When Miriam Carey died in a hail of bullets after leading Capitol police on a car chase from the White House to the Capitol last Thursday, the incident seemed to make no sense. Why had Carey done what she did? She had no weapons on her. She seemed to have no political motive. There seemed to be no real plan to her “attack” on the White House security perimeter. There was a baby in the car with her.
As reporters began to look into her story they discovered that Carey had been suffering from serious mental illness and that her ill-fated trip to Washington DC may have been driven by delusions about Obama. One of her sisters told ABC News that Carey had been diagnosed with “postpartum depression with psychosis” after the birth of her child about a year ago.
Her delusions seem to have centered around Obama. According to CBS:
Law enforcement sources confirmed to Orr Friday that Miriam Carey, 34, a licensed dental hygienist of Stamford, Conn., told police in December that she was a prophet, that President Obama would place the city of Stamford under a “lockdown” and that he had her and her residence under electronic surveillance.
While the details of Carey’s illness or illnesses remain unclear, what was clear,and quickly, was that Carey had been a deeply troubled woman who may have had only a tenuous grip on reality during the frenzied car chase that ended with her death.
But Men’s Rights videoblogger Stefan Molyneux isn’t having any of it. His explanation for the events in Washington last Thursday? A spontaneous outburst of “rank female evil.”
In a video titled “No Excuses for Female Evil!” Molyneux complains that the media “rushed in to defend, to explain and to strip the woman’s body of any moral responsibility for dragging a child into basically a suicidal death-by-cop situation.”
So, in other words, a woman, for no reason other than pure “female evil,” decided to attack the White House with her car and put her child in jeopardy in the subsequent car chase. As he puts it:
It may be hard for you to process just how evil this is because there’s so much propaganda shielding women from actually having any moral responsiblity.
Molyneux then compares her to James Holmes, the young man who marched into a movie theater in Aurora Colorado, armed to the teeth and wearing body armor, and deliberately murdered 12 people in cold blood before being taken down by police. Molyneaux asks us to imagine if Holmes had gone into the theater with “a baby in a little backpack. … would we not find that even more appalling?”
He asks a similar question about Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber.
So I guess the implication is that she was somehow worse than these two monsters?
Molyneux handwaves away the talk of postpartum depression — he somehow fails to notice that Carey was apparently diagnosed with the rarer and more severe condition of postpartum psychosis — as a “hormones made me do it” excuse.
“What happened to women being morally responsible for what they do?” he asks incredulously.
It seems a strange question to ask about a woman who in fact died in a hail of bullets at the hands of the police who were chasing her. Clearly, they considered her responsible for her actions, and she was confronted, and chased, and killed because of them.
When someone commits a crime, we judge them in part based on what they do, but we also judge them in part on their state of mind at the time.
Carey is being treated differently than Holmes and McVeigh in the media not because of her gender but because her actions, her motivations, and her state of mind all seem to have been dramatically different from the two male mass killers.
Holmes and McVeigh committed crimes that were carefully and methodically planned; both intended to kill as many innocent victims as possible. While McVeigh was obviously troubled, he doesn’t seem to have been seriously out of touch with reality. And while Holmes’ lawyers argue that he was in the midst of a psychotic episode at the time, it’s hard to reconcile this argument with the months of planning and preparation that seem to have preceded the shooting rampage.
Carey, by contrast, didn’t kill anyone and didn’t have any weapons. There’s no evidence that she planned anything in advance, or that she had much of a plan at all; she seems to have simply driven down to Washington and up to the entrance of the White House. All of this is consistent with someone in the midst of a psychotic break.
It’s not an issue of gender. Clearly someone who is not in touch with reality is not morally culpable for their actions in the same way the rest of us are.
But Molyneux isn’t really interested in making fine moral distinctions. He is more interested in using Carey’s case as an excuse to rant about the evil that is woman.
The evil that women are capable of and the evil that women do — not all women — but the evil that women do is generally invisible to society which is why there’s so much violence in society.
Uh, come again?
Molyneux then trots out the standard Men’s Rights argument that women are responsible for adult male violence because women commit more child abuse than men. Of course, this is because women are more likely to be the ones taking care of the children and thus in a position to abuse the children. Men who are never around children are not likely to abuse them, just as people who don’t live in France are unlikely to commit a lot of crimes in France.
Molyneux purports to be flabbergasted by this sort of argument, and suggests that it’s similar to arguing that men beat up their wives “because wives are so innately annoying, of course they’re going to beat them up, because they spend time around them, and so it’s the wives’ fault for being annoying.”
Never mind that no one is suggesting that children are to blame for being abused, simply that people who are not in physical proximity to children aren’t able to abuse them.
At this point Molyneux seems to be overwhelmed by his feelings about all of this, and collapses in a heap of mixed metaphors:
See, men have moral responsibility but we have to build these little shimmering cathedrals around the sensitivities of these little dandilions called women who just float around without any responsibility just being pushed and buffeted around by hormones and society and patriarchy and oh my God.
I stopped taking notes at this point as he babbled on and on.
Here’s his terrible video, in case you want to watch the whole thing:
“Plan 9 is doomed by the lack of funding anyways.”
Kickstarter anyone?
What good is Plan 9 if Ed Wood isn’t around to run it?
Or is this … ZOMBIE ED WOOD we’re talking about? :O
Reblogged this on iheariseeilearn.
This article sucks. And I don’t even like Molyneux.
Well, at least it’s 12 min of rambling instead of almost 2 hours. It’s intellectual masturbation for his followers and himself. Erudite gobbly gook with maybe something here and there of substance. Not much, but something of substance. Just my opinion anyway, lol
Goldenblack, I’m sorry and glad you got help. I hope you’re doing okay. Thank you for sharing such a personal story with us. You’ve really highlighted how the mentally/emotionally typical just don’t understand.
You are insane. holding a person MORALLY responsible, does not occur in a hail-fire of bullets. Holding a person morally responsible occurs in social outlets and the media. I came here because i was looking for decent arguments as to why stefan molyneux is a crackpot (because he is) but you my dear are only supporting his points with this absurd drivel.
That’s nice, dear. Have a cookie.
I’m wondering what wombat’s own views are on this tragic event from October. All I can really gather from that comment is that David is wrong, and Molyneux is wrong, because mumblemumblecrackpotmumble.
And you, wombat, are incredible ableist.
How dare you impugn the good name of wombat.
The wombat will NOT be impugned.
I’m glad you posted Stef’s video so everybody can see what an idiot you are.
Silly little drive-by, no1curr.
@aaronanason
“I
’m glad youpostedStef’s videoso everybody can see what an idiotyou are.I am ”FTFY
I really shouldn’t have said “drive-by” given the particular post this is on. Sorry, I didn’t check carefully which page I was navigating to.
What I meant is, Aaron has left their one comment and will now never come back, satisfied that he’s told David Futrelle what’s what in his devastating months-late retort.
First of all, liking fake maple syrup makes you a horrible person with zero redeeming factors. Simply put, you are worse than Hitler and are likely incurably insane.
So hold on… We don’t blame women for their actions? See, that’s interesting because it seems to me that we not only blame women for their actions but for men’s actions as well. Like, I don’t know, take a random example that has nothing to do with this because it’s not like it was just mentioned in this article and the video in question. Women committing more child abuse than men and as a result turning men into criminals through no fault of their own. That’s one completely random example that came from God-knows-where.
But wait… Women are NEVER blamed for things that happen to them either. Like rape. Nope… Not once. Never, ever do I hear a story of a woman being told she was irresponsible or that she was wearing the wrong thing or that she shouldn’t have been out at night or anything like that! Never! Oh, and I don’t read YouTube comments to the effect of “I’m convinced 90% of the bitches who cry about rape are lying” everyday. And that’s not a direct copy and paste. No sir. And neither is this: “Hot bitches are ONLY good for sex.” Or this. “Some news for you girls. Sexual objectification is not a thing.” No, those are not directly pasted off of Comments on YouTube.
Nope. That sure doesn’t happen! You’re right, there’s no rape culture. There’s no patriarchy. It’s just not there. Yes, you are 100% right about that. You are very smart, clearly. Please, tell me more about how the REAL victims of sexism are exclusively male. And how the real victims of racims are white people.
And let’s not forget the Garden of Eden incident. Eve, the naive irrational PMSey woman child was easily corrupted by the Serpent (because emotions and menses and such) and Adam, a decent and loving man who wanted to keep his irresponsible, emotional, and childlike wife Eve happy, bit the bullet and took one for the team so that Eve wouldn’t have to endure the consequences of her impulsive and rationality-devoid actions alone. Always the White Knight, that Adam. And Eve, what a pain in the ass that harpy was! Adam, clean up the fallen branches! Adam, go gather the apples! Adam, go take out the trash! Amiright, fellas?!
Liking the sentiment, loving the sarcasm but not the ableism.
This is also why mental illness needs to be taken seriously in this country. I’ve seen even on progressive sites the commenters who are educated about lots of things not wanting to talk about mental illness. Of course some of them couch it in a “I don’t want to vilify mentally ill people” thing but honestly I think it just makes them uncomfortable. I don’t usually talk about this but one of my closest friends in the world has been suffering from schizophrenia all her life and it got bad when she was 14. She saw a little girl who was not real who had color-changing hair and her mouth was sewn-shut. I’m not interested in anyone trying to analyze her, thank you, but what I will say is that she’s told me that I was the only person she ever told about a lot of that stuff and during some of her hardest moments it seemed like I was the only thing holding her together. She’s since learned that it was her who was holding the darkness at bay but the therapist said I did help a lot. Now that we’re older I look back on it and see that she didn’t have anywhere to turn. Her parents didn’t want to do anything and she knew it. She never told them about most of it. She told them she saw ghosts when she was young and they’re religious so they believed that rather that face the possibility that maybe they were dealing with something that might necessitate them putting forth some effort. That’s mostly an issue of bad parenting but even now she struggles to get the treatment she needs and many psychiatrists are not willing to deal with patients who have severe or even moderate mental illness. I’ve been told I have a form of mental illness too. I have intense anxiety and sometimes pretty bad depression. Is that mental illness? It’s definitely not like schizophrenia. But is it mental illness? I tend to think no but then again, I’m not well, am I? I need medication to think straight so maybe. This is the kind of thing that has to be talked about and understood so that things like this can be nipped in the bud as soon and as often as possible.
I’ve seen the “let’s just not talk about it” mentality on feminist sites, on politically progressive sites, on atheist sites, on gay rights sites and everywhere else. If you’re a feminist don’t you understand that just not talking about it leads to further entrenching the status quo and that it then gets even harder to change? If you’re gay, don’t you understand why it’s important to educate people so that they know what they’re talking about and how many people are affected? If you’re progressive politically, don’t you understand how more information leads to more informed positions (funny how that works) and that leads to better decision making?
It’s a national disgrace how many homeless mentally ill people we have in the US. It’s a national disgrace how badly we fail at getting people the help they need and forcing them to get it when necessary. This is what happens when we just don’t talk about it. If this is your mindset, this is what you get.
This is something that needs to be changed. Fast. We need to take mental illness seriously right now. It’s one of the causes of the mass shootings, it’s the reason for a lot of discrimination, and it’s the subject of monumental ignorance. We need this in the minds of the public. We need to demand action.
By the way, “insane” is a legal term. You’ll never find a psychiatrist calling someone “insane.” There’s a reason I didn’t say “crazy” or something. I said insane because it does not refer to anything specific nor does it vilify anyone. It’s used as a sort of way to say “legally incompetent.” The implication is that it means you’re forever tainted by that view and that it will affect your mindset. This is yet another example of the casual ignorance we have about mental illness. “Insane” and “crazy” are not the same thing. (“Crazy” is not a diagnosis either, by the way. It’s a word I’d like to see disappear in all honesty.)
We do talk about mental illness here. We talk about it a lot. We just don’t use crazy or insane as a put down.