Living in the Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler

Author:James Howard Kunstler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950665129
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2019-12-13T16:00:00+00:00

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME

Yet, here he was now: Rob Freeman, a middle-aged family man still dabbling, when he could find the time, in a young man’s game of political agitation. He left Boston and came to the Quiet Corner of Connecticut in 2003 because he could afford to live there. His wife, Anna, was working as a licensed attorney and Rob worked for her for years as a paralegal. He hit a speed bump when Anna ran for an elected probate court judgeship and her opponent discovered Rob’s alt-right connections—and “doxxed,” or outed, him publicly. Anna lost the election.

He wanted to run a business of his own, and he liked the idea of a cab company.

“I wanted to be the mass transit operator of Windham County. But also I didn’t want Muslims to start a taxi company here.”

“Were they doing that?” I asked. “Here or elsewhere?”

“Yeah. Taxi companies are typically owned by foreign people. And mostly Indians open convenience stores and liquor stores. This is what the Thomas Friedman/Bret Stephens New York Times guys are like: foreigners are so great, so wonderful, because they open businesses . . . aren’t they wonderful! Well, let me tell you something about the foreigners opening businesses here. They have somewhere to flee after they get caught stealing everything that ain’t nailed down. They stiff their creditors, they stiff their employees. They stiff the IRS. They stiff the state. They stiff the local taxes. They don’t pay anything and they just put the money in their pocket as much as possible, and then when they finally get caught, they go back to their home country. That’s why foreigners like to start businesses here: because they get the money, and they don’t pay anything.”

“Surely some of them really want to stay here and play by the rules.”

“But a lot of them are doing that model,” he said, “and they find all kinds of ways to game the system, and because they’re ‘diversity,’ the government lets them do it, the government looks the other way.”

In 2014, Rob Freeman set up his cab company with $20,000 of his own savings plus $80,000 in a business loan. He continues to battle the intermediary company that is supposed to channel the state’s payments of his invoices and always drags it out as long as possible. What you have read are his unadulterated ideas and beliefs about the current state of our national life. This is obviously not a comprehensive survey of alt-right ideas and activities across the USA, but of an individual with his own singular history. Many readers will find much of this material unappetizing, but at least you know what one particular self-described white nationalist is thinking. It’s better than not knowing.

As with everyone else I talked to for this book, I asked him the same concluding question: Now what . . .? He answered in an email some months after my visit to the Quiet Corner.

Buddhism, I’ve found, is how to live in Hell without becoming a devil.

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