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DavidNeiwert's profile
David Neiwert
David Neiwert
David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert

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David Neiwert

@DavidNeiwert

Author, 'Red Pill, Blue Pill: How to Counteract the Conspiracy Theories That Are Killing Us' (Prometheus, 2020). Staff writer @DailyKos. I block shitheads.

Seattle, WA
dneiwert.blogspot.com
Joined July 2014

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    David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

    1) Yesterday I ended discussion with an interlocutor who became abusive (life is too short to converse with shitheads) after I told him that, in my view, libertarians often are some of the worst authoritarians. So let me explain. Long thread follows.

    6:03 PM - 5 Sep 2018
    • 686 Retweets
    • 1,623 Likes
    • Wide Mind | Fierce Heart 🦓🥄 𝚐𝚑𝚘𝚜𝚝 𝚒𝚗 𝚊 𝚖𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚎 Joseph Mazeppa Today 𝕳𝖚𝖌𝖍 𝕸𝖆𝖈𝖐𝖆𝖞 Alex Korzh Stepan Sadovnykov Andreyka (╯°□°)╯︵( .o.)
    55 replies 686 retweets 1,623 likes
      1. New conversation
      2. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        2) I’ll agree that the notion of libertarian authoritarianism seems counterintuitive. After all, it’s a worldview predicated on enshrining individual liberty as the highest possible social and political value. But it nonetheless is proving a massive gateway to authoritarianism.

        4 replies 36 retweets 351 likes
        Show this thread
      3. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        3) Perhaps the single greatest indicator of this is the way libertarians have lined up in support of Donald Trump, who is the most authoritarian personality in the history of the American presidency, resembling nothing so much as a Banana Republic dictator in his ruling style.

        6 replies 27 retweets 402 likes
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      4. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        4) I began exploring this in greater depth a couple of years ago upon realizing that an unusual number of the young men who were being swept up in the alt-right began their paths to radicalization by first adopting libertarianism as their preferred political philosophy.

        3 replies 26 retweets 361 likes
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      5. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        5) Recall that alt-right founder Richard Spencer started out dabbling in libertarianism. Many other alt-righters claim it in describing their origins: Milo Yiannopoulos. Tim “Baked Alaska” Gionet. Augustus Invictus. “Crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell. https://christophercantwell.com/2017/08/17/consider-alt-right/ …

        2 replies 21 retweets 253 likes
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      6. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        6) Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes still describes himself as libertarian. To this day, large numbers of Proud Boys I’ve spoken with describe themselves as libertarian. So do many of the “III Percent” and Oath Keeper militiamen I’ve interviewed.

        4 replies 23 retweets 253 likes
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      7. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        7) Remember that guy in Seattle who got infamously decked for wearing a swastika armband? I looked into his background, and found that he too started out as an Ayn Rand-loving libertarian.https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nazi-man-swastika-seattle-punched-beaten-up-streets-video-a7954406.html …

        3 replies 23 retweets 265 likes
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      8. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        8) So did “Seattle4Truth,” an alt-right conspiracy theorist whose murder trial I will be covering this fall. He was once a software worker who adhered to libertarian beliefs.https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/10/23/alt-righter-seattle4truth-charged-killing-father-over-conspiracy-theories …

        2 replies 18 retweets 240 likes
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      9. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        9) But then, this is nothing new. Back in the 1990s, both Militia of Montana founder John Trochmann and key militia figure James ‘Bo’ Gritz described their own views to me as libertarian. As did dozens of their followers.

        1 reply 14 retweets 242 likes
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      10. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        10) The nation’s most famous libertarian politician, Rep. Ron Paul, ran a presidential campaign that turned out to be a massive meeting and recruitment ground for radical-right extremists. In many ways it paved the way for the alt-right’s rise. http://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/11/dark-side-of-paul-phenomenon.html …

        3 replies 49 retweets 324 likes
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      11. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        11) Establishment libertarians like the folks at Reason angrily dispute any connection, of course. They also point to its supposedly robust defense of free speech and its putative opposition to authoritarianism.https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-insidious-libertarian-to-alt-right-pipeline …

        3 replies 31 retweets 272 likes
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      12. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        12) But let’s take a closer look at how, in fact, libertarianism is deeply appealing to authoritarian personalities – the folks who, at the end of the day, prefer to live under the rule of an authoritarian leader and who hold democracy in contempt.

        1 reply 33 retweets 272 likes
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      13. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        13) I myself was briefly attracted to libertarianism in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. But I drew away after observing that the philosophy was, in the end, deeply incoherent, and actually ran deeply counter to my own core values.

        7 replies 12 retweets 319 likes
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      14. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        14) Consider, for instance, its supposed advocacy of free speech and the free exchange of ideas as expressions of individual liberty. Yet you will find they are peculiarly hostile to the free expression of ideas that run counter to their own.

        2 replies 19 retweets 371 likes
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      15. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        15) The key for me came early in my career, when I was dealing as a journalist with the crimes committed by neo-Nazis associated with the Aryan Nations in northern Idaho. It was clear that these crimes effectively negated the individual civil liberties of their victims.

        2 replies 14 retweets 269 likes
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      16. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        16) And yet libertarians were (and remain) hostile both to civil-rights laws and hate-crimes laws intended to protect those individuals’ rights, because they use various classifications of protection: racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual.

        1 reply 18 retweets 313 likes
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      17. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        17) Libertarians seemed to me then, and now, wrapped up in the notion that only the government can deprive individuals of their civil liberties. From my early experience onward, I have always known better. Their fellow citizens are in fact far more likely to do so.

        9 replies 121 retweets 625 likes
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      18. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        18) I also read Ayn Rand quite a bit in this period. I slogged through the wretched, didactic prose in the hope of fully grasping her ideas, which my libertarian friends all loved. I found her ideas to be thinly veiled rationalizations for a shallow, toxic self-centeredness.

        7 replies 52 retweets 602 likes
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      19. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        19) The clincher for me was the scene in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ in which she rubs out an entire trainful of people in a mountain tunnel, and writes it as though it is an unalloyed good thing. Anyone who views other human beings as disposable is, in my view, essentially evil.

        4 replies 55 retweets 555 likes
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      20. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        20) This was also where I first observed libertarians’ authoritarian streak. When I told my libertarian friends that I found Rand repulsive, they derided me as stupid and short-sighted. Anyone who dissed Rand, for them, just didn’t dig hard enough. It was cult-like.

        6 replies 18 retweets 303 likes
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      21. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        21) More to the point, Rand’s political philosophy is itself profoundly authoritarian. It essentially advocates the supremacy of the will of the powerful individuals who reside atop the economic hierarchy. We little people should happily submit to the rule of the John Galts.

        2 replies 45 retweets 436 likes
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      22. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        22) Of course, in many ways this appeals to the American psyche. Steinbeck is credited (incorrectly, I gather) with the adage: “Americans never see themselves as poor, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Whoever said it, it’s deeply true.

        3 replies 25 retweets 437 likes
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      23. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        23) But it also appeals to authoritarian personalities. The first of the three behavioral/attitudinal clusters that define such personalities is Authoritarian Submission: The belief that in order to have secure civil society, we should submit to the rule of the Legitimate Leader.

        3 replies 18 retweets 286 likes
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      24. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        24) The remaining two clusters are Authoritarian Aggression – directed at anyone who fails to appropriately submit, or any leader deemed illegitimate – and Conventionalism, the belief that people with their views represent the “real mainstream.”

        1 reply 15 retweets 268 likes
        Show this thread
      25. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        25) These clusters combine to create a series of identifiable traits, many of which fit libertarians to a T, particularly in their real-life behaviors: Compartmentalized thinking. A high tolerance for bigotry, both in action and rhetorically. A tendency toward conspiracism.

        2 replies 18 retweets 305 likes
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      26. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        26) But the defining trait of authoritarian personalities, both followers and leaders, is also a defining trait of libertarians: A contempt for the principles of equality, and a prevailing belief that inequality is the natural state of things, which should not be undermined.

        3 replies 92 retweets 486 likes
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      27. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        27) This is where compartmentalized thinking plays an important role. This is the psychological device by which people are able to cope with the cognitive dissonance that naturally arises when a person holds two apparently contradictory beliefs simultaneously.

        1 reply 13 retweets 260 likes
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      28. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        28) So now we have the spectacle of libertarians who ardently support an overt authoritarian as president, and are fans of a Russian premier whose authoritarianism is being spread throughout Europe in the form of anti-LGBT/anti-immigrant white nationalism.

        3 replies 21 retweets 271 likes
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      29. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        29) We have anti-government militiamen who line up behind the same regimes and demand utter fealty to his government. We have far-right Proud Boys who violently respond to anyone who dares to exercise their own free-speech rights by protesting them.

        1 reply 19 retweets 266 likes
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      30. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        30) This is all because compartmentalization produces a mindset in which only their point of view is deemed legitimate. It’s all “free speech for me, and none for thee.” Any objection to their views, or decision to deplatform their bigotry, is deemed an attempt to oppression

        2 replies 36 retweets 342 likes
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      31. David Neiwert‏ @DavidNeiwert 5 Sep 2018

        31) We have a generation of young men lining up to fanatically defend an authoritarian ideologue like Jordan Peterson, who claims on the one hand to be all about individual rights but promotes the values of male patriarchy.https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/evqekn/the-fundamental-errors-of-jordan-peterson …

        7 replies 39 retweets 368 likes
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      32. Show replies

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