Real Libertarian Talks Sense To Kaitlin Bennett & Liberty Hangout | Skeptic TaraElla 2020.7

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Today, I will be talking about Kaitlin Bennett again. Last time, I spoke of how I sort of admired her at first for having the guts to stand up to political correctness, but on further thought I didn't admire her anymore because I believe she was only going to make things worse in the end. The thing I now worry most about is that, part of Kaitlin's brand is standing up for liberty, and she even uses the yellow and black colors, which means she could be seen as representing libertarianism. This, I fear, could reflect badly on libertarianism broadly and liberty activists more generally.

Which is why I think it's time to rescue the libertarian brand from Kaitlin Bennett's so-called activism. I guess the ideal thing to do would be to get Kaitlin herself to have a rational conversation, to point out why we real libertarians disagree with her quite a lot, and why her project could only backfire on liberty. But since I think she wouldn't agree to such a request anyway, we'll have to settle for the next best thing: responding to comments she's already made elsewhere.

"This is me. I'm Kaitlin Bennett, I'm the most hated person on the internet."

The problem is, you seem to enjoy the attention that comes with the hate. And that gives you a conflict of interest in our goal of restoring free speech on college campuses. Because, if you think about it, if campuses became bastions of free speech overnight, your voice would be reduced to just one more opinion in the peaceful free market of ideas. No students would try to stop you from saying anything, which means you won't get to be a political celebrity anymore. This conflict of interest means that I just can't trust you to really work hard for free speech.

"What do you think about starting an intitiative here on campus to be more inclusive to trans women, and put urinals in the women's restroom for them?"

You know that's a troll question, and a silly one because trans women don't use urinals. By the way, real libertarians have consistently supported LGBT rights as long as they don't infringe on other freedoms. For example, the Libertarian Party supported gay marriage long before the Democrats! You will also find many pro-LGBT articles on respected libertarian sites like Reason and Cato. Anyone who has a basic libertarian understanding would know that, from the libertarian perspective, the bathroom issue should be treated as a private property issue, which means that it is not even a political issue at all! The fact is, real libertarians don't have a problem with LGBT rights as long as they don't infringe on free speech or religious liberty. Conservatives who keep using LGBT issues as political wedges aren't real libertarians. They are just the mirror image of the authoritarian SJWs you despise so much. And at least back when I was in college, we real libertarians despised them, and their dear leader President Bush, just as much.

"You guys want to pick fights about my content, you don't know a damn thing about my content."

But the problem is, a lot of your content is about confronting college liberals. You don't talk enough about liberty, what is liberty, how do we restore or ensure it, you don't have enough intellectual talk on these matters. And you don't even explore the origins of the free speech problem on campus. You know, there was once a radical thinker called Herbert Marcuse, who in 1965 published an essay titled 'Repressive Tolerance', in which he called for the suppression of conservative ideas. Marcuse became very influential among the student activists of the late 1960s, who went on to have a huge impact on intellectual culture throughout the West. The fact is, college SJWs only act the way they act because they have been unknowingly encouraged by radical baby boomers. But that's probably too much history and too much intellectualism for your style. So you just blame immature college students for a conflict that is way beyond their ability to create, and ignore the real roots of the problem.

"What's it like being conservative on campus?"

You and I both know it's difficult. I'm not a political conservative, but I am a philosophical conservative, in that I admire great thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and the like, and I strongly reject thinkers like Nietzsche, Sartre, Marcuse and Foucault, who were all what I would call atheist fundamentalists looking for chaos. The campus conversation around the humanities is now so imbalanced that it simply rejects people who think along the more conservative or classical liberal cannon, with all the associated political implications. But I think people like you are only making the problem worse, because your confrontational attitude makes conversation impossible, and conversation is needed to fix this bias.

"You got to speak out. Come on, look, you get a lot of fans if you speak out."

Yeah, but I'm not after political celebrity like you. I actually want to have the necessary conversations to fix things, and as things stand, I'm not able to have that conversation started. Even if I speak out, and be completely honest about my thoughts, I feel like I'm just going to be misinterpreted, and used to further the polarization. I guess what we need to do is to have the necessary conversations, do the necessary work to restore free speech and respect for diversity of thought on college campuses and elsewhere, so that when people do speak up, they are properly understood, and we can have constructive debates in the free market of ideas. But then, in that case, you wouldn't be a political celebrity anymore, so you personally might not want that to happen.

The bottom line is, we desperately need a new intellectual culture that is wrapped around the basic ideals and intellectual canon of classical liberalism. The rise of such a culture is the only hope of restoring balance to the intellectual discussions on college campuses. However, your crude activism is part of the problem preventing that from happening.