THE DAY LIBERTARIANS BECAME FASCISTS

Over the course of a day, I recently saw some of the most horrifying fascist tweets I have ever seen. The shocking thing is they were on the Twitter page of one of the leading libertarian intellectuals, Hannah Cox.

The worst was a woman who said that as a juror, it is your responsibility to find someone not guilty if you think a law is unjust. This is the same as saying we should enforce unjust laws on people we don’t like.

What this woman dreams of is we eliminate injustice, by all jurors using their discretion to stop injustice when they see it. So suppose there somehow gets to be a law that everyone who is in the house when a person dies from an accident, gets life in prison. We fix this by jurors simply refusing to convict anyone for this law.

Can you imagine being a Jewish person in Germany, and overhearing people talking about this law in a public square, and everyone agreeing to not convict anyone for it as jurors? It would be terrifying. Because you know they are not talking about saving you. They have just created a terrible law, and exempted themselves and their friends, and reserved it for Jews. They are talking about if it is someone who looks like them and their same religion and lives in their jurisdiction, they are going to say not guilty. But if it is you, a Jewish person on trial, they are going to say well, it is the law, and this Jewish guy looks like he probably deserves it anyway.

But it is actually worse than that. Because as many likes as this woman may get on Twitter, chances are the majority of people support whatever law she thinks is unjust. The actual result will be the majority of people approving of police lying, to get around these sappy jurors who let everyone off. After OJ’s lawyer attacked Mark Furhmann and the jury found OJ not guilty, people decided jurors and defense attorneys can’t be trusted. So we have to look the other way on perjury and let cops lie, as the only safe way to get around juries and actually get the bad people locked up. And if someone tries to attack a cop for lying, we will lie about the person attacking the cop and frame him also.

In the United States today, mayors and sheriffs and district attorneys look the other way on state witnesses committing perjury at trial, this has become standard practice. The OJ jury is a big part of the reason people support this. This is not used on Jewish people so much as anyone without political connections, anyone with a past drug arrest, any broke or incompetent person who can be painted as a villain, young black guys and (most people don’t look in the mirror to realize this last one) young white girls.

A “Constitutional Sheriff” is not going to care about the Second Amendment when some black teenagers have a gun in their car. So refusal to enforce unjust laws in practice amounts to ethnic cleansing, to the extent it is done very unevenly.

The next terrifying Tweet was Hannah Cox herself saying courts cannot protect rights, so Congress needs to “intervene”.

So Congressmen berating the FBI on TV – to get revenge for giving Congressman Gaetz’s ex-girlfriend immunity to testify about his sex crimes, or for arresting President Trump’s supporters for trying to stop the election certification – will protect individual rights?

Hannah really does not seem to have any legislation in mind when she says “intervene”. There is no purpose defined for Congress in the Constitution that allows it to hack its various powers together to achieve some sort of executive enforcement action. There are 51 executive branches in the United States, plus millions of citizens who can file civil complaints.

What Hannah is saying is we no longer even think to get what we want through passing a law like USC 1983 to give people recourse for rights violations, or through choosing a new executive, or through a sunshine law that would give us the information on government activity that we could put in the lawsuit or use to choose whom to vote for. We just say let’s form a mob on Twitter, and some people in that mob are Congressman, and we can all come together as a mob to try to seize control of whatever it is we don’t like and obtain the preferred outcome. There are no courts or branches of government, just a mob “intervening”, a lynch mob in essence.

But it’s worse than that. Such a mob is not even whipped up on behalf of some individual’s rights – some anonymous nobody – and never will be. It is whipped up in this case by Congressmen who had their phones snatched by the FBI. Those Congressmen are free to sue like everyone else, if their rights have been trespassed. They can afford lawyers and often are lawyers. They can even pass new laws to enable them to sue, if for some reason the laws already in place do not enable the courts to address the problem. It is because they can’t sue because there is not even an injustice, that they instead whip up a mob.

They tell their supporters “When they investigate me for paying a teenager for sex, it is really you they are coming after, and I am the one standing in between”. So naive young idealists like Hannah Cox get whipped up into thinking they are taking up arms in a mob as the last resort to defend freedom or something. And that this will do anything to prevent a non-famous person from having his rights violated. But this process will never be available to, and does nothing for, the average nobody whose rights are violated. Normal people cannot whip up Twitter mobs and get Congress to “intervene”. Hannah Cox will never know their names, and their only hope is in law and the courts.

But fascists don’t want things like sunsine laws and USC 1983 that allow nobodies to protect themselves. They want to seize power as a mob.

The next terrible Tweet was from a leader of the “freedom movement” Spike Cohen. He combined two cliches, 1) suggesting two different things are the same, to frame his opponents as irrational hypocrites for classifying them differently, and 2) advocating that who goes to prison should be decided by popular vote enacted directly by an executive, i.e. fascism.

If Spike really wanted more journalism like Julian Assange did, he would advocate changing the law to make such journalism legal, not to let criminals out of prison. Does Spike really think the world can be consciously directed and arranged by a council of wise Twitter users? When I commented to Spike that mob rule instead of law is not libertarian, he blocked me on Twitter.

The interesting thing is Spike knows collective power doesn’t work. If gas or mattresses were expensive, or people were fat, Spike would never say President Biden needs to take over the energy industry, or the government needs to manufacture mattresses or stop people from eating to fix this. But for some reason he thinks collective power can work in journalism and law, everything but manufacturing common retail goods.

More recently, Hannah Cox complained about Twitter banning someone for telling an opponent to “go jump off a bridge”.

Does Hannah really think Twitter can make a profit holding a jury trial for every suicide bullying or other objectionable Tweet? It shows the incredible power of the human instinct to be blind to reality, and imagine the entire world can be controlled by tribal quorum. Twitter sucks people in like hamsters on a wheel by encouraging this misguided and disastrous impulse.

You need an automated process that can work for millions of tweets, like capitalism provides millions of goods to millions of people without being consciously directed by anyone.

Capitalism is an automated system for producing goods with nobody consciously controlling it, which process is opaque to its users and not even understood by them. The way to improve it is to improve the rules of the system, whether private property rights or laws that encourage business success. In this same way, you need to improve the rules of the algorithm to recognize and filter out tweets, not have a mob saying “Free Mumia”.

Reducing the output to what a quorum can consciously agree on, greatly constrains the quantity and diversity and efficiency of what it can accomplish.

We fought the British for the right to a jury of peers. Today people want “conviction integrity units”, which is just a group of politicians who operate like tribal elders 10,000 years ago, to let a few popular people out of prison. So people are convicted and exonerated in the media 15 years apart, where everything is turned over to the Twitter mob.

Even worse this serves as a substitute, and blunts any thirst to actually fix jury trials, which would help millions of innocent people and not take 15 years. Just like imagining Congress can “intervene” substitutes for the real solution of empowering individuals through courts and legislation.

People have no interest to improve jury instructions or punish state-witness perjury, when they can just go on Twitter and say whom they want freed. When President Biden “intervened” to get Britney Griner out of a Russian prison, people complained there are thousands of Americans in prison for marijuana crimes. These same people then go on Twitter every day and say whom Biden should pardon, Assange or Snowden or whoever. It is a hamster wheel that leads to fascism.

Fascism is nothing more than the human instinct to seize collective control over everything you don’t like, which Twitter then gives people hope to do, like having a peace march in Golden Gate Park. It transforms even libertarians into collectivists who want the public mob to decide your fate.

So now libertarians spend all day on Twitter saying “I like this, I don’t like that”, and either Joe Biden or Elon Musk or Ron DeSantis should fix it. Freedom is now a mob on Twitter saying “this person should be free”.

The only defense of liberty is law. The biggest enemy of liberty is mob rule.