I SUPPORT EDGE ACTIVISTS FOR GOOD REASON
I am a typical anglo classical liberal who found insights into economics and law in the libertarian movement. In context, beginning in around 2009, under the obama administration, it was clear that the optimistic conservative movements had failed, and that included the libertarian and anarchocapitalist.

So during the period leading up to the 2020 election we saw the usual right wing factionalization searching for ideas and advocates. And as expected, with the election, with expected outcome, we saw the radical suppression of the ability to use social media as a means of circumventing the mainstream ‘gated institutional narrative’.

While I was myself a post-optimistic conservative, I did not expect whatsoever to be someone the right would favor, but my work, precisely because it addressed the taboo subjects, provided them with useful ideas and insights.

I was one of the first theorists to formally make use of the zero cost of the new social media to use King of the Hill Games as a research technique that circumvented the difference between reported and demonstrated behavior.

At the time I did not realize that the people most likely to speak the truth of their thoughts would be the ‘harder’ right – meaning people with low-agreeableness personality traits. And I engaged those people because well, they engaged me.

Our organization’s hypothesis was that the disenfranchised right could be mobilized if directed away from falling prey to leftist ‘baiting into hazard’ and mobilized against the coming suppression of free speech and canceling. What we learned is that this can’t be done.

Now, In my research work I ran across nearly everyone influential on the right. The right factions need someone who thinks proximally as they do. So they are forever weak, because they are forever factions.

So, people like Joel were able to capture an audience and educate that audience over time. I enjoyed Joel (and Dillon – Trudiltom) because I thought, that as a young man he was exceptionally talented and had a non-trivial understanding of the history of thought, as well as activism.

So I encouraged him as well as others who are in other ‘wings’ of conservatism such as Aarvol. Both of these people are ‘the real thing’. And I don’t need to agree with people who are the real thing trying to do the right thing. I figure each of us is moving a subset of the population.

For myself I consider my myself, my work, and my organization to be engaged in what is effectively mainstream scientific research directed toward legal and policy reform.

But we will support anyone with moral ambitions even if we consider their solutions a bit more extreme than we’d prefer to advocate ourselves.

Precisely because the factions each take their own path, and it’s the collective direction that matters more than the exactness of any one faction. -CD