Fallen Libertarians: The Zeroth Position
Zeroth Position is a self-claimed “libertarian reactionary” blog which was both the main influence that turned me to libertarianism, and a fascist outlet smearing the reputation of libertarianism.
At the time I was a confused teenager who’d recently figured out that state authority was illegitimate but hadn’t gotten rid of the deeper indoctrination about the use of force. The chief Zeroth Position writer, Nullus Maximus, was an extremely good influence on me during this period. He taught me about the NAP and how you could morally oppose something without wanting to use force against it (which was literally an alien concept to my recently-statist mind); although I didn’t agree at the time, I was definitely moved closer to it by my desire for harmony with the first anarchist blogger I found. He also taught me a lot about defending markets from pragmatic statist critiques, in particular about pollution. That pollution could violate the NAP is an insight I wouldn’t otherwise have had until many years later.
He also taught me about the “libertarian to alt-right” pipeline. I’d heard anarcho-communists talk about it but I thought they were crazy, until I was forced to admit that my own mentor was an example. I watched in horror as he promoted state borders, police brutality, and constantly used “libertarians and rightists” as if that is a natural, obvious grouping. I didn’t read most of these articles until after I’d become an actual libertarian due to his influence. I don’t know if I was contemporary to Nullus Maximus’s fall from grace, or if I just happened to read all of the innocent articles before all of the fascistic ones.
In The Pragmatic Libertarian Case Against Open Borders, he describes the theoretical state of affairs in an anarcho-capitalist society where immigration is subject to private property, and then says that the existence of the state prevents this and forces us to choose between forced segregation and forced integration, and concludes that forced segregation is the lesser evil. There are so many reasons this argument fails:
* A core consequence he focuses on is the “overloading” of the welfare state. Of course the welfare state is unjust because taxation is theft. So how does he think the borders are funded? Where does he think the wages of ICE employees come from?
* If being a recipient of state welfare makes it acceptable for others to use force against you, shouldn’t we also try to deport every American-born citizen who receives welfare? Why does this only apply to immigrants?
This argument is also altogether backward because the state clearly harms immigrants more than American-born citizens. Immigrants must deal with not only the threat of kidnapping and deportation, but also with regulations and licensing, making it incredibly difficult for them to find work or do anything else.
Also note that insofar as undocumented immigrants are able to find under-the-table work, they do not pay taxes on it. This is literally an agorist activity of subverting the state, and Nullus Maximus wants the state to crush it.
Let’s also note that in an earlier article on the same subject, responding to a piece by Nicholas Sarwark, Nullus Maximus agreed that foreigners use welfare programs at a lower rate than American-born citizens. Doesn’t that completely flip his argument upside-down?
* He says immigration will have bad consequences due to other statist policies such as minimum wages and child labor laws disrupting market signals, but doesn’t consider that preventing free movement is also a disruption of market signals.
* Even if he were correct that closed borders were less harmful, it’s inconsistent with his own contention that the ends can never justify the means, no matter how much the means are a lesser evil. If he believes that, he shouldn’t support state aggression against immigrants regardless of the consequences of letting them in.
When he does admit some downsides of closed borders, note how they are all focused on how it affects the people within the country and not the would-be immigrants.
This type of nonsense argument for state borders seems to be universal among libertarians who catch the alt-right infection. I didn’t understand how he could make such arguments when I first saw them; I didn’t want to believe what I was reading. I saw it as a bizarre aberration in an otherwise excellent outlet.
But perhaps this alone doesn’t render Zeroth Position an anti-libertarian outlet. Perhaps a real libertarian can sincerely think those things? Here’s one of the things Nullus Maximus reminisced about in his 2018 review:
Welton and I figured that if libertarians and rightists are going to be slandered as fascists and Nazis no matter what, then we have nothing to lose by examining real Nazis and seeing what can be learned from their example. The result was an excellent piece on the rise and fall of the Sturmabteilung (SA).
That article is as horrible as it sounds, and contains absolutely nothing to suggest the author even identifies as libertarian. Rather, it heavily suggests the author as more of a fascist.
See also “On The Relationship Between Libertarianism and Fascism" where Zeroth Position author Insula Qui openly speaks of fascist sympathies and a possible alliance between libertarians and fascists.
First, from the premises of libertarianism, fascism is a lesser evil than left-wing socialism. Fascism undoubtedly preserves property more than left-wing socialism does, thus fascist sympathies cannot be construed as completely anti-libertarian.
Despite these horrendous posts, the Zeroth Position still hosts a shocking amount of real insight, including what I learned from. 25 statist propaganda phrases and how to rebut them and its sequel point out many statist sayings that muddle the mind of the utterer, and suggests responding to “but who will build the roads?” with “if we free the slaves, who will pick the cotton?” — probably the best answer possible. But Who Will Build The Death Camps? is an excellent piece on a particularly salient reason to oppose states. Liberty Requires Revolution and the ensuing series of rebuttal to Underhill are incredibly insightful pieces on the eventual necessity of defensive force against the state, even if not in the near future.
From Nullus’ fall into the alt-right I think I learned a lot about the nature of this pipeline. Let me point out some of the factors that appear to have led him to it:
* Reactance bias from dealing with the authoritarian left. When you have conservative ideas yourself and see so much of people wanting to use the state to enforce leftist ideas, it’s easy to start to feel that the state and leftism are inherently linked, and even that the reason the state is bad is because it enforces the ideas of the left, rather than vice versa.
* Feeling betrayed by other libertarians for promoting the (even eventual) use of defensive force against the state.
This didn’t happen to Nullus personally, but in particular I recall being shocked to read that his friend Christopher Cantwell (this was my only knowledge of him at the time) was banned from an FSP event for saying that it would be ethically justified, albeit not a good idea, to attack state enforcers. What seems like such a modest claim that, at least if you ask me, follows so clearly from libertarian principles, gets you ostracized by many left-libertarians. A tragic misdeed that understandably leads to right-leaning libertarians becoming skeptical of left-leaning ones.
On this note, Nullus Maximus wrote in The Pragmatic Libertarian Case Against Open Borders that “There is almost a perfect overlap between libertarians who have come out in favor of importing Syrian refugees and libertarians who will denounce anyone who argues in favor of the use of defensive force against the state”.
Ultimately the Zeroth Position writers hate “the left” far more than they do the state. In “On the Imbalance of Political Terror”, Nullus Maximus argues broadly that the left wins because the right is unwilling to fight dirty, in particular by refusing to use state and institutional power to target the left, refusing to use direct action such as street violence against the left, and denouncing the “most extreme” elements of their side while the left refuses to do the same. He argues that the solution is for “libertarians and rightists” to use more of these strategies, including in ways that clearly violate the NAP such as outlawing the wearing of masks (this was before COVID). He doesn’t appear to detect it as a NAP violation because he thinks of the left and the right as distinct entities in such a way that “the left” as a whole is a legitimate target for defensive force because of the actions of a few, a deeply collectivist and unlibertarian mode of thought.
A paragraph in that article suggests we ought to “stop denouncing [white nationalists, fascists, or any other far-right group]”, and instead purge “those who insist on playing respectability politics and purging people toward that end”:
The fourth problem is the result of leftist infiltration into right-wing and libertarian circles in the forms of neoconservatism and left-libertarianism. This has led to an obsession with respectability in the eyes of the left, which in practice can only mean conformity with leftist agendas. The problem began in earnest for the right with William F. Buckley’s purges at the National Review, and although it was always present at some level within the modern libertarian movement, Samuel Konkin bears much of the blame for this. One does not have to like white nationalists, fascists, or any other far-right group to realize that they are an asset in a street battle against the left and that however bad they might be, communists are even worse. Thus, the first order of business is to stop denouncing such people, at least until the left is either defeated or willing to denounce its violent extremists. Then, and only then, may the worst elements of the right be jettisoned. Second, those who insist on playing respectability politics and purging people toward that end must themselves be purged. The difficulty of this will vary widely, as leftist infiltrators vary widely in how much resistance to their agendas they must face in order to become sufficiently triggered to leave libertarian or rightist groups, but most will leave once it is clear that they and their ilk are no longer welcome. These two measures, if thoroughly implemented, should move the balance of the political scales away from the left and toward the center.
So we are to compromise our principles by not only cooperating with alt-right groups when we share goals, but ceasing to even denounce their authoritarian ideas, and we must even ostracize our fellow libertarians who disagree with this. Whose interests is this plan really supposed to serve? Libertarians, or the right?
He also published strategy advice for the state and right-wingers to crush Antifa. Let’s examine some of this:
2. Fight fire with fire.
When a behavior is punished, those who engage in that behavior will do so less frequently, and other people will avoid emulating that behavior for fear of being punished themselves. Where Antifa members continue to assault people and destroy property, it is because they face far too little defensive violence in response to their aggression. Fortunately, this has changed in many places. The rank-and-file police do not typically wish to stand down, but are ordered to in many cases because their commanders are sympathetic to Antifa. The bright side of this is that it has encouraged right-wing citizens to take to the streets in order to defend against Antifa themselves. The formation of the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (FOAK) is a sign of progress on this point. This will build confidence in people to be more self-reliant for their security needs rather than dependent on the state. As predicted in the first edition, Antifa members have shown themselves to be physically weak and lacking in combat experience, needing superior numbers or weapons to win a skirmish.
Emphasis added. The FOAK is a sub-group of the Proud Boys, which is not a remotely libertarian group. They are street warriors who steal, vandalize and assault fellow victims of the state, no different from Antifa. They don’t even limit their targets to leftists. Still sound like a “sign of progress”?
10. Declare Antifa a domestic terrorist organization.
So he doesn’t understand (or doesn’t care) that Antifa isn’t an organization, but a nebulous identity claimed by a vast variety of groups. As there is no objective definition of who is “Antifa”, it would be up to the government on a case-by-case basis. Libertarians should be fully aware of just how much abuse and wrongful prosecution this would obviously entail. The reaction of right-wingers to libertarian martyrs who have sympathized with the Black Lives Matter movement, such as Garret Foster, is an excellent indication of how such a designation would be used even against property-respecting libertarians.
The paragraph explanation for this one also mentions:
This would allow for federal funding to be allocated specifically for combating Antifa, as well as the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and other such agencies.
Government funding to own those anti-NAP leftists!
13–15. Charge anyone who aids Antifa in any way, freeze their funds, and send illegal aliens involved with them to Guantanamo Bay.
Damn. I guess I should be charged with a crime because I donated to the “Antifa” Portland shield smiths who saved protesters’ lives from stormtroopers.
20. Above all, stop trying to be better than the enemy and focus on defeating the enemy.
…
Remember, this is a war, and in war, nothing is more honorable than victory.
Well, I think we’ve seen enough.
The Zeroth Position is clearly a fascist outlet, and while we can learn things from their writings, it is essential that we disassociate our movement from this corruption or libertarianism will be forever seen by outsiders the way the Zeroth Position writers see it.
