102: Rittenhouse, Anarcho-Tyranny, and Blood Libel | I Don't Speak German podcast

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Episode description

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Episode description

In the second part of our Rittenhouse coverage, we start with a look at Kyle's reception as a rock star messiah at Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA and follow the thread where it leads, from more on Elijah Shaffer to Tucker Carlson and his 'Trial of Kyle' to Mike Enoch and the National Justice Party via "a twentieth century philosopher". In the process, we consider the currency of the concept of 'Anarcho-Tyranny' and how the term Blood Libel is being appropriated. Dialectical? Yeah, we're dialectical AF. And we don't apologise.

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Carl Schmitt (/ʃmɪt/; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative4(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt#cite_note-4)[[5]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt#cite_note-5) theorist, he is noted as a critic of parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism,6(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt#cite_note-6) and his work has been a major influence on subsequent political theory, legal theory, continental philosophy, and political theology, but its value and significance are controversial, mainly due to his intellectual support for and active involvement with Nazism.

Sam Francis, Chronicles Magazine, July 1994 Anarcho-Tyranny USA

In the United States today, the government performs many of its functions more or less effectively. The mail is delivered (sometimes); the population, or at least part of it, is counted (sort of); and taxes are collected (you bet). You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things—corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation—but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them. Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin.

This condition, which in some of my columns I have called "anarcho-tyranny," is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent. At the same time the governor of North Carolina grotesquely fails to uphold his famous oath to protect the citizens of his state by keeping convicted felons in prison, he has no problem finding the time to organize a massive waste of his time and the taxpayers' money to hound and humiliate a perfectly innocent citizen for the infraction of a trivial traffic law.