UPDATE 10/25/16: If you’ve come here after reading about a petition to cancel screenings of The Red Pill, I ask you to NOT sign any such petitions. It’s just free publicity for them. Read more of my thoughts on the matter here.
Dear Cassie Jaye,
Congratulations. You surpassed your Kickstarter fundraising goal yesterday, more than two weeks before the Kickstarter campaign was scheduled to come to a close. You’ve funded the postproduction work on your long-delayed documentary on Men’s Rights activists, and then some.
But I’m not sure that the person I should be congratulating is you. Last night Paul Elam of A Voice for Men – the central subject of your film – was doing his own victory lap online. And no wonder, because he seems to be the real victor here.
In a post on his site that managed to be giddy and vindictive at once, he offered his congratulations to you, then, well, to himself. “Even though the victory goes to Ms. Jaye,” he wrote, in an awkward attempt at modesty, “I have the need to offer up some thanks.”
And then he spelled out why he thinks your “victory” is really a victory for him.
For the past six years AVFM has had mud kicked in its face by a corrupt, left-wing media. Bottom feeders like Adam Serwer, Jeff Sharlet and Mariah Blake have performed endless unscrupulous acts, directly lying to their readers in order to attack AVFM, this movement and me personally.
Their work was not just to harm me, or to damage a website but to make sure if they could that the message we carry never found its way to the larger public. Their intent was and is to paint an indelible stain on all of us so hideous that we would never be taken seriously by enough people to matter.
They have failed, and I can now predict that they have failed miserably.
In other words, Paul Elam thinks he and his friends in what he ludicrously calls the “Men’s Human Rights Movement” have bought and paid for a feature-length advertisement for them.
And it’s not hard to see why Elam – and the other manospherians who’ve rallied around your film in recent days — think this. After all, they are the ones who have rescued your film from oblivion by pouring tens of thousands of dollars into your Kickstarter.
And all it took for you to unleash this torrent of money was an interview with one of the sleaziest figures in right-wing journalism, Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart.
In the interview, posted on Monday, you complained that “I won’t be getting support from feminists. They want a hit piece and I won’t do that.”
There was more than a little bit of irony in the fact that you were saying this to a man infamous for his many hit pieces on so-called “Social Justice Warriors.”
You also complained about an intern on your film who, you said, “had a lot of crying attacks and emotional experiences. She claimed everything I was showing her was triggering her.”
A young feminist “triggered” and crying. This is red meat to the Breitbart crowd, and I have to assume you knew this when you told Milo this story.
To an outside observer like me, this shameful pandering looks a lot like a Hail Mary play on your part. Having failed to convince most potential funders of the film that you would present anything close to an accurate picture of the Men’s Rights movement, you told Breitbart what its readers – and the broader manosphere – wanted to hear.
And it worked. Men’s Rights activists, self-professed “Red Pillers” and other assorted antifeminists rallied around your film, and the money started flowing.
On Reddit, the moderators of the Men’s Rights subreddit “stickied” an appeal to donate to your Kickstarter to the top of their front page, urging MRAs to open their wallets in order to show skeptics that “we can take part in some actual activism and not just post stuff in here.”
Even the regulars in the violently misogynistic Red Pill subreddit agreed to help bankroll your film.
And it wasn’t just Men’s Rights and “Red Pill” Redditors who organized support for your film. One right-wing Red Pill blogger, notorious for his harassment of ideological enemies, pledged to match donations up to $10,000, describing your documentary as “the Movie SJWs Do Not Want You to See.”
Meanwhile, on her blog, AVFM’s “social media director” Andrea Hardie (an internet bully better known under her pseudonyms Janet Bloomfield and “Judgy Bitch”) not only rallied her readers around your Kickstarter but also set up a gofundme of her own, raising money in hopes that it would buy Breitbart’s Yiannopoulos a producer credit in your film. (I hope that is out of the question, even if she raises more than the paltry amount she’s raised for this purpose so far.)
And then there was Elam himself, on Twitter, calling on his followers to, in his words, “Help fund #RedPillMovie because fuck feminists!”
https://twitter.com/AVoiceForMen/status/658700057311506432
Accepting money from these people would seem to be a pretty clear violation of the principles you set forth in your own Kickstarter video, in which you declared that
in order to keep this film non-partisan, and respectfully show all sides to this debate, we won’t accept funding from organizations that inevitably have biased agendas.
Instead, you have chosen to take money from people who see your film as a chance to say “fuck you” to feminists. You have chosen to take money from the actual subjects of your film.
You are making a film about Men’s Rights Activists, funded to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by Men’s Rights Activists. You are making a film about A Voice for Men funded in part by A Voice for Men.
Does that not trouble you at all? It should. In your interview with Breitbart, you noted that “films that support one side and act as propaganda do better than those that try to have an honest look.”
You said this, presumably, to set yourself apart from such propagandists. Now you seem to have cast your lot in with them.
Which I suppose makes sense, since the clips of your film that you’ve posted online so far look a lot more like propaganda than they do like any sort of honest look at the Men’s Rights movement,
I felt uneasy about your project from the start, concerned that you had been pulled in by the soothing but misleading rhetoric that MRAs spout when they are trying to sound more respectable than they really are, rather than on what MRAs actually say and do when the cameras are off of them.
But I knew you had a good reputation as a filmmaker, and heard good things from several feminists who knew you better than I did. So I held my tongue and tried my best to give you the benefit of the doubt, even when you posted clips from your film that portrayed AVFMers as heroic underdogs rather than the misogynists and malicious harassers that they really are.
When I wrote you a little over a week ago with some of my concerns, you assured me in the phone call that followed that the clips you had posted were only part of the story, that you were well aware that the MRAs you had interviewed were on their best behavior when talking to you, and that the real story of the Men’s Rights movement is far less rosy-hued. Against my better judgement, I continued to hold on to some kind of hope that you would live up to your reputation in the end.
And now, frankly, I feel like I’ve been played.
Unfortunately, it looks like you have been played too, much more spectacularly than I have. I suspect you are doing far more damage to your reputation than you even know.
One thing I have learned in five years of watching, and writing about, and dealing with, the Men’s Rights movement, is that if Paul Elam is happy about something, that thing is almost certainly terrible.
I suspect, sadly, that you will ultimately learn this lesson yourself, the hard way.
PS: In our phone conversation, you suggested that if you were able to fund your film, you might be able to finally film the interview with me that we originally had planned to do, but which fell through due to financial and other practical obstacles during the original filming of The Red Pill. At this point, I am sorry to say, that is completely out of the question.
@ Woody, you said
how many of those do not share your viewpoint? Crickets…
Have you ever heard of google? This was like about the first thing I hit when I typed “cassie jaye youtube”. Try it. You’ll be amazed.
I agree that there are some white males that deserve zero respect. There are also some females that deserve zero respect, right? Also some gay people that deserve zero respect. Also some trans people that deserve zero respect. I think all people that want to make everything about race and gender fall clearly into that camp.
Division by race and gender is wrong. I will always be against that, it goes against all that I stand for, which is equality for all people. I reject all peddlers of ways to build walls between race and gender. People that say “I am a man, so women are not allowed to comment on my life!” or “I am a woman, so men are not allowed to talk about womens issues!”. No, we are all entitled to debate, or else we live in a little totalitarian nightmare (I sometimes think that is what some people want – no debate, no discussion, silence all “wrong-think” etc).
“Jaye’s new buddy Matt Forney under his former pseudonym Ferdinand Bardimu once wrote about how domestic violence is necessary because without women will behave no better than chimps?”
I have no idea who that is. I’ll look into it, but I will tell you this, here is hypocrisy:
– Hillary Clinton actively opposed gay rights for 30 years, fighting hard to prevent gay marriage. Apparently she had a change of heart in 2013 (yeah, I bet it had nothing at all to do with focus groups suggesting it might hurt her in an election. noooo, that would be too hard to believe!).
– Jeff Sessions is *alleged* to have made racist comments in the 1980’s. Additionally, he fought against the KKK in the south of America and got the first death sentence for a KKK member since 1920. The KKK utterly despise him.
a) we are told that we must forgive Hillary all of her opposition to gay rights, and that she is a wonderful human being.
b) we are told that Jeff Sessions must be called a “racist” and “White Supremacist” until the end of time, even though he’s fought more against the KKK than probably every person that has ever criticised him.
So this is how I view the world. There is a lot of hypocrisy that wants to feed us fake narratives. I take people on what they DO, and I am quite wary about what they are “alleged” to have said. So whatever this person related to Cassie Jaye is, or has said, or has done, that is not a reflection upon her as a person. That exactly why I am against “racialising” and “genderising” everything. Take a person by their actions and words, and don’t listen to people that do pathetic hit pieces to try and demean and denigrate.
I don’t know who the author of this article that I’m commenting on is (it does not say) but that byline about how they refuse to do an interview with this Cassie Jaye, there is no other way to say it, that is about stifling debate, pure echo chamber bigotry.
I’ve watched the first part of that interview with Cassie Jaye, going to watch the second half later.
I’m assuming that Andrew, Dandy Andy, and Yor are all the same loser?
Oh, and I stumbled across this while perusing the archives a few days ago and bookmarked it just in case he comes back.
https://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2012/08/02/roosh-v-has-a-little-trouble-with-the-concept-of-no-tw-rape-apologia/comment-page-10/#comment-181240
Looks like he was here before, defending Roosh’s pro-rape drivel. What a fucking shock.
Defending Jeff Sessions. Adorable. Yes, I totally believe the neutrality schtick now.
@ Yor, I saw The Red Pill and it is worth seeing. When faced with facts and statistics that men do face discrimination any of those on the feminist side of the debate responded like holocaust denyers.
Many parts of the debate are troubling. The way the media covers gender and they way government responds is just one. The Islamist extremist group Boko Haram has killed hundreds of young boys and kidnapped thousands more in Nigeria. This received little attention in the media and from governments around the world yet when 200 young girls are kidnapped in Nigeria it takes over the headlines and is top-of-mind among governments and organizations like the UN.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-kidnapped-boys-of-boko-haram-1471013062
Yor, you are right about an open dialogue. You just won’t have a snowballs chance in hell of finding that here.
Andrew, did you create a sock so you could agree with it? Or were you stalking this thread so you immediately jump in the next time it was necro’d.
Either way, it makes you look like a real dipshit.
@ Yor, give up trying to win hearts and minds here. Most (not all) of the regulars on this site have cold hearts and closed minds. Not worth your time to try and warm their hearts to a real dialogue and open their minds to the real possibility that women do not have the market cornered on discrimination.
@ Woody,
I will file that under “I have been called much worse by far better”.
Again, as I have said on previous occasions people like you are part of the problem and not the solution. You illustrate this time and again.
I bathe in your tears sockpuppet.
I love the irony. I don’t *defend* Jeff Sessions. He could be a right asshole for all I know. But I made it clear. I showed clear hypocrisy. Hillary Clinton, 30 years of fighting AGAINST gay rights. So I know that Hillary is a toxic homophobic piece of sh*t. No wait, I can *show* that based on her fight against gay people. As I said, it’s all about what people do, not what fake news narratives tell us we are supposed to believe.
Anything to say about Hillary’s record on gay rights? no … just tumbleweed and a refusal to show anything resembling intellect huh …
weirwood, you are the definition of a bigot. Look up that word sometime, I don’t think it means what you think it means. Your bigotry (dictionary definition) is a joke to behold. You are like a child having a tantrum. You need to find out what “bigotry” means, and then you need to dip your whole self in sh*t. Would probably do you a lot of good (I know you are used to sh*t, as all you seem to do looking at your comments is hurl sh*t). I dunno why you are so pointless and so incapable of understanding (i.e. trying to say that I am defending Jeff Sessions, completely ignoring the content of what I said). I guess you just have a lack of education, very low I.Q. the usual, but there we go. You are a moron weirwood.
Sockpuppet, haha, I’m no one’s sockpuppet, that’s funny 🙂
I love the tears of you people. You are so bitter and twisted that the world does not love you. Reality is that the world probably doesn’t like you because you project your toxic values to everyone around you, and so everyone is repulsed by you. I get it, some men can be toxic shits also, but you people are just hilarious at how clueless you are “male tears” jesus, get a grip, are you still crying over Hillary losing. Did you cry and cry and cry some more? hehe 🙂
We didn’t address that point because it’s imaginary.
http://media.tumblr.com/8b8cb315e7890bc15893c96bcf6483dc/tumblr_inline_mrm6umYJJJ1qz4rgp.gif
Didn’t take long for Yor to melt down, did it?
@WWTH
http://i.imgur.com/cBG2ltl.gif
Dandy Andy, thanks, I’ll track that film down. I love the irony here. They cannot imagine the possibility that people could find their vile and offensive attitude obnoxious (cos they are just wonderful, in their perverted heads!) so any person like me that comes along must be a “sockpuppet”. It’s inconceivable that anyone could show them anything but reverence.
This article is ABOUT the stifling and shutting down of debate. That’s what this twit says right at the end of the article, basically, “I refuse to talk to this person, cos I am BETTER, so there!” just basically a child hurling it’s toys out of a pram. Absolutely hilarious.
I guess these people are what are called “Social Justice Warriors”, clueless that believe they are fighting for Jusice and Equality, but in fact are just toxic petulant crybabies that group gibber at anyone that disagrees with the group-think. Wow, truly pitiful … Cassie Jaye seems quite reasonable and smart from what I’ve seen on that interview so far. Is weirwood in charge here, it sort of looks like they all congregate around her, I’m guessing she’s she alpha-twit, they do seem to grovel at her feet a bit. Hey ho, I’ve seen Christian forums before, and you know, this is identical. Dogmatic, rude, paranoid, incapable of reasonable debate, etc etc. weirwood is as bad as the worst Evangelicals, but hilariously, just like the Evangelicals, she’s incapable of seeing it due to the complete brainwashing.
Wow, imagine being her partner. That must be awful … How anyone could suffer that. That poor person has my infinite sympathy …
@ Yor, see what I mean? Fucking pointless as most of these people are fucking clueless.
The funny thing is that, no, no feminazi stole my ice cream. You clowns don’t get it yet do you. No one really cares what you think. I know this is hard to take. You are constructing fairytales, like children. This idea that you are cool and in charge, and I’m crying over feminazi’s. If you got the same animation with me rolling about on the floor laughing with some fat angry twit radical feminists ranting all day long, then that would be spot on … 🙂
“PS: In our phone conversation, you suggested that if you were able to fund your film, you might be able to finally film the interview with me that we originally had planned to do, but which fell through due to financial and other practical obstacles during the original filming of The Red Pill. At this point, I am sorry to say, that is completely out of the question.”
Yeah, that’s not shutting down debate at all … lol. Wait a minute, change of heart, I’ve decided I want to be like you. I will say all the mantra’s to join the cult. “Patriarchy!”, “Toxic Masculinity!”, “Rape Culture!”, “It’s all straight white men’s fault “. Please let me join the cult. I’m guessing it has to be weirwood that ok’s it as she’s the most bitter? Please weirwood, please can become a bitter person with no social life, just like you! Go on, I’ll be great, I’ll say 50x “Patriarchy!”‘s (hail-Mary’s) a day, and flagellate myself over my “white male privilege” (original sin). I will be aspire to being as miserable and horrible as all the others, and I will put up GIF’s that try to make out that we are all really cool and tough and “right-on activists!” (instead of the fat basement manatees that the rest of the cult are!). Ok, I’m not a fat basement manatee, but apart from that, I reckon I’ve got what it takes to be as bitter and miserable as you are. Pleeeeeeeezzzzzzeeee? 🙂
Hmmm…
I’ve heard of masturbating into a sock, but this is ridiculous.
@wwth
May I please grovel at your feet briefly?
I think you already do grovel at her feet, as weirwood really does seem to be the “there was blood coming out of her … wherever!” chief manatee on this site. Andy, you are right, there is probably no point trying to have reasoned, equality based discussions with a Feminist. They are simply anti-Equality, dogmatic, empty, and hate-filled. I do live in hope of talking to reasonable feminists, but the cult-like (and manatee-like) behaviour is like a talking to a Christian about religion.
I had a friend that came up with a good way to get Womens Rights Advocates like these on-side, it was a brilliant strategy, and it does work. What you have to do is manipulate their “shame and victimhood” virus ideology against them. It’s a brilliant technique. They are so wrapped up in their dogma that they can’t stop themselves. It’s like throwing a dog a stick, they always go after it. Genius system, I’ve seen him wrap some around his finger quite well. Bedded a few of these miserable toxic sanitary towels as well (though I wouldn’t want to go there myself personally, I can only hold my nose so long).
IP,
Since I’m the chief manatee, I’m going to have to ask that you grovel at my flippers instead.