What if gatekeeping is actually good?

I think that it actually matters who we organize with and advocate for!

The Libertarian Party wants you to believe they are raging against war. Together with the dubious “Movement For A People’s Party,” whose owner, Nick Brana, recently appeared on a round table discussion held by the LaRouche Cult affiliated Schiller Institute, they are raising money by hosting a collection of COVID deniers, white supremacists, TERFs, and pedophiles along with a handful of respectable figures like Jill Stein and Dennis Kucinich to legitimize Andrew Napolitano, Tulsi Gabbard, and various advocates of a Canadian invasion as “antiwar.” It’s really disgraceful that someone like Chris Hedges would be obsessed with finding common ground with Scott Ritter against imperialism. Their claim to put peace higher than anything else is belied by their willingness to hang around with Nazis. Everyone attending is participating in the grift in some way, if only by legitimizing it.

Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Jimmy Dore have all been preaching the virtues of some kind of principled antiwar coalition with the libertarian right since 2020… Dore since 2017. The fact that the so-called “libertarian right” is white nationalist, anti-China, and bankrolled by the Big Oil and Big Tech interests that drive wars over resources tends to get forgotten. The take over of the Libertarian Party by the Mises Caucus is just one example of the problem. Ron Paul (speaking at “Rage Against The War Machine,” of course) was sending a white supremacist newsletter to Texas Republicans while he was in Congress and its editor, Jeffrey Tucker, now runs the COVID denial shop called the Brownstone Institute. This support for an alliance with “antiwar libertarians” has spilled over into support for COVID denial by speakers like Jimmy Dore, and support for Nazi anti-LGBTQ+ positions by speakers like Tulsi Gabbard.

There appears to be a sincere belief in some quarters that being “antiwar” means showing up and speaking up anytime any group gets a bunch of people together and claims to be “antiwar.” This is based on the idea that showing up to these events, or speaking at these events, will somehow grow a non-existent antiwar movement instead of the far right groups organizing of these events. Legitimizing the idea that Nazis are antiwar actually hurts our prospects of building a real antiwar movement targeting the wealth of the resource extraction industry and the military industrial complex. The people we want to join an antiwar movement aren’t going to join a Nazi led movement.

Tailing the far right this way actually prevents us from organizing this movement. We’re investing in their events instead of building our own movement. We compromise our organizing potential by following instead of organizing ourselves, and we follow leaders who do not support our class interests. Can people who want a race war really be antiwar? Can people who want to remove LGBTQ+ people and sex workers from society really be antiwar? These contradictions matter and they weaken us when we ignore them.

Let’s not forget that publicly aligning with Nazi “antiwar” movements also divides the working class. Nazis are anti-Black and anti-immigrant,and the working class is Black and brown. Nazis are anti-LGBTQ+ and the working class is queer. Most importantly, Nazis are anticommunist and will always be opposed to the pursuit of working class interests by working class organizations. Dividing us is part of their strategy for winning.

This same bait to get the left to tail the right instead of building its own organizations and institutions is represented by Compact Magazine. Founded by two conservatives and COVID denying Marxist, Compact states its ideological enemy very clearly: liberalism. The idea that the anticapitalist left and the antiauthoritarian right can somehow find common ground against liberalism, and that this can be turned into a wider attack on capitalism, is very popular in indy media circles. Chris Hedges is devoted to the idea. Extinction Rebellion is “non-partisan” because of this idea. People don’t want to face the facts.

The facts are that the “anti-authoritarian right” is fine with police authoritarianism against Black people. The “anti-authoritarian right” is fine with passive eugenics via a policy on non-policy on COVID despite the authoritarianism inherent in letting poor people die because they can’t afford care. That “anti-authoritarian right” embraces a philosophy of free speech that includes Nazis shooting up drag shows and attacking the basic idea of a free society. So how can the “anti-authoritarian right” actually exist?

Spoiler: it doesn’t. The inverted totalitarianism of the libertarian right results in Nazism, as corporations fund far right paramilitary organizations to influence the government. The managerial feudalism supported by the libertarian right creates the Nazi ruling class. Ultimately, libertarians and liberals will come to some accommodation that shuts anticapitalists out of society if we help the right organize at our own expense.