2016 was a great clarifier for the Right.

First, Donald Trump separated those who genuinely care about the problems facing the West from the movement hacks who would rather impotently opine about “the Constitution” and “my principles” while their civilization crumbles around them.

But over the past week, while Twitter intensified its alt-right purges, violent communist demonstrators attempted to shut down the National Policy Institute’s annual conference, and the left chose Richard Spencer for its newest Two Minutes Hate, another distinction became clear. The battle for free speech is fast becoming one of the most important battles of our time. And once again, events are separating those who actually understand the problem in its real, concrete form from those who focus on dogmas, platitudes, and fantasy worlds.

Speaking of the latter: Many of us first came to the alt-right through the libertarian movement, especially as influenced by Ron Paul, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard. This tradition thinks of free speech only as property rights, defined by the non-aggression principle. According to them, I should be free to say whatever I want on my own property, so long as everyone else is free to do the same. If no one infringes on anyone else’s property rights, then no problem arises. Though my SWPL neighbors would drive me out of their homes if I brought up racial IQ differences over dinner, they can operate their property however they want, so my speech rights are not technically violated.

As a former libertarian myself, I can’t dispute the logic of this argument. And yet, it is completely inapplicable to the actual free speech battleground that exists today. Though legal protections for the freedom of speech are as wide as they have ever been, it has also never been more dangerous for a dissenter to speak his mind—eloquently demonstrated by the fact that people can face severe repercussions if they mention that they voted for the President-elect of the United States.

None of our modern speech-policing occurred through infringing anyone’s property rights. Instead, it came about in a new spin on the old Marxist view of property owners exploiting the propertyless. The only difference is that now the capitalists use their immense fortunes to silence the Right and to empower the Left.

The concerted attacks on Richard Spencer and anyone who dared attend his conference this past weekend are just as brutal and dishonest as anything ever leveled against Donald Trump. Only this time it is done against people without Trump’s resources and media savvy. Richard is smart and will likely weather the attacks. But what about a college kid who gets doxxed for attending his speech? In a libertarian world, CNN has every right to drag him through the mud and render him forever unemployable.

The same principle plays out countless times elsewhere. We see Twitter censor right-wing accounts, while Google and Facebook prepare to change their algorithms to make it harder to find the so-called “fake news” sites that they fear benefitted Trump. (At least one left-wing professor believes the “fake news” list should include Breitbart, the Drudge Report, and LewRockwell.com. We can be sure that many others share her sentiment.) On the flipside, Google can also ensure that a record of association with so-called “white nationalists” will remain the top search hit under anyone’s name who might rather it didn’t.

The threat of losing a job or becoming permanently blacklisted as a “racist” is the biggest roadblock to genuine free expression and prevents the corporate employee class from voicing opposition to egalitarian orthodoxy just as effectively as the old Soviet commissars ever could. Moreover, the “speech codes” that do exist today are imposed by private colleges and corporate HR departments, all of which are, in libertarian terms, just setting the rules for their own property in accord with the NAP. After all, as the Rothbardians never tire of saying, “no one forces you to work there.”

We can expect that the free speech battles of the twenty-first century will therefore barely involve the state at all. Instead, it will be a battle pitting free-thinking but scattered individuals of relatively modest means against well-funded private corporations, academic institutions, social media empires, and search engines.

In the worst case, the state may give some subsidies to the colleges and corporations that oppose us, making it marginally easier for them to employ the types of censorship they would have employed even in the absence of government funding. More likely, though, the state will simply step aside and let us fight amongst ourselves. Though libertarians live for fine, hairsplitting distinctions, the actual censors do not care exactly who is doing the censoring so long as the targeted views get silenced. If censorship can be outsourced to the private sector, then, from a lazy bureaucrat’s perspective, that’s just one thing less to worry about.

Then again, in the best case, the state may actually be our friend. The Trump administration would likely prefer us to the puritanical scolds who used the same social shaming and economic boycott tactics to push him into conforming with the leftist hive. And even the administrations that follow Trump will still have the First Amendment to contend with. This, combined with the fact that the state gets its tax money regardless of what the taxpayers think of it, means that it will be generally immune to economic pressure in ways a private business would not. When NPI came to Washington, the private Hamilton restaurant immediately canceled a dinner contract when antifa turned up the pressure. But the federal Ronald Reagan Building, constrained by the First Amendment and immune from market pressure, kept its bargain and allowed the conference to stay.

In the face of these new threats, the idea that Twitter or Google can do whatever it wants because it is a private company is increasingly meaningless. Sure, the idea accords with traditional notions of property rights. But who cares? If libertarian property rights empower the people who seek to destroy western White civilization by flooding it with alien cultures, while the dwindling remnants of the West dissipate their last hours with Snapchat, Porn Hub, and dildos, then why bother defending it?

The Right must fight the battles that actually exist. In 2016, everyone attacking free speech does so for the exclusive benefit of the Left. They want to silence us because they understand that if people are free to speak their minds, the Left will be exposed for the pretentious charlatans that they are. So if we want to save the West, we must first break down the barriers that make even discussing our goals prohibitively dangerous.

As we do so, we must remember that this battle has nothing to do with legalistic niceties like property rights or the NAP. Rather, it is a proxy fight in the most important issue of our time: whether the people who, as inventors of electricity, literally gave the world light, will survive. The Left understands this, which is why they fight so hard. So does the alt-right, which happily responds to Twitter purges with the full realization that leftist censorship is always evil and wrong, regardless of the process through which it is imposed.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Right—the libertarians, cuckservatives, paleocons, mainstreamers, and party loyalists—will have to choose. They can join us in the fight against left-wing thought control and help create a more livable society for themselves and their families. If they do, we should forgive them their past mistakes.

Or they can decide to cling to old dogmas that disempower them for the benefit of their enemies. In so doing, irrelevance is their only hope. If they help our enemies win, they will only end up as junior partners to a left-wing monolith—propped up by Third World immigrants—that will never leave them alone and will never stop hating them. On the other hand, if, God willing, the Right can take our country back from the managerial class who have ruined things for so long, then they will join their intellectual peers Jeb Bush, Glenn Beck, and Evan McMullin in the trash heap of pompous cowards irrelevant to the events transpiring around them. In other words: the moral equivalents of a man who debated metaphysics while his family died in a house fire.

Cold War liberals used to parrot the mantra “Better Red than Dead.” According to this line, the prospects of nuclear war were so dire that surrender to the Soviet Union was morally preferable to an anticommunist foreign policy that, in its willingness to provoke our nuclear foes, might cause the end of human life on earth.

We should, of course, be skeptical of the Left’s sincerity. Time has shown that liberals have never been so much anti-war as they are pro-communist. The ideological descendants of the sixties generation clamored for wars in Kosovo, Bosnia, Rwanda, Libya, and now Syria, so long as they could be dressed in humanitarian garb. And if America’s Cold War adversary had been a nuclear Nazi Germany or other some “fascist” menace, likely the same sixties liberals would have instantly boarded the war train, as did the fraudulent peacenik Woody Guthrie when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union.

Still, the Left’s Cold War rhetoric at least showed a willingness to put aside moral preening and try to achieve the best outcome possible at the time.

Fast forward thirty years. Donald Trump is a purported “racist” and “sexist” who credibly claims that he will extend an olive branch toward Russia and dismantle the Cold War-era NATO bureaucracy. His statement on at a recent debate that it is actually a good thing for America to cooperate with Russia for common interests is unprecedented among presidential candidates.

On the other hand, Hillary Clinton has a long history of antagonizing Russia—in Syria, in Ukraine, even within its own borders—in ways that could easily escalate to a nuclear World War III. But she mouths the correct left-wing platitudes in public.

Given the choice between a pro-war egalitarian and an anti-war racist, the Left has emphatically chosen the former. Among the SWPLs with whom I live and work in the Washington beltway, support for Hillary is de rigeur, while support for Trump would bring immediate ostracism. I actively avoid workplace functions from the knowledge—borne from experience—that they inevitably turn into anti-Trump hatefests.

And this is despite the fact that, if Hillary actually does antagonize Russia into World War III, we in the nation’s capital will be among the first incinerated. Thus, whether consciously or through willful blindness, the DC smart set prefer to increase their own chances of death than dissent from egalitarian orthodoxy.

The modern, fashionable liberal’s approach to this election is an application of the “Rotherham effect” on a global scale. For over 16 years, over a thousand young girls in Rotherham, England were raped, abused, and groomed as sex slaves by Pakistani immigrants. One such girl was raped with a broken glass bottle while others were doused in gasoline and threatened to be lit on fire. There are reports that other girls even had their tongues nailed to tables, ostensibly to prevent them from speaking to the police.

Most tragically of all, the nail-tongue was entirely unnecessarily; the town council and local police actually knew about what was going on, but simply failed to act, because acting against dark-skinned immigrants might be considered racist.

The types of people who would ignore the localized, private brutality in Rotherham for the sake of conforming to left-wing shibboleths are the same ones who demand that we support the one candidate for the presidency who would make the extermination of the entire human race more likely. Of course, when pushed, most of them will say that they do not want war with Russia. But they are still willing to look the other way when their chosen candidate acts to make that war more likely. The fact that they not only fail to do same, but work themselves into a moralistic frenzy, when People magazine slaps together a few hastily assembled sexual allegations against Donald Trump tells you all the need to know about the demented death cult that is the modern Left.

Whereas once its claimed peace as its highest value, now it would rather destroy the world in nuclear winter than countenance a peace candidate who might have called a Latina beauty queen “Ms. Housekeeping.”

In the kind of world these fanatics have created, the most radical truths are ones that wouldn’t have made our grandfathers bat an eye. For starters: Better Racist than Dead. If racists could avoid the horrors or Rotherham or prevent nuclear war, then I’m with the racists. Whether our people can make the same common-sense choice in the face of immense social and political pressure remains to be seen. But our ability to do so will be our ultimate test. The fate of the world depends on it.

Two groups held conferences in Washington, DC this past weekend, symbolizing both the past and the future of youthful right-wing revolt. As is well known here, the National Policy Institute attempted on Friday to hold a press conference with Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, and Peter Brimelow in the First Amendment Lounge of the National Press Club. This prompted the Press Club for the first time in over a hundred years to cancel the event—and even block NPI on Twitter.

The scene was radically different the next morning. On Saturday, libertarians bedecked in bowties and Rothbard t-shirts joined the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity for its first annual conference near Dulles Airport, to discuss the failures of US foreign policy. Unthinkable as it may be for the shitlords of the alt-right, these attendees came with their families, slapped on name tags sporting their real full names, and did not hesitate to tell strangers where they worked. That’s right: at the Ron Paul Institute, a table-mate asking, “What do you for a living?” is taken as a friendly conversation starter, not a warning of a leftist spy.

The dichotomy between the two conferences is illuminating because it gives the lie to libertarian pretensions about the modern state and our own role in it. Libertarians constantly tell us that the state is a monster that lies, cheats, steals, and kills. They tell us that it grabs power ravenously, that it crushes all who oppose it, and that it leaves only destruction in its wake. What’s more, they claim that only the libertarians can see through the whole charade and expose the state for what it is really is—a “gang of thieves writ large”—while the rest of us persist in ignorant thrall to nefarious “statism.”

One would think that, in standing up to this murderous gang, the libertarians would be condemning themselves to a life of persecution and misery. If I decided to go to Ciudad Juarez and pontificate on how the drug cartels should be immediately abolished, I would at the very least expect some pushback. And yet, our ruling class is utterly ambivalent to the libertarians’ existence. Not only does it not murder or imprison them—as libertarian rhetoric would indicate that it would—but it doesn’t even try to inconvenience them in the smallest ways, say, by stigmatizing their conferences.

Why is this? It cannot just be the libertarians are small and non-threatening. Small as their institutions may be, alt right institutions are even smaller, and more poorly funded. And yet, authentic right-wing groups are subject to outright criminalization in Europe and to the ever-more oppressive whims of antifa mobs, social media censors, and HR busybodies in the United States.

The truth is, what matters to the ruling class is not municipal roads, intellectual property rights, or the war on drugs that libertarians love to blather on about. It is not even our meddlesome foreign policy—important as that may be a source of power to many groups within the ruling class. No; if any of these issues really mattered to the state, then it would move to suppress the people who attack them. But instead, the only dissenters that our rulers actively suppress are those who dissent on race and culture. So race and culture, we must conclude, are the issues that concern our rulers most. They form the one unquestionable dogma of the ruling class.

Accepting these principles does not necessarily require a departure from orthodox libertarianism. A libertarian could theoretically hold no opinion on cultural issues, but oppose state-sponsored egalitarianism just because it infringes on a person’s freedom to follow whatever cultural mores he prefers. This is close to the position that Murray Rothbard held at the end of his life.

But regardless of what theoretical possibilities remain open, the total freedom under which libertarians may publicly espouse their ideology shows that most have followed a different path. In doing so, they have chosen to live by a glaring contradiction. On the one hand, they claim to radically oppose statism, while, on the other, they side with the ruling class on the single issue that matters to it most.

This may be why intellectually honest people rarely stay within the libertarian movement for long. If they are really seeking an answer to the burning questions of our times, libertarian parlor games provide no satisfaction. They eventually realize that the people actually speaking the truth are those that the liars in power actually care to suppress.