Commentary On Confederalsocialist (Stodles)

Confederalsocialist is a prominent member of youtube who I have know for a while now. He was a white natinalist a bit less than a year ago, then suddenly switched to anarchism. After that point, he was promoting national anarchism and I had numerous video quibbles with him about that issue. The most recent fall-out between us was that he has started preaching moral nihilism and is spear-heading a trend in that direction among the youtube anarchists. He has become my arch-enemy on youtube for numerous reasons (particularly because I think that he is confusing people about anarchism and has misrepresented both me and the views of a sizable chunk of the anarchist movement, and he has disingenously misrepresented me as the leader of "the modals").

I personally consider him to be a crass manipulator at this point. My reasons for this are plentiful: he has made a bajillion different accounts with commentary on people behind their backs, he has repeatedly lied about people, he has an obcession with popularity statistics (to the point of keeping statistics on the activity of my blog vs. his website!), he is constantly inviting people to his channel (as if he is desperate to be "on top") and he has totally manipulated the meaning of words in order to get people to accept his positions (even to the point of rendering the word "anarchism" undefinable and calling you an "archon of words" if you attempt to provide a even a loose basic definition for anarchism as a political philosophy). Why am I making this commentary here and not directly towards him? Well, he blocked me from his youtube channel a few months ago, so it's impossible for me to comment on his videos or his channel. So I'm stuck making "outside commentary" in response to claims that have been made that I am unable to directly respond to.

Most recently, he made a video attacking the left-libertarian movement. Most of his arguments are outright misrepresentations. The biggest bone I can give him is that he simply does not understand the libertarian left. But barring that, he's simply engaging in misrepresentation. He also made a video a few weeks prior to that in which he argued that libertarian socialism is nothing more than an irrational reaction to the industrial revolution. However, I don't intend to do a refutation of those videos. Perhaps I should run over a summary of the conflict between me and him, which might shed some light on his motivation and understanding that behind such videos. He considers me to be a "modal libertarian" (a term that he is taking from Rothbard out of context) and despises me because:

(1) I challenged him on his Hoppean notion of "restrictive covenants" for *entire communities*, noting that his model is indistinguishable from a statist social contract, especially intergenerationally. Laughingman0X added to that debate with a video demonstrating how the nationalist "restrictive covenant" becomes coercive as soon as a female member of the all-white community gets impregnated by a black man out of town and has the baby within the area of the "restrictive covenant", at which point Stodles had no problem with the idea of the woman and child being forcibly expelled from the community (at which point he has very little leeway to deny the authoritarian implications of his viewpoint). He never responded directly to Laughingman's arguments, although he did make a video response in which he critisizes Laughingman for suggesting that there may be "core anarchist principles".

(2) I have maintained the premise that national anarchism is mostly a ruse and that the ideology of nationalism is inherently authoritarian and collectivist (in the most negative sense of the term).

(3) I have repeatedly called him out for his crack-pot realist views on race, in which he constantly is making apologetics for white nationalism via appeal to science and statistics; he has flip flopped endlessly between denying that he is a nationalist and making statements that more than suggest it. He dislikes the fact that I continued to bring it up, because he generally prefers to function covertly and to not have people have negative associations toward him. But I didn't initially bring it up - everytime I got into the subject it was in reaction to commentary or videos of his in which he was essentially defending ethnic nationalism with a psuedo-scientific veneer. He also seems to consider anyone who disagrees with his "scientific racism" to essentially be a marxist. Of course, that is simply false. Anti-racism is not inherently marxist in nature, and I've made no bones in the past about being unapologetically against marxism.

(4) I have insisted that anarchism is meaningless if your conception of anarchism is merely "pluralism for the sake of pluralism", since this devolves into any form of authoritarianism imaginable, only perhaps its more decentralized authoritarianism. My white nationalism debate with him somehow devolved into a debate about meta-ethics, with me defending moral anarchism and him excusing anarcho-authoritarianism via appeal to moral nihilism. Hence, the youtube anarchists have split into two basic camps: the moral nihilists and the libertarian anarchists (by libertarian anarchist I generally mean anarchism that at least nominally is concerned with morality). Confederalsocialist and D4Shawn are the "leaders" of this new trend towards moral nihilism. At least in the case of confederalsocialist, I view this move towards moral nihilism as nothing more than an obfuscation of his rather narrow and biased value judgements (all of which are sympathetic to a conservative view).

(5) I oppose the ideology of "property above life", which is to say that I don't believe that owning something inherently grants someone absolute decision-making power or any absolute right to use violence just because it's on their property. To use the most absurd example, I don't think that just because a child is standing on your lawn it is okay for you to shoot them. This seems pretty obvious to me, and even a Rothbardian conception of justice at least introduces a notion of proportionality to avoid such scenarios, and consequentially Rothbard rejected what he called "the maximalist position". Confederalsocialist would like to insinuate that my position is the rejection of all private property, when that is simply a strawman or misunderstanding. What's being rejected isn't private property as such, what's being rejected is institutionalized violence (that clearly is not in self-defense) in the name of defending property titles. My objection to his "restrictive covenant" proposals is partially for this very reason, since they are basically involuntary social contracts that are violently enforced based on land claims.

His main defenses run roughly as follows:

(1) He equates "the restrictive covenant" with any sort of voluntary agreement; virtually all voluntary agreements are "restrictive covenants" in his view. Property inherently equates to extreme levels of exclusion in his view; wait, he's getting this almost verbatum from Hoppe, so I may as well be saying "in Hoppe's view". Of course, this view is incorrect. Property does not inherently involve the level of exclusivity that him or Hoppe advocate, and it is my contention that this is a conflation of their preferances with the nature of property in general. He may prefer that property conventions be hyper-exclusive, but there is nothing inherent to property that makes it hyper-exclusive. Someone could concievably be hyper-inclusive about property. The notion that "the natural order" is hyper-exclusivity is simply a statement of bias, not a fact.

(2) In a video from about a week ago, he claims that everyone is a nationalist by default, and he gets away with it by redefining nationalism to essentially mean "any group with a cause"; it shouldn't be hard to see why this is a horrible manipulation of language. Indeed, just as he has done with the word "anarchism", with "nationalism" he is blowing up the word to meaninglessness by essentially rendering it undefinable and by acting as if it describes everyone by default. This is nothing but crass manipulation of language to fool people into agreeing with him. Clearly, nationalism is more specific than that and generally is understood to be territorial in nature. Merely having an ideology or principle in common with other people does not make someone a nationalist, and no word games can get around that. It surprises me that anyone would fall for such a cheap trick.

(3) His main talking point is that "evolution didn't stop at the neck" and he equates anyone who doesn't buy into his racism-with-a-scientific-veneer as being irrational, and he equates all anti-racists with antifa types (this makes sense, given his past as a white nationalist). He expresses the viewpoint that most ethnic nationalists are mostly reasonable people, while he tends to think that "anti-racists" are mostly irrational. With respect to the relative merits of anti-racists vs. ethnic nationalists, all he can really do here is appeal to his personal bias as an allegedly "former" white nationalist. And as a "former" white nationalist, OF COURSE his image of anti-racism is going to be constituted by the image of irrational and violent antifas. What else would one expect?

(4) Since I reject his amoralism and his "pluralistic" facade, he accuses me of being dogmatic and rejecting pluralism (which is hypocritical of him, since he's been attacking the entire classical anarchist tradition and "left" end of libertarianism while being either silent about or apologetic with regard to the libertarian right; he plays amoralist while simultaneously taking explicitly right-libertarian/Hoppean positions). However, in actual fact I was one of the first anarchists on youtube to meaningfully advance the idea of pluralism or anarchism without adjectives, and my rejection is not of anarchist pluralism but of what might be called poly-authoritarianism that sells itself with the rhetoric of pluralism. Overall, my position as an anarchist on youtube has been quite neutral, with me critisizing elements from both the social and market anarchist camps while encouraging a healthy middle ground. However, confederalsocialist seems to want to disingenously lump me (as well as the rest of the left-libertarian movement) in with vulgar socialists such as mr1001nights, despite the clear differences between the over-arching left-libertarian movement (which has no platform and therefore he will have trouble making a general critique of the whole movement) and vulgar socialism.

(5) In response to my views on property, he has strawmanned me as a pacifist. Either he is purposefully being disingenous or he simply does not understand the difference between rejecting abhorently violent property claims and being a pacifist. In fact, I am not a pacifist; I simply have a tighter view of what constitutes self-defense than most libertarians. I simply do not consider defense of property to exactly be in the same category as defense of persons (and I consider it an error to equate personhood with property, hence my questioning of the premise of self-ownership). I don't think he really fully comprehends the libertarian arguments behind this question. In either case, as an alleged amoralist, it is somewhat confusing as to why he is actually defending a hardline moral view in favor of violence in the name of property claims. I sense one-sidedness and hypocrisy: confederalsocialist suddenly gets all huffy puffy in favor of a particular moral conception of private property while simultaneously putting on a facade of neutrality and amoralism. This is part of why I have trouble completely taking him seriously, since he preaches moral nihilism while simultaneously falling back on conservative-libertarian norms.