How do you stay safe when engaging in activism? We want to stand up for our principles. We want to make a statement. We want our voices to be heard. We want to influence our world so that we can eventually leave it better than we found it. And we want to do that without violence. But we don’t want to get our necks broken in the process.
When do we launch the armed resistance? That is the question bouncing around the libertarian/anarchist social media scene and blogosphere over the last few days. At what point do we stop risking arrest, stop pamphleting, stop speaking out, blogging, YouTubing and all that other stuff in favor of picking up arms and dropping cops and IRS agents by the dozens?
This past week the Free State Project (FSP) made the news again and, as usual, not in the best way. The FSP board of trustees voted to expel a member – blogger and activist Christopher Cantwell – from the organization for violating the policy against promoting violence.
Voluntaryism is easy to grasp. It says that all interactions among people must be voluntary, i.e., without aggression. This is Ayn Rand without the psychological repression, the judgmentalism and the fake statism weakly glued on. This is anarcho-capitalism, without any hint of state capitalism. This is free market anarchism. This is left libertarianism. This is […]