Authored by Jacob Hornberger via The Future of Freedom Foundation,
The libertarian movement can be divided into two basic groups: libertarians who call for reforming welfare-warfare state programs and libertarians who call for dismantling welfare-warfare state programs.
I fall within the latter group. Why? Because I want to be free. Reform doesn’t get me freedom. At best it gets me a better serfdom. That’s nice, but it’s not want I want for the rest of my life. I want to be free, and only by dismantling infringements on freedom can I attain genuine freedom.
Consider 19th-century slavery, for example. Imagine libertarian reformers in the state of Mississippi calling for slavery reform. They would say, “Slavery is here to stay. It’s in the Constitution. We have to strive for what we can get. We also need to gain the respect and credibility of the people of Mississippi. We won’t do that by being radical and calling for the end of slavery. We must settle for advocating slavery reforms, such as shorter working hours, fewer lashings, better food, improved working conditions, and a bit of education.”
Would the slaves have been happy with such reforms? Undoubtedly, because their slavery would have been improved. But there would have been one big problem with these reforms: They wouldn’t have meant freedom for the slaves. To achieve freedom would have necessitated a dismantling of slavery, not its reform. Thus, the dismantle-libertarians would be raising people’s vision to a higher level — one that showed the evil, immorality, and destructiveness of slavery itself.
The fact that calling for the dismantling of slavery wouldn’t have been a popular position among the people of Mississippi would have been considered irrelevant to dismantle-libertarians. What would have mattered to those libertarians was not what the general population felt about them but the fact that they would be advocating what was right.
The principle is no different with respect to the serfdom under which we live today.
Our way of life is not one of strict slavery, like that of 19th-century slavery. But it is quite similar in terms of the serfdom way of life under which we live.
Under our serfdom way of life, the federal government is our master, and we are its servants.
We work to support the federal government.
That is our mission in life under the welfare-warfare state political-economic system under which we have all been born and raised.
The government decides how much of our earnings we are permitted to keep, much as a parent decides how much of an allowance to give his children.
That’s what the federal income tax, which formed no part of American life for more than 100 years after the founding of the United States, is all about.
We live under a governmental system that requires us to share a part of our earnings with others.
That’s what Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, subsidies, bailouts, and other welfare-state programs are all about. We are told that this mandated sharing shows what a good, caring, and compassionate people we are, even though no one is free to opt out.
We live under a governmental system that punishes us for consuming substances that the government says are harmful to us.
It serves as our daddy to make certain that we are taking care of ourselves. It sends us to our room if we disobey. The room is in a federal penitentiary..
We live under a governmental system that forces parents to subject their children to the state’s educational system, which can easily be described as army-lite. Here children’s minds are bent and molded into conformity, regimentation, deference to authority, and blind obedience to the ruler or to the government and its official narratives. It’s here that people are indoctrinated since early childhood into believing that their serfdom way of life is freedom.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.
We live under a socialist (i.e., central-planning) immigration-control system that comes with a brutal immigration police state, which entails death, suffering, humiliation, and massive destruction of economic liberty, free markets, private property, civil liberties, and privacy.
We live under a national-state governmental system, one in which the military, the CIA, and the NSA wield omnipotent, totalitarian, and dictatorial powers, including assassination (i.e., murder), secret surveillance, seizures, kidnappings, torture, and incarceration for life — all without due process of law and trial by jury.
What do reform-libertarians say about this serfdom way of life?
They say, “The system needs reform.” And so they come up with all sorts of welfare-warfare state reforms to make the serfdom more palatable.
Some examples of libertarian welfare-warfare state reforms are: school vouchers, raising the Social Security retirement age, health-savings accounts, income-tax reduction and reining in the IRS, improved concentration camps for illegal immigrants who are being deported, ending civil-asset forfeiture, legalizing only marijuana, reducing military spending, limiting secret surveillance, reining in the CIA, limiting foreign interventionism to cases involving “national security,” and getting members of the “freedom movement” into public office to manage the welfare-warfare state and the regulatory departments and agencies.
Would such libertarian reforms be beneficial? Undoubtedly!
They would almost certainly improve our serfdom way of life, much like libertarian slavery reform would have improved the condition of 19th-century slaves.
But there is one great big problem with libertarian reform of the welfare-warfare state. It’s not freedom, any more than slavery reform would have meant freedom for the slaves.
In order to achieve freedom, it is necessary (1) to identify the infringements on freedom that are preventing people from being free, and then (2) dismantle, not reform, every single one of such infringements.
Is that an easy task? Of course not, especially when the vast majority of Americans are convinced that their serfdom way of life already constitutes freedom. (Goethe: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”)
But if freedom were easy, everyone in history would have had it.
Achieving freedom is extremely difficult. It requires a critical mass of people who have come to understand what genuine freedom is and have decided to do whatever they can to achieve freedom, rather than simply settle for a warmed-over, improved serfdom.
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/12/2026 - 20:05Iran is dominating headlines, but Washington’s favorite bipartisan monster abroad is never too far from the sights of the hawks. Just days ago, and while the U.S. is fighting a war, Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell scolded Marco Rubio for pausing a weapons shipment to Taiwan.
Last night, ZeroHedge hosted opposing think tankers to answer the question that DC likes to keep ambiguous: Should the U.S. defend Taiwan if China invades?
In the “no” corner was Doug Bandow, senior fellow at the Cato Institute, who once served as special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. Arguing “yes”, we should intervene, is the Heritage Foundation’s Steve Yates, a former deputy national security advisor to the Vice President Dick Cheney.
Below were the highlights for those who missed it:
Are We Prepared?Bandow argued that the Taiwan debate often understates both the depth of Chinese nationalism and the possibility that a U.S.-China conflict could escalate beyond anyone's control. He said his interactions with Chinese students while teaching summer programs convinced him that the issue is not simply the ambition of Xi Jinping but a broadly shared belief that Taiwan is part of China.
"Chinese students are very nationalistic. They all believe that Taiwan's part of China. So this is a sentiment that is not just the folks in Zhang Nanhai. I mean, it's not just President Xi."
Bandow's central warning was that threatening war requires being prepared to follow through even if events spiral. He questioned whether the United States has fully grappled with the consequences of escalation, particularly if China began losing and faced attacks on mainland targets.
"If we're going to threaten to go to war, it's very hard to back down… If the Chinese find themselves losing, if the Chinese find that we are attacking mainland bases, what are they likely to do? They are likely to escalate… How do we control that?"
Bandow said Taiwan is "a wonderful place" but asked whether Americans are prepared to risk their own society (and life, civilization… really everything). The key question, according to him, is not whether Taiwan deserves sympathy, but whether the United States is prepared for what could become a full-scale war with another major nuclear power.
"Are we prepared to risk our own society?... We cannot assume it would turn out well… Are we prepared for a full-scale war?"
— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) June 12, 2026 Fentanyl!Yates said Beijing's role in the fentanyl crisis is not accidental, arguing that China's extensive surveillance apparatus makes it implausible that authorities are unaware of the scale of the trade flowing through Chinese manufacturers and financial networks.
"It's the world's most advanced surveillance state to the point where they literally will find images of Winnie the Pooh on Hong Kong protesters' phones… completely implausible that they can have illicit precursors manufactured at a scale sufficient to result in half a million American fatalities counted conservatively over ten years without them knowing."
The issue, he said, has been raised repeatedly at the highest levels of diplomacy and can no longer be dismissed as something that escaped Beijing's attention.
"It's not something that snuck up on them… There really is no ambiguity of where it's coming from and at what scale."
While Yates acknowledged he cannot prove that Chinese leaders explicitly intended to kill Americans, he argued that intent becomes harder to dismiss when the trade continues after years of warnings and mounting casualties.
"Did they say, 'I want to do this in order to have this effect?’ Maybe, maybe not. I don't think we'll ever get to know… But once it is in train and moving and three presidents have raised it and the casualty numbers reached what would be considered a weapon of mass destruction level, it's kind of hard to say that they have clean hands, or there's no intent to allow it to happen."
— ZeroHedge Debates (@zerohedgeDebate) June 12, 2026 Full DebateWatch the full debate below or listen on Spotify.
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 11, 2026 Tyler Durden Fri, 06/12/2026 - 19:40Authored by David Harsanyi via The Epoch Times,
It turns out that the most generous funder of white supremacist groups in the United States was likely the Southern Poverty Law Center.
At least that’s what the Department of Justice’s superseding indictment against the SPLC alleges. The organization secretly paid informants to engage in the active promotion and funding of racist groups while denouncing and “fighting” the very same groups in public.
The SPLC purportedly created fictitious entities to hide funding from their donors.
The SPLC, for instance, is accused of bankrolling the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally, paying a leader nearly $300,000 to post racist messages, organize and even transport people to the infamous Charlottesville protest, where one person was killed.
In another instance, a pair of white supremacists who approached the SPLC about leaving the Klan were encouraged to stay in the group and recruit new members.
Given salaries, the two men were allegedly reimbursed for the costs of their activities, including those “incurred for cross-burning events, to include the wood and fuel used.”
In the end, I’m not sure what the legal jeopardy there is in engaging in this brand of duplicitous activity, but it is without a doubt corrupt, fraudulent, immoral, and bad for the country.
Many people correctly point out that SPLC is merely interested in keeping white supremacist groups operational to justify its existence. White nationalists and identitarian groups have no genuine political power or support, so it makes sense that SPLC and other groups would prop them up for fundraising. The notion that Americans live in a nation of deep-seated systemic and cultural racism is a foundational belief of the American left. Having a bunch of cartoonishly racist groups running around the country not only perpetuates the myth but helps raise money.
But a far more vital objective of the SPLC is destroying the reputations of effective legitimate organizations that are involved in mainstream political debates that have absolutely nothing to do with racism or extremism.
The purpose of the “hate” maps and enemies’ lists compiled by SPLC isn’t to alert Americans about local skinheads, but to associate those skinheads with the American College of Pediatricians, Family Research Council, Ben Carson, Turning Point USA, American Family Association, and Moms for Liberty.
In 2016, for instance, the SPLC “Hate and Extremism” list added Alliance Defending Freedom, a highly effective legal organization that’s won multiple religious freedom cases in front of the Supreme Court. Oftentimes the ADF represents minority clients. Its most high-profile case involved Jack Phillips, the persecuted cake maker from Colorado whose First Amendment rights were stripped by the government. But the group also takes on cases regarding state funding for abortion or the biological males competing in girls’ sports.
You may disagree with ADF’s positions on those issues, but only an extremist progressive actually considers it a “hate” group worthy of inclusion on a list with “neo-confederates.” It’s not the pinhead “Neo Volkisch” that concerns the SPLC, it’s the impressive lawyer with the ADF.
By making their case to the press, these conservatives are wisely appealing to the SPLC’s most powerful source of influence.
Yet, the SPLC’s “hate list” has been treated as an authoritative source on extremism by virtually every legacy media outlet for years.
During the height of BLM protests and riots, The New York Times cited the SPLC as an unimpeachable authority on hate groups in hundreds of stories over a one-year span. The group was cited by the paper thousands of times over the previous decade. That’s a single media organization. From the mid-2010s through 2025, when the SPLC was sending millions to prop up the worst right-wing extremists in the country, virtually any story about rising extremism on NBC News featured the SPLC.
The question is, how can any reputable media outlet, much less a government agency, ever use the SPLC as a source again?
They’ll try.
Even now, outlets like the Associated Press refer to the SPLC as “civil rights” group.
The SPLC, formed in 1971 by civil rights activists in Montgomery, Alabama, hasn’t been fighting for the rights of African Americans for a long time. By the mid 1980s, the SPLC had already shifted away from the civil rights fight to rooting out “right-wing extremism.” In 1986, the entire legal staff, save founder Morris Dees (who was pushed out of the organization in 2019 after allegations of sexual harassment and racial discrimination), quit over the change.
The SPLC, probably superfluous when it was formed, has long been a shady left-wing activist group with a near-billion-dollar endowment. The new indictment only further confirms it was worse than we thought.
Tyler Durden Fri, 06/12/2026 - 19:15