Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I get messages, practically continuously, from decent people asking me what they can do in the battle for America and for freedom.

It may have been Reason magazine, way back before it became National Review, Jr. (Sadly, Republicans have their RINOs; Libertarians have their LINOs.), or it may have been some Ayn Rand publication I subscribed to when I was in college, but somebody or something once introduced me to the handy phrase “intellectual ammunition”, about half a century ago. I don’t really want to dwell on why this expression should come to mind at present. You see the same TV and read the same websites that I do.

The Internet, at least my little corner of it, is chock full, just now, of advertising and articles about that gun or this cartridge you may need for the end of the world as we know it, about this holster or that “bug-out bag”. Combat knives and brass knuckles, as well. One item that seems conspicuously absent to me—and I ought to know—is the literature, if you’ll pardon my language, that nurtured our minds to begin with and can do the same for our children and our grandchildren right now, when it’s most needed—the kind of material they’ll never see in the Peoples’ Glorious Public Schools these days. The kind of material they’ll get kicked out of the Peoples’ Glorious Public Schools for, if some union teacheroid should happen to catch them reading it.

I started writing for public consumption around 1968, I guess, when I was almost the only thinker (aside from Robert Heinlein) who believed that the Second Amendment means exactly what it says, and who thought that the world would be a better, cleaner place if everybody in it carried a gun. Long before I wrote The Probability Broach or even “I Dreamed I Was A Libertarian In My Maidenform Bra” I wrote freedom-oriented essays which I printed on brightly-colored Xerox paper so they’d draw attention to themselves, and distributed by hand at gun shows.

That attitude and those ideas—which were hated, loathed, despised, detested, and reviled by all of the usual suspects—have cost me a great deal, over the years. Northeastern book publishing is an incestuous snake-pit. My books were seldom reviewed and almost never advertised. I doubt, in the end, that I ever made more than minimum wage, defending individual liberty. When an editor at one of my publishers retired, she publicly regretted that she and her pinko husband would no longer be able to act as gatekeepers. She actually used the word, out loud, if you will. And this was many years before the Silicon Valley technobullies conspired to appoint themselves the commissars of our forebrains.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t complain (nobody listens to me, anyway). I haven’t complained, very much, in the last forty-odd years since I was first published. Instead, I decided I had to “endeavor to persevere”. That stiff-necked determination produced more than thirty-five radical (look the word up—the right wing misuses it) novels dedicated to freedom in the manner of Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, and H. Beam Piper, informed by Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Robert LeFevre. Bad company, I know.

Here is a fairly recent summary of what I’ve accomplished so far: https://ncc-1776.org/books-so-far.html

My intent was always deadly serious, but, mindful of the dreadful propaganda screeds of Edward “Looking Backward” Bellamy and his fellow communards, I tried to keep what I wrote, above all, humane, funny, and optimistic. I was stacking, I knew, the arsenal of liberty with that very intellectual ammunition that I mentioned earlier.

Just in case you missed it the first time, here it is again: https://ncc-1776.org/books-so-far.html

Now my sense of history tells me it’s time to unstack those shelves and start loading up. Early on, I understood that it was my job, my calling if you will, to corrupt the youth of America (from the leftists’ point of view), gatekeepers be damned. I’ve spent my adult life putting dangerous ideas on paper and into people’s heads. It’s time now to put them to work.

Everybody tells me that the third time’s the charm: https://ncc-1776.org/books-so-far.html

Just six months ago, a glowing future stood before us, wide-open and shiny-bright. Now we’re threatened by a new Dark Age. The vile, stupid, poisonous things that collectivists in both parties believe have stifled real progress, impoverished the world, and killed two hundred million people in the last century. They will murder the Space Force in its cradle. The government, the media, the schools, spew nothing but toxic garbage, attempting to convince us and our kids that it’s a good thing. The word online is that Biden and his criminal ilk now look forward to rounding up Trump supporters and executing them. Welcome to Holocaust 2021.

If you want to do something to prevent that—if you want to get your wide-open and shiny-bright future back—then buy my books. Make them best-sellers. I realize you know that I stand to gain from such an effort. At the least, it would make my patient, long-suffering family happy. I’m trying to offer you something in return. Give them to your friends, to your kids, to your grandkids, to your nieces and nephews. Help me in my lifelong struggle to turn all of our posterity into the same kind of stiff-necked bastards that you and I have always striven to be.

As I said at the beginning, I get messages, practically continuously, from decent people asking me what they can do in the battle for America and freedom. At the risk of repeating myself, go to https://ncc-1776.org/books-so-far.html I promise that you won’t be disappointed. Do it now. We’ve gotten pretty damned close to too late.

As always, Where We Go 1, We Go All.

 

*“If you would have peace, prepare for war.”—Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus