Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

In my last article, “Open Letter to Reason Magazizne”, I called out Reason magazine for their virtue signaling and the overall dishonest reporting that has led to my decision to not renew my subscription, which is soon to expire. What led to this decision were two videos from Reason TV, the first one Trump Denounces Racism in Charlottesville Too Little, Too Late, and the other What the Alt-Right Gets Wrong. In the letter, I mainly addressed the fallacies in the video about Charlottesville. I addressed a few of the problems that I had with the Alt-Right video, but it had so many fallacies that it probably would have taken an extra three or four pages to address them all. Yet, I thought that it was important to address them, so I decided to dedicate an entire article to everything that was wrong with that video.

At the beginning of the video, we are told that people are calling libertarianism “The Pipeline to the Alt-Right.” The reason why anyone would say such a thing? It was because certain members of the White Nationalist movement, such as Richard Spencer and Christopher Cantwell, had once identified themselves as libertarians. This explains why Reason is so desperate to distance themselves from the so-called Alt-Right, though I don ’t recall anyone outside of Reason ever making such a claim about a “Pipeline.”

As I pointed out in my Open Letter article, I absolutely despise the word Alt-Right, as well as the Alt-Lite variation that was used in the video for the same reason I hate words such as Rape Culture or Hate Speech. These are blanketed terms that were created out of thin air and were never properly defined. So basically, you can make these terms mean whatever you want them to mean. I think Donald Trump was spot on when he asked a reporter “What is the Alt-Right? Can you define it?” The very fact that you can use these terms to paint people such as Ann Coulter, Tucker Carlson, Milo Yiannopoulos and even nationalistic libertarians such as Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern with one broad brush, kind of proves my point.

Now, one of the issues that Reason seems to have with the so-called Alt-Right is that they are against illegal immigration. I hate to break it to them, but opposition to Open Borders isn’t just synonymous to what you call the Alt-Right. Despite their attempt to lead people to believe that you can only be a true libertarian if you believe in Open Borders, there are many prominent libertarians that disagree with that stance. It’s interesting how they used an old interview of libertarian leaning economist, Milton Friedman to reinforce their point about free trade, yet they didn’t mention that this same economist also said that it wasn’t economically feasible to have open borders in a nation that has a massive welfare state. For that matter Murry Rothbard, who was much more hardcore when it came to libertarianism than Friedman, didn’t like the idea of Open Borders either. Also, as Lauren Southern pointed out in her response video, they tried to compare today’s immigration with that of the early twentieth century, which is asinine because many of today’s immigrants have no desire to assimilate like they did in the past. It reminds me of the old footage of newly arrived immigrants from Italy, who were waving American flags. Now compare that with the immigration protests of 2006, where you had illegal immigrants waving Mexican flags while chanting “Viva, Mexico!” Though I have to say that my main concern about immigration has more to do with the type who want to replace Western values with Sharia Law, as it has been happening in Europe. Reason mentioned this concern, but they didn ’t really have any response for this except that America isn ’t Europe. For many years I was actually on the fence about the issue of immigration and what made me side against Open Borders was that the advocates of that position were not able to give a coherent answer of what to do about immigrants who want to see our way of life destroyed.

Then they gave the so-called Alt-Right flack when Tucker Carlson called for the regulation of Google as a monopoly. I find it interesting that they can’t even properly define the Alt-Right, but they somehow assume that there is a consensus among this group when it comes to regulations. As Lauren Southern also pointed out, Google is a corporation that receives benefits from the government which gives it several advantages over their smaller competitors, so regulating it doesn ’t seem as unreasonable as you may think. Personally, as deplorable as I find Google’s freedom hating policies, I don ’t think government interference will make it any better.