The Orange Line’s Embrace of Black Militants

On New Years, Margaret Roberts at VDare noticed that Rand Paul and the broader Washington D.C. libertarian community has embraced (physically, morally, politically) black militants and their allies in the radical left.

In a move condemned even by Jennifer Rubin, Rand Paul poses with Al Sharpton. So now it appears that House GOP Whip Steve Scalise did not after all speak to David Duke’s EURO group, although the news is disseminating suspiciously slowly [Steve Scalise spoke to civic association meeting, not white nationalist conference, David Duke adviser Kenny Knight says, by Julia O’Donoghue, NOLA.com, December 31, 2014]. This presumably means that the Main Stream Media will be thwarted, for now, in its obvious intent to spread the smear to Senator Rand Paul via his father [If you’re a politician and your chummy past with neo-Nazis resurfaces, don’t worry. Ask Ron Paul, by Jeb Lund, The Guardian, December 30, 2015]. But there can be no doubt that, if Paul had been brought under more pressure, he would have groveled. Perhaps the most ominous trend on the American Right today is libertarians’ adoption of prevailing “anti-racism” dogma, to the point where they can increasingly only be interpreted as overtly anti-White.

“Three out of four people in jail for drugs are people of color,” Paul wrote late last year. “In the African American community, folks rightly ask why are our sons disproportionately incarcerated, killed, and maimed?” [Rand Paul: The Politicians Are to Blame in Ferguson, TIME.com, November 25, 2014]

Unfortunately for Paul, two assassinated NYPD officers were the predictable subsequent result of the ongoing Leftist agitation to which he was pandering. He had opened the door for his intra-party rivals to run against him on the traditional Republican issue of “law and order.”

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Yet it’s at this moment that Libertarians have decided to ape the electoral strategy of the Democrats: mobilize the fringes of American life against the core. Unfortunately for this strategy, however, it’s the core American population—the married, content, and patriotic—who are most likely to support the values of property ownership and limited government.

Rand Paul and his Left-Libertarians have turned their back on their natural supporters at the very time they most need a champion.

The fringes are easy to get riled up. But the core is the only demographic that really has much skin in the game with respect to property rights. The fringes have no property to worry themselves over.

For those of you who don’t know, ‘the Orange Line’ refers to libertarians affiliated or employed by the Cato Institute, including the editorial staff of Reason Magazine. It’s also sometimes referred to as the ‘Kochtopus’ because of its financial connections to our friends at Koch Enterprises.

From a democratic-politics perspective, it’s even dumber for Rand Paul to be moved by the influence of left-libertarians, because those people will oppose him for other reasons, largely related to foreign policy but also economics, as soon as it is convenient for them to do so.

Indeed, the left-wing Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog accused Rand Paul of being an ‘asshole and moral pervert’ last year, among other things.

Libertarians, especially the academics, have positioned themselves against their natural base, aligning instead with the donor class and radical academics. Because politics is ultimately mock-war, alignment on the battlefield matters more than whatever the generals are talking about to justify that alignment. Who is shooting at whom is more relevant than what motivates all the shooting.