Not long ago, I told the story of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) putting its foot in its mouth by denouncing the followers of the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand (“The Objectivist Menace”, July 23rd 1996), showing that the real agenda of the SPLC is to smear advocates of individual rights as racists, anti-semites, etc. It is the idea of individual autonomy, not the idea of race, that drives the hysterical neo-McCarthyite rants of Mr. Dees et al., and the attack on Rand's followers is undeniable evidence of the SPLC's real intent.

Can you believe that the SPLC appears to be behind an even more absurd smear campaign? In this case, the targeted organization was the Individual Society for Individual Liberty (ISIL), which held its annual conference in Whistler, British Columbia last week. Just prior to the conference, a Canadian leftist group planted a story in the Vancouver Sun attacking ISIL with the usual epithets of being racist militia sympathizers, etc. The group also tried to pressure the hotel hosting the conference into cancelling it. Luckily, the ISIL conference organizers were on top of the situation and were able to handle the extensive media coverage and foil the efforts of the Canadian Marxoids to disrupt the conference. More importantly, according to my ISIL sources, strong evidence of a SPLC connection to the Canadian anti-ISIL plot was discovered.

ISIL is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco [now Benicia], California. It has thousands of libertarian members from around the world, including numerous non-white members from Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as from the U.S. The last time I checked, Nigeria, Djibouti, South Africa, Costa Rica, Peru, Pakistan, and India were not known to be strongholds of the Ku Klux Klan, though I wouldn't be suprised if the SPLC soon uncovers shocking evidence of ISIL's secret links to the Nigerian Klan.

ISIL's goal is educational, primarily to improve communications among libertarian activists from around the world and raise public awareness of libertarianism, with the object of facilitating the advance of freedom everywhere through political decentralization and greater respect for individual rights. Like most libertarian organizations, ISIL strongly prefers peaceful methods of societal change and exclusively employs such methods in its own efforts. However, ISIL members also understand the gravity of the statist threats that are facing the American people today, and fully respect the right of Americans to organize for the defense of the political principles embodied in the Bill of Rights. ISIL is proud of its stand on behalf of individual liberty and on behalf of those Americans who are bravely standing up to the gun grabbers and the health care socialists and all the other Marxoid power lusters in the government, and will not be deterred by the childish smears of those who hate individualism. ISIL has nothing to hide; its web page has links to numerous ISIL publications (including its collection of pamphlets and back issues of FNN), so anyone with web access can see for themselves just how “racist” ISIL is.

The basis for the Sun's racial charges against ISIL is two-fold: (1) long before the media paid any attention to the militia movement and the concerns many Americans have about the ongoing losses of their liberty, ISIL's hard-hitting newsletter Freedom Network News (FNN) accurately reported the growth of the militia movement and the increasingly draconian police-state legislation that has been making its way through the U.S. Congress; (2) Colorado State Senator Charles Duke spoke at the conference. From this, the authors of the Sun article were able to resort to the classic McCarthyite guilt-by-association tactics, without bothering to tell their Canadian readers the truth about what ISIL stands for and who constitutes the membership of ISIL. Of course, once the TV cameras showed up at Whistler, they had to work very hard to conceal the non-white ISIL members attending the conference. The propaganda line from the more hostile elements of the Canadian media grudgingly changed from charges of racism to ISIL having some mysterious hidden agenda. ISIL members and sympathizers haven't stopped laughing yet!

Apart from the peculiar antics of the professional race-baiters, there is a deeper issue that is brought to the forefront by these attacks on libertarians and other individualists. Why does the establishment fear radical individualists and hard-core capitalists so much? Why is it that charges of “racism” or “divisiveness” resonate so strongly among establishment opinion-makers even when directed against people who plainly are not racial bigots, who have only a marginal influence on electoral politics, and who have not even been particularly active in organizing militias?

The answer is that libertarian ideas, and not libertarians themselves, pose the real threat to the establishment. In the eyes of the elite, a libertarian stands convicted of ideological treason without even the faintest trace of bigotry having been detected. In the twisted semantics of modern academia, racism no longer means that you seek to injure or offend others because they are members of a different race. Instead, racism means that you have the power to independently affirm the value of your own identity even though that entails no harm or offense to members of other races. In today's sociological pseudo-science, the key to understanding its definition of racism is power, not bigotry. If you advocate individualism and capitalism, you advocate locating power in the individual, making the collective defenseless against the spontaneous emergence of genuine pluralism. The establishment pseudo-intellectual only wants diversity of the kind that he himself has planned, usually in the form of symbolic gestures of inclusion and quotal representation. As the spontaneous pluralism of a free society never conforms to the artificial “diversity” of the establishment pseudo-intellectual, advocates of individualism are smeared as “racists” simply for being individualists.