Chris in Simpler Times, Acting as Security for the Hallowkeene Dance Party in 2014.
While Christopher Cantwell still looks like himself on the outside, his beliefs have completely changed in the last few years and become even worse than they previously were. Tuesday night, Johnson Rice, Aria DiMezzo and I had Chris in the LRN.FM studio for a special internet-only, in-depth conversation that exclusively aired on the LRN.FM Twitch channel. If you can stomach the watch, it’s fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way.
In my last article about him, written shortly after his arrest in Charlottesville at a white nationalist hate rally, I explained that despite Chris’ libertarian activism being covered by this blog in the past, he had never been a blogger at Free Keene, nor was he ever invited to be. When he came to Keene in the early part of this decade, he was just crass libertarian comedian Chris Cantwell from Long Island. He wasn’t a racist, but still caused much controversy for his hatred for the police.
Today, Chris has embraced the police as his potential tool of oppression, even though they recently threw him into a jail cell for months in Virginia. As he revealed in our conversation Tuesday night, he literally wants to become the state. Shortly after 2 hours, 22 minutes in he actually says he wants to force his beliefs on others, and then moments later says, “I want to be the government, yeah.”
His dramatic shift to statism isn’t a first for the Free State Project libertarian migration, which was the original reason Chris chose to move to New Hampshire. Early mover to Manchester Amanda Bouldin went from being an anarchist to a hostile-to-libertarians leftist. Conversely, Chris has gone from being an anarchist to a actual NAZI. There’s not a shred of a libertarian left in him. Libertarians, voluntarists, and liberty-loving anarchists believe people should be judged as individuals, by their words and actions. Chris is obsessed with race and admits in the conversation that it’s lazy to judge people based on the group into which they are born, but nonetheless runs with the idea anyway, as he considers the laziness of racism to be an efficient filter for his ideal society.
Previously a libertarian against the war on drugs, he’s now for prohibition.
Further, Chris actually seems to believe he has some chance of becoming the state, by leading some kind of white nationalist takeover of the government. About the only thing we agree on is his support of secession. Politics does indeed make for strange bedfellows. Of course if NH were ever to secede, we’d be at odds again as I support open borders and he supports a closed-border police state.
The conversation we had on the Twitch-only show (though I’ve since exported it to Youtube here) had some particularly bizarre moments including Chris holding the confusing position of having used cannabis while supporting continuing prohibition against it. He speaks out of both sides of his mouth by acknowledging the benefits of harm reduction and decriminalization but refusing to advocate for policy changes in that direction. It’s a perplexing perspective. Despite his own personal knowledge of the ineffectiveness of prohibition and the various studies proving it is an abject failure that creates the opposite of its intended results, he rejects all that on the near-religious belief that outlawing something reduces its use. It’s a belief wholly at odds with how he used to think on the issue.
At one point in the conversation he actually refers to himself as a caricature. What does he really believe? Outside of another total personality shift to a communist, that which he currently hates, or perhaps maybe going transgender, it’s hard to imagine where Chris will go from here.
Speaking of transgender, Chris also had a segment with the Anarchist Shemale, Aria DiMezzo. Aria wrote about it on her blog, and was disappointed she didn’t get more time on-air to fight with Chris. I’d invited her there with the expectation that Johnson wasn’t going to stay through the whole show and that Aria could take his chair later. Turns out, Johnson stayed the whole time. She was also upset that we didn’t go toe-to-toe with Chris on trans issues, which I honestly know next-to-nothing about.
Only advocates of peace are allowed to blog at FreeKeene.com
Others, Aria included, wanted to see more challenges from Johnson and I, and were upset that I laughed at Chris’ sick jokes. I’m the first to admit, I laugh at inappropriate things and I’ve always enjoyed Chris’ sense of humor. But Johnson and I definitely challenged his racist and insane statist beliefs. People will hear what they want to hear, of course, and people are highly emotional when it comes to Chris. They give him way more power and weight than he actually has. Some say we shouldn’t give him a platform, but then widely share the very video they say we shouldn’t have made.
Others, like me, can see the value in giving enough rope to Chris to verbally hang himself. We don’t think that bad ideas should be shut down, but instead they ought to be countered publicly. The answer to ugly speech is more speech, not de-platforming or censorship. If you don’t think I was the best person to counter Chris’ ideas, that’s fine. If you hate me because I’m kind to Chris, that’s fine too. Hate only hurts the hater. That’s ultimately the true irony here, that hating Chris only makes you more like him.
Chris has become what he once hated – an arch statist. He has rejected the libertarian principle of non-aggression and instead embraced coercive, institutionalized violence as his tool. Of course, violence begets violence and he will reap as he sows.
Though Chris is certainly responsible for his horrible beliefs, he’s ultimately a creation of a society that has long embraced the aggression of government as a tool to control their neighbor. If you hate Chris but you support the coercive state, you ought to look in the mirror. People cover their support for state violence by believing in nonsense like the “social contract” and refusing to see the threats of violence that back all government programs. They hold conflicting positions, like supporting the state while believing they themselves support peace. To his credit, at least Chris is honest about his reasons for supporting the state. He knows it’s a tool for the violent to control others and is eager to use it for his purposes. If you support the state, you helped make Chris into a monster.
The video DiMezzo was parodying involved a hulking trans person who made an outrageous scene at an Albuqueque, NM Gamestop over being called “sir”. In that video, the brutish Tiffany Michelle bellows at the poor Gamestop employee and kicks over a display while storming around and shouting profanities. As the original, now-viral video begins, Michelle was upset with the Gamestop returns process then flips out on another customer for using “sir” when referring to Michelle and turns and targets the Gamestop employee when he referred to both customers as “guys”.
Aria DiMezzo files for Cheshire County Sheriff as a Libertarian
DiMezzo made her parody video to counter the perception that all trans people are as easily offended as the ridiculous Michelle. She told me in an interview for Free Keene, “It was to show that not all trans people behave that way and that her behavior was more a reflection of her character than her being trans. Because the stereotype has grains of truth in it, I’m now in facebook jail because said people don’t know how to take a joke.” Keene’s Gamestop staff appreciated the humor and the DiMezzo’s video ends with a handshake with the clerk.
After DiMezzo posted the video to her Facebook page, she was given a seven day ban within 24 hours for “hate speech” and the video was pulled down by Facebook. DiMezzo appealed the decision and Facebook admitted they were wrong to consider the video as “hate speech” and restored the video, while bizarrely leaving her account banned.
If you’re looking to escape Facebook, you can follow DiMezzo’s account over on the decentralized Mastodon social media network. Also, check out our previous article showing multiple alternatives far more useful for communication than Facebook.
RT America contacted me Friday and asked for a quick comment on behalf of Cop Block regarding this week’s mass page takedown by Facebook. The takedown affected the facebook pages of major police accountability and pro-liberty sites including the Free Thought Project, the Anti-Media, Cop Block and others. I explained that Facebook is their property and they can do as they wish with it. Police accountability activists and other libertarians should be building alternative platforms rather than relying on those provided by political corporate behemoths like Facebook and Twitter. Here’s the segment that aired on RT America yesterday:
The good news is, such a platform already exists in the form of Mastodon, which is a decentralized, federated competitor to Twitter. Unlike Facebook and Twitter which are centralized platforms controlled by corporations, a Mastodon server can be run by anyone and worldwide there are thousands of Mastodon servers. Each server admin decides the rules for their server, including which other Mastodon servers to connect to – this is what it means when Mastodon is described as “federated”. Its decentralized, federated structure is why Mastodon is much more censorship resistant than the centralized, corporate platforms.
Cop Block’s new Mastodon!
I recommend you create an account on your preferred Mastodon instance. If you’re pro-liberty, then you should try out Liberdon, which launched this summer and houses various libertarians and voluntarists. I just made a CopBlock account there today, which you can follow here.
Facebook’s blog post explaining their takedowns basically admitted they were upset that pages like Cop Block were getting people to leave Facebook and visit their respective websites, meaning potential revenue for the sites in question and potentially less revenue for Facebook. Facebook doesn’t want you to leave Facebook. Whether there were political motivations behind the takedowns is more speculative, but it certainly reeks of it. Regardless of their reasons, perhaps you should consider leaving Facebook entirely and helping build the decentralized alternatives. It’s up to you.
NH was one of the states that fought hard against REAL ID. That opposition was in character with the “live free or die” philosophy we’re supposed to be famous for embracing. It was in character with our reputation as a libertarian leaning state.
Somewhere along the way we stopped fighting REAL ID and meekly submitted. Sixteen years of indoctrination – a combination of fear based agitprop and training to submit to authority, changed our tune from Just Say No to We Have to do this for National Security. REAL ID means that the state maintains a database of information on people, including Social Security numbers and photos.
She’s right. This year in the state house the supposed privacy nut state rep, Neil Kurk, capitulated after years of holding firm against REAL ID, and endorsed the state’s partial embracing of the federal ID standards. One who wishes to acquire a non-REAL ID-compliant card can still get one, but according to someone I know who visited the DMV this week, the DMV bureaucrats are pushing the new REAL ID version.
NH Internal Border Patrol Checkpoint
I recommend reading Susan’s whole post, it’s well-done and there’s very little she says that I can disagree with. Until the end, that is. She says in the final paragraph:
There hasn’t been a peep out of the liberty and freedumb crowd about this. Not a word from the allegedly liberty loving Free Staters. The folks who do the wailin’ about gummint encroachment on our lives are strangely silent when it comes to “show us your papers” stops. Their interest in gummint interference extends to deregulation and tax cuts. Actual violations of privacy and civil liberties don’t interest them in the slightest.
I may not be a “Free Stater”, but I love liberty and am friends with many of them. I have seen plenty of liberty people upset about these checkpoints and they have posted their outrage online… on facebook. Which means no one hears it except those connected to the person on facebook – such posts only hit the libertarian echo chamber. Sadly, most of the people who are here are not bloggers like Susan and me. They are just as outraged as she, but fail to communicate it effectively to a wider audience. (more…)
Obviously anyone can donate to the Red Cross anytime, but Stallcop’s fundraiser will be benefiting the Red Cross with a twist. If his fundraiser reaches its goal, he’ll be stripping down for a full body waxing – ouch! Plus, he’ll receive the waxing on video to prove it. He explains in his fundraiser that he’s a huge Rocky Horror Picture Show fan and generally dresses up each October, but this year he’ll go all the way and add a full body waxing (except his head & eyebrows) to his Rocky costume if the fundraiser makes it before Halloween.
Keene Signals its Support for Secession by its Recent Peaceful Civil Disobedience
In case you aren’t aware, the police have their own gang symbol. It’s called the “thin blue line” – a blue line horizontally sandwiched between two black bars. You’ll frequently see it on the back of vehicles presumably containing police or their immediate relatives. Of course, anyone can buy these stickers now, so police have other ways of recognizing their own, like these family “professional courtesy” passbooks, but regardless, the blue line is still seen on their cars, their clothing, and now flags. It helps create the “us vs them” mentality that some police have. Worse still, some people insist on treating the police as though they are better than the rest of humanity. Their word is gold in court, they get special burials when mass calamity happens, deferential treatment in many of the crimes the corrupt officers commit, and more.
In a recent Keene Sentinel piece about multiple city councilors gushing over their recent decision to paint a horribly garish blue line down the middle of Marlboro St, local commenter Johnson Rice points out that the city is actually committing civil disobedience against the federal government: (more…)
