Diversity, Equity, Inclusion is a fundamentally low-grade, Orwellian anti-liberal project

Sunday Telegraph editor, and vehement classical liberal, Allister Heath, writes about the "DEI" movement, which has spread like a cancer around US universities and corporates, in scathing terms:

DEI is only interested in racial or gender diversity. It doesn’t really care about poverty, class or geography. It loathes diversity of thought; it preaches an imbecilic groupthink that can never be questioned. It denies the scientific method. Its more extreme North American proponents occasionally even reject the idea that 2+2=4, claiming it implies “covert white supremacy”, the sort of lunacy that would have made even the Soviet pseudo-agronomist Trofim Lysenko blush.... 

The woke demand performative adherence to dogma, even when it is evidently contrary to reality, hence “Gays for Palestine” chanting pro‑Hamas and pro-Houthi slogans, even though both terror organisations are brutally homophobic, whereas Tel Aviv celebrates gay pride. Eliminating objective reality is every tyrant’s dream: citizens can no longer judge the validity of what they are being told. 

That's it, it's the latest part of the 20th century post-modernist excrescence that denies evidence, reason and genuine diversity between individuals.  Indeed it is a movement of neo-Maoist Cultural Revolution, with staggering parallels with that most murderous period in China's history.

...DEI advocates group “justice” that is at once unjust and inequitable, based on confiscation and redistribution. People don’t matter, only aggregate statistics. Individual merit counts for nought: DEI judges people solely on their membership of a tribe based on racial or sexual characteristics. This is a reversal of centuries of Western progress towards individual dignity, a rejection of Enlightenment ideals and a readoption of pre-modern group politics....

DEI is horrifically exclusionary, seeking to cancel anybody who fails to pretend to agree: it embraces the permanent inquisition, the auto-da-fé, excommunication and (metaphorically) burning heretics at the stake. Staff are “encouraged” to take the knee, to wear special lanyards, to share pronouns. Employees are divided into “allies” and “adversaries”, with the “good” in-group pitted against the “bad” out-group. “Micro-aggressors” are denounced.

This toxic philosophy is as destructive to individual freedom as Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, Islamism and all other forms of mystical authoritarianism, because it is mystical. It is entirely based on the feelings of the proponent, it is inherently inconsistent and immune to evidence. It is a social movement that has life because of well-meaning people who take the claims of the philosophy on face value, but is catalysed by generals of sociopathic misanthropists who lead armies of dimwitted malcontents and grifting inadequates, keen to shame, cancel and scream at those they deem "the enemy".

Diversity movements, activists, units and managers are about the exact opposite. No business should have a bar of it, and should purge its marketing and human resources departments (especially the latter, which is an administrative overhead all businesses should minimise). 

Government should purge it as well, eliminate it from all government agencies and make all staff who exist to promote the concept within government redundant.  I wont be holding my breath though.

Wellington is in a funk

The general election has knocked Wellington for six and has put a great deal of public servants and more than a few in the consultancy-industrial complex in a funk, because philosophically and culturally, the change in government has shown up the gulf between them and the government. It has also demonstrated two major issues:

• The dearth of strategic and intellectual grunt in much of the public sector;

• The ideological chasm between many of the (largely young and relatively new) public servants, and the Government they have vowed to serve.

I moved back to Wellington last year after a considerable absence, and I noticed quite a few changes, and there have been a lot more since the election. Not in the sense of the urban form (that hasn’t changed dramatically), nor infrastructure (setting aside the leaks everywhere), but rather in the culture and capability of the public service, and those who provide some degree of heft in fundamental public policy analysis are in short supply.

I spent ten years in the Wellington public service before leaving it (and the country) to be a consultant.  When I first joined it was clear there was a significant cohort of senior and leadership talent in parts of the public service in particular that were formidable in their intellectual capability, commitment to ideological neutrality and interest in an evidence based approached to public policy. Sure there were differences, but overwhelmingly there was one key factor, a deep understanding of what they did and did not know, and what they could not know.  I saw this in The Treasury and the economic sector-based departments, such as what was then the Ministry of Commerce (since morphed into MBIE) and Ministry of Transport.  There was a bit less in the Department of Internal Affairs, but it was still there.  The more social policy-oriented agencies were somewhat different. Health, Education and Environment had less experience of structural reform, and still believed they could be the repositories of all that is best practice in their sectors.  The departments responsible for oversight and regulation of business and the productive sectors knew differently.  

They all knew that, by and large, they had no idea how much of the economy worked in any detail.  These were people who looked at the likes of the telecommunications sector and wouldn’t even pretend to know the details of the technology being used, because it mostly didn’t matter (unless it was related to something the government had to do, like auction radio spectrum for mobile phone use). Nor did they pretend they knew what the cost or price of inputs were, if markets were competitive or not falling between the cracks of the role of the Commerce Commission.  After all, history is replete with examples of how neither bureaucrats nor most politicians have the faintest idea about what changes in technology or markets will come next.  There were bureaucrats who knew that.  I recall sitting in a meeting room in 1997 with a manager at the Ministry of Commerce, who got the IT Department to set up a demonstration of a free application called Real Audio which was streaming radio programmes from across the world.  He said at that moment “this is the future and it will disrupt everything we do in broadcasting, it’s a matter of time”, this was when politicians were mainly fretting about the use of dial-up internet to access pornography.  That manager was right of course, but at the time the Ministry of Commerce was responsible for broadcasting policy, alongside telecommunications, IT and energy policy. Broadcasting is now within the purview of the Ministry of Culture, Heritage and the Arts, which is not an organisation with a primary culture of business and innovation. 

The beginning of change in that culture happened under the Clark Government, which was much more pro-active and wanted to “do more”.  However, that Government did get plenty of advice around the limitation of the public service to actually know what was best for particular sectors (except of course the social sectors, which acted much more as intermediaries between the strong professional producer sector interests and the government, especially since more than a few people in the social public sector would switch employments with the professional producer lobby). While the Key Government paused that change, the Ardern/Hipkins Government put it into overdrive, and the Luxon Government will be seeing the signs of it.

The election of Tamatha Paul as MP of Wellington Central and Julie Anne Genter as MP for Rongotai provides a sign of what has happened to the Wellington public service in that time.  It's a far cry from Richard Prebble being elected in Wellington Central in 1996, and the time when it was seen as a marginal seat between National and Labour. No more.  The public sector has seen retirement of many men and women who were part of both the Muldoon era of extraordinary central planning, and the Lange/Palmer/Moore/Bolger era of dismantling central planning and instituting more direct accountability in the public sector for results, and in taking political and bureaucratic decision making away from trading enterprises, ranging from the Post Office to the Railways and Electricity Department.  Those people have retired, moved away or passed away. Some remain from the 90s, but are increasingly pushed aside by the well-meaning, but shallow culture around promoting “new perspectives” around “diversity”, which does not include depth or breadth or critical thinking (not in the post-modernist sense) in public policy.  The Wellington public service grew enormously in the past six years, drawing upon enthusiastic graduates, predominantly coming with support for the Government of the day, bringing with them a leftwing ideological framework, which are not just the traditional enthusiasm for state-intervention and suspicion and cynicism about private enterprise, but rather the wholesale cultural revolution in how they think about the state, society and stratification of the country into people categorised as oppressive, oppressed or allies of the oppressed. MP Debbie Ngarewa-Packer characterised it as being Tangata Whenua, Tangata Tiriti and everyone else (the racists). So a combination of left-wing enthusiasm for state intervention, regulation, spending and taxation, with an suspicion around the interests and the views of significant portions of the public, including those of more senior civil servants, because of identity factors (e.g. race, sex, gender).  None of that would matter one iota if they could put that to one side and be highly competent public policy analysts, but that competence is wanting, and it’s clear from plenty of people engaging with the well-meaning, but lacking historical knowledge and being weak on analytical capability.

As a result the mood today in many government departments, particularly the more social and environmental policy oriented ones, is one of fear and depression, as a workforce of relatively young public servants, most of whom did not vote for this government, struggle to cope with being asked to implement policies they don’t agree with. Some act professionally, and it is to the credit of some that they seem to have delivered the Government’s “First 100 day” plan. Few are obstructive, clearly one or two are choosing to leak, but many of them are moping about, worrying about becoming unemployed and are openly, to their like-minded colleagues, unhappy about the choice of voters.

When I was a public servant I was generally not happy with any government that was elected, on a lot of issues, but when it came to the sectors I worked in (and there were a few), I put it all to one side. People knew what my politics was, but I also knew what high quality public policy was as well.  You serve Ministers, you seek to achieve their policy objectives, you analyse alternatives and you implement what Ministers want.  You give free and frank advice, and they either take it, or they continue to do what they want to do, and you can simply say they were told, if the consequences don’t turn out how they wanted. That’s not the mood in Wellington now.

Of course it will change. Although there is significant scope to scale down the numbers of people doing policy in government in Wellington, the scope to scale down the depth and breadth is small, because there is a distinct lack of talented, capable and clever people, who put aside their personal political biases in favour of evidence-based policy advice.  Most importantly, there are few who will admit to Ministers “we don’t really know how to do that” or “we don’t know how that part of the economy works” or “we don’t have the knowledge or experience on that issue Minister”.

I’ll take one example in a field I know something about. “The Aotearoa New Zealand Freight and Supply Chain Strategy”. I’m frankly gobsmacked that a lot of people clearly pulled together something which smacks of the sort of central planning NZ had done away with in the 1980s. The idea that MoT is steward of the freight and supply chain system is so laughable as to be a joke.  There is no remote hope that the Chief Executive of MoT, let alone almost any of the staff, would know how to arrange the consignment of freight from any producer to customers or outlets.  There is relatively little about productivity and competition, yet 62 pages has been dedicated to a “strategy” which has as its main challenge not labour shortages (which have been a major issue), but climate change. Nine immediate actions are proposed, all of which are either about more planning or lowering emissions. It’s a manifesto for central planners.  Nobody was willing to tell Ministers that “we don’t know much about any of this, and we have no visibility into how businesses and transport firms arrange and price their services, or invest in capital”, or if they did the response was “find out, collect data”!

Where does this lead a public service that ought to be focused on delivering on an agenda that many of its staff disagree with?  It's not easy, particularly as getting talent to work in Wellington is tough nowadays.  However the government appears willing to lean down the state sector (albeit not enough), which should provide ample opportunities to send blinkered ideologues with mediocre intellectual grunt to a new life not serving a government they hate. 

There are three strategies that might help as well:

1. Cull activities in Ministries and Departments to enable competent people to focus on the priorities of the new Government. This has already started, but the competent people need to be placed on high-profile, high-risk projects of reform and delivery. This require line-by-line scrutiny of the work programmes of each Ministry, Department and agency, to strike out what isn’t needed. Then offer redundancies to those no longer needed.

2. Don’t be afraid to restructure. Who would trust the Ministry of Education to implement Charter Schools any more than you would have trusted the Post Office to implement a competing mobile phone network or the Railways Department to implement a competing trucking firm? Treasury likes consolidation, but smaller, nimbler agencies can be more responsive, and incentivised to be focused.

3. Push for cultural change in the public service. This means focusing once again on accountability, transparency, delivery and efficiency, and recognising the limits of knowledge and capability. Hayek’s “Fatal Conceit” concept would be a helpful one to promote.  Encouraging understanding of concepts around markets, competition and the "law of unintended consequences" and to be concerned about capture by interests, whether they be business, producer unions or lobbyists, even those with purportedly "altruistic" motives.

4.      Better link the public/consumers to the supply of the services provided by the state to them.  Give them incentives to perform.  This used to be done by setting up SOEs, but the scope for that is largely spent.  

It might be farewell Newshub, but intelligent TV news disappeared over 30 years ago

 I do have a shred of sadness if it turns out that TV3 wont have a news service anymore. A shred because it really is a shadow of its former self.  It seemed like New Zealand had finally joined the rest of the developed world when finally private enterprise had been permitted to broadcast television news in competition with the state-owned enterprise, TVNZ. 

However, when TV3 launched it was in the context of a transformation of TVNZ from the mixed-mode blended commercial/public service broadcaster to a fully fledged commercial broadcaster, which had dire consequences for the depth and breadth of TV news. Under CEO Julian Mounter, TVNZ achieved significant commercial success, but saw its news and current affairs shift towards the model seen largely in US local commercial broadcast news. Serious reporting of politics and world affairs got diluted in favour of crime, celebrities, sport and disaster, as the idea was to maximise the news audience by making it “accessible” (dumbed-down) and “relevant” (relatable). The preference being for stories to be binary in nature, like sport. Crime is easy – “bad person does bad thing to good person”. Disasters “bad thing happens to good people”. Nuance and depth of discussion around public policy and politics, or world affairs has little space in this. Indeed, the focus on international affairs was largely to “make it relevant” which from time to time meant finding a NZer in whatever country something was happening, so we might “understand” what it means. Of course, it worked in getting sheer numbers of viewers and pleasing advertisers, so TV3 entered the market finding it very hard indeed to attract enough people from TVNZ. So much so that TV3 effectively went into receivership in under a year, resulting in liberalisation of media foreign ownership laws so that there could be 100% foreign ownership of broadcasters.

Of course it was what happened to TVNZ that saw Lindsay Perigo leave TVNZ declaring its news and current affairs "braindead", and of course he was right.

TV3 news in the 1990s did have some highlights. It was notable in extending what was the half-hour news bulletin to one hour, at 6pm at the time of the Gulf War.  TVNZ for some time claimed it had a “news hour” because it had half an hour of Holmes, but eventually relented and extended to one hour.  TV3 took direct TV news feeds from NBC during the Gulf War, and TVNZ followed with ABC (US) and ITN.  TV3 also for a while had a weekly current affairs show called The Ralston Group, hosted by Bill Ralston, which had him discussing issues of the week with four journalists/commentators from across the political spectrum.  

Newshub today is a shadow of that, and is essentially indistinguishable from TVNZ.  It’s far from clear why anyone would prefer either channel for news, short of personal preference around personalities. Both channels take a “once over lightly” approach to news, both are more than keen to place a major sports success for a NZ team as a lead story over war overseas. Both channels also have a statist leftwing slant to their bulletins, noting most recently their willingness to report statistics published by Hamas. The fact they are philosophically indistinguishable, and also indistinguishable in terms of depth and emphasis means that it is hard to miss Newshub.  A tweet a few days ago asking what people think of the new Jetstar uniforms rather said it all for me.

So yes, it will be a shame if the only NZ television news comes from state-owned broadcasters. Yes I mean broadcasters, because Whakaata Maori (once known as Maori Television) is another TV broadcaster with news, although it is ideologically also statist, collectivist and left-wing in its bias. However, Newshub offered nothing new or different.  It could have gone more in-depth, less populist and more serious, in the hope it could attract an audience of people with higher incomes, higher education and attractive to a smaller, but wealthier base for some advertisers.  It could have been philosophically more pro-business, less-statist, less-collectivist more in the mould of Sky News Australia or GB News, which might have attracted an audience that was not keen on “woke”, identity politics or the solutions to problems being new laws or new taxpayer spending.  It could have chosen to have a current affairs show at 7pm instead of the woeful The Project, which just was a variation on TVNZ’s Seven Blunt. Given its 200 or so staff, it’s astonishing how light in content Newshub is.

I hope TV3 can come back with some form of news broadcast, even if it collaborates with Sky, relegates international news to a rebroadcast of a foreign broadcaster’s content, and just sticks to reporting a shorter serious news bulletin. Having the state monopolise TV news just feels wrong, as of course there is no hope that the current government, given the presence of NZ First, would privatise TVNZ. 

However, if it doesn’t happen, we wont have lost much, because NZ lost TV news that wasn’t braindead a long time ago.  If you want something akin to Newshub, you just need to switch to One News.

Mining companies, white supremacy, Zionism, neo-colonialism, libertarianism and education vouchers: The fascist programme to establish a racist, oppressive state that will wreck the planet

I wrote in my previous post that I am embarking on a journey, thanks to the sagacious commentator and academic, Dr. Mohan Dutta.  Although he is unaware of this, I am truly grateful for him showing me a new way and recognising that I may have been duped, for years, to be an instrument of dark forces, from overseas and paid for by mining and fossil fuel interests, who only want to make a profit exploiting others.

I said I had questions, and I do, as I have been deconstructing the network of connections that means libertarianism is actually a vehicle for fascist white-supremacy and neo-colonialism, including Zionism, which is a tool of not only apartheid, but allegedly genocide.  This is serious stuff and very confronting for anyone who has spent a good 25 years or so promoting libertarian ideas and politics, to be told that actually what you advocate for isn't more freedom, less government and getting the state out of people's lives, but rather a sinister strategy to facilitate takeover of society by mining and fossil fuel interests.  It's not advocacy for individual rights, but advocacy for racism and oppression of people.

I'm unsure what this really means for what form of government we should have, how laws should constrain freedom of speech, funding of political activities and the rights of mining and fossil fuel companies. I don't know what it means for foreign affairs, beyond ending diplomatic relations with Israel.  However, I do want to know, and I want to know whether everything I believed in is for naught, or if there are shreds of campaigning for individual freedom that are worth continuing with.

So here are some of my questions: 

1. Given Zionism is irredeemable (apartheid, settler-colonialism), do Jews have a right to self-determination as a people? If so, where? If not, what is it about them that denies them this right?  Are they not a nationality or race, but just a religion, or is it that they have a right to self-determination, but somewhere else? If so, where?

2. Does the right to self-determination on land where your ancestors once lived and governed, disappear if the people who moved there subsequently, and were part of empires that conquered that land, still have their descendants living on part of that land?  If so, does that not also apply to lands with generations of settlement of people who live on land previously occupied and governed by other people indigenous to that land?  How is this applied consistently in a principled way?

3. What makes "whiteness" a unique characteristic among racial groups globally? Does it apply to all ethnicities that are visibly "white", notwithstanding the diversity of languages, religions, histories, cultures and experiences?  If not, what is its essential nature? (I know there are books, but they are not all consistent). 

4. Is it possible to want individual freedom, small government and human beings interacting voluntarily without being part of a scheme to enrich mining and fossil fuel companies? 

5. Many declared white-supremacists are anti-semitic, and hate Jews as much as other races (such as the Nazis), what makes them different from the ones that are libertarian, who like Jews and hate Nazis, is this just internecine warfare between people who are similar, or something else?

6. Islamist militant groups universally use violence as a form of resistance and often expound racist rhetoric that is Islamic supremacist in nature. Where do they fit in, or am I misconstruing their otherwise heroic revolutionary acts of self-determination that are not to be interpreted under the lens of "whiteness"?

7. If libertarianism is fascist and white supremacist, are statist authoritarians (those advocating a very intrusive and dominant state role in the economy and society) anti-fascist and anti-racist? Or rather, is the solution to libertarian fascism and racism the adoption of a large government that has significant control over economic and social systems?

8. If education vouchers are a tool of white supremacy, does that mean that Sweden (a pioneer of educational vouchers) is a white-supremacist state?  Are all European states white supremacist? How do they avoid this?

9. Is Zionist backed white supremacy the most virulent and destructive ideological influence in the world today, or are there others? I gather the Hindutva moment is similar, as Dr Dutta has written much about it, but do other countries or cultures also promote similarly fascist ideologies? If so, what are they?

10. If the solution to Palestine is for Israel to be disbanded, should we even consider the future of Palestine at that point? What would happen to the Jews there?  Jews in most Arab countries have declined in number precipitously, is this something to be concerned about, or should we just not care what happens to the Zionists?

11.  What is the answer to Ukraine? Is this just white supremacists fighting each other? Should we all just let them fight and hope for peace? 

12. How should the international order be restructured for decolonisation and anti-racism? Presumably it means the US withdrawing globally, along with disbandment of NATO and an international order of the South having more power (excluding fascist Hindutva India).  Can we trust the People's Republic of China to lead a new peaceful world order, or will a multi-polar world just be more peaceful and just?  Does there need to be reparations paid by Western countries (and presumably Japan) to the South? How is consensus to achieve this to be reached to take such taxes from people in those countries? How do we avoid corruption in the South seeing such money accumulating in the hands of national elites?

13. Decolonisation should always exclude violence against civilians, but does that include what a post-colonial government does to civilians?  Some post-colonial governments have been brutal to the civilian population in implementing their policies (see Equatorial Guinea, Uganda, Cambodia, Central African Republic, Zaire/DRC), how should we respond to this?

14. Virtually all of South and Central America is dominated by people who are, by the definition applied to Aotearoa, Australia, Canada and the USA, settler-colonialists. How is this injustice to be addressed? Is resistance against these governments, from Mexico to Chile, justified? 

More questions will come no doubt

A Revelation

Happy New Year everyone. I was hoping for a break over Christmas and New Year, but I was busy. I had a Road to Damascus experience. I’ve been a libertarian for over 25 years, and having at different times been a member of ACT, Libertarianz (when it existed) the Taxpayers’ Union and the Free Speech Union, I had my own set of views, and I would happily express them. I expressed untramelled opposition to Hamas’s attack on Israel on 7 October, and expressed dismay and anger towards those who not just ignored it but seemed to celebrate it. However, I was naïve, I did not join the dots to understand fully what I was a part of, when I tweeted my opposition to a phrase published by a man I clearly misunderstood.  I would have gotten away with continuing this if it hadn’t been for the meddling Professor. 

What I wrote

By whom I mean the world-renowned expert in developing culturally-centered, community-based projects of social change, advocacy, and activism that articulate health as a human right, Dr Mohan Dutta, Dean’s Chair in Communication at Massey University.  Dr Dutta reminds me of Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics who became famous for his commitment to anti-imperialism and taking on global capitalism and those exaggerating or not understanding the context of emancipatory movements around the world, and the network of white supremacist, libertarian, Zionist, extractive industry funded pro-settler colonialist promoters opposing them. 

Dr Dutta caught me (and others part of this network) tweeting about him, and explained in some detail, (in over 5,000 words) on New Year’s Eve quite how it all works. In truth I am shocked and ashamed, because I didn’t quite realise the connections, but it is all clear now.   He wrote this article which I unreservedly defend his freedom of speech to produce.  I don't want him silenced, I want his views shared and of course with that he will have to defend his views, but that highlights them more.

See I thought when he said:

I was therefore not surprised to wake up today in the backdrop of what would be described as a powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance and my expression of solidarity to it to angry and racist tweets by Giraud. 

He was supporting Hamas's attacks, but that oversimplified and falsely represented his views, and he opened my eyes.

I had thought that libertarian movements and groups domestically and overseas were simply people who believed that society’s problems were best resolved through voluntary human interaction, co-operation and trade, rather than through the use of coercion through government. I thought they were avowedly against the initiation of violence (violence only being approved in self-defence, and proportionately so), and that a belief in treating all humans as individuals based on their deeds and character was an ethical position to have. 

I did not realise I had been duped for so long by the world’s extractive industries (by which I take to be mining and fossil fuel extraction) seeking to make their fortunes through neo-colonialism.  You see those industries, which despite being only 12% of global GDP, exercise disproportionate power and control over governments and the public. They make money by imposing the white supremacist concept of “property rights” over land and by requiring white supremacy (even China is now doing this) to ensure labour in extractive industries is predominantly undertaken by ethnic minorities and seeks to ensure they remain impoverished. This is especially so in colonial-settler countries such as the United States and Australia, although official statistics in both countries indicate indigenous people in both countries form a tiny part of extractive industry employment, I haven’t done enough research to question Dr Dutta’s findings. He also notes the role of the tobacco industry, but I thought that was a tiny part of the global economy and not at all influential.

Extractive industries seek to promote both white supremacy (this includes the mining and fossil fuel businesses owned and managed from countries such as China, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey (all of South America is colonialist-settler based though)), because whiteness brings with it the concept of privatising property and human relations (I’m not sure quite how Marx, Engels and Lenin fit into this, all being white and seeking to abolish private property, and implement an idealised society without exploitation and where there would be equal provision for all, but again I am new to this). 

This is where I once was confused.  See I thought white supremacy was what was seen in Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, UDI Rhodesia and the US Deep South, of course most European colonialism was a project led by a belief in superiority of the colonisers over the colonised. This changed after WW2, when most colonies became independent, and the horrors of the Holocaust shocked most of the world, and theories of race and eugenics were seen as immoral. A more classically liberal view of humanity emerged, with human rights of individuals, not limited by race, nationality, caste or sex.  

I was wrong, in fact the classical liberal/libertarian view of rights is white supremacy, not just because it was developed mostly by white people, but because treating people as individuals blanks out the oppression people experience and feel. I thought that because the Nazis ran a totalitarian state, the Apartheid regime had severe restrictions on freedom of speech and movement, and even the segregationist states of the US severely constrained private property rights, freedom of movement and speech, that a libertarian would be absolutely opposed to racism, let alone white supremacy.  Especially given the writings of ultra-nationalists and racial supremacist politicians and political parties always seem to promote strong, interventionist states with little tolerance for untrammelled free speech, legalising drugs, free trade, foreign investment and immigration. 

So libertarians are white supremacists funded by extractive capital, but it goes further. The global network of libertarians pushing school vouchers and school choice actually want only rich people’s children to be educated, and to sustain racial differences in educational outcomes (although I’m unsure if this includes the above-average performance of children from various Asian backgrounds in many countries, including the US and the UK, but Dr Dutta might have an answer for this).  School choice is a tool of white supremacy and colonialism.

Dr Dutta rightfully places the example of Equatorial Guinea, a country I know a bit about, as an example of colonialism exploit its resources, but I’m not clear whether the Franco regime instituting Macias Nguema was designed to exploit resources that it didn’t know existed at the time (fossil fuels) who then systematically slaughtered a third of the population.

What’s most sinister though is the links between white supremacy and Zionism. Zionism isn’t a project whereby the Jewish people (who I mistakenly thought lived in the land of Israel for thousands of years) have an independent state on their historic lands, after centuries of colonisation and imperial invasion, but is a settler-colonial project. Maybe Ken Livingstone got it right and the Nazis and the Zionists were in cahoots? Of course, I was first astonished that the people who suffered the first industrialised genocide in history, undertaken by a white supremacist government, could actually be called white supremacists themselves – but Dr Dutta says it is a colonial settler regime that engages in apartheid (I’m unsure whether the Arab members of the Knesset fit into apartheid, and where non-Jews are prevented from going within Israel, but who am I to judge?).  

This all comes back to what I first said. I thought when Dr Dutta after the Hamas pogrom saying it was “a powerful exemplar of decolonising resistance”, that saying it is a “resistance” means it was justified (is a resistance not justified ever?), and saying it was a “powerful exemplar” meant its meaning was powerful and it was an example, perhaps for others seeking decolonisation. 

He has since clarified that decolonisation “fundamentally critiques violence in any form carried out on civilian lives”, which infers condemning all forms of terrorism, which is a relief. No ethical person could possibly support what Hamas does to its own people, let alone Israelis.

I could go on, but the links Dr Dutta makes are clear:

Mining and fossil fuel companies seek exploitative profits and cheap labour.

To achieve this they promote idea of private property, freedom of speech (but they don’t like people criticising their ideas), school choice and small government.

This promotes white supremacy, because only white people benefit from these ideas.  Zionists are white supremacists as well, because like white supremacists that lead major Western countries (Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak – don’t let his name fool you into thinking he isn’t a tool of white supremacy), they want more settler colonialism.  They are colluding with the Free Speech Union to suppress the voices of Palestinian solidarity and to attack anti-racist concepts like Critical Race Theory and decolonisation – which proves how racist they are.

Libertarian organisations are funded by mining companies to promote policies for the expansion of genocidal white supremacist including Zionists, and will wreck the environment and exploiting non-white people.

I don’t want to be a part of that. Not just because I’ve not seen a dollar of money from extractive industries or the Atlas Network, but because I don’t want to be a part of an international ecosystem of misinformation that is about wrecking the planet, expanding colonialism and promoting white supremacy, that encourages Zionism (which is implementing genocide apparently). 

I thought the far-right were explicitly racist people wanting largely closed ultra-nationalist states that categorise people by race, with laws and money distributed by the state based on racial characteristics, and a heavy-handed state that suppresses speech, media and art it finds offensive, and hated Jews.

I was apparently wrong.

Dr Dutta has explained a lot, but I do have a lot of questions.