Libertarianism Or Fascism?

[Lauren Johnson]

There is a lengthy six-part interview of an anonymous libertarian Naked Captitalism, who looks at Ayn Rand, for one, as sell outs. Read this person's vision for a world without ANY government. How does he do it without chaos? Hint: Hans-Hermann Hoppe (quotes high lighted in red) and these things called Government Like Organizations (GLO's). Here are a few paragraphs from the last section (CNC is Code Name Cain):

CNC: Once upon a time, there was a certain man, and he had two sons. The older son stayed at home and worked hard and did whatever his father wanted. But the younger son got bored of life at home, and asked for his portion of the inheritance. The father consented, and the younger son left. He took a journey into a far country, and there wasted his money in riotous living.

The younger son became hungry, and in order to survive, he took a job feeding hogs. But he still did not have enough food to eat, and decided to return to his father.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me one of thy hired servants."

But the father said to his servants, "Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet. And bring the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry."

Now the older son was in the field, and as he came and drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. He called one of the servants, and soon learned what was afoot. He became angry, and refused to go inside; and so his father came out, and entreated him to join the celebration.

But the older son answered his father, and said, "I have served you all of this time, and you never killed a goat for me so that I could have a feast with my friends. But this other son of yours, who has devoured all of your money with harlots when he came home, you killed for him the fatted calf."

And the father said unto him. "Son, you are right. I have been a fool, and I have paid too much heed to my emotions." And the father went inside, and took the clothes and the ring from the younger son, and cast him out from his lands. And he called the friends of his older son, and the feast continued in the honor of the son who deserved it.

ANDREW: But you changed the story! That isn't how it ends the father doesn't agree with the older son. He says it is right for them to celebrate, for "thy brother was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found." And most readers assume that at that point, the older brother realizes that he has been acting like a two-year-old.

CNC: Look, I'm not like Ayn Rand or Ludwig von Mises. I don't think that being a libertarian is incompatible with being a Christian. But since, as Mises put it, "all efforts to find support for the institution of private property… in the teachings of Christ are quite vain," it is true that the New Testament needs to be edited a little.

ANDREW: I'm sure you have other examples in mind.

CNC: Think about how much more inspiring the Sermon on the Mount would have been if Jesus had said: "Blessed are the rich in spirit, for as they lay up for themselves treasures upon earth, so they will also lay up for themselves treasures in heaven."
The key is to realize that since libertarianism reconstructs all of ethics… in terms of a theory of property rights [200], it is fine to believe in Christianity provided that whenever a correct understanding of property rights conflicts with Christianity, property rights shape one's understanding of Christianity, and not the other way around.

ANDREW: This interview has become very interesting, but I'd still like to hear your answer to my original question about freedom.

CNC: Let's see. As I've been trying to explain to you, due to democracy the genetic quality of the population has most certainly declined [185]. It is in the big cities… that the process of genetic pauperization is most advanced [184]. Now you asked me how I could support a future in which everyone would be free, but not everyone would be effectively free.

ANDREW: Yes.

CNC: What you have to understand is that I believe in negative liberty, not positive liberty. Everyone, even the most brutish individual, has a right to freedom, because that's negative liberty but effective freedom is a form of positive liberty, and so no one has a right to effective freedom. In fact, creating a right to effective freedom actually means coercing some people into doing forced labor for others.

ANDREW: I think I'm starting to see where this is going.

CNC: A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person… but falls instead into the same moral category as an animal of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a "free good") or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest).

On the other hand, there are members of the human species who are capable of understanding the [value of the division of labor] but… who knowingly act wrongly… esides having to be tamed or even physically defeated [they] must also be punished… to make them understand the nature of their wrongdoings and hopefully teach them a lesson for the future. [173]

Now yes, maybe some of these quasi-humans will be effectively slaves in a future libertarian society but they have no right to be effectively free, nor have they done anything to earn effective freedom. In today's America, the government expropriates more than 40% of the income of private producers, making even the economic burden imposed on slaves and serfs seem moderate by comparison [278]. In today's America, everyone, even productive geniuses, is unfree whereas in a libertarian society, everyone will be free, and people who deserve it will also be effectively free. Everyone will be better off.

[B]ANDREW: Maybe I understand now. But don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night and wonder if there isn't as big a difference as you imagine between you and the people you see as human trash? Don't you ever think that maybe, deep inside, they have the same dignity as you or worry that in your future libertarian society they will be plunged into a living hell?

CNC: Look, am I my brother's keeper?

Postscript

Nietzsche… has a description… of the disgust and disdain which consume him at the sight of the common people with their common faces, their common voices, and their common minds. …[T]his attitude is almost beautiful if we may regard it as pathetic… When he makes us feel that he cannot endure the innumerable faces, the incessant voices, the overpowering omnipresence which belongs to the mob, he will have the sympathy of anybody who has ever been sick on a steamer or tired in a crowded omnibus. Every man has hated mankind when he… has had humanity in his eyes like a blinding fog, humanity in his nostrils like a suffocating smell. But when Nietzsche has the incredible lack of humour and lack of imagination to ask us to believe that his aristocracy is an aristocracy of strong muscles or an aristocracy of strong wills, it is necessary to point out the truth. It is an aristocracy of weak nerves.
G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, p. 185 (published in 1905)

Part One: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/11/j...ision.html

[Magda Hassan]

Sheesh! How did I miss that one Lauren?

Anyway here is some more Libertarian fascism.

As Reason's editor defends its racist history, here's a copy of its holocaust denial "special issue"

By Mark Ames
On July 24, 2014

"The German concentration camps weren't health centers, but they appear to have been far smaller and much less lethal than the Russian ones."
Reason magazine, January 1976

Last weekend, I wrote about how Reason magazine and their backers, the Koch brothers was supporting a major push to further sell Silicon Valley on the "virtues" of libertarianism.
After I exposed Reason's history as a publisher of racist, pro-apartheid South Africa articles during the 1970s, the current editor-in-chief, Matt Welch, answered back in what must stand as one of the most bizarre responses imaginable.
Rather than simply doing what any sensible editor would do apologize for the magazine's past transgressions but reiterate that the racists articles do not represent its current editorial position Welch instead wrote a long blog post, smearing Pando and my reporting, including describing me (apparently without irony) as an "anti-libertarian conspiracy theorist." He also admitted that sure! Reason published a bunch of sick, racist pro-apartheid articles… but hey, they also published articles critical of apartheid, so what's the big deal?

If defending apartheid was a "matter of faith" in Reason during the '70s and '80s, you would expect editors and staffers and contributors to routinely make that case when the subject of apartheid came up.

There are so many problems with Welch's response but the first thing that stands out is the hypocrisy, or at least inconsistency. Welch and Reason attacked Ron Paul over his decades-old racist newsletters and attacked Paul for ducking responsibility when they were exposed in 2008, rather than simply apologizing for them. Why wouldn't they do the same? What constituency are they concerned would be alienated by Reason distancing itself from 1970s racists?
The second problem is that Welch urges readers (and us) to "please mine the archive for yourselves" and make our own judgements about what Reason truly stands for, then and now.
As someone who has spent the past few months doing precisely that including many hours spent in public libraries, digging through microfiche copies of issues that (for reasons that will become obvious) are not available online it seems to me that digging more into Reason's past is the last thing Welch should want anyone to do.
Astonishingly, in February 1976, Reason dedicated an entire "special issue" to promoting Holocaust deniers, under the guise of so-called "historical revisionism." How horrifying is it? You can judge for yourself the whole thing is embedded below.
PandoDaily contacted noted Holocaust historian and Holocaust Museum expert Deborah Lipstadt to ask her opinion. In 2000, Lipstadt won a much-publicized libel trial in Britain against a leading Holocaust denier, David Irving. When we shared with her the list of Reason's "special issue" contributors and authors positively cited in the issue, Lipstadt described it as "the Who's Who of early American Holocaust deniers."

Authors who contributed articles to Reason magazine's "special issue" included one of the most notorious American pro-Nazi activists of the postwar era, Austin J. App, author of the 1973 tract, "The Six Million Swindle: Blackmailing the German People for Hard Marks and Fabricated Corpses" and contributing editor to the rabidly anti-Semitic magazine, the American Mercury. Two more authors hired to write for Reason's "special issue" included James J. Martin, a regular contributor to the same neo-Nazi American Mercury magazine; and Percy Greaves, a founding board member at the anti-Jewish hate group, the Liberty Lobby.
Both Martin and Greaves were deeply involved in leading anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denier outfits before, during and after Reason hired them as contributors; and shortly after they appeared in Reason's "special issue," both Martin and Greaves served as editorial directors in David Irving's favorite neo-Nazi outfit, the Institute for Historical Review, described as "the world's single most important outlet for Holocaust-denial propaganda" by the Anti-Defamation League.
Perhaps the most shocking article in Reason's "special issue" was penned by Gary North, who was also Ron Paul's congressional aide that same year, and has been one of the most influential figures in the Christian radical-right since the 1970s. North's article in Reason mocked the Holocaust as "the Establishment's favorite horror story" and questioned "the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler." North also painted other rabidly anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers in a positive, "contrarian-cool" light, praising the works of David Hoggan, author of "The Myth of the Six Million," French neo-fascist Paul Rassinier, and American historian Harry Elmer Barnes, considered the godfather of American Holocaust denial literature.
Gary North in Reason Magazine

Perhaps the reason Reason's current editor is hesitant to distance his magazine from past contributors is that some of them are still around, still running the Reason show, and otherwise remain major names in the Koch brothers' libertarian network. Robert Poole and Manny Klausner, listed on the masthead of the Holocaust-denier issue as co-editors, also co-founded with David Koch the nonprofit Reason Foundation, which publishes Reason magazine to this day. The Reason Foundation still lists Poole, Klausner and Koch as trustees; Poole is also listed as a Reason Foundation "Officer," alongside Reason editors Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie. The Koch brothers have donated millions to Reason, which, besides publishing the magazine, also advises state and local governments on mass privatizations of public assets and services.
Besides working as a privatization advisor to several US presidents and Margaret Thatcher, Robert Poole has more recently served as a privatization advisor to Florida governor Rick Scott and Texas governor Rick Perry.
Marty Zupan, listed on the Reason masthead as Book Review Editor in the February 1976 Holocaust deniers' issue, is today president of the libertarian Institute for Humane Studies, whose chairman is Charles Koch. Tibor Machan, listed as "Senior Editor" of the issue, is the son of a Hungarian Nazi war criminal. Machan and Zupan were married when they worked together on Reason's special Holocaust-denier issue.
A WHO'S WHO OF AMERICAN HOLOCAUST DENIERS
So who exactly are the people featured or cited favorably in Reason's holocaust denial issue, and described by one of America's leading experts as a "who's who of American holocaust deniers."
Austin App

It is impossible that Reason did not know who Austin J. App was. A Village Voice article said App "was better known as one of the earliest proponents of the theory that the Holocaust never took place," listing titles of App's books including "Can Christianity Survive When Jews Control The Media and the Money?" and "Kosher Food Racket Exposed."
According to Lisptadt, App "played a central role in the development of Holocaust denial, especially in the United States," tracing the structure of modern Holocaust denier arguments to Austin App's 1973 tract, "The Six Million Swindle." In it, App accused greedy "Talmudists" of "using the six million swindle to blackmail West Germany" the real victims in Austin App's historical revision.
Writes Lipstadt:

"His [App's] major contribution was to formulate eight axioms that have come to serve as the founding principles of the California-based Institute for Historical Review and as the basic postulates of Holocaust denial. Since App posited them in 1973, virtually all deniers have built their arguments on them."

Despite App's public notoriety as a Nazi sympathizer and Holocaust denier in the 1960s and 70s, Reason magazine hired him to write about the "Sudeten-German Tragedy." According to App's article in Reason, the postwar expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czech borderlands after the fall of Nazi Germany was "one of the worst mass atrocities in history," while the Munich Pact that let Nazi Germany annex chunks of Czechoslovakia is described as "belated justice."
Reason's choice of Austin App as a shining example of "historical revisionism" says all you need to know about what the Koch brothers meant by libertarian history. Although App had been burning both ends of the candle for decades arguing that the Holocaust was a hoax, and Hitler and Nazi Germany were the victims of World War II, Reason's author description whitewashed him as just another tweedy professor:

"Austin J. App received an M. A. and Ph.D. in English literature from the Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. He is the author of numerous reviews, articles, and books on English literature and writing, current affairs, and history."

Just two years before he appeared in Reason, Austin App published a follow-up to his "Six Million Swindle," a tract titled, "A Straight Look at the Third Reich: Hitler and National Socialism: How Right? How Wrong?" in which he mocked "the legend of the six million Jews gassed'" while praising Hitler as "a man of architecture and art, not of armaments and war."
When he wrote for Reason, Austin App also served on the board of trustees of the neo-Nazi National Youth Alliance, which later morphed into the more violent neo-Nazi National Alliance, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as "the most dangerous and best organized neo-Nazi formation in America."

App also served on the editorial board of the rabidly anti-Semitic rag, The American Mercury, which published articles by another Holocaust denier glorified in Reason magazine's pages: James J. Martin. One of Martin's articles in the American Mercury accused FDR's Jewish Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, of plotting to turn postwar Germany into "one vast concentration camp of starvation and physical misery…unparalleled in scope before or since." Martin, it turns out, was not only glorified in Reason magazine's pages; from the mid-1960s through at least 1980, Martin also received backing and support from Charles Koch.
James J. Martin
The lead feature article in Reason's "special issue" turns out to be one of James Martin's slyer works of historical revisionism: "The Framing of Tokyo Rose," an outrage-fueled attack of the 1949 treason trial and conviction of a wartime Japan radio voice, American-born Iva Toguri, known as "Tokyo Rose." For Martin, this was about as safe as his World War II historical revisionism got. By the time Martin wrote about her for Reason's "special issue" in 1976, Toguri was already an Establishment cause-celebre, her unjust conviction profiled in 60 Minutes, and soon to be overturned by President Ford, who pardoned her upon leaving office.
Martin's purpose for taking up Toguri's cause was to prepare Reason's readers for a much broader political point: That World War II was as unjust as the trial of Iva Toguri, and the Allies who fought that war against the Japanese and Germany were as brutal and duplicitous as the prosecutors who sent Toguri to prison.
A month before Reason's lost "special issue" profiled here, in the January 1976 issue, Reason devoted a fawning eight-page interview glorifying James J. Martin as "one of America's leading revisionist historians," a libertarian maverick unafraid of taking on the Establishment's "version" of "sacred cows" like the Holocaust. Here's an excerpt from Reason's interview:

REASON: Dr. Martin, do you believe (1) that the specific charge against the Nazis of having a mass extermination program of several million Jews is true, and (2) that the Allied atrocities were as great or greater than those of the Germans, from your study of the question?
MARTIN: Well, I never made a head count of all who lost their lives in the Warwe've seen a wide variety of statistical materials, some of which have been pulled out of thin air… I don't believe that the evidence of a planned extermination of the entire Jewish population of Europe is holding up. [...] The German concentration camps weren't health centers, but they appear to have been far smaller and much less lethal than the Russian ones.

As proof that the Holocaust was a hoax, Martin told Reason's "journalists" that he relied on the works of Europe's leading Holocaust denier, Paul Rassinier, whose books "Debunking the Genocide Myth," "The Drama of European Jewry" described Nazi concentration camps as "a gesture of compassion" designed by the Nazis to "rehabilitate the strayed sheep." According to Rassinier, the Holocaust was a "swindle" concocted by money-grubbing Zionists out to "make Germany an ever-lasting milk cow for Israel."
Reason set Martin up perfectly with softballs designed to make these Holocaust-deniers appear as courageous iconoclasts persecuted for having the guts to tell the truth:

REASON: For a number of years Rassinier's works haven't been available in English. Are a lot of people afraid to see them come to light?
MARTIN: I don't know who would suffer the most from exposure to Rassinier's objections to the standard line on the concentration camp literature

Reason was so enthralled with their Holocaust-denier hero James J. Martin that he appeared in three consecutive issues in a row: December 1975, in an issue that featured a four-page screed by Charles Koch attacking leftists, Ralph Nader, and American businessmen who weren't sufficiently radicalized to fight the left; the next month, January 1976, Reason fawned over Martin as he mocked and cast doubt on the Holocaust; and the next month, February 1976, when Reason published and promoted "the Who's Who of early American Holocaust deniers."

Martin's relationship with Reason can be traced back to Reason's sugar daddy, Charles Koch, who first sponsored Martin in the mid-late 1960s at Rampart College, where Koch funded Martin's fledgling "history department" as well as Rampart Journal, one of the earliest American journals devoted to pushing Holocaust deniers. When Rampart College collapsed in 1968, Charles Koch reportedly gave Martin a one-time $60,000 payout, a lot of money in those days, which Martin used to fund his own far-right publishing house, issuing books by authors like "American Fascist" Lawrence Dennis. In the 1970s, Charles Koch continued funding Martin through grants and seminars put on by Koch's Institute for Humane Studies, through sinecures at Koch-funded outfits like the Center for Libertarian Studies (where Martin served on the advisory board in the mid-late 1970s), and through the Cato Institute, which published James Martin and his Holocaust denier guru, Harry Elmer Barnes, as late as 1980.

In 1979, while Martin was still part of Charles Koch's libertarian apparatus, he joined the editorial board of the most notorious American Holocaust denier outfit, the Institute for Historical Review home to KKK Grand Wizard David Duke, and David Irving, "the world's most prominent Holocaust denier." Martin spent the last 25 years of his life in the neo-Nazi cesspool, publishing through them his final shameful book, a Holocaust-denial tract titled "The Man Who Invented Genocide."
When Martin died in 2004, Reason wrote a largely hagiographic obituary, downplaying Martin's sickening mockery of the Holocaust, lamenting only that Martin's decades spent denying the Holocaust,

"will in the eyes of many discredit all his work, but it ought not."

Ron Paul's Guru: Gary North

Another contributor to Reason's "special issue" was Gary North, Ron Paul's congressional aide and his longtime partner in politics and business. North is better known as one of the key figures in Christian Reconstructionism, which to Gary North means applying capital punishment (by stoning to death) for "crimes" including blasphemy, abortion, "witchcraft," women who have pre-marital sex, or "incorrigible juvenile delinquency."
North's article for Reason, "World War II Revisionism & Vietnam," stands out as the issue's most sickening it's the most aggressive in mocking the Holocaust, and most disturbing when you look back and realize, this same Gary North shaped the worldview of libertarianism's leading pitchman, Ron Paul.
North's article, as the name implies, tries to convince readers that World War II was as bad as Vietnam, which in 1976, a year after the fall of Saigon, was about the worst smear imaginable. In this sense, North's article continued a common theme in Reason's "special issue": World War II was just as bad, if not worse than [NAME OF MOST UNPOPULAR WAR EVER], and FDR was just as sleazy and deceitful as [NAME OF MOST UNPOPULAR PRESIDENT EVER].
There is a politics to all of this, a politics that's barely budged since the days of the American Liberty League: The goal is to discredit the New Deal and FDR, which can't be done effectively without discrediting FDR's most popular cause, the victory over fascist Germany and Japan. To far-right extraction industry billionaires like the Koch family, FDR and his New Deal politics were a kind of anti-business "holocaust," because the the New Deal forced the long-dominant plutocrats to part with a portion of their wealth and political power. To the nation's Big Business oligarchs in the 1930s, FDR's New Deal reforms breaking up the power of finance, trusts, and industrialists, while empowering labor unions was a crime and a wound as raw in 1976 as it was in 1936.
For them, FDR was a tyrant and a criminal, an American Hitler, only no one else could see things their way, because the real Hitler was widely believed to be one of the worst figures in history. Therefore, libertarian "historical revisionism" had to convince these Americans that Hitler wasn't nearly as awful as they believed, which meant that the Holocaust couldn't have happened if the goal was to discredit FDR and the New Deal.
North's article appeals to another sensibility popular with libertarians (and the Boomer left): the cult of the anti-Establishment iconoclast, every self-absorbed middle-class Baby Boomer's fantasy. That cult of the iconoclast allows North to paint libertarianism's far-right "historical revisionism" as anti-Establishment Cool, more an expression of one's individuality than a political act. So if the boring, bad Establishment says Hitler was bad and World War II was good, then naturally the anti-Establishment maverick will question that. Gary North writes:

"One topicthe ultimate litmus test of hardnosed World War II revisionismhas generally been skirted: Hitler. Was he a madman, diplomatically speaking? Was he exclusively responsible for the Second World War?"

Much of the Reason Holocaust denier propaganda is about promoting a new set of anti-authority voices to replace the Establishment's. So Martin cites Holocaust deniers Paul Rassinier and Harry Elmer Barnes; and Gary North introduces Reason's readers to Bay Area Holocaust denier David Hoggan, the "anonymous" author of the 1969 neo-Nazi book "The Myth of the Six Million":

"In American revisionist circles the most famous (or infamous) case has been that of David Hoggan, the Establishment's number-one academic pariah of the revisionist camp…Hoggan's thesis regarding the origins of the Second World War are straightforward, and completely unorthodox. The primary villain was not Hitler; it was Lord Halifax, the British Foreign Secretary."

North is a clever huckster who's studied his Baby Boomer audience, so he uses marketing words that he knows appeal to his target consumer: "unorthodox," "Establishment's number-one academic pariah," and weirdest of all for a strict Old Testament theofascist like North, he even uses the then-popular hippie expression "far-out" (meaning "cool") to sell Holocaust denial:

"Probably the most far-out materials on World War II revisionism have been the seemingly endless scholarly studies of the supposed execution of 6 million Jews by Hitler. The anonymous author [Hoggan] of The Myth of the Six Million' has presented a solid case against the Establishment's favorite horror storythe supposed moral justification for our entry into the war."

North promotes the same Holocaust denier as James J. Martin does, Paul Rassinier, alleging that his "untranslatable books….have seriously challenged the story" of the Holocaust. North also promotes a Holocaust denial tract by Richard Harwood, editor of the fascist British National Front party magazine, Spearhead:

"A recent and very inexpensive book in magazine form, Did Six Million Really Die?', appeared in 1973, written by Richard Harwood."

According to Lipstadt, Harwood's "Did Six Million Really Die" was "the preeminent British work on Holocaust denial" for a decade after its publication, i.e., when Gary North promoted it.
At the end of that astonishing paragraph, North once again called into question the Holocaust:

"One thing is certain: 6 million executions or not, we did not intervene when the Soviet Union executed millions of kulaksthe private owners of small farms, prior to their expropriation and liquidation by Stalin in the late 1920's and early 1930's. The kulaks, unfortunately for them, had no supporters writing editorials in the New York Times."

There we have it in concentrated form: In just a single paragraph in the Kochs' Reason magazine, mockery and denial of the Holocaust, and shameless praise for three of the world's most notorious Holocaust deniers David Hoggan, Paul Rassinier, and Richard Harwood (neé Richard Verrall) repackaged as hip, contrarian iconoclasm for Reason's largely white, male, educated libertarian audience.
Percy Greaves, Lew Rollins
Other contributors to Reason's "special issue" included:

• • Percy Greaves, a founding board member of Willis Carto's racist, anti-Semitic propaganda outfit, the Liberty Lobby which marketed and distributed many of the Holocaust denier tracts promoted in the February 1976 issue of Reason magazine, including "The Myth of the Six Million" and ended his life on the editorial board of Carto's biggest Holocaust denier outfit, the Institute for Historical Review, joining David Duke, David Irving, and James J. Martin. For Reason magazine's "special issue," Percy Greaves wrote "FDR's Watergate: Pearl Harbor," advancing a conspiracy theory that FDR tricked Japan into bombing Pearl Harbor in order to secure his New Deal reforms at home.
  
• • "L.A." Lew Rollins, who was featured on Reason magazine's masthead from the 1970s through the early 1980s. Like so many other Reason contributors, Lew Rollins also joined the David Duke/David Irving Holocaust denier outfit, publishing articles like "The Holocaust as Sacred Cow." At Reason, Rollins wrote a far-right libertarian Ambrose Bierce ripoff called "Lucifer's Lexicon," with entries like, "looter, n. A civil rights worker" or "majority rule, n. The moral equivalent of gang rape." After coming out of the anti-Semitic closet, Rollins' "Lucifer's Lexicon" became even crazier:
  

HOLOCAUST, THE, n. A smoke screen obscuring the atrocities of the Allies and the Israelis. The insurance fraud of the century. A cheap cinematic trick; a flimflam; the Hollywoodcaust; a soap opera.
ZIONIST PROPAGANDA, n. Hebrew-National Baloney.

A brief history of Reason magazine
"Reason" first appeared in 1968 as a typed, poorly-edited student newsletter, the rantings of a severely mentally ill Vietnam War veteran and Ayn Rand groupie named Lanny Friedlander. He began "Reason" while living at home with his mother and attending classes at Boston University. A handful of MIT College Republicans, including future Reason frontman Robert Poole, took an interest in Friedlander's "Reason," but they were turned off by his mother, "a shrill fishwife who yelled and screamed," according to Robert Poole; and by Friedlander himself, who spent most of his life in psychiatric institutions and veterans hospitals.
In 1970, Poole moved to Santa Barbara to work for a DARPA spinoff called General Research Corp. Poole decided to buy the rights to Reason from Lanny Friedlander, cobbling together a small group of MIT grads (Charles and David Koch's alma mater) and a local Santa Barbara libertarian grad student named Tibor Machan, who used grant money he received from Charles Koch to finance the "takeover" of Reason from Lanny Friedlander. (Shortly before Friedlander died of a heart attack in 2011, he sent a hand-written note to Reason's science editor, advising him to research immortality more: "I also wonder if magicians can reverse the effects of old age," Friedlander wrote him.)
Tibor Machan, Senior Editor of Reason at the time of the Holocaust-denier issue, is the son of a Hungarian Nazi war criminal. Both Tibor Machan and his father escaped from Hungary after the collapse of the fascist regime. According to Machan's 2004 memoir, his father was a "fanatical Nazi" during World War II, serving as the Nazis' chief Budapest radio propagandist during the roundup of that city's Jews. After the communist takeover, Machan's father was arrested, and slipped out of Hungary, soon joined by Tibor, who together made their way into the US.
Tibor Machan served as Senior Editor for Reason when it published its Holocaust deniers; and yet Machan claims to have despised his father's politics:

"He was a dedicated supporter of Adolph Hitler into the last days of World War II and would remain a fervently anti-Semitic admirer of the Fuhrer's ideas until he died in Philadelphia in 1970…When I recall that my father was a relentless anti-Semite who bragged that he would not hesitate to shoot Jews if it were only legally permitted, again I find little cause to stress his few positive qualities."

Charles Koch, who funded much of Tibor Machan's career, is the son of a Nazi admirer. According to Daniel Schulman's book, "Sons of Wichita," Fred Koch praised the Axis powers in late 1938, even as the Nazis were brutalizing Jews and others, and well after Imperial Japan killed and raped hundreds of thousands in their military invasions into mainland China. With that in mind, Fred Koch wrote in 1938,

"I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard."

Fred Koch also negatively compared New Deal America to Hitler's Germany:

"When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome."

Reader Reactions
Devoting an issue to Nazi supporters and Holocaust deniers shocked at least some of REASON's readers, and found support from others.
Reader "Sylven Shaffer" of Tempe, Arizona, complained,

"I'm absolutely shocked regarding Dr. Martin's remarks concerning the Nazi extermination of European Jewry."

And Adam Reed of Rockefeller University, a contributor to REASON, wrote a letter to the editor complaining about Gary North's promotion of Holocaust deniers, calling it "shocking," "disturbing" and "inexcusably poor scholarship."
Gary North responded to Prof. Reed by doubling down on Holocaust denying:

"The second point, that about 6 million Jews really did die in the concentration camps, is one that will be open until the records of the period become fully available. I am not convinced yet, one way or the other.
"I shall continue to recommend that those interested in revisionist questions read The Myth of the Six Million' and Did Six Million Really Die?' as reasonable (though not necessarily irrefutable) pieces of historical revisionism."

Othersdiehard libertarianswere more gung-ho. Sam Konkin, one of the earliest stars in the libertarian movement, gushed:

CONGRATULATIONS
For the first time in your publishing history you produced a product which kept me all night reading cover-to-cover. I refer to your Revisionist issue of February 1976.
I hope you maintain the gains you made with this issue and even surpass them. You may yet deserve your logo.
Samuel Edward Konkin Ill Editor, New Libertarian Weekly

Konkin, author of "The New Libertarian Manifesto," went on to join the editorial board of neo-Nazi Willis Carto's Holocaust denier outfit, Institute for Historical Review, where so many other Reason and other early libertarian alumni wound up.
The biggest public endorsement for Reason's Holocaust-denier issue came from the founder of the Libertarian Party, David Nolan. In the 1960s, Nolan was an MIT college Republican activist with Robert Poole, who went on to become Reason's front man from 1970 onward.
Nolan's letter to the editor in Reason's June 1976 issue praised the magazine's Holocaust-denier issue as "outstanding," pompously adding,

"You, and all who have worked with you, are to be congratulated on your skills and dedication, for your achievement has been a most significant one. Keep it up!"

"We Should Be Very Concerned"

"Charles and David Koch have been for the last 40, 40-plus years the most significant backers of libertarian-based organizations and philanthropies in the country. It's not even close. It is Charles and David Koch 100, everybody else 2."
Matt Welch, REASON magazine editor-in-chief

Just as my previous piece was about something much bigger than simply calling out a magazine's pro-apartheid archives, so the above is about more than its history of publishing holocaust deniers. Reason isn't just any magazine since 1970, Reason has been backed by the richest and most politically engaged oligarchs alive, Charles and David Koch. The Kochs are almost singlehandedly responsible for giving us libertarianism, a radical-right version of neoliberalism that has steered the Republican Party agenda for decades now, and has made major inroads into the disaffected left as well. Reason is the respectable, "educated" blue state face of the Kochs' libertarian network.
Or as Reason's longtime front-man and Koch partner Robert Poole explained in a private letter back in 1978, Reason sought "to be something of a recruiting ground, reaching out to the broad general public of intelligent, educated people and offering them an exciting alternative to Harper's, New Republic, National Review."
That same year, 1978, Charles Koch told Reason magazine that he believed radical politics were the most effect politics; and he saw libertarianism as a radical brand of pro-capitalist politics:

"Our greatest strength is that our philosophy is a consistent world view and will appeal to the brightest, most enthusiastic, most capable people, particularly young people. But to realize that strength, we have to state it in a radical, pure form."

Today, Charles and David Koch are worth an estimated $100 billion, making them the richest brothers on earth. They are also the most politically active oligarchs this country has seen in many decades. The money invested into electing politicians is only a small part of their long-term strategy of altering America's political ecosystem, and in this respect, no one comes close.
When asked by email about how concerned we should be that the richest and most politically engaged billionaires in the world were so personally involved in backing and promoting Holocaust deniers, Professor Lipstadt answered with commendable understatement: "We should be quite concerned."
Pando contacted Reason, Koch Industries and Gary North for comment [2+ hours before publication] but none had responded as of publication time. We'll update this story with any subsequent response.
Reason February 1976

Scribd link to original Reason magazine

[Magda Hassan]

Homophobia, racism and the Kochs: San Francisco's tech-libertarian "Reboot" conference is a cesspool

By Mark Ames
On July 18, 2014

Starting today, San Francisco plays host to the Reboot 2014 conference. According to the event's blurb:

Reboot 2014 will bring together technical talent and policy advocates to turn ideas into deliverables for liberty.

The word "liberty" is the giveaway, of course. With "Reboot," libertarianism is making its Big Pitch to Silicon Valley. The event features the movement's superstar scion, Rand Paul, as keynote speaker; alongside Nick Gillespie, the leather-jacketed editor of Reason.com, the online edition of Reason magazine, the longest-running and most successful libertarian media outlet, backed by the infamous Koch Brothers. In fact, the entire event is sponsored by the Kochs.
Under the weird banner of "conservatarianism," other key speakers include prominent republicans like Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Republican Conference, and Andy Barkett, CTO of the Republican National Committee.
This is very definitely a Valley event, though, organized by Lincoln Labs: Aaron Ginn and Chris Abrams of StumbleUpon and Garrett Johnson of SendHub.
[Update: After publication of this story, a spokesperson for StumbleUpon emailed to say that Ginn and Abrams have both left the company. On the Reboot site, Ginn is still described as "currently the head of growth at StumbleUpon" while Abrams is described as "a software engineer for StumbleUpon." The StumbleUpon spokesperson added that "We'll be reaching out to Lincoln Labs as well to so it can make the updates, too."]
Silicon Valley and libertarianism would seem to be a natural fit, given Ayn Rand's reputed popularity in the tech worldat least, according to the caricature. At the billionaire level, a number of Big Tech superstars identify themselves as "libertarian": Pierre Omidyar, Peter Thiel, Travis Kalanick to name a few. And Reason magazine, based in southern California since 1970, would seem to be the perfect matchmaker between the Bible Belt libertarianism of Rand Paul and Charles Koch, and Silicon Valley's "California libertarianism." After all, it was Reason that inspired Wired magazine's libertarian founder, Louis Rossetto, when he was a Columbia U student in the early 1970s.
Lately, Rand Paul, the superstar of the libertarian world, has been hard-selling himself to Silicon Valley billionaires. In May, Sen. Paul did a billionaires' crawl in the Bay Area, gloating about "unlimited potential for us in Silicon Valley." And last weekend, Rand Paul wormed his way into the annual Sun Valley oligarchs' retreat for some quality one-on-one face time with Facebook billionaires Mark Zuckerberg, Sean Parker, and Peter Thiel (who bankrolled Rand's daddy Ron Paul's 2012 run for president).
[Disclosure: Peter Thiel is an investor in Pando, via Founders Fund]
So now we have the "Reboot Lab" conference taking place in the heart of San Francisco's SOMA tech district. But if the purpose of the Reboot Lab conference is to merge Koch-brand libertarianism with Silicon Valley "libertarianism," then the first thing you have to ask is: Why the Hell did they invite a mean homophobic hick like Cathy McMorris Rodgers to the show?
Rand Paul at least does a decent job showboating outrage against Big Brother snooping and drone attacks; at least there's something there to grab onto before you get into the rest of Rand's loonie-right politics. But the other keynote speaker, McMorris Rodgers?
In the, I suppose, quite likely event that Silicon Valley doesn't know who she is, here's a quick primer:
Rep. McMorris Rodgers was homeschooled by her father, and got her higher education degree at an unaccredited Christian fundamentalist institution, Pensacola Christian College (PCC), which bans homosexuality, open Internet (PCC until recently banned all Internet access), and mixed-gender stairwells (male and female students are required to use separate stairs and doors). Pensacola Christian College is the publisher of A Beka textbooks for K-12 pupils, which teach kids that Islam is a "false religion," Hindus are "incapable of writing history," Catholicism is "a monstrous distortion of Christianity," African religions preach "false religious beliefs," liberals and Democrats are crypto-Marxists, and the United Nations is a "collectivist juggernaut that would crush individual freedom and force the will of an elite few on all of humanity."
In the mid-late 90s, McMorris Rodgers took office in the Washington state legislature and co-authored a bill banning same-sex marriages, then later earned notoriety for blocking a bill that had already passed unanimously in Washington state's upper house to replace the pejorative "Orientals" with "Asians" in official state documents. As reported in the press at the time, legislators were dumbfounded as to why McMorris Rodgers would do something as gratuitously mean-spirited as blocking a bill undoing racism against Asians; a few, including the bill's Korean-American author, literally broke down in tears. McMorris Rodgers' excuse, as reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

"I'm very reluctant to continue to focus on setting up different definitions in statute related to the various minority groups. I'd really like to see us get beyond that."

Since coming to Congress, she co-sponsored a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, voted against bills that would protect the LGBT community from hate crimes and discrimination in the workplace, against the equal pay bill for women, against federal funding for Planned Parenthood, and she opposes legal abortions in the case of rape or incest (unless the mother's life is in danger). The Pensacola Christian College grad did, however, co-author a bill "recognizing Christianity's importance to Western civilization."
And this weekend she'll be keynoting at Reboot, sharing the stage with LeanIn.org's Andrea Saul, whom Sheryl Sandberg hired last year to "help reach women and men so that we can all work together towards a more equal world."
Indeed.
At first glance it makes no sense to front a rabidly anti-gay candidate like McMorris Rodgers to sell the Kochs' and the Paul family's scrubland libertarianism to a Bay Area audience full of hip disruptors and "anarchist" practitioners of bohemia grooming fads.
But that's because what Silicon Valley folks think of when they hear the word "libertarianism" actually has very little connection to what the libertarian movement actually stands for, and has stood for since the 1970s.
To understand what libertarianism really means to some of the people on stage at the Reboot conference, you need to look back at the archives of Reason magazine the de facto house magazine of American libertarianism. A magazine whose online editor, don't forget, will also be on the Reboot stage.
For the past few months, I've been sifting back through Reason's archives to try to understand the dark origins of all this flashy libertarian patter that's being repackaged and sold to today's Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as "bold" and "new" thinking.
Reason magazine: Predicting Silicon Valley disruption since 1972

The involvement in Reboot of Reason.com's editor is both telling and entirely appropriate. For all of Silicon Valley's self-celebration and pretensions to progressive values, you can find most of the Big Ideas spouted by Silicon Valley's 21st century geniuses in Reason's musty, nearly half-century old archives, many of which are only available in print or microfiche via public libraries.
Peter Thiel's floating libertarian islands? The December 1972 "special issue" of Reason magazine proposed abandoning statist America for "new libertarian countries" built on floating ocean platforms. Travis Kalanick's disrupted, deregulated taxi cab free-for-all? Half a decade before Kalanick was born, Reason's February 1972 issue published "Taxis and Jitneys: The Case for Deregulation," a proposal to disrupt taxi cab "monopolies" and licensing laws, published by a DARPA spinoff called General Research Corp (where former Reason editor Robert Poole also worked). Reed Hastings' school reforms (i.e. privatization)? Reason published "The Case for School Vouchers" in April 1971. Elon Musk's private space company? Reason devoted its April 1979 "special issue" to privatizing space. In fact, Reason's Robert Poole and early contributor Mark Frazier are credited with organizing the first major space privatization conference in the mid-1970s.
Reason magazine and apartheid South Africa
And then there's the uglier, darker side of the Kochs' libertarianism on display in Reason's archives: the fringe-right racism and fascism that the movement has tried to downplay in recent years to appeal to progressives and non-loonie techies. Throughout its first two decades, in the 1970s and 1980s, Reason supported apartheid South Africa, and attacked anti-apartheid protesters and sanctions right up to Nelson Mandela's release, when they finally dropped it.

In May 1976, just before the Soweto Uprising when South African police slaughtered hundreds of black youths Reason's South African correspondent, Marc Swanepoel repeated a common theme in Reason's pages: libertarianism and the white race are one and the same:

"Let the people who advocate immediate majority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia take note. It would be very nice to have a minimal libertarian government and that is what South African libertarians would like to achieve. But as long as the choice is between being governed by a relatively informed white minority and a Socialist black majority, apartheid' in South Africa will stay."

Throughout the 1970s, Reason's pages dripped with racist justifications for apartheid, on the racial-economic theory that whites stood for free market libertarianism and individual liberty, while blacks were genetically predisposed towards socialism and looting. Therefore, libertarians could not support majority rule, which was merely a trick to destroy libertarianism.
In 1973, Reason defended the apartheid regime's new policies resettling millions of black South Africans into "Bantustan" statelets:

"The major black ethnic groups lumped together under the general term Bantu' are as distinct from one another as Germany and France. They are largely illiterate, largely uncaring, mutually mistrustful, mutually antagonistic. They are not the great single black mass yearning to be free that sentimentalists and self-servers in other lands try to portray them."

As for libertarians' sacred property rights, Reason's correspondent wrote in 1977 that the only way to secure whites' property rights was to deny property rights to blacks:

"I regret the fact that honest, law-abiding blacks cannot own property in or near white cities, but I realize that without this restriction separate development will fail and with it the capitalist system in South Africa."

For Reason's libertarians and pro-apartheid whites, this was the great tragedy that loomed: the loss of their free-market paradise, their "liberty," to black majority rule. Majority rule and socialism were one and the same; for Reason, apartheid was the only thing safeguarding "liberty." The logic was insane; but it was accepted as a matter of faith in the pages of Reason.
While Reason's readers fretted over the precarious state of their libertarian paradise, Black South Africans faced very different tragedies, and one of the worst took place in 1977, when the leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, Stephen Biko, was beaten to death in police custody.
Biko's death didn't warrant a mention; instead, that same year, Reason magazine reminded its libertarian readers that black majority rule was liberty's mortal threat:

"As all libertarians should know, unlimited democracies tend towards totalitarian systems, with the rulers competing with each other to control the political machinery. Some years ago, the whites realized that a democracy may deteriorate into a dictatorship in the wrong' handsespecially when those hands have the wrong color to boot."

By 1980, South Africa's black population was on the verge of exploding, as the apartheid regime beefed up its police state apparatus and its repression of the majority black population. The State of Emergency regime was just a few years away, when Reason cheered:

"It is possible that in the past decade no country has moved further toward a libertarian society than South Africa has. YesSouth Africa."

Is Silicon Valley really libertarian?
In Silicon Valley at that time, the personal computer industry and tech culture were just beginning to take shape.
The emerging politics in Silicon Valley's tech world anti-bureaucratic, anti-politics, idealizing the decentralized and the voluntary was already like a half-baked, happier version of Reason's libertarianism. In the late 1970s, Charles Koch looked like he was making California his libertarian playground. He moved his premiere libertarian think-tank, the CATO Institute (originally named "The Charles Koch Foundation") from Wichita to Montgomery Street in downtown San Francisco, alongside a handful of other Koch-funded libertarian outfits. Down the peninsula in Menlo Park was the Institute for Humane Studies, Charles Koch's flagship libertarian think-tank since he took control of it in the 1960s. Reason magazine and the Reason Foundation, with David Koch as director, were headquartered in Santa Barbara; and in 1979 the Libertarian Party, with funds from the Koch brothers, held its convention in Los Angeles, where the Koch-backed political party chose David Koch as its vice presidential nominee for the 1980 race, allowing the Kochs to skirt campaign donation limits.
The two libertarianisms the hick fascism version owned by the Koch brothers, essentially rebranding Joe McCarthy with a pot leaf and a ponytail; and Silicon Valley's emerging brand of optimistic, half-understood libertarianism, part hippie cybernetics, part hot-tub-Hayek should have met and merged right there in the Bay Area.
And yet they really were different, fundamentally different. The libertarianism of the Kochs is a direct descendant of the Big Business reaction against FDR's New Deal, when the DuPont oligarchy created the American Liberty League to undo new laws establishing Social Security and labor union rights. Their heroes are the America Firsters led by Charles Lindbergh. And they haven't stopped fighting that fight to dismantle the New Deal and everything that followed, even though most Americans have only a dim understanding of what that political war was about, and how its redistribution of political power still shapes our politics today. For the Kochs and their die-hard brand of libertarianism, that war with FDR and the New Deal is fresh and raw, and still far from resolved.
Rand and Ron Paul's Neo-Confederate ghost writers
All of this brings us neatly back to Reboot's keynote speaker: Rand Paul.
Anyone paying attention to the Paul family knows about Ron Paul's unhinged racist newsletters, Ron and Rand Paul's opposition to the Civil Rights Act, and Ron-Rand Pauls' intimate associations with neo-Confederates, white supremacists, and conspiracy loons.
Last year, Rand Paul's speechwriter, campaign aide, and ghost writer, Jack Hunter (aka "Southern Avenger"), resigned under pressure but only after Sen. Paul refused to fire his aide for his decade-plus record of pro-Confederacy activism, and rants like "John Wilkes Booth Was Right".
By a strange coincidence, Rand's father, Ron Paul, had the same racism "problem" with his ghost writer or writers of the Ron Paul newsletters (a more complete account here). The "Ron Paul Newsletters" described Washington DC's black males as "95% semi-criminal or entirely criminal," quipped that the 1992 LA riots only ended when "when it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks," and suggested black activist Al Sharpton should rename New York "Welfaria," "Rapetown," or "Zooville." Dr. Paul's newsletters also attacked "gays in San Francisco" for dying of AIDS in the early 1990s, claiming "these men don't really see a reason to live past their fifties," and that gays enjoyed dying of AIDS because "they enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick."
But the Ron Paul newsletters were most obsessed with Martin Luther King Jr, described as a "lying socialist satyr" and a "comsymp if not an actual party member" who "seduced underage girls and boys," and who was a "threat" to America both alive and decades after assassination, still "threatening to strangle our culture." (Ron Paul voted against establishing the Martin Luther King Jr holiday and then lied about it; and more recently, Congressman Paul voted against a symbolic bill commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act.)
Old News?
Some might argue that it's unfair of Pando to dig up Reason magazine's long romance with apartheid. After all, apartheid is "old news." Indeed, Ron Paul tried to use that same defense when the stories broke big in 2008 about his racist newsletter, prompting Reason magazine editor-in-chief Matt Welch to scoff,

"Old News'? Rehashed for Over a Decade'?"

Welch answered that by reposting his Lexis Nexis search on the long history of Ron Paul's flips and flops over his newsletters, changing his story over the years.
Nick Gillespie, the Reason.com editor who's starring at this weekend's Reboot, agreed with Welch that the Ron Paul newsletters, dating back to 1978, were "stunning":

"there is no shortage of truly odious material that is simply jaw-dropping."

Reason did a good job publicly distancing themselves from Ron Paul by refusing to take this as mere "old news" and by breaking a "scoop" pinning the newsletters on Ron Paul's former Congressional aide, Lew Rockwell, with whom Dr. Paul founded the Ludwig Von Mises Institute.
But Reason has two problems here: First, going back to the 1970s, Reason has been hard-selling the alleged "Ron Paul phenomenon" to its readers. Perhaps no other glossy in the 1970s and early 1980s glorified the crusty Old Righter Ron Paul as the New Libertarian Hero as did the Kochs' Reason magazine (see for example here, here, here, and here).
And secondly, by Reason's own standards with Ron Paul, Reason needs to account for its grotesque propaganda supporting apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 80s. Not least because the same key figures in charge of Reason during its pro-apartheid years are still around. Robert Poole, who headed Reason from 1970 through 2001, and co-founded the Reason Foundation with David Koch (the nonprofit foundation publishes the magazine,) remains on the Reason Foundation's board of trustees, as does David Koch. Poole continued denouncing anti-apartheid sanctions as late as 1989 in the pages Reason.
And looming over it all, the Koch brothers, who backed Reason magazine since Robert Poole got involved in 1970, and whose support in dollars and infrastructure continues through today. Koch money is a major funder of San Francisco's Lincoln Labs, sponsor of the Reboot Labs conference, and of the Liberty Hackathon that took place last autumn. And the Kochs also support Rand Paul, and the Kentucky senator helps the Kochs raise money for their network of libertarian front groups.
A Silicon Valley recruiting agency
Back firmly to present day. Lincoln Labs, the organizers of the Reboot conference, is run by a young Republican Party activist from Texas named Aaron Ginn, and Ginn has acknowledged that he's essentially running a talent scouting agency for the talent-starved GOP, which recently set up offices in Silicon Valley.
Running the GOP operations in Silicon Valley is a former senior Facebook engineering manager named Andrew Barkett, who now works as CTO of the Republican National Committee and partners in a privately held GOP data-mining firm based in San Mateo called Data Trust. Barkett explained how Lincoln Labs helps recruit new GOP foot soldiers:

"We don't need thousands of people; we need dozens," Mr. Barkett said. "We could do a lot of damage with 30 people. A lot. But they've got to be real engineers." Of Mr. Ginn, he said: "Aaron gets that."

To recruit, Lincoln has set up events like Hackathons and "open government" get-togethers at tech venues like Microsoft and StumbledUpon, and bring in celebrities like Rand Paul, who appeals to progressives ignorant about Paul's lesser-known reactionary beliefs and far-right past.
To avoid scaring away the local talent, Lincoln Labs' Ginn confided to the New York Times that he masks his politics:

"I avoid saying Republican' so people don't think I'm part of crazy right-wing stuff."

It's funny that he says that, because in the 1970s, Reason magazine published articles arguing that the best way to recruit liberals like those Lincoln Lab faces in the Bay Area is to lie to them "you can use tricks and you better, if you really want libertarianism to have a fighting chance," Reason advised. One article laid out some "simple facts" about tricking others into accepting libertarianism, and it means hiding things like the movement's adoration of apartheid and instead over-emphasizing their opposition to the NSA and the war on drugs. Reason advised:

" To sell libertarianism, you must sell it under a formula which corresponds to the basic convictions of the guy to whom you sell it."

And that's exactly what Reboot appears to be: Libertarian sold under a formula tailored to Silicon Valley convictions, while doing everything it can to hide what really lurks beneath.
To be continued…
Pando contacted Koch Industries, Reason Magazine and Lincoln Labs for comment on this article [2+ hours prior to publication.] Only Lincoln Labs responded, saying they would "be back to [us] shortly" and asking "are you planning to attend the conference or are you writing the article in a vacuum?" Pando has applied for media accreditation for the event but have not yet received a response.

[Illustration by Brad Jonas for Pando]
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http://pando.com/2014/07/18/homophobia-r...-cesspool/