As regular readers of this site will know, I hate big tech. I hate everything about it, from the fact that they’re run by statists, to the amount of money and power the government has given them, to the censorship they will use in enforcement of statist narratives, there’s pretty much nothing I like about mainstream social media. I will regularly go on tirades to whoever will listen about the benefits of switching to alternate social media platforms. Admittedly, I should be less of a hypocrite about that and use the alternatives that I’m on more often. But that’s an issue for another day. The main point is that anyone who authentically opposes big text censorship will have an ally in me, providing they don’t support some other kind of tyranny.

But the problem with a lot of the people who claim to oppose this sort of thing is that they only oppose it because their particular brand of tyranny was barred from some platform. This has been the case for some time with the founder of Gab, Andrew Torba. Gab bills itself a free speech network, yet has a reputation for banning anyone who dares go outside the bounds of the conservative framework, specifically calling it a Christian social media platform, while allowing a wide variety of things which are not Christian. A massive hypocrite, Andrew can be regularly seen to allow a wide variety of people on his platform who speak in a manner which would at least concern Jesus. But that doesn’t matter to him. Because really, “Free Speech™” to him means an alternative to the other allegedly leftist platforms.

Because I don’t like him and I don’t like what his platform stands for, as well as the fact that it’s centralized enough to be able to censor people in the first place, therefore violating by its very nature the free speech that it advertises, I’m subscribed to the email newsletter, and I get to see firsthand all the bullshit he preaches on his podium; so, yes, I occasionally take opportunities like this to speak against it. Side note, for a fun game sometime, tell somebody who’s been subscribed to the Gab newsletters for a long time to find the black person in their advertising materials. It’s almost like they know who they’re talking to, and they don’t need to talk to anybody else. Anyway, to get back to the point, last Monday’s newsletter was funny to me, because I’ve been recently opposing a trend of liars, who use the Bible to advertise conservatism and use the branding of King in order to do it. Just look around for people who say they’re “Kingpilled” or something similar. It’s a pretty pathetic trend and it’s growing in populism…sorry, popularity.

So when I saw the email subject, “Kingdom of God Economics,” I knew I was in for a steaming pile of shit of epic proportions. Not because I oppose Christianity…In fact, you’ll find a strong advocate of Christianity in me, especially the kind of Christianity proposed by Lev Tolstoy – who used the term “Kingdom of God” to much more accurate effect long before people like Torba got their hands on it. If you ever have a long moment, I would recommend reading “The Kingdom Of God Is Within You,” by Tolstoy. It’s considered a foundational book in Christian anarchy, the idea that the church has largely co-opted the words of Christ and the Bible itself, to a statist end, ignoring the actual words of Jesus. The book makes a very libertarian case for opposing war, state-sponsored anything, and more, and eventually comes to the conclusion that it takes an awful lot of heresy to be a Christian statist.

So, that makes it kind of awkward that Andrew has been using the official account to promote anti-libertarian sentiment, for a long time now. Oh, did I say awkward? I meant craven. I’ve watched the account for a significant period of time, because people constantly send me tweets they make when they come out. We have our laughs, but then they’re gone. Because ironically, for a company which complains of censorship on social media platforms like twitter, they literally delete all their tweets regularly. It makes sense to 100% censor one’s account as a response to being censored, I guess. But when the tweets do leak through, it’s oftentimes claiming that libertarians are nothing more than degenerate society destroyers, and that they need to get out of the way of conservatives. It’s pretty funny that I can concretely point to multiple things in his recent email, which directly align with agorist praxis. So let’s get into that.

In this email, he starts off discussing the fact that he built a desk out of lumber. Not just any lumber though, lumber he picked up from a local lumber yard. He then goes into detail about how it makes him feel good to express himself, and he gets direct utility out of it. This is good. Not only because he’s promoting localism, which is a key tenet of something like agorism and a variety of other libertarian ideas, but because he’s talking about doing it for selfish reasons. Self-motivated direct action toward limiting your consumerist tendencies and the amount you purchase from corporations is good. It’s also a plank of much agorist praxis. And I bet it was cheaper too.

He then continues by saying:

“People have been asking me how I find the time to do things like this while running Gab and raising two young children. The answer is simple. I don’t watch TV. I don’t use Facebook. I don’t follow any sports or celebrity gossip. I don’t watch Hollywood movies. I spend as much time as possible living in the City of God and fleeing from the City of Man.”

Any agorist who’s been in this for a while can tell you where I’m going to go with this. The fact is, all of those things he listed are things the state has directly subsidized or promoted. Much of what you’ll see on this site encourages getting away from all that. Maybe not for religious reasons, but definitely the same result will occur. So when he says that he’s doing it to get away from the city of man, I don’t mind that. In fact, it’s a good way to prove that the city of man that he discusses is rife with ethical compromise, and a variety of other terrible things that nobody should support.

Y’all know how I feel about Facebook, and the amount I talk shit about celebrities, Hollywood, corporations, and a variety of other things I attribute to State capitalism, or consumerism or whatever. The fact is, these are all distraction mechanisms, created by the state in order to keep us all pacified and glued the screens, only serving their very limited narrative, which increases their ability to control us. This also allows for a bunch of divisive trash to be spewed, which encourages the divide and conquer mindset that increasingly balkanizes society; and after a certain amount of atomization, we won’t be able to resist at all. If Satan exists, he delights in such a system.

Especially since that system primarily exists to enrich and serve Mammon. Anybody who’s actually read the Bible knows you can’t serve both God and Mammon, so it’s pretty good to oppose that on either an anarchist and libertarian basis, or a Christian one. If you ask Tolstoy, it’s both. And the fact that the same parties are benefited constantly by the division caused by such a system, falls right in line with the lines where Satan came into sow seeds of discord. This is why I favor Christian anarchy, and this approach to it highlights an area where different types of anarchists can find synergy. Of course, just to reestablish this fact, Andrew has repeatedly made it clear that he hates libertarians. So there’s that. I don’t think he’s interested in bridges, which is the reason for me writing this in the first place. Also makes it pretty awkward that he says, “The City of Man is the society that not only rejects God, it is anti-God by design. In the City of Man there is no objective Truth, only feelings. There is chaos, division, hate, fear, sorrow, and sin.”

Yeah, you never divide anyone, you perfect angel, you. Anyway, he continues:

“Living in the City of God starts with having a Christ-First Kingdom-Oriented Mindset. When Christ is the cornerstone of every aspect of your life making the shift away from the City of Man becomes rather straightforward. Just ask yourself some simple questions. What does binge watching Netflix all night accomplish for God’s Kingdom? How does worshiping at the church of NFL instead of your actual church on Sunday glorify God? Does watching Fox News for 5 hours every night after work really help you get closer to God? You all know the answers. Yet so many Christians fall into the pit of the Enemy’s hands by dedicating all of their time, attention, and money to the City of Man.”

This is an excellent way to highlight the need for agorism, because what Andrew has just done is established the existence of a primary economy, one rife with corruption, which goes counter to his own interests. He also established that it goes counter to his ethical standards, and it goes against mine too (possibly for different reasons, but nonetheless we can find common ground there).

So what does he recommend as a solution to this? He then goes on to pillory the alleged rise of “global communism,” despite every system much more closely mirroring fascism than that, and he goes into some detail about the places people are putting their time, money, attention, etc., eventually concluding that people need “Kingdom Economics.”

I think you can see where this is going:

“If we unite and work together to lay the foundation for a parallel society we can simultaneously build the largest and fastest growing Kingdom Economy this side of heaven while toppling the City of Man by refusing to live in it any longer. The point of Kingdom Economics isn’t to only support Christian businesses exclusively, although I won’t complain if you choose to do so, but rather it’s about making a conscious effort to support Christian-owned businesses FIRST. In doing so you are Kingdom building for Christ and His Church. We need to unite and help one another. Buy things from one another. Communicate with one another. Love one another. We need to make a strong and dedicated effort to keep the majority of our time, money, and data with our brothers and sisters in Christ and start building for the Kingdom. When we do the entire City of Man will collapse on itself into a pit of ash. We are the backbone of their economy. We need to stop propping up the demonic system with God’s resources. Everything we have belongs to God. We are shamefully using what God has mercifully provided us with to fund, support, and live in the City of Man. It needs to stop.”

Well congratulations, Andrew, you have now arrived over five decades late to a train started by Samuel Edward Konkin III: that is, counter-economics (a lot smoother phrase than yours, by the way). If you look at “An Agorist Primer,” counter-economics is defined as: “All (non-coercive) human action committed in defiance of the State.”

SEKIII continues,

“A Counter-Economist is (1) anyone practicing a counter-economic act; (2) one who studies such acts. Counter-Economics is the (1) practice (2) study of counter-economic acts.”

He then got specific in a way which might resonate with Andrew:

“Government laws have no intrinsic relationship with right and wrong or good and evil. Historically, most people knew that the royal edicts were for the king’s good, not theirs. People went along with the king because the alternative looked worse. This line of thinking leads to Chapter Five, so we’ll just note here that even today, society recognizes the conscientious objector: the religious dissenter to laws that his deity forbids him to obey, the man or woman who follows the Law of God or Nature against the monopoly of force in society. Since they would rather die than submit, a society which restrains its government from heavy repression will exempt many objectors.”

See, the whole point of counter economics is to separate oneself from the overarching structure of the state. While libertarians normally call this something like “the state,” however, Andrew calls it the city of man. That’s fine. But the point I want to get across here is that the mechanisms are essentially the same. Build a counter-economy, put your money toward the elements of that counter-economy which you would like to advance, and keep doing that, regardless of intervention or interference by the powers that should not be.

This is the essence of agorism. And I’m not just bringing it up because I’m incredibly petty. I’m bringing it up because it really highlights how using libertarian tools can help people of a variety of persuasions achieve their ends. It also highlights the fact that a lot of the disrespect somebody might bear for one group or another may be misplaced, and that person might just be either intentionally or unintentionally ignoring common ground. If it’s the latter, there’s a possibility that pointing out these similarities could spark some desire to improve relations between the groups. And especially considering that agorism is a left-libertarian mindset, these people seeing that not everyone on the left is Mao, Marx, Stalin…that might be incredibly helpful to both of our ends. It would, however, require admitting that libertarians aren’t the scum of the earth. A thing I don’t think Andrew is willing to humble himself enough to do, even if it would be good for the ministry. Some people would rather live in the city of man, after all.

But that’s why I’m not trying to reach Andrew specifically. This was more directed at everybody who’s received those emails, and the countless others that his site has put out. And those who have been emotionally manipulated into using his not-very-good website because of promises it inherently can’t fulfill. It should be no wonder that he has required the use of Bitcoin at many points along the journey of running his site. Using libertarian tools, invented and popularized by libertarians, will often get you more libertarian conclusions than you would otherwise receive. But it’s also true that the state is run by powers and principalities which are dark and do not act in the interests of god. This means that if you end up at more libertarian conclusions, you end up at more Christian conclusions by default. What you do beyond that default is up to you, and nothing is going to stop a sinner from sinning in anarchy in any more strict a fashion than they would in statism.

However, gotta say? It’s pretty ironic that somebody who started their business, partially citing it as a place for libertarians, is so hell bent on destroying any possibility of alliance between us now. It’s almost as though lulling people into a free speech site that is more censorious than Twitter in general, but more accepting of conservative ideas, needed a certain amount of libertarians to promote it. Hell, I was one of those people early on. But then I found out that the site was going to be unreceptive to my ideas, because it really wasn’t there for free speech. It was there for “free conservative speech”, not even particularly Christian conservative speech.

So, what you ended up with was a centralized platform run by a guy who objects to a certain culture, who would eventually end up using his site to restrict any activity which did not comport with that culture, claiming he was doing it for Christian reasons, all while prospering off the conditions therewith. By the way, I implore you, if you have been getting emails from them for a while now or have been watching their advertising, play that game I mentioned earlier. It’s hilariously obvious who they’re marketing towards, and part of that hilarity is exemplified by the fact that the Bible was not written in white countries by white people. But for some reason, it’s very difficult to spot anybody who’s not white in the advertising material for this site. It’s almost like they have an agenda, and it has very little to do with the Bible. Like maybe the Bible is just being tacked on now, to further cement and embolden the existing userbase. No more does this strictly aesthetic Christianity support the Bible than do corporations responsible for death, destruction, and more, adopting a rainbow flag aesthetic during pride month help anybody identifying as GSM.

But most of all, I hope whichever users of Gab see this, if any of them are even willing to give it a look, realize that they’ve been spitting on potential alliances against the common enemy of the State, for way too long. Perhaps during the Trump administration, they got emboldened, assuming that they would have a forever president. A god-emperor, ironically. But now, whether through legal means or otherwise, the Biden presidency is here to show people that the state will always serve the state’s interests, and there is no political solution.

Part of the reason SEKIII started to write was because he needed to provide a counterpoint to the writings of Murray Rothbard, who was pushing what SEK called partyarchy at the time. This was a strategy that was attempting to build a new party for libertarians, by libertarians, blah, blah, blah. It ultimately failed, and now, we’re left with people like Jo Jorgensen, a milquetoast Remax agent who jumped out of the hanging sign for the house she was supposed to be advertising, to advertise the blandest, least philosophically interesting approaches for the same kind of thing which had been failing for decades.

The Libertarian Party started to fail right at the beginning when the funding for libertarian activities was pouring in from conservative organizations, who turned it into nothing more than watered down republicanism, only to have it occasionally swing a little bit in the direction of Democrats, and pretty much never in the direction of anarchy. Libertarianism started out as an anarchist philosophy, and it needs that consistency in order to prevail, but the partyarchs got at it, and that was the beginning of the end. And no, I’m not recommending libertarians work with Republicans to Republican ends either. That would be counter to the point, and it ended poorly already when Rothbard tried the “paleo strategy.”

What I recommend, instead, is that libertarians remember their anarchist roots, and people who are interested in building this alternative economy in the name of living a more ethical, more Christian life, recognize the similarities between this approach and the free market principles of agorism. Neither the humor, nor the irony, are lost on me, when allegedly “Free Market™” Republicans reject a totally free market because that totally free market has been proposed by anarchists, so they settle back into proposing whatever legislation they need to in order to make them feel comfortable with participating in the unfree market. If this is you, reconsider what you consider a free market…because you have that wrong.

If this isn’t you, consider that maybe the only way to free the market is to smash the state. And the only way to oppose Mammon, powers, and principalities is to oppose the state right alongside all these people Andrew has told you to hate. We do need unity. And if this seems like an unconventional way to approach unity, remember not to lean unto your own understanding, because God works in mysterious ways, and maybe He has a plan that includes more market freedom than has ever seen its precedent.

Perhaps, the final stages of the Bible were a warning, and there is a possibility that if said warning is heeded, there’s a way forward after all, and the world needn’t end so soon. Ever occur to you that maybe the reason it’s so evil to be unable to buy and sell things without bearing the mark is because that Mark comes from the state, and is designed to force you into the city of man?

This means, beyond any doubt in my mind, that the answer to Revelations is counter-economics. Make of that what you will.