Counter-Currents
The White Nationalist Case for Federal Marijuana Legalization
Roman Frege1,234 words
Gary Johnson, despite numerous, cringe-worthy campaign missteps, a non-existent foreign policy, and an economic policy supported by approximately zero practicing economists, was the most successful Libertarian Party (LP hereafter) candidate of all time in both total vote and percentage terms. Almost half of the votes that the Libertarian Party has ever received in all presidential races put together went to the Johnson/Weed ticket in 2016.
On a cash efficiency basis, Johnson outperformed Trump, paying approximately $4 per vote versus Donald Trump’s $5 per vote. Furthermore, most of the Johnson/Weed ticket voters were drawn from the same demographics that Donald Trump will need to win in 2020: young, white, and non-ideological. If the LP continues to grow at its 2000-2016 rate in these demographics, Republican Party retention of the White House will prove difficult if not impossible in 2020. It is time that the “Libertarian moment” came to an end.
Fortunately, this is easy to do. Given the obvious unattractiveness of the LP bench, all that must be done to defang the LP in time for 2020 is to take a page from the Clintons and steal the LP’s key issue.[1] The libertarian to alt-Right pipeline must be repaired; Trump should legalize marijuana at the federal level. In addition to being good politics,[2] marijuana legalization would also be good for Whites.[3]
First, as I am likely to be attacked personally for my position, let me state outright that I do not endorse the use of marijuana, which is (in the vast majority of cases) for losers and degenerates. Nonetheless, when proposing policy, we ought take the society as an organic whole, its angels and its devils, into consideration.
One common argument by White Nationalists against the legalization against of marijuana is that police selectively enforce the law to keep criminals off the streets. If marijuana were legalized, the argument runs, then police would lose one of their key tools in crime reduction. Let’s dispose of the leftard myth that marijuana arrests play a disproportionate role in the rise of (necessary) mass incarceration: they do not. Most of the increase in percentage of Americans in the criminal justice system is explained by the increasing fraction of non-Asian minorities (NAMs hereafter) in America and harsher sentencing for all crimes.
Still, a racialist may wonder, aren’t federal marijuana laws useful for negrocity containment? Not as much you might think. Recently available data from Obama’s Department of Justice, which has every incentive to play up the role of differential sentencing by race in drug crimes as a contributor to differential rates of imprisonment by race, suggests this is false: if all state prisoners who were only in jail for drug charges were released, blacks would go from 37.5% of the total state prison population to 37% of the total state prison population. Given that blacks usually use harder drugs than Whites, federal marijuana legalization is unlikely to have any impact on the racial composition of our prisons. Finally, we have evidence from legalization at the state level on marijuana legalization’s differential impact by race. The results? White arrest rates for marijuana use went down as expected, but black and Hispanic total arrest rates for marijuana actually went up according to the Colorado Department of Public Safety (CDPS) because marijuana became easier to obtain and these populations are more likely to use marijuana in illegal ways. Even if we reject the analysis by the DoJ and CDPS, under the proposed policy local governments could still keep marijuana illegal[4] and thus lock up problem negroes carrying marijuana as necessary.
Beyond criminal justice, the economic impact of federal marijuana legalization would be destroy middleman minority cartels and transfer resources to young, white businessmen. Given the statistics presented above, this should not be surprising; the vast majority of individuals who have trafficked weed at such a scale so as to obtain a life sentence are white. In states which have legalized marijuana for medical or personal use, nearly every link in the supply chain is controlled by whites. This is in part because whites are less likely to have interacted with the criminal justice system previously, but in time it should become obvious to all but the most educated that NAMs can’t get into business in this domain as well.
Last, but not least, there are three critical metapolitical side benefits for WNs that would result from marijuana legalization.
- Marijuana legalization would accentuate regional cultural differences. Localism, a right-wing alternative to American conservatism that is often de facto White Nationalist, would become more attractive.
- Marijuana legalization would reconcile many non-LP whites with the state. This would occur through two mechanisms:
- De facto left libertarian (but in all likelihood Democratic voting) organizations like High Times and NORML would see their funding dry up.
- Federal state capacity currently wasted on marijuana enforcement in states where it is legal could be redirected towards reducing the prevalence of drugs which harm whites (e.g., methamphetamines and opiates).
- Legalizing marijuana at the federal level would facilitate yet another white liberal narrative collapse on the race issue. Liberal narratives on drug policy mainly result from constantly parroted misleading data points. Based on my conversations, these narratives are so pervasive that they have been unwittingly internalized by many on the Right. When marijuana is “legalized” but prisons are still disproportionately occupied by violent NAMs, our intelligentsia will need to rely on increasingly convoluted stories to explain what will be clear to people on both sides of the political spectrum with eyes. On this issue (for once!), neo-Communists accept reality as it is: blacks simply commit more crime. They believe everyone should be willing to accept more violent crime by assigning shorter sentences to NAMs so as to lessen racial disparities. Normies will not.
Prior to the establishment of an ethnostate, all legislation ought be judged by its impact on the metapolitical climate in addition to its impact on material well-being of the polity. Indeed, even deleterious laws should be enthusiastically supported by the New Right if they advance our ideological hegemony. Federal marijuana legalization’s short-term impacts are good for whites, its long-term impact are ambiguous, but it is an obvious winner in the space of metapolitical moves. The Trump administration should strongly consider federal marijuana legalization prior to the midterm elections.
Notes
1. It is probably not a coincidence that the Democrats have lost every election since Obamacare went into effect. Obamacare’s implementation completed the vision of the welfare state originally laid out by FDR. For the neoliberals who triumphed over the socialists in the Democratic Party primary, all that was left to do was to tinker with and administer the existing system (which despite the lack of vision involved is by no means an easy task!). This was hardly a compelling vision for voters. Just like Batman in The Dark Knight Rises, victory defeated the neoliberals.
2. More states have legalized marijuana than voted for Clinton in the most recent election. The issue would also cater to the core of The Donald’s voters, and resolve a policy incoherence between Trump’s “state’s rights” approach to social issues and the federal illegality of marijuana. It might even put otherwise unreachable states in play for 2020.
3. We will spare you the argument that federal marijuana taxes would also be a boon.
4. If one is worried about the mass release of hundreds of thousands of criminals all at once, one can just terminate Obama’s clemency policy and prevent the legalization law from being retroactively applied.
25 comments
i wish i had written that. i agree 100%. your argument remains sound even when expanded to include 2 crucial (imho) underlying foundations of the alt right: biology & freedom.
social policy should be informed by biology. prohibition does not work. humans desire a “buzz.” prohibition advocates look sanctimonious to young voters. further, when one is forbidden to grow a plant in one’s backyard there is an appalling lack of freedom.
moreover, to widen our “pipelines” (no pun intended) beyond libertarianism into the very left itself: pot (& abortion) are often THE major voting issues for young people. the young are turned off by opponents of those issues – who seem “holier than thou” to them. being driven by reality means basing policy on biology & freedom (aka choice).
oh yeah, also “muh taxes!” (a simple & more pragmatic argument:)
> social policy should be informed by biology.
agree.
> prohibition does not work. humans desire a “buzz.”
disagree. Why shouldn’t this argument lead to the legalization of murder?
> prohibition advocates look sanctimonious to young voters.
agree.
> further, when one is forbidden to grow a plant in one’s backyard there is an appalling lack of freedom.
Freedom is not my highest value, but it is on my list. Mixed.
Freedom is an underlying foundation to the alt right? No dude, no it isn’t.
There are plants out there that are extremely dangerous and if used as a drug can cause severe delirium and sometimes even death. There is no rational argument for why we should allow a drug to be produced merely because it’s a plant. If you want to argue for marijuana legalization, fine. But saying “it’s a plant” is not an argument.
Sole fact that left pushes marijuana so hard should be proof that something is totally wrong with this ” harmless” plant.
Yup. Marijuana, after a period of regular or heavy consumption, causes brain damage, making the user stupid and slow, yet also bad tempered. The one-two punch. And it’s not reversible.
However, so long as alcohol is legal, growing marijuana should be legal, too. Regardless of your drug, it’ll lead to destruction of those who are weak in the first place.
This is an issue about which I have very strong feelings yet am still ambivalent, if that is even possible. Please read to the end to see what I mean.
First off, I would absolutely *hate* it if marijuana were legalized across the country. I see what pot does to people. It deadens their ambition and productivity. They say it lowers IQ points over time. There’s also data linking pot to an increased number of traffic accidents. I’m just afraid that legalizing pot will turn even more of our youth into potheads. How can we compete on the world stage, let alone form an ethnostate if a large chunk of our fighting age men are getting stoned most of the time?
On the other hand, I am familiar with the libertarian arguments for its legalization, and you present some of them in your article. They make sense and are hard to refute…as long as pot does not have an elastic demand. In other words, all is well if we legalize it as long as no more than X amount of people will partake in it. If vast numbers of people were to abuse pot after its legalization, then all the economic benefits will vanish as we become a nation of lotus eaters.
Still, with the way things are, it might be worth a shot to legalize marijuana. Maybe I am wrong? Maybe we’ll get lots of good and little bad from its legalization. There is only one way to find out. And if I am right after all, then we could make it illegal again.
Your argument about legalizing pot peeling off votes from the LP to the GOP is interesting. From a tactical standpoint, it could help the GOP. However, I suspect that it wouldn’t have much of an impact for two reasons: 1. The Dems could embrace pot as well, thereby nullifying the issue. And 2. I suspect that most of the LP voters coming from the GOP in 2016 were principled, free market moderates who were repulsed by Trump and couldn’t vote for Hillary. Once people get used to Trump, I’m pretty sure the LP vote will shrink considerably in 2020 to its pre-2016 levels. That will be good for the GOP regardless if we legalize marijuana.
Legalization does not cause disorder per se. It depends on preconditions. Netherlands has some degree of legalized marijuana and it has to be one of the most orderly states in Europe.
However, I don’t see benefits of legalization in Detroit. In the end high trust societies profit from any privilege that’s based on high trust i.e. people not using this privilege for abuse. Multi-ethnic societies have police-state as their modus vivendi.
Even in Detroit, I would argue, marijuana legalization would free up state capacity for going after harder drugs. In general, having a state that tries to do everything poorly a la the Soviet Union or Venezuela is a great way for the White Nation to fall apart.
The reality is that economic policies matter, and all else equal, if we have better policies, we will have a better state than if we have worse policies. I strongly suspect if the Democrats had run Bernie Sanders or Warren they would have won this election because their policies would have been better for white working class voters (relative to Hillary) and neutralized much of Trump’s “economic nationalist” appeal. We need to keep this possibility in mind in the back of our head and push for the Democrats to become the globalist, cosmopolitan party of “fiscal responsibility” so that they lose elections until an ethnostate is formed. This requires good governance (no W. Bush people or W. Bush style thinking, no bad policies that do not advance our metapolitical standing), self-discipline, and politicking.
Failure of drug wars has little to do with capacities. More with methods, and even more with extremely flawed reasoning, and a lack of bigger picture that is so typical of plutocracies.
Governments who are fine with ceding enormous financial and organizational power to international drug cartels (this international part being the most problematic of all) for the sake of people having “freedumbs” are governments whose will to truly govern is dubious. One only has to be reminded that there are dozens of states today that are de facto ruled by drug cartels to realize the peril.
That being said, cannabis, with it’s properties, poses minimal danger.
My argument for legalization is extremely limited in scope in the sense that it would still be possible for marijuana to be de facto banned in the United States. Consider the (unlikely I admit) case in which marijuana might still be legal at the federal level and banned in every individual state and municipality.
As for “lotus eaters”, if we cannot control ourselves, we have little right to control a nation.
If the Democratic Party tried to steal the legalization issue, the LP party would disappear (good, I would argue) and I strongly suspect that the vast majority of LP voters would break for the Republicans. In the optimal case in which the Democratic Party attempts to go hard line on the marijuana issue (why would they do this? I have no idea), they would simply get wiped the fuck out all over the map, and face mass defections even among nonwhite Millennial voters that will comprise their base. I doubt we’d ever win a majority of them, but even if we get to a little under 28% of black voters nationally, some of the MTV/ZOG/Democratic GOTV NAM-targeted efforts actually start to backfire in the general.
In a game theoretic sense, I see federal marijuana legalization as close to a “strictly dominant move” for the Republicans.
One argument I didn’t make is that a lot of Trump’s power comes from his ability to dominate that news cycle, and overwhelm bad news; this would be an awesome way for him to dominate it during a slow or bad period.
Too high to riot works for me.
Some more links on the detrimental effect of Cannabis:
“London – A definitive 20-year study into the effects of long-term cannabis use has demolished the argument that the drug is safe.
Cannabis is highly addictive, causes mental health problems and opens the door to hard drugs, the study found.
The paper by Professor Wayne Hall, a drugs advisor to the World Health Organisation, builds a compelling case against those who deny the devastation cannabis wreaks on the brain.”
http://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/cannabis-the-terrible-truth-1762804#.VDejbBawRz0
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2377581/Teenagers-smoke-cannabis-damage-brains-LIFE-likely-develop-schizophrenia.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2352695/Smoking-cannabis-really-DOES-make-people-lazy-affects-area-brain-responsible-motivation.html
The other question is – shouldn’t a white nationalist set an example for others by giving up any substance abuse, instead of promoting it with a sometimes very specious reasoning? I at least often suspect an addiction by persons who want to justify its legalization in order to continue with this habit, and not because of other benefits of the Cannabis plant.
Virtually all of the damage marijuana does to the brain for both long-term and short-term consumption is exceeded by alcohol, which can also substantially reduce IQ. I, personally, do not drink or use marijuana.
Frankly, if ever there is established a legitimate, formal organization, I would strongly consider bans on using either as a condition of membership. Nonetheless, I think that the damages you point out are irrelevant to the calculations I have made above.
In the long term, abuse of marijuana will lead to a certain degree of wasted potential, but there will always be millions in every generation who are sufficiently responsible to abstain or indulge with reasonable limits (as a freely admit to doing). In the short term, though, the Right needs to leverage every possible advantage in recruiting young voters… Winning in 2020 is vastly more important than the GPAs of a few thousand college students.
I can’t see a teetotaler like Trump pushing legalization, but yes – it would be the answer move.
(While we’re talking about winning/losing social issues, I really do wish Pence would stay out the public eye. Trump is a suicidal moderate, but Pence’s spotted history will preclude Millennials from joining us as long as he’s in the spotlight. The New Right is traditionalist in many ways, but its inspiration does not come from megachurch-attending Evangelical-style social conservatism.)
*the smart move
As long as Pence absorbs abuse with dignity, a la Hamilton, I think he’ll be worth keeping on the ticket. 81% of the Evangelicals was more than the margin of victory in some Southern states.
I understand some of the concerns regarding legalization, but I don’t think they are fully justified. I would rather the culture changes to act as an inhibitory factor, than prevent people from getting high. Over zealous, nannying legislation is the hallmark of Leftists who project their own degeneracy on the masses. People are far more likely to be abstemious if they are treated like adults and the culture discourages irresponsible behavior. And of course legalization cuts criminality.
Gary Johnson has a problem. Wait for it…the tongue,,,and watch the reporterette recoil:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_azcqlYC2s
I don’t think it’s a smart move politically. First, the only reason the dems aren’t pushing it is that they don’t see it as a vote winner. It’s outside the Overton window at present, or Soros would certainly have ensured that Shillary campaigned on it. Second has to do with our brand. Yes we want to pick up the libertarian seekers, but if we lose our integrity they won’t be attracted to us. I think what happens is that they get sick of the poz and realise that what they really wanted from libertarianism was freedom of association, and that what they really care about fundamentally is the well being of their race. That’s the narrative I hear from the TRS guys. So if we went soft on degeneracy, that would only confuse people. Thirdly, dope is for dopes.
“I don’t think it’s a smart move politically.”
Michael Tracy’s Twitter feed indicates that there are about a million voters who showed up to vote for marijuana legalization at the state level who did *not* vote for either Hillary or Trump. I suspect the vast majority of these individuals voted for Johnson.
“First, the only reason the dems aren’t pushing it is that they don’t see it as a vote winner. It’s outside the Overton window at present, or Soros would certainly have ensured that Shillary campaigned on it.”
Many Dems at the local level are campaigning on it. Soros spends millions on trying to legalize it. Millions of members of our Greatest Generation/boomer voting base who care about this issue are going to die over the next four years, and we have to be forward, not backward looking. A Libertarian Party that takes, say, 7 million votes is one that prevents Trump from winning North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, or Arizona in 2020.
“Second has to do with our brand. Yes we want to pick up the libertarian seekers, but if we lose our integrity they won’t be attracted to us. I think what happens is that they get sick of the poz and realise that what they really wanted from libertarianism was freedom of association, and that what they really care about fundamentally is the well being of their race.”
If you think concretely about these issues, as I have tried to in my writings above, you’ll see that this has little to do with whether or not marijuana is legal at the federal level.
“That’s the narrative I hear from the TRS guys. So if we went soft on degeneracy, that would only confuse people.”
I just don’t see federal marijuana legalization as soft on degeneracy relative to alcohol legalization.
Also, I think you really have an outsized image of our importance in mass political mobilization. The TRS guys represent a tiny minority even in the White working class that they speak for. Compare the number of White working class male voters in the LP (around 1 million) or Democratic Party (around 10 million) versus the upper bound of Fash the Nation listeners or TRS.biz visitors and you’ll see it. Scott Alexander is not wrong when he says that, as of now, there is an upper bound of perhaps 1,000,000 White Nationalists in the United States at this time, and probably much less. The more paths people find from the LP to WN the better. Expecting everyone to take the same path as the TRS.biz guys would be fine if we were building a cult, but we are attempting to build a movement. Issue stealing and neutralization should be a part of that.
“Thirdly, dope is for dopes.”
Mostly irrelevant. See other comments in this thread.
The legalization of marijuana would indeed be a good thing, not only to draw libertarians into voting Trump/Republican but also in itself.
Economically it would divert the cash flow from criminal gangs to the state via taxes. Plus, by avoiding to put people in prison for possession or use of said drug, we would avoid paying for the prisoners (who, if they’re only in jail for having a bag of weed on them, are not dangerous to society in any way).
Drug trafficking would still be illegal and should be even more strictly punished than now. It will mostly die out by itself, like cigarette and alcohol trafficking. The ones still doing this will be large, organized criminal networks and not random students growing pot in their wardrobe. Police will have more time to focus on more important crimes, and criminal courts as well (less things to judge = quicker, more efficient justice).
On the side-effects of the drug : weed doesn’t cause brain damage and doesn’t turn people into vegetables, UNLESS YOU ABUSE IT. The perpetually stoned out hippies you see are not regular users, but the equivalent of alcoholics and crackheads, only the drug is less powerful. They begin their day with a joint and end it with a joint, smoking pot throughout the whole day. They smoke weed like people smoke cigs. In the Netherlands pot is legal but people aren’t zombies, they go to the coffee shop and have a joint after work but they don’t get stoned all day. In fact, in my country (France) abuse of marijuana is more common than in the Netherlands, even though it’s illegal.
Mental health problems only happen if the person is predestined to having it (i.e. if your family has a history of schizophrenia), and a single joint from time to time won’t do shit even then.
If marijuana is legal there also need to be abuse prevention and help programs (don’t smoke and drive, smoke responsibly, Marijuana Anonymous etc.). Regulate it like alcohol, basically. Remember that alcohol is second only to heroin in dangerousness (when abused) but not many people are alcoholics. Weed has almost no withdrawal effects and doesn’t cause people to overdose. People would also have access to better quality weed, unlike the shit you sometimes find on the street that’s mixed with piled glass or similar crap.
And regardless of whether it’s legalized or not, the government should be promoting physical activity way more than now (as an alternative to drinking and smoking… and more importantly as a way to fight obesity, especially in the US) and the culture should shift in that direction too. Promoting SOMETHING ELSE works better than saying “X is bad”.
The only problem I see with legalization is that it will probably alienate some of the most “traditional conservatives” in the Republican voter base, particularly older people. Decriminalization of possession and use may be a better answer then. The government would still get money from the fines and spend less in prisons.
“And regardless of whether it’s legalized or not, the government should be promoting physical activity way more than now (as an alternative to drinking and smoking… and more importantly as a way to fight obesity, especially in the US) and the culture should shift in that direction too. Promoting SOMETHING ELSE works better than saying ‘X is bad'”.
Absolutely.
“The only problem I see with legalization is that it will probably alienate some of the most ‘traditional conservatives’ in the Republican voter base, particularly older people. Decriminalization of possession and use may be a better answer then. The government would still get money from the fines and spend less in prisons.”
Unfortunately, many of the hardliners on this issue are expected to die before 2020. Decriminalization would be an improvement over what we have now, but my personal preference would be to divert the state capacity entirely towards cartel smashing and the billions in weed money into granola eating hippie White hands.
One comment, “What’s Allepo”?
you mean, “What’s Allepo, Man”?
Something which could be addressed without legalizing cannabis is in the apparently unconstitutional practices which arose in the wake of the drug war back in the 1980s.
Drug testing is a demeaning ritual in which one’s bodily fluids are seized without probable cause or warrant. In some cases, a hair sample is tested (i.e., an employer can demand that an applicant chop off a part of their body). This forces people to make some thumos level decisions about whether or not they want to comply (and knuckle under) or defy (thereby losing their job plus potentially career and home). Even for people who do comply, a false positive can consign one to unemployment and endless rounds of “rehab” programs. It’s all quite Kafka-esque.
Asset forfeiture authorizes law enforcement to seize property under civil law, thus depriving people of cash, cars, boats, airplanes, bank accounts, houses and (ahem) grow lights without very much in the way of due process and compensation. The abuses of civil asset forfeiture are well known, though mitigated in recent years by legislation. Innocent people have had the state seize their property and then must go through all sorts of convolutions to get it returned – if ever.
The drug war has been used as an excuse for expanding government wiretapping and surveillance as well as de facto overturning posse comitatus. And no kidding, there have been numerous cases of SWAT teams kicking in the wrong door and gunning down innocent people in their own homes. Look at the killing of Don Scott in 1992 by an anti-drug task force.
These drug war laws are also a fitting commentary on the failure of past Republican administrations to “limit government” and Democrats to protect “civil rights.” While all this may have given the government some tactical advantages, it’s created not a little hostility among the citizenry against law enforcement. This has been evidenced to in the rise of the Militia movement, the anti-cop bias of Reason magazine (among others), and (alas) the explosion in Black Lives Matter. It’s a fitting commentary on the Obama era policy of anarcho-tyranny that unconstitutional drug war practices continued largely unabated while rioters were given “space to destroy” in the streets of many American cities.
Also, the precedents created by the drug war can potentially be used by the state against dissenters on the Alt Right.
The ending of drug testing, asset forfeiture and related practices could shift more public support behind the Trump administration, especially among libertarians, civil or not. Certainly a White Nationalist state could not countenance practices which attack the dignity and property of its own citizens. All this could be done without legalizing a single leaf, tab or line.
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