Hillary Clinton’s Deplorables: Stefan Molyneux

 

Rarely if ever will you see on this blog the phrase “Hillary Clinton was right” – not unless it were to be concluded with phrases such as “to resign,” “to stand down,” or “to jump off a cliff” – but she was right to condemn the deplorable “alt-right” who have taken Donald Trump to their breast, about whom others such as Robert Tracinski and Stuart Hayashi had already exposed.

Stuart has also done sterling work exposing the downright racism of a one-time anarchist who underwent an “ideological transmogrification” to make himself one of the fonts of these deplorables. Tracinski gives over his own newsletter this week to Stuart, who explains as he has before that for all his fine words, Stefan Molyneux is just an old-time racist in a new guise and with new rationalisations.

When it comes to being the main apologist on the Web for Trump and his antics, Molyneux is second only to Milo Yiannopoulos. It is therefore unsurprising that Molyneux is cited occasionally in essays contributed to ‘Breitbart News’ and frequently in its comments section…
    The podcaster’s latest turn as Trump apologist [however] was particularly flabbergasting for those of us in the liberty movement who have been familiar with Molyneux’s podcast for the past decade. How is it that a man who once consistently advocated “market anarchy”—not coincidentally, similar to Murray Rothbard’s—has rebranded himself as an apologist for a political candidate strongly associated with the expansion of government power to restrict immigration and international trade?

Insert here as answer Molyneux’s need for a new (paying) audience after exposure as a disgusting opportunistic charlatan.

With but a dwindling number of anarchists standing by him, it seemed that either Molyneux would have to end his podcast series or find a new target audience.
    Thereafter Molyneux drifted from one vaguely right-wing ideological hobbyhorse to another, briefly trying to make inroads in the “Men’s Rights Movement.” But by the middle of 2015 he finally found a new movement he could grab onto—the alt-right and its white nationalism.

“White nationalism.” Yes, it is as disgusting as it sounds. Molyneux surfed this wave just in time for his depiction of “modern society as a struggle between native-born whites and brown-skinned aliens threatening Western traditions” to be reflected in Trump’s campaign, making him a natural to cheer the orange-skinned man to a standstill – “even if these rationalisations were convincing to no one other than those already in Trump’s corner.”

Unlike Trump, Molyneux prefers to sound intellectual. To make his predictions of impending race war sound more compelling, Molyneux cites terribly old-fashioned racist pseudoscience.

Stuart cites chapter and verse to demonstrate that this dangerously puerile movement is new only in its terms and rationalisations, beneath which is the same racism and barnyard collectivism of old that views human beings simply as cattle.

That seems to be the popular appeal of [Molyneux’s podcast]—it reinforces prejudices that its audience would otherwise be ashamed to hold.

If it seems unimportant to address this movement and its spokesthings, it’s not, says Tracinski: We should “take seriously the recent resurgence of racism under new guises and with new rationalisations.” Says Hayashi:

Human beings have struggled with racism for millennia. It has been present, historically, in every major culture, and anthropologists theorise that racism, in some form, was even prevalent in the Paleolithic Era, when separate hunter-gatherer clans looked upon one another in mutual distrust and often lingering animosity. One of the greatest achievements of the United States in the late twentieth century was removing the stigma against other races and placing the stigma on racism itself. Open racial hostility became more of an exception, not the norm. It would be a tragedy if we allowed Molyneux and the rest of the alt-right to make brazen racism seem normal once again.

Yes. It would.

So let’s keep calling it what it is, even when both right and left wish to relabel and redefine what is they are both practising.

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