Anonymous asked: Molyneux being a Fed actually explains so much of his behavior. What about Christopher Cantwell, what odds do you give him of being a Fed?
Cantwell was the other obvious one I had in mind, yeah. And Richard Spencer tried to crash that libertarian conference, so I guess he counts as well.
It’s kind of lost in the mists of 4chan history now but one of the defining events in the early ideological development of what was to become /pol/ was the Hal Turner saga. 4chan mercilessly screwed with this guy running a white supremacist Internet radio show, mostly for the lulz, and wound up costing him thousands of dollars in excess bandwidth fees until it was revealed that he had been a fed all along. The fact that this asshole was sponsored by the government to act as a pied piper for potential radicals was a big shiny red pill the politically engaged segment of 4chan was forced to swallow, and it gave a lot of credibility to what would otherwise be dismissed as racist conspiracy theories, a genre that came to dominate the discussion on /new/, the predecessor of /pol/.
I’m always on the lookout now for libertarian Hal Turners and I’m very skeptical of anyone who’s just some dude with a podcast calling himself one of us while acting purposefully offensive, starting feuds against more credible libertarian figures, and particularly anyone who explicitly calls for violence like Cantwell has.
Cantwell strikes me as being too crazy to be a fed. The dude has legitimate substance abuse problems and a history of erratic behavior. Not only that, but he’s not the brightest bulb on the tree, if he was a fed he’d probably have given it away by now.
Spencer doesn’t strike me as a fed either, he’s probably more realistically a Duginist puppet.
Someone with substance abuse problems piteously begging for money on the Internet sounds like the ideal candidate to become a federal informant to me though. If he isn’t a fed I feel bad for the guy, but either way he’s left the fundamental principles of the ideology far behind at this point.
And you may be right on Spencer, but again, either way he’s not on the level about who he is and what he represents, and his attempts to associate himself with other groups should be seen as hostile attempts at discrediting them. Becoming a universally reviled figure and then attaching yourself to causes to damage them is a time-honored tactic of intelligence services - Aleister Crowley probably served that purpose for British intelligence, for example.