Steve Klabnik and Alex Payne, Support of Terror and Mass Murder

The brown scare has come for Moldbug, he was banned from Strange Loop. Two of the ringleaders of this particular round of left-wing McCarthyism are Steve Klabnik and Alex Payne. Yarvin was banned for his political writing, so let’s look at the kind of political writing these two are involved with and judge them in a manner similar to the way they have judged Moldbug.

I had a tweet where Steve Klabnik wrote in support of looting that I was going to link to, but he’s since protected his Twitter account, so I’ll just state here that he’s come out in support of the use of looting as a form of political violence. But beyond advocating political violence, Steve Klabnik has written in support of Marxism and calls himself a communist.

For those who are unaware, communism is the single deadliest ideology in history. In all, about 150,000,000 people (estimates vary) have been murdered by communists in just the last century, far more than the mere 21,000,000 killed by nazis. Communists were responsible for the Holodomor (the genocide which killed about 4 million Ukranians), the Great Leap Forward (which killed about 20-30 million), the Cultural Revolution (which killed 1-3 million and persecuted 36 million), the Red Terror (which kill 1-2 million), the Great Purge (which killed about 1 million), and the Cambodian genocide (which killed 2 million, a quarter of the Cambodian population), just some of the mass killings they have enacted.

Steve proudly and openly supports an ideology who’s primary legacy is mass murder, political terrorism, and totalitarian government. Like most communists, Steve equivocates. He supports communism and calls himself a communist but says he disagrees with the dictatorship of the proletariat. A very useful and disingenuous motte & bailey communists like to hide behind when somehow, every communist regime implemented ever somehow leads to the same violence and repression. I’m sure Steve’s particular brand of communism will miraculously avoid the violence of every other attempt at communism.  If someone claimed to be a nazi, but said he wasn’t into the whole Jew-killing thing, would that be a sufficient defence to those who would excuse this?

Of course, we can see that given that Steve uses his very limited power to suppress those he disagrees with, such as Curtis Yarvin, it would not seem amiss to think that he would gladly use stronger methods of suppression had he the power, just like all the communists who preceded him.

This is whom Strange Loop believes should dictate the morality of tech conferences, a man who openly flies the same banner as the greatest mass murderers in history, who proudly believes in an ideology of violence, terror, totalitarianism, and genocide?

Alex Payne is on the advisory board of and has written for a magazine called the Jacobin. For those who don’t know, the Jacobins were the leaders of the French Revolution and the appropriately named Reign of Terror. The  French Revolution was a revolt that killed 100,000 people. Following the revolution, the Jacobins put a despotism in place and instituted the Reign of Terror which arrested 300,000 people and 27,000 people killed by the Jacobins, including women who were raped and tortured to death. About 40,000 people died in total. In addition, the Jacobins exhibited extreme bigotry and violence against Christians, murdering and exiling priests and destroying churches.

So, this is the moral leader to whom Strange Loop bows? Someone who proudly identifies himself with mass murderers and rapists. A man who aligns himself with the ideals of political terror, tyranny, and religious bigotry and suppression.

Given that he uses his minor influence to suppress those who don’t agree with his, it would seem Alex Payne’s ‘democratic socialism’ is only differing from the Jacobin terrors by degree, not kind. If he had more power, would he hesitate to use it as the Jacobins before him?

So, to Alex Miller and Strange Loop organizers, I am going to ask, are supporters of movements of mass murder, genocide, political terror, and bigotry really the kind of people you want dictating who can and can not speak at your conference?

Why are these supporters of violence accepted at tech conferences? Why are these who give support to terror and murder allowed to dictate who is allowed to speak about technology issues? So you want to give more power to those who support oppressive and violent ideologues when they have already shown they will use what little power they have to suppress people they don’t like?

So, Alex Miller and Strange Loop, take a stand against these violent ideologies and do not let their supporters use your conference as a tool to suppress those who disagree with their murderous ideologies.

8 comments

  1. The essential rebuttal to the whole Strange Loop debacle. Great stuff. Of course, in the sorry excuse for education to prevalent in the west today, one can see a great difference between the teachings on the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.

    More focus is given to the Holocaust than WWII

    More focus is given to the Cold War than Soviet oppression

  2. FN, you’re letting the Jacobins off waaaaaayyyy too easy.

    The figure you give of 100,000 deaths is actually an estimate (a fairly low one) for the number of counter-revolutionaries massacred in the revolt in the Vendee, a single province (whose inhabitants, chiefly peasants, were curiously attached to the ancien regime). The total number of deaths from the French Revolution is much higher — 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 at least (http://necrometrics.com/wars18c.htm#FrRev1).

    That’s not counting the rebellion on Saint-Domingue (now the thriving independent republic of Haiti!), in which another 100,000-200,000 perished — including as many as a third of the black Haitians it “liberated.”

    Nor is it counting the 2 to 6 million soldiers and civilians who perished in the Napoleonic Wars, which are also layable to the Jacobins’ account for at least two reasons — it was their destruction of the old order that made the rise of a madman like Bonaparte possible, arguably all but inevitable; and it was their special brand of messianic-republican, fanatical nationalism that kept the French war machine chugging for more than two decades.

    In a sane world, “Jacobin” would belong to the vilest class of slur, on a level with “Nazi.” That a semi-reputable thinkmag can get away with using the name tells you all you need to know about who owns the past.

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