People have addressed this topic elsewhere, including Mister Metokur, but there doesn’t seem to have been a serious look at what happened on the 4th of July. For those of you not aware, Curt Doolittle of the Propertarian Institute decided to hold a rally for a new Propertarian Constitution in Richmond and declared “independence.” Thankfully, the rally did not have as bad results as Charlottesville had three years ago. However, the rally still did not go well, and the aftermath is even worse.
Propertarianism is essentially a beefed-up libertarianism that wasn’t quite as ethnically explicit as Chase Rachels’ White Right and Libertarian. Thought up by Curt Doolittle, it grew within the past few years within the broad Dissident Right. Like many of the new right-wing movements, there was an unsettling conflict with Christianity. Many of Curt’s posts over the past few years indicated a strong disdain for Christianity and “Abrahamism.” There had been a tone shift over the month or so before the 4th of July. He even hinted that he was planning massive change in Christianity to remove some of the negative aspects of Christianity, which seemed like an admission he was going to try to reform Christianity according to his will, not God’s.
The biggest structural flaw I noticed in Propertarianism was the emphasis on personalities, especially Curt’s. Movements need to have division of labor. Our own Padraig Martin articulated this as the head, the heart, and the hands. The thought leader needs to be distinct from the face who is distinct from the organizer. When roles are combined, there is too much work for one man to do and problems emerge. That is what happened with Propertarianism. Curt is an intelligent and mostly pleasant person, but he is a better thought leader than an organizer or a face. He blurred the roles together and problems arose.
After Curt’s speech on the 4th, BLM guys got the microphone and were able to have an excellent “good optics” moment in which they got everyone to do their special salute. In turn, the Propertarians had the inverse bad optics moments by saluting on command when a communist told them to. Curt had several bizarre blunders, including mentioning that African-Americans have large genitals.
Everyone makes mistakes and it is certainly understandable why Curt, or anyone with social issues like autism, would slip up in a confrontation. Rather than accept that mistakes were made and maybe even acknowledging a need for restructuring, Curt and his fans doubled down and said the rally went perfectly. This may have been in order to show a wall of solidarity against criticism (which is ironic for a group that believes telling lies should be a prosecutable offense), but reading through the threads makes it seem more like the Propertarian mob just repeat whatever Curt tells them to say. Propertarians self-style themselves as independent thinkers, but cults of personality inevitably popped up and they frankly sound like NPCs who just repeat what the news tells them by refusing to acknowledge the obvious mistakes.
Alternatively, some Propertarians blamed the problems on the 2nd Amendment people they had allied with for the rally (who themselves had earlier denounced the Propertarians as white supremacists). These were fair-weather friends at best and saboteurs at worst. Furthermore, one must assume that if Curt had better division of labor, this unfortunate alliance would never have been formed. In any event, the fact that Propertarians responded to criticism by either 1) denying anything bad happened or 2) shifting blame to people they should not have trusted, led those criticizing to take a harder stance.
Constructive criticism shifted to mockery. People made memes to mock Curt and the sycophants responded like leftists. They got increasingly angry and some made veiled threats, such as calling those mocking Curt “bottom feeders” and saying, “you know what we do to bottom-feeders.” That itself gave me pause because it is eerily reminiscent of the “punch Nazis” that ANTIFA repeat.
John Mark, the #2 in Propertarianism, decided to withdraw from politics because of the blowback. Doolittle doubled down in response to this, saying John Mark quit because he realized the Dissident Right is hopeless and that, “Whites have no elites because they don’t deserve them. So now we pivot normiecon.” So, criticism turned Curt into a civic nationalist out of spite.
It’s important not to criticize without offering something constructive. We need to rethink political action. Meeting together is necessary, political movements can only grow so far online, but rallies are not currently a good idea. Rallies provide opportunities for mass doxxing and for saboteurs to set up criminal acts. There are simple lessons we can learn from the Church. The early history of Christianity involved meeting in secret. Christians in the USSR modeled that behavior and successfully grew in strength. Though our movement is not purely religious, the opposition to us from the state is arguably as severe as that of the state against Christianity in the past and meeting both in-person and in secret is vital for building community while simultaneously avoiding the boot of the state.
The other thing to take from all this is to not expect too much of people. No messiah is going to rise from the internet. All these folks are human. It is important to stick with your people, but blindly following people is rarely a good idea. Don’t jump off a bridge just because someone you respect tells you to or believe a bad idea is a good idea simply because of who says it. God gave you a brain. Use it.
-By Dixie Anon
O I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am. For this “fair land of freedom” I do not care at all. I’m glad I fit against it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon for anything I done.
That’s sound reasoning and great advice. All of it. I’ve always told my kids, “never put too much faith in people; they’ll let you down every single time when you do.” Another one of my old sayings relevant to your point is that “if you ain’t screwing up, you ain’t trying very hard.” Everyone (every. one.) screws up as you say; it’s part of the “human condition” and therefore inescapable. And as you also iterate, admitting you’ve made a mistake is really really hard for certain persons. I suppose all of us have played the “blame game” at least once during our lifetimes.
Good post.
Good point and also why I, very slightly, discourage our people from time to time from getting too carried away when they start talking about Robert E. Lee, Nathan Bedford Forrest and all the rest. Understandably in these times we must protect the memory of Southern men and women, people who loved our people and our cause and then gave themselves over to that cause in order to preserve us.
That said, sometimes in groups I am part of the posts sometimes turn into borderline idol worship and deifying of them, which is not only not Southern in our mentality and culture, but the men themselves would have scoffed at the notion. Defensiveness can be forgiven in these times when they are constantly being attacked and insulted though. I just worry it gets carried away sometimes. But as you said, we all make mistakes, and that means collectively as well as individually.
Michael:
I only wish I had the kind of influence (outside my little circle, of course) that could properly serve to discern between idol worship, and the kind of honor given our fathers and mothers they rightly deserve. There is always, of course, the hazard of conflating the two, but I generally follow my instincts on the matter and trust that our people understand the difference when it comes to the proverbial ‘nut cuttin’. If that makes sense.
Very good recap.
The well-read and historically literate people of Identity Dixie know well how movements form, organize, and operate. Musonius has cited countless times post-war southern groups, Irish “movements,” and of course what should be the Right’s REQUIRED study of Communist party/cell structure. The Communists solved how to create a large, anti-fragile, highly effective movement that spreads organically while avoiding all the personality, privacy, and dilution issues. This material is readily available online, easy to understand, and only requires a few people to commit to relatively minor action to begin.
At the most basic level, there are several things needed to make a movement possible: a clearly articulated platform (ideology) that “every man” can grasp and be motivated by, leadership, resources (money and material support), and crucially, wide-spread physical communities of like-minded people that can be activated. The later are not militias. They are groups of trusted friends. How many of you actually meet regularly with small groups of trusted friends?
The Right in general and Propertarianism in particular can’t check a single box. The wise men of the American War for Independence knew what was required and wrote easily digestible tracts to win support from the “normies” of the time (an ideological platform). They also had the equivalent of he communist cell structure to meet, organize, and communicate. They had well-connected and well-financed men to support the active clandestine actors of the revolution. And they had serious leadership.
To cut Curt and those committed to Propertarianism a break, they shouldn’t be ridiculed. If you look at what they propose, it was largely modifying and “updating” parts of the US Constitution that have long been acknowledged weak spots, it is hardly radical. I wouldn’t characterize what’s actually on paper as being pejoratively “Libertarian.”
There is an undeniable sense of urgency that something must happen now to counter the truly dangerous and accelerating pace of the international anarcho/techno hard left. Curt and Co. stepped up. But too soon and revealed, yet again, the many gaps in what a movement is going to require to be in place if we are going to have a chance in hell to resist, let alone rebuild.
While I am not familiar with these people particularly, I am familiar with the “Libertarian” type, as I briefly was one during the 90’s-2000’ish (due to the fact our memory of Republicans history with Southerners had been erased in yankee indoctrination camps) a lot of Southerners were seeing Republicans as deeply flawed, despite lacking the history of it, we started calling them RINOs for instance. So along came Ron Paul and then we started gravitating towards the Libertarian Party, which more or less barely existed at the time.
The problems of that Party I watched unfold in real time, along with my other trips into alternatives to the Republican party we were all looking for, such as ANCAPS and all the rest. I learned a lot through that process, not least of which being the reasons which they always flounder and fail. First and foremost, they are so ambiguous, thats due to them not being a reflection or product of a distinct people and culture, just a broad ideology, so they depend on “leaders” like Ron Paul etc. to be effective, which leads to Jim Jones like cult personalities being drawn to them and accumulating power which then leads to a lot of the in-fighting you see in these groups, they are basically sociopaths jockeying with one another to control the betas. That is anathema to individual liberty and not appealing to Southerners specifically, whose nature is rugged individualism, not cultist group think. Southerners shared understanding stems from our culture and our God given nature as a people, i.e. we have a collective soul. These groups lack those blessed underpinnings we have (see also the Yankee identity crisis) so they rely on “leaders” to bind them together, remove that and they crumble. That is why yankees always turn families into political dynasties (the Kennedys, Bushes and Bidens, with Camelot, Lincoln on his throne in Washington etc.), basically their monarchy complete with kings, its necessary for them and thus necessary for these political movements of theirs. They lack the collective soul of a true people like we have, sociopaths fill in that void, which leads to in-fighting and turning on each other. That then leads to their dear leaders looking for outside boogey men to use to unite them together and accumulate power, they need outside things to unify them, to artificially approximate the true internal soul they lack. Its why yankees never stop looking at and judging everyone else, but never themselves. It is a manifestation of this mechanism of their psyche.
They absolutely need Southerners to hate and their dear leaders never tire of using us as a foil to further bind their betas in ever increasing amounts of chains, even “Libertarians” do it, in one breath “the commies are coming and I need power” and in the next breath, “Southerners are traitors and their hatred and bigotry have no place here.” (of course our occupation must continue, and be damned all of their talk of Liberty). That incidentally is also why they must subvert the Christian elements among them, after all to say sodomites cant be married is just some outdated bigotry and they will usually throw in a dash of “Jim Crow, something, something, priests touch boys, burning witches at the stake, something, something.” Its a non-starter for them and illiterates the hopelessness of their situation. Christianity, the true form of it, is precisely the thing that could lead them to that collective soul they lack and their ability to do away with earthly kings. Sad.
All of that then facilitates the second reason they fail. Subversion. Subversion. Subversion. I will leave off here for the sake of overly long comments, but if you have some other questions or insights I missed, just leave a reply and I will answer the best I can. I certainly can talk about that “Heads, Hearts and Minds” subject you mention if you like, I have some insight into that. Thanks for taking the time to write this, its appreciated, good job.
Yes, seeing CD’s Tweets in the aftermath made me cut him out of that particular feed so I wouldn’t have to see them any more. I would have to agree with the author’s assessment:
“That is what happened with Propertarianism. Curt is an intelligent and mostly pleasant person, but he is a better thought leader than an organizer or a face.”
CD seems intelligent but he is not cut out to be a leader, as he doesn’t know people or how to lead, whatever the cause of that might be.
As for organizing, we should be learning from the leftists, but we have to do more; for the leftists, having a common cause and enemy is enough, and that is why leftist movements are marked by betrayal and purges in the name of purity and so on, when they are just moves for greater power, eliminating rivals, and so on. If we want to restore our communities, we need to build up virtue and hold each other accountable, and this is a more difficult task.
Propertarianism isn’t libertarian at all and Curt needn’t be its leaders. The proposal was to separate the states, retaining treasury, military, judiciary (upheaved). Every state (polity) would have to more or less comply with a series of terms or otherwise pay heavily to have them excused, but the series of policies include these very non-libertarian things (work in progress): Mandatory 2A (every able man must carry); 1~2 years mandatory military service for men; segregate boy/girl education; boys must be taught by male teachers; eliminate no-fault divorce; reform alimony (single mothers must ‘give’ something, the law just assumes they raise children better, they don’t and can’t); universal standing in law (every man or institution can sue or be sued for matters public; no state exclusively takes the people’s ability) also known as tort; Dueling is allowed (long explanation); Lynching is allowed (bare minimum of 25 local men in agreement).
Propertarians needn’t Curt, the proposal is just to make a list of demands minimally tough enough to resolve the problems (which mainly steam from excessive feminine cognition throughout the institutions), so we can get a minimal amount of men sign onto it and do it by any means necessary. No violence needed either. Hold the moral high ground and let the enemy decide how we continue.
Good article with a lot of good points in here.