The November 2023 issue of Texas Monthly contains an article that deploys the archetypes of our great anti-capitalist, government-supremacist, domestic imperialist passion play so deftly it could be a Hollywood movie: “Black-Owned Land Is Under Siege in the Brazos Valley.”

A siege is an act of war. Who is waging war on black Texans and how are they doing it? The article’s subtitle explains:

“Acre by acre, families have lost long-held property near Bryan and College Station—much of it to the efforts of two men who weaponized arcane documents to acquire plots potentially worth millions.”

The two men (a real estate owner and a lawyer) are white. And probably cis-gender, heterosexual, and heteronormative. Definitely rich, and just overall avatars of patriarchal, predatory capitalism. We can envision the movie: The Siege of Brazos Valley, or The Quick and the Deedless, or Once Upon A Time In Black Brazos.

Of course, a close reading of the article reveals the insidious claws of the state dug deep into the entire fabric of social reality. Why must “racist capitalism” be the scapegoat? It is because the state—backed by ultra violence, ritual, and myth—has made itself sacred.

The historian of reason Mark Ajita has argued that humans engage in three prevalent types of normative behavior: convention, standard, and ritual. Convention is founded on imitation, standard on dialogue, and ritual on “belief.” Ajita puts belief in quotation marks to suggest its deep and confusing complexity.

After all, belief has connections to concepts of “God” and “faith” and “consciousness,” and it can be held with or without reference to supportive knowledge claims. It can also be embodied with or without conscious awareness and (either way) is not amenable to accurate verbalization. Embodied beliefs can function as “unknown knowns,” something former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld implicitly warned us about in 2002. He was tricking us into war with Iraq, but he still had a good point.

The libertarian frame of reference is confronted by the fact that people believe in the state. They believe in its necessity, its inevitability, and its righteousness. At worst, the state is a black box of potential benevolence. At best it is a “shining city upon a hill,” delivering peace and justice and also lower grocery prices. When people perceive injustice, they are programmed to trace it anywhere but the blood-soaked marble steps of state malevolence.

The villains of Brazos County are certainly villainous. Yet their villainy is made possible, facilitated, and exacerbated by the state. The real estate owner came up in the game specializing “in ‘courthouse steps’ auctions, buying real estate seized for unpaid taxes and flipping it for a profit.” The article frames this as vulture capitalism. But wait a minute. It is the state that imposes taxes, seizes property when those taxes go unpaid, and then auctions it off.

The real estate owner then began targeting “heirs’ property,” most if not all of it owned by black people. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture:

“Heirs’ property is family-owned land that is jointly owned by descendants of a deceased person whose estate did not clear probate. The descendants, or heirs, have the right to use the property, but they do not have a clear or marketable title to the property since the estate issues remain unresolved.”

The real estate owner and his lawyer appear to have engaged in fraud, but their basic approach to scooping up heirs’ property was within the parameters of the law. What kind of diabolical law is this!? Families that had lived and worked on land and then passed it to their descendants for more than a century can be forced to sell it because the state doesn’t have documentation it regards as valid?

Libertarianism emphasizes self-ownership and the ownership of property (especially land) as an extension of the individual. As Robert LeFevre observed:

“Currently in the United States, although we praise private ownership of the land as the bulwark of our system of land ownership, the taxes levied actually perpetuate a kind of collectivity in ownership. The social group (the city, county, or state) collects a fee for the use of the land…This practice, aided by the customs of eminent domain, central planning, and zoning, emphasizes that we still pay tribute to the primitive system of collective land ownership.”

The article explains that so many black Texans (and black Southerners in general) live on heirs’ land as a result of nineteenth century slavery and the post-Civil War Reconstruction. This is a foundational element of our anti-capitalist culture. Radical chic, postmodern, revisionist academics love to portray capitalism as compatible with (if not dependent for its genesis on) slavery and as inherently racist. To many a scholarly type, there is no difference between nineteenth century radical abolitionists and the people who wanted to reopen the North Atlantic Slave Trade. They’re all just a bunch of racists.

Yet it was the state that made slavery at scale possible, underwriting it with its taxation and ultra violence. As Joshua Mawhorter observed:

“Slavery, largely because of its high enforcement costs, was always vulnerable to cronyism…how could slaveholders shift the economic burden off of themselves and onto others? The answer is that the only way this could be achieved was through employing the legal and coercive apparatus of government to enforce the system.”

It is through coercion that the state establishes its sacred status. It is through killing that it shields itself from the condemnation it deserves. Never forget what it looks like when the state lays siege to black Texans.

The state has instilled unquestioning belief in its apparatus deep within the people. For many, it is an unknown known that the state is God.