this was a gross violation of a just natural order. It was hardly surprising then, that their resistance was so fierce.

The end of a constitutional right to bodily autonomy (in the form of abortion access) that occurred last week, conversely, is seen as the true citizens asserting themselves against the illegitimate, dangerous parts of society. While the pro-life movement is certainly steeped in misogyny, the contours between the superior and inferior groups here are best understood not as man vs woman, but Christian vs non-Christian. White evangelical Christianity is thoroughly fused with the Trump-right at this moment, and it openly desires supremacy over the political realm and all other section of society.

Compelling pregnancy and childbirth through state violence is a mechanism for maintaining domination over those who fall outside of the true Christian citizenry. The Christian right has long set itself against a society it sees as promiscuous, debauched, and sexually immoral. Forced pregnancy, as they keep telling us, creates earthy consequences for sexual sin.

As with the necessity of repressing criminals, there is both a satisfaction in the domination (people love putting women in their place), and a need for protection against a perceived threat. In this case an overtly supernatural one. Remember that conservative Christians do not see the US as a pluralist society of many groups; but as islands of believers who will go to heaven, surrounded by a sea of sinners who will go to hell. Given the belief in eternal torment, not as metaphor but concreate fact, it becomes quite rational to seek and use state power to save people from it.

While implicit and explicit appeals to supremacist liberty are becoming more mainstream, the conception itself is nothing new. The contours defining the superior group have changed over time, but something like it has existed as long as the concept of freedom has. It was, after all, invented in the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome and championed by slaveholders. In the modern world its most famous and consequential evocations the American constitution and Declaration of Independence where likewise the work of men who owned slaves (and in the latters case, a man who enslaved his own children).

This seems like a contradiction to many, but, again, it is only a contradiction when viewed from within liberalism. A classic definition of a free person is someone who is not a slave. There is nothing about this that implies that a free person may not own slaves or rules out a view that his freedom will be enhanced by his doing so. After all, freedom is about choice, being self-directed, having control over things - your body, your mind, your property. Hence, having control of other human beings (according to this conception) makes you more free.

Far from being a relic of the dark but remote past, something like this idea is alive and well today. Supremacist freedom is attractive and compelling for reasons that the modern mind struggles to articulate, but the ancients and early moderns understood perfectly well on their own terms: We like the idea of getting special treatment. We enjoy punishing others, or seeing them punished. Our sense of self-worth is enhanced by knowing others are inferior to us.

And once you add in the belief that there are real demons out there, supremacist freedom doesnt just feel good, it becomes necessary. We the small business owners, the Christians, the hardworking, the straight, the White, the sexually pure, the real Americans require the freedom to deal with them the lazy, the gay, the trans, the criminals, the promiscuous, the sexually immoral, the immigrants, the illegals, the aliens, the traitors before they destroy us all.

There is much more to say on this topic having coined a term to describe a conception of freedom I should trace a history of it, anticipate and answer objections, consider its relation to other political concepts, give my own moral evaluation of it, and so on.

For now though, let me just close with this:

I have tried to give an account of supremacist liberty more or less on its own terms, not because I think it is a worthwhile conception, but because I think its worth understanding, given that its animating a large part of the American right. It is not, of course, the only conception of liberty. Liberty will always have competing conceptions, and it is worth our time and energy to ensure the better ones become ascendant. A great deal depends on it.

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Supremacy, Liberty and the Right | Toby Buckle - IAI