Kim du Toit & the Freedom Paradox

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Kim du Toit

2,864 words

One of the tricky things about writing from an Alt Right perspective is how to deal with conservatives or Alt Light people I have always respected but who aren’t “Alt” enough for me to truly connect with. This usually boils down to differences along one of two axes: either these people are more anti-Left than they are pro-Right, or they are more anti-anti-White than they are pro-White. In both cases, the main difference is that the Alt Right is not afraid to take its own side in the great political struggles of our day, even if that “side” has quite a few nasty elements alongside its noble ones. On the other hand, mainstream conservatives and Alt Light figures would rather live in a world of principled objectivity where no one takes his own side and nothing is nasty. They oppose Leftists and anti-white bigots not so much for racial reasons but because such people tend to misbehave more, abuse their power more, and operate with greater hypocrisy than those on the Right. In other words, the Left poses a much greater threat to freedom, and so they oppose it.

Granted, these are good reasons. But they are not our reasons.

This leads me to discuss a blogger I have always enjoyed who has recently returned from an eight-and-a-half-year hiatus: Kim du Toit [2]. If I had to classify him, he belongs front and center in what I could call the Gun Right [3]. I’m sure he would be happy to learn that I became a shooter because of him over a decade ago. I even purchased my first firearm based on a recommendation on his now-defunct blog, The Other Side of Kim.

His knowledge [4] of guns is vast (or, at least, appears vast in the eyes of a firearm dilettante like myself), and on his previous blog he gleefully kept track of news items about innocent near-victims shooting and killing attackers, muggers, rapists, home invaders, and other such bad guys. He called it his “Dead Goblin Count,” which I never ceased to enjoy. Kim also occupies the ninety-ninth percentile when it comes to gun rights literacy, and much of his work could make up a thick volume entitled Why We Should Support the Second Amendment.

Based on my impression after years of reading him (and not on any one particular thing he wrote), Kim also has a strong libertarian, live-and-let-live streak. Leave him alone, and he’ll leave you alone and not be terribly concerned about how you live your life. Other than that, however, he’s pretty much Hard Right about a lot of things. His famous “The Pussification of the Western Male [5]” essay from 2003 is a great example. It approaches Chateau Heartiste levels of righteous shitlordery, and was manosphere well before there was a manosphere. Without giving himself undue credit, Kim thinks the essay foreshadowed such things as the Men Going Their Own Way movement [6], Gamergate, and the Sad Puppies phenomenon. I believe that when future historians chronicle the masculine reconquista of Western civilization, “The Pussification of the Western Male” will garner at least a mention in the first chapter. There are so many great quotes from it that you could bibliomance your way through it and come up with gem after gem after gem.

Here’s a taste:

Out there, there is a huge number of men who are sick of it. We’re sick of being made figures of fun and ridicule; we’re sick of having girly-men like journalists, advertising agency execs and movie stars decide on “what is a man”; we’re sick of women treating us like children, and we’re really fucking sick of girly-men politicians who pander to women by passing an ever-increasing raft of Nanny laws and regulations (the legal equivalent of public-school Ritalin), which prevent us from hunting, racing our cars and motorcycles, smoking, flirting with women at the office, getting into fistfights over women, shooting criminals and doing all the fine things which being a man entails.

According to Kim, the essay elicited a huge response which crashed his host’s servers and then got him kicked off for its offensive content. His description of what happened after is priceless:

The responses I got in the mail – I didn’t allow comments at that stage – were interesting. A large number, of course, were vituperative squeals from feministicals and their girlymen cohorts, and included death threats and threats of violence against me and my family. (Most of those disappeared when I responded to them by email with my home address, and an invitation to take their best shot – and to bring a gun, because I surely would.)

His classic “Let Africa Sink [7]” essay from 2002 helped earn him “The Internet’s Most Loathsome Blogger” moniker, as well as the undying respect and admiration of budding Right-wingers like myself. You will not find a more direct, honest, and truthful assessment of the savagery, incompetence, and corruption that goes on in Africa all the time. You also will not be able to find a more eloquent expression of Western (or rather, white) disgust and loathing for the putrid mess that black Africans make of human life. He also skewers those sympathetic whites who try to help them by recommending the following:

a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.

He knows it’s harsh and doesn’t care. Kim grew up in Apartheid South Africa and served in its military. He believes (at least at the time of the essay’s writing) that:

Growing up there [in Africa], I was infused with several African traits – traits which are not common in Western civilization. The almost-casual attitude towards death was one. (Another is a morbid fear of snakes.)

Maybe after fifteen years he has mellowed from this perspective. I really don’t know. But as a stalwart of the Right who is thankfully writing again, he hasn’t really mellowed much at all. When discussing the recent spate of antifa violence [8], here is what Mr. du Toit has to say (and as with nearly everything he writes, there is a temptation to quote more, believe me):

Needless to say, when the first dozen or so “antifa” thugs (anti-fascist, very cute) get their bones broken and heads cracked, they’re going to run like frightened rabbits . . .

. . . only to find their escape routes blocked by yet another group of Trump’s supporters with a similar attitude to the first, and yet more bones are broken and skulls cracked.

I mention this set of tactics because it was one of many that I learned while training for COINOPS (counter-insurgency operations) back in a real fascist country, South Africa, as part of my military service.

So I repeat the question: do you little snowflake antifascistas really want to go down this road? Because I promise you: we know a hell of a lot more about this stuff than you do. And the police aren’t going to protect your precious little asses forever; at some point, it’ll be Kent State redux, only with more casualties. A lot more casualties. Sure, you may get the propaganda victory . . . but you’ll be dead and won’t get to enjoy it.

Kim also has interesting things to say about art and music. In fact, it was he who turned me on to Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto [9] (beautifully performed by Leif Ove Andsnes), and his recent post on cover artist Robert McGinnis [10] was a lot of fun. And he loathes Bob Dylan. I’m pretty sure the commenting on his one anti-Dylan rant from years back went on for weeks.

Oh, and did I mention that Kim has a twisted, yet charming, sense of humor? Two of his three “ironclad rules of getting older [11]” are, number two, “Never trust a fart,” and number three, “Never waste an erection.”

I will leave it to you to figure out what to do with such sage droplets of advice.

If I had to describe Kim du Toit the blogger with one word, it would be “mean.” Of course, that doesn’t describe Kim the man. His recently-deceased wife once described him as an old softie, and I have no doubt that that’s true. Given how Kim likes to rant about manners and decorum, I also have no doubt that his behavior in real life is impeccable. It’s just that arguing with him about anything political (especially guns) would be sort of like tangling with a prime Roberto Duran. (No thanks!)

Aside from being a first-rate blogger, novelist, and fascinating character just bristling with Dostoevsky-worthy anecdotes, I find Kim du Toit interesting from an Alt Right perspective for two main reasons. One is his avowed and yet rarely-discussed philo-Semitism (I know this might be a deal-breaker for some, but bear with me). Kim doesn’t write about Jews or anti-Semitism often as far as I know – his old blog is down, so I’m going on memory here, and his new blog has only been up for a couple of months now. Of course, like any good Right-winger, he’ll excoriate individual Jews (especially the anti-gun ones), but without connecting any Star-of-David-shaped dots to explain why so many gun-grabbing Leftists are indeed Jews.

The second reason, I believe, is related to this. While many of us on the Alt Right talk about how great a white ethnostate would be and pine for the day when we can create one, Kim du Toit actually grew up in something very close to a white ethnostate . . . and didn’t really like it. He called Apartheid South Africa a “fascist country” in the quote above, and still refers to it derogatively as “the Old Racist Republic.” Sure, he doesn’t spend a lot of time bashing his former country, but he doesn’t wax nostalgic about it much, either. And as a White Nationalist, this worries me.

Recently, he relayed a story about how he was arrested [12] in 1972 for expressing his opposition to Apartheid:

That was only the first of my encounters with the State, by the way. Another involved hiring a wonderful Black maid to clean my apartment and do my laundry, but refusing to “register” her with the proper local authorities because I thought that was a load of old bollocks. Then when this was discovered, the local gauleiter bureaucrat charged me with being in contravention of the Group Areas Act (the one that said that Blacks couldn’t be in “White” areas without a permit), and issued me a fine. Which I refused to pay. So I was dragged into court yet again.

This is what I meant by not being “Alt” enough for me to truly connect with someone. I happen to believe that the Apartheid laws of South Africa made a lot of sense despite their restrictions. I happen to believe that had they remained in place, Kim would have called for all of Africa to meet up with Davey Jones except for Apartheid South Africa, because that still would have been a nice, white country compared to the rest. I’m sure Kim is aware of how far South Africa has fallen since the end of Apartheid. I’m sure he’s aware of the anti-white racism [13] going on over there. I’m sure he’s read the work of Dan Roodt [14]. Isn’t it possible, then, that the very strictures of Apartheid which Kim complains about were the very things preventing this kind of decline all along?

Yes, unlike Kim, I never lived in South Africa, so there’s only so much authority I can bring to the table. But you know who did live there? South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd. And according to this American Renaissance article [15], he and other white men like him had very good reasons to install Apartheid laws in South Africa. Blacks and whites occupy different places on the evolutionary timeline, you see. In order for such genetically disparate populations to coexist, different sets of laws are required to suit their observably different temperaments. And the population furthest along on the evolutionary timeline should be the one that dominates, even if that means requiring work permits for one and not the other.

What I say is borne out of a profound sense of race realism, something that is mostly absent from Kim’s writing, his “Let Africa Sink” essay notwithstanding. Indeed, during the eight-and-a-half years of Kim’s absence I have leapfrogged rightward past him and into the Alt Right. But why hasn’t he gone that way as well? Why does he seem to shy away from race and race realism when he shies away from so little else? It’s not like we don’t have a growing body of scientific and psychometric data showing that race realism is factually correct.

It can’t be cowardice or fear. How could it be when he invites would-be assassins to the home where his wife and kids live for what basically amounts to a Wild West-styled duel? (Granted, said wife and kids were probably armed to the teeth as well, but still . . .) Kim also had the charming habit of writing things which were astoundingly offensive to the liberal elites of this country and then doubling down by “signing” his name in big, bold script like so:

Sincerely, Kim du Toit

A big f—k you to anyone who would dare give him grief for his opinions. And, if I am not mistaken, he did pay a price in his professional life years ago for such opinions. Still, he never changed. No one can say Kim du Toit doesn’t have a shiny pair of brass balls.

Rather, I suspect Kim and other, more mainstream or Alt Light-ish conservatives steer clear of race realism (and its not-always-agreeable step-sibling, anti-Semitism, which usually tags along) for one simple reason: they cherish freedom. I really believe that white people, and basically only white people, have a weakness for freedom. Could something like the Magna Carta have been signed in Imperial China eight hundred years ago? Could the French Revolution have occurred in the Ottoman Empire? Could slavery have been outlawed after a bloody civil war in any country other than a white one?

Probably not. The plain fact is that such liberating moments have not occurred nearly as often throughout history in non-white societies as they have in white ones.

On the other hand, folks on the Alt Light are always quick to respond that whites have been very effective at restricting freedom throughout history as well. This is what I call the Freedom Paradox, and it is confusing (indeed, bewitching) enough to apparently stop brilliant guys like Kim du Toit in their tracks, hence their hesitance to jump aboard the newly-refurbished White Nationalism train. They know quite correctly that throwing their lot in with other whites in a movement centered on race would eventually entail at least a partial loss of their cherished freedoms, and not just for them; for many others as well.

In response to this, I’d like to point to the nigh-Marxian belief in historical inevitability that one finds a lot on the Alt Right. Vox Day is a big proponent of the idea. Greg Johnson wrote an article on the topic entitled “Ahead of the Curve [16].” With Third World immigration going the way it is going, that loss of freedom is coming, one way or another. The vast majority of humanity is tribal and racial, even to the point of sacrificing the white man’s precious freedom for it. And they are not going to change. How else can you explain the loyalty blacks have to their black leaders in places like Zimbabwe when these leaders are demonstrably more oppressive than were the white ones who preceded them?

I have said this many times before: once non-whites (Hispanics, blacks, and Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East, mostly) gain enough numbers to wield real power in Western Europe and the United States, they will use that power as much as possible to exploit and eventually oppress their white host populations. And they will be brutal about it, the same way they are towards their own kind in their own countries. One of the main points of White Nationalism is to prevent such an outcome before it is too late; too late to prevent it without massive bloodshed, that is. A strong racial identity among whites is one great way to safeguard the white majorities in traditionally white nations. Without it, we’re staring at a future much grimmer than what was offered by Kim’s “Racist Republic” of South Africa, which today seems fairly benign compared to the rest of the African continent which Kim wishes to relegate to the bottom of the ocean.

That’s the dichotomy whites in the United States and Western Europe will be facing in the next thirty years, I’m afraid. Returning to restrictive, race realist forms of government or being swallowed up in a sea of black and brown. Either way, our freedoms are going to take a hit. And the sooner talented and insightful men like Kim du Toit realize this and take their own side in this struggle instead of staying above it, the easier it will be for us to win.