What is the John Galt Cargo Cult?

A new “provocative, Marxist-informed defense of looting” has been published by Bold Type Books, and author Vicky Osterweil has unwittingly penned a stirring appeal for the creation of a “John Galt Cargo Cult.”

In Defense of Looting postulates that a new world is possible, and that “joyous and liberatory” looting will help to usher that world into existence.

Looting, says Osterweil, “attacks the idea that in order for someone to have a roof over their head … they have to work for a boss, in order to buy things that people just like them somewhere else in the world had to make under the same conditions. It points to the way in which that’s unjust.”

And looting also “demonstrate[s] that without police and without state oppression, we can have things for free” and “provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be.”

Osterweil doesn’t specify which imaginary world we’ll have after looting brings down the “unjust” system of work, so I’ll take it on faith that in her new society I can either build my own big-screen TV or get one for free from the local smash-and-grab.

What she does specify is the “right wing myth” that small business owners create jobs and are part of the community.

Wait, let me quote that in full, because all small business owners — no matter how, or if, they vote — should be terrified that this ideology is being unleashed on America:

“It’s actually a Republican myth that has, over the last 20 years, really crawled into even leftist discourse: that the small business owner must be respected, that the small business owner creates jobs and is part of the community. But that’s actually a right-wing myth.”

If it’s not clear to you yet that Marxists don’t respect the owners of community pharmacies, gas stations, or restaurants — businesses that enable our communities to function, or just make our lives enjoyable — Osterweil clarifies:

“A business being attacked in the community is ultimately about attacking like modes of oppression that exist in the community.”

You see, whether you own a family-run pharmacy or a small Ecuadorian restaurant or a corporation named Target, the looters really aren’t attacking you, or the family you support, or the people you employ. They’re attacking “the way food and things are distributed” or other forms of oppression like “the idea of property.”

As the Huffington Post put it, this isn’t a “betrayal” of the Black Lives Matter protests. It’s “a vital aspect of the movement.”

Marxists like Osterweil are not just calling for your business to be looted in the name of equality. They are calling for the utter elimination of your ability to own anything at all.

* * *

In 1940, or so goes the myth, a man who identified himself as “John from America” appeared in a native village in the New Hebrides Islands with a message: Rebel against the colonizers, their missions, their schools, their laws, and John would reward them with free housing, clothing, food, and transportation.

The result was the “John Frum Cargo Cult” that persists to this day in the modern-day South Pacific nation of Vanuatu.

Frum’s message was remarkably similar to Vicky Osterweil’s message: rebel against settler domination, against the history of whiteness, and someone will reward you with all the free stuff you need.

Like Osterweil’s chaotic myth of impossibly contradictory Marxist worlds, we can’t be sure who the mythical John Frum was, how or when he arrived, whether he was a man or a spirit-being, if he lived in the U.S. or in the island’s active volcano, or if he first appeared as a tiger on an island where no tigers live, as a black man with a moustache, or as a white man who magically spoke the native language.

You can pick your own truth about Frum, because Marxists will tell you it’s no better than anyone else’s truth.

And, like every other false promise spoken by the fork-tongued followers of the dead white male devil Karl Marx, John Frum brought with him a vision of the future in which the old social order is violently dismantled, a new world is born, and the people emerge with material wealth, happiness, hope, and success.

After Frum left the islands, large numbers of Americans in their flying machines immediately and miraculously followed, building military airstrips and bringing in enormous quantities of cargo. Everything came to pass just as John Frum had promised.

The residents of the islands, of course, did not understand modern manufacturing or transportation, or that World War II was underway. The cargo simply arrived at the airstrip in the jungle, apparently by magic.

Kind of like the Target stores around the country that are repeatedly looted only to be magically restocked by the invisible hand of an invisible genius named John Galt.

* * *

At this point I must make it perfectly clear that I, myself, do not believe that modern Americans of any race, creed, color, or socioeconomic status, are somehow akin to the stone-age islanders before or after they formed the John Frum Cargo Cult.

I leave that to Vicky Osterweil, whose malignant cult of Marxism would shackle all Americans — but Black Americans, especially, because her target is on their backs — to an existence of waiting on a mythically benevolent state to hand out housing and food, where the dignity of individual effort is worth nothing because everything is free.

So, who is John Galt? Well, he’s not a mythical being who provides all your material needs by magic. He’s a fictional genius in Atlas Shrugged who rebels against looters like Vicky Osterweil who take over family-run pharmacies, small Ecuadorian restaurants, and corporations named Target, and “accidentally” destroy the economy.

John Galt says America’s endless ability to invent, produce, transport, and provide a dizzying array of goods is the natural result of science, individual hard work, and free markets.

The native islanders of 1940 called it magic that mysteriously ceased on September 2, 1945.

Vicky Osterweil calls it oppression that must be looted until someone calls a stop to the looting and constructs a new world of material wealth and happiness where, mysteriously, looters don’t exist.

In a world seen through that Marxist lens, working “for a boss” so you can buy things is evidence of an “unjust” system. And the George Floyd riots are evidence of “the history of slavery and settler domination of the country” because living in Minneapolis in 2020 is the same as being a slave in 1619 Jamestown.

And if you’re a slave, then looting is “basically nonviolent mass shoplifting” that “immediately provides” poor people with the ability to “live a better life.”

“It’s just money,” Osterweil protests. “It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people.”

So if Marxism is about ending slavery and giving the poor a better life, why not enact Osterweil’s entire agenda? The state-ordered takeover of every private business. The abolition of private property. Where everything is free, and if you work at all you work for the benevolent state that just liberated your property by force.

Because that’s when John Galt leaves the building.

The result of Osterweil’s malevolent ideology isn’t freedom, and someone “who gets free food, housing and clothing but never actually owns any of it and their rights to their own labor is forfeit” isn’t free. No, that person is a slave.

And the desperate people, huddled by the airstrip carved out of the asphalt jungle, waiting for the next shipment of cargo that’s never going to arrive?

That’s the John Galt Cargo Cult.