The “Libertarian to Alt Right pipeline” as a concept has been around almost since the term “Alternative Right” came into popular consciousness in 2015. The alleged pipeline has mostly been used as a cudgel by left-leaning statists and some foolish left-libertarians to attack right libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism especially, as being simply a gateway drug to nazism. Most of the personalities using the term, and indeed most people throwing around the term alt right, have done little research into the term and its adherents. Consequently alt right has come to mean a vast array of opinions from Ben Shapiro to the most psychotic genocidal groypers. In this case, it is just about a useless term unless narrowly defined. 

So what is the alt right? For the purposes of this discussion, the Alt Right is that group of right wingers that coalesced between 2012 and 2014 against mainstream conservative opinion on important topics such as foreign policy, immigration and racial policies. Though often credited with coining the term, Paul Gottfried, friend of Murray Rothbard and devout paleoconservative, would not fit this definition. When I say alt right I mean men like Ryan Faulk of Alternative Hypothesis, Mike Enoch of the Right Stuff.biz, and Christopher Cantwell of Radical Agenda. All three of these men happen to have been libertarians at one time. The reason that they are all considered alt right, despite some lingering interest in libertarian arguments and policies, is that they have accepted the importance of the role of government and force more broadly to attain right wing anti-egalitarian policies. While Hans Herman Hoppe believes that when the state withers, the natural order between men and women, the productive class and the non-productive class, and any other social hierarchy will reemerge, these men do not trust the market either theoretically or practically to fulfill this need. We will go through the ideological journey of each of these men in turn, analyzing why they left libertarianism and why they were incorrect to do so.

First, Mike Enoch. Michael Peinovich, a New yorker who in his earlier days had made a (now deleted) contribution to Mises.org, at some point around 2013 had become obsessed with the myth of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. At the time of writing most listeners will be familiar with “helicopter memes” but a decade ago Enoch was on the cutting edge of “edgy libertarianism” as he called his brand of racially controversial, authoritarian apologetic paleo-libertarianism. Rothbard, the founder of Anarcho-capitalism and author of such essays as “Race! That Murray Book” and “Right Wing Populism” would not be unfamiliar with non PC analysis of government and culture. However, Murray never voiced support for the contemporary Chilean dictatorship that Enoch initially saw as a proof of concept for the right. This is probably for a few reasons. While Rothbard was certainly happy to ally with some statists on some common goals, from marxist leninists who wanted to end the vietnam war, to southern neo-confederates who wanted to cut welfare spending, he was not short sighted enough to literally gift right wing statists total power and hope they would smile and pat him on the back. In 1975 he opined, “Again, the major lesson of the Chilean tragedy should be clear. Once

again, a right-wing dictatorship has simply taken over the pernicious

institutions created by a previous left-wing dictatorship. Right and left

are brothers under the skin. Once again, massive U.S. foreign aid

(supplemented this time by CIA) has only succeeded in strengthening the

yoke of despotism upon a foreign land. And, finally, once again we see the

absurdity of expecting victories for liberty in a land where no libertarians

or classical liberals exist.” Rothbard rightly condemns Pinochet for lacking the fortitude or knowledge to privatize the copper industry, Chile’s major export, and the reliance of the Chilean state on copper tax revenue was a major factor in that nation’s rise to upper income being fraught with setbacks. Enoch would eventually become ambivalent towards both Pinochet and free market policies in general, founding basically a left wing national socialist party called the National Justice Party which calls for nationalizing all major industries and eliminating banking as an institution. He has gone far, far down the path of hyperstatism, but his road to perdition started with a belief that if you just got the right strongman in power he could fix all of society’s ills. 

Little is known about Ryan Faulk’s background, many of the things he has claimed to be are contradictory, and though a viewer of his content since around 2013 I cannot say anything with any sense of confidence. However, by that time Ryan Faulk had gone through a litany of name changes for his youtube channel and ideology shifts. Once a prominent anarcho-capitalist youtuber in the early 2010s, his shift was mainly on the axis of racial politics. For a time Faulk was able to synthesize race realism with anarcho-capitalism neatly, then shifting more into a Keith Preston style pan-secessionist program as a solution to racial and cultural strife, one that inspired a young Adrian Shephard. By 2015 however he had become committed to a right wing populist platform which called for a shut down of all non-european immigration to the united states (to preserve liberalism and free markets), and saw donald Trump as his champion. With the disappointment (shared by big Trumper Enoch) of Trump as actual administrator, Faulk went down the rabbit hole of unreconstructed national socialism. Hitler, then Otto Strasser became his heroes and his support for laissez-faire turned into total disgust at the market system in the first place. Along with many other “left wing fascists” his current lot has been thrown towards China and Russia as the saviors of civilization against the degenerate west. Race realism, the idea that human populations differ in psychological behaviors is not inherently statist or anti-statist, regardless of its actual merits. Ryan Faulk’s focus on immigration, and his insistence that mass immigration inherently makes countries more statist at first blush could make sense. The excellent Open Borders book by Bryan Caplan however, undermines this argument and shows that dehomogenization can actually have salutary results if your goal really is to weaken the state and its hangers-on.

Christopher Cantwell was never a libertarian “in good standing”, however his brazen style and lack of frills gained him a cult following online and in New Hampshire where he was a frequent guest of the Free Talk Live libertarian radio show, one of the oldest libertarian institutions in the Free State. Cantwell would often get in trouble for being anti-PC, despite holding basically to a plumb line libertarianism ala Rothbard. His conflict with culturally left libertarians brought him into the orbit of Mike Enoch and his Right Stuff network and Cantwell started “reading into” data on racial differences in crime among other things. Still a committed libertarian on economics at least, he butted heads with the head honchos of the Right Stuff and when he started talking bad about the protectionist policy of Donald trump and paleocons he was muted for being “autistic”. His time with the Alt Right would eventually ruin his prospects for anything like a normal life. In 2017 he attended the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. His assault charge from a pepper spray attack against a left wing protester on the day was the impetus for his current situation 6 years later, having been released from police custody this December. He has stayed in the right wing blogosphere (with a decimated fanbase), and one of his more recent articles is of some interest for this video. On May 16, 2023 he published “Free to Decline”. This essay is a short retrospective on the Free State Project (which he was once a member of before being ousted for a frankly based article he uploaded challenging the New Hampshire police to “stack up” as it were.). Cantwell logs the decline in social quality of the Free State project, bringing up a tweet wherein a Porcfest attendee claims to be bringing a drag queen story hour to the Porcupine Freedom Festival, the state fair of the Libertarian movement. The alt right argument that the free market cannot stop degeneracy is at least as old as the concept of laissez-faire capitalism itself, and the old reactionaries of the 18th and 19th century certainly agreed that society was simply unfit to regulate itself. Therefore we must meet these pre-modern arguments with their enlightenment counters. As Frederic Bastiat so succinctly put it, “If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind.” No special pleading to any particular moral panic can ever refute this charge. There is no alternative to the free association of moral agents, and if ones fears that we will collapse into degeneracy once the perverted freaks of the WEF are disempowered, libertarians have reams of pages on how institutions such as the central bank and easy money create the kind of short sighted, high time preference individuals which do destroy civilizations. All the more reason to be a Rothbardian ancap. 

Me and most members of Springtime of Nations lived through this time where dozens of our libertarian acquaintances were pulled into the singularity of the alt right. Thankfully with the collapse of the alt right movement following Charlottesville this threat has somewhat blown over. Libertarians should always prepare for these events and know how to counter them when the ugly head of right wing statism is rearing. Long live liberty, death to Tyranny and may 1000 flowers bloom.