Filmmaker Cassie Jaye seems to have developed a weird affinity for bigots.
First, she cozied up to some of the most hateful figures in the Men’s Rights movement during the filming of her documentary The Red Pill.
Then, when her funding for the film ran out, she happily accepted financial assistance not only from the actual subjects of the film but also from a motley assortment of far-right ideologues — among them a notorious quasi-journalist who was famously tossed off of Twitter after his fans barraged Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones with racist abuse, and a delusional Trump superfan who literally believes he gave Hillary Clinton the flu with his mind. (After a big donation to Jaye, he got himself an associate producer credit on her film.)
Now she’s trying her best to drum up interest in her film, which has barely drawn any notice at all outside the overlapping spheres of alt-right lady haters and MRAs since it premiered at a New York theater earlier this month.
While The Red Pill got a glowing, if rambling, “review” from new pal/volunteer fundraiser Milo Yiannopoulos at Breitbart, and a somewhat less-enthusiastic thumbs-up from Cathy Young at the right-wing internet tabloid Heat Street, the two real film reviewers who’ve bothered to give it a look have panned it.
Katie Walsh at the Los Angeles Times took issue with the film’s “uncritical, lopsided” argument, complaining that Jaye “twists herself in knots to justify the movement’s misogynist rhetoric.” The Village Voice’s Alan Scherstuhl dismissed Jaye as an inept “propagandist” and warned potential viewers that, as the headline to his piece put it, “You Can’t Unsee ‘The Red Pill,’ the Documentary About a Filmmaker Who Learns to Love MRAs.” (His review of what he described as an “agonizing” film caused much wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the MRA crowd.)
With little hope of attracting positive attention from film critics, and apparently desperate for any publicity she could get, Jaye agreed to appear on the podcast of an internet-famous bigot who has been described by one critic, not without reason, as “THE MOST WARPED USELESS PEICE OF SH*T THAT I HAVE EVER HAD THE DISPLEASURE TO ENCOUNTER [on the] INTERNET OR ELSEWHERE.”
I am talking, of course, about the rape-excusing, abuse-encouraging, lady-hating, gay-baiting white supremacist Matt Forney — he’s the one on the left in the photo below.
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/787198238575120384
She didn’t just give Forney a couple of minutes of her time; she sat down with him for roughly three-quarters of an hour for his podcast “This Alt-Right Life.” It’s a singularly unedifying discussion. At one point she mentions that she used to get into arguments with her boyfriend every month about nothing, something she now jokingly blames not on PMS but on her (former) feminism.
Badump-tsssh!
She also expressed sympathy when Forney mentioned that he himself had been the victim of a “false” rape accusation. (Imagine that, the author of a blog post titled “Why Girls Rarely Mean No When They Say No” being accused of rape!)
Not that long ago, Jaye was by all appearances a staunch opponent of pretty much everything Forney and his alt-right pals stand for.
In 2012, she released a documentary titled “The Right to Love,” which, according to its description on IMDb, is the portrait of a “Californian married gay couple and their two adopted children,” fighting against the forces of “discrimination, ignorance and hate” who would deny them their right to marry and raise children.
Now she’s appearing on the podcast of a guy who is a virtual embodiment of this ignorance and hate.
It’s not as if evidence of Forney’s despicable views is hard to find, and not just in the WHTM archives. The name of his podcast contains the phrase “alt-right.” In the list of “popular posts” highlighted in the sidebar of his blog one finds such lovely titles as “How to Crush a Girl’s Self-Esteem” and “Why Fat Girls Don’t Deserve to Be Loved.” (Neither title is meant ironically.)
And then there is the endless stream of racist, misogynist and homophobic abuse that is his Twitter account. Some highlights from the last several days:
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/790064680907792386
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/790364983171354625
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/790367816360857601
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/790050589598162944
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/789976518596362240
https://twitter.com/basedmattforney/status/789633067791122432
That last tweet — a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s practice of murdering people by throwing them from helicopters — is technically a death threat, aimed at a National Review writer who has gotten many such threats from Forney’s colleagues in the alt-right, including photoshopped images of his 7-year-old daughter being gassed in a Nazi death camp.
Are these really the sorts of people Jaye wants to align herself with?
In his “review” of The Red Pill, Milo claimed, without evidence, that a virtual army of feminists was “scrambling to stop Cassie Jaye” and her film. In fact, feminists have mostly ignored The Red Pill. And the person who has done the most to damage Jaye’s credibility is, well, Jaye herself.
@ Buttercup
I’m sure we can squeeze them in somewhere between “foraging” and “how to fend off marauders”
@ Alan – They’ll have an easier time passing their learner’s permit test if the roads are buried under the cratered ashes of humanity.
(Actually, I’m dreading the day I have to add two 16 year old boys to my insurance…maybe self driving cars will be a thing by then.)
@WWTH – Heck yes, and it wasn’t any better back in the day when the dog whistles were quieter and only a few dogs were barking. There was still ugliness, but it was hidden, baked into all of our institutions and cultural assumptions. I’m glad all the hatred is being dragged into the open now so it can be confronted.
Looking back at all the candidates who were disqualified for trivial things, it’s interesting how most of them were Democrats. Democrats, apparently, are expected to be perfect, but graciously apologize and resign when caught in a moment of weakness. Republicans can light a gasoline fire on the Lincoln monument and use the Constitution to snort coke, and everyone shrugs and goes about their business. It’s almost like no one expects Republicans to meet minimum moral standards, so why hold them accountable?
I think it is because they don’t generally carry the emotional baggage of adversity. Just by way of example our black cat Spyro has recently gone fairly blind. When he can walk around his well known house with everything in its place you wouldn’t even know. But this week there are 3 additional people staying with unusual baggage all over the place. I’ve been watching him walk into things all week. Pretty much
Bump “fuckit”
bump “fuckit”
bump “fuckit”
But no wailing or gnashing of teeth or cries of “why me God”
Just…
bump “fuckit”
bump “fuckit”
bump “fuckit”
“Ah – here’s the food”
“Nom”
@ Buttercup
Does ‘being pulled along by the one horse that didn’t get eaten’ count?
PS – as a 54 YO liberal – also very much not of the mythical salt and pepper generation.
When it comes to assorted misogynists, racists, homophobes, transphobes and rapey-as-fuck-PUAssholes*, I very much fall into the “string ’em up by the ‘nads” school of thought.
*I could go on.
@ tricyclist
Aww, that is both hilarious and adorable.
I never realized that using the phrase “As a 52-year-old liberal…” would be construed as an attempt to establish my qualifying “credentials” to post here – but really, it wasn’t even necessary for me to share that bit of personal information about myself anyway, as I believe ideas can and should be judged by their content and not ranked according to the identity of the person expressing them. So I’ll keep in mind that sharing anything about myself using the phrase “As a…” is seriously not cool in these here parts! 🙂
I want to thank all the posters who got me to think in greater depth about what I said about protests, because I do strongly agree that being able to protest is an integral part of our right to free speech. The aspect of some of the protesting that I feel encroaches on the rights of others, is practices such as going around ripping down posters advertising an event. As one example, this happened a few weeks ago at CSULA, prior to a talk Christina Hoff Sommers gave there titled “Where Feminism Went Wrong.” These kinds of practices interfere with the rights of one’s fellow students to learn about an event so they can make their own choice about whether to attend.
In response to the poster who stated that not wanting to fund a documentary was not the same as protesting it – I totally agree with you there. And again, we all have the right to protest films we disagree with. We just don’t have the right to prevent others from exercising their right to view the film – and not funding it certainly isn’t the same as trying to prevent others from seeing it.
However, when the people who’d supported Jaye’s work in the past exercised their right to pull out of the project and it looked like two years’ work would be going down the drain because she didn’t have the funding to complete it, and others stepped in with a willingness to help her finish the work with a clear understanding that they were not buying any creative control over the project, Jaye made a choice that I believe I also would have made. She was honoring not only the hard work that she and her team had put into the project, but also the time and effort of those people – both feminists and men’s rights activists — who’d given her an interview.
Yes, I’m sure she was and is grateful for this support, just as she’s been grateful to the liberal donors who’ve supported her previous work. Did that gratitude prevent her from doing ethically sound work in this one case? I haven’t had the opportunity to see “The Red Pill” yet, but I did get to see both “Daddy I Do” and “The Right to Love: An American Family.” I didn’t get the impression that her gratitude towards her donors muddied the waters in those cases, so I don’t see any reason not to give “The Red Pill” a chance, too.
In response to the poster who felt that giving men’s rights activists a platform was identical to giving haters a platform, I think this stems from the way that everyone in the manosphere tends to get lumped into one group. The men’s rights movement is pro-equal rights for both men and women, and is also not opposed to LGBT rights or the rights of other minorities. Men’s rights blogs do, however, attract some posters from the Alt-Right who’d like to turn back the clock to the days when women and minorities were subjugated. I suppose this is similar to how some feminist blogs attract posters who use misandrist terms like “mansplaining.” A young feminist just pointed out to me the other day that the terms “feminist” and “misandrist” were mutually-exclusive, so I guess the message here is not to be too quick to generalize about any group.
Well, my days of not taking That_Susan seriously are certainly coming to a middle.
@That_Susan
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5qle5J85-RI
I am kind of green, in every way possible, but if you’re typing something like that, with this
I’m seeing a whole lot of trying to equate mra’s to feminists mixed with a load of garbage pr for mra’s, on a site that pretty much tracks that shit like how a cherry picker shakes the cherries off a cherry tree.
Dude just pull off the five dollar wig and tell me which troll you are.
Chad Skyboomster Mk 2,
The same old dances and tunes,
It is quite boring.
I mean, it’s not like David has just spent 6 years chronicling all the ways the MRM is opposed to rights for anyone not a cis man or anything. Who did she think she was going to fool with that crap?
Fucking hell, Snoozan. Get out.
Well, SFHC was right as always
@Susan
Who? Since when?
1stly, bullshit. 2ndly, ain’t they magnanimous? They’re not opposed to people’s rights!
If my ideas line up well enough with literal nazis that they form a significant part of a coalition around my goals, I’d probably rethink… everything. All my life choices
No, it’s not
No, it’s not
Wrong again, Sue!
@ that susan
I’d raise two issues here.
Firstly what ‘rights’ are there that men lack and thus require fighting for?
I know the common bugbears are things like suicide rates and family court matters. With regards to those I’d suggest that actually feminists do more to address them than MRAs.
It’s feminists that criticise the “man up” approach to coping with problems. And I’ve yet to hear a feminist say that blokes talking about their feelings is a betrayal of masculinity.
As for the court system, here in England at least the law is gender neutral. It is true (although to a much lesser degree these days) that men may be more likely to pay child support. But that’s because women tend to be the primary care providers whilst men are at work. But that’s down to traditional gender roles and again, it’s feminists more likely to challenge that.
Secondly, MRAs always seem to be less interested in actually addressing these issues anyway as opposed to just hating on women. They do nothing to make mens lives better, they just want to make women’s lives worse.
Pull the other one!
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes: “It could also be that the authoritarian impulse expresses itself in a ‘just keep your head down and get along’ mentality, which has been the cause of a lot of problems in history, and today. As our concern troll from above demonstrated, a lot of the Left’s internal issues come from groups trying to avoid making waves.”
You described the authoritarian impulse a lot better than I did, and I don’t see it as unique to the Left. It comes from a lack of trust in the masses, a fear that if people feel free to express their reservations about any of the tenets that a particular group happens to embrace, that group’s movement will be utterly destroyed, or maybe hijacked.
I’m pretty sure that I’m the person you were calling a “concern troll.” I’ve also been accused of trolling when I’ve posted in the manosphere. As someone not completely aligned with any one camp, though predominantly liberal, I find that I’m learning a lot by debating with very diverse people. And I just don’t find it interesting or stimulating to only converse with those I agree with. If I’m expressing my opinions honestly and respectfully, how does expressing disagreement or concern equate to trolling?
Oh wait I got another one
A sock puppet so poorly made
That even a child would give doubt.
A post of the lowest grade
See yourself on the way out.
Address us that susan,
Of your false equivalence,
Or dig your own hole.
@Alan
http://static.yourtango.com/cdn/farfuture/d6zQi58BdWkZM6mCqoWBBTBESzXHvPUDsN3g996gti4/mtime:1468447401/sites/default/files/preach3.gif
Also, something something draft, yadda yadda shelters
You made a comment “In his “review” of The Red Pill, Milo claimed, without evidence, that a virtual army of feminists was “scrambling to stop Cassie Jaye” and her film. In fact, feminists have mostly ignored The Red Pill. ”
In Australia, there is has been a concerted effort, including change.org petitions, to get it pulled from a cinematic showing, which has succedded in at least one cinema pulling it as of Oct 2016
“How do you do, fellow feminists” is way too common a schtick to narrow this down without further information, so: Susan, would you say that we’re VILE MISANDRISTS, or perhaps REPUGNANT B***HES?
If only I was as intellectual and dispassionate as Susan. Then I, too, could engage in stimulating, thoughtful debates with people who hate me about whether my body belongs to me, or to men as a whole.
Edit: Are children whole people, or are they trophies that belong to their fathers? Only exposure to a variety of ideas can lead us to the answer. Maybe the truth lies somewhere in the middle!
As a 53-year-old…whatever, can I say that I feel zero connection to That_Susan or any of her ideas & opinions?
Ffs, we are not from the Second Wave: we’re from the punk rock generation & are several years younger than Madonna. Deconstructionism & nuance should be second nature to us.
Meanwhile, Susan is making the sort of old-school liberal arguments I hear from people two or three generations older than us.
What the hell happened?
I’m definitely glad that we put that sign up, that welcomes everyone in for a free debate on their topic, with them being allowed to express their opinion on any matter (no matter how offensive) as long as it’s honest.
No? We didn’t put that sign up? Well, that must be because that is not our fucking business.
Come to think of it, I’ve never seen that sign anywhere on the web. It’s almost as though the web is not in desperate need of more people expressing opinions on it.
@ ooglyboggles
I hate to be pedantic but cherry pickers are those machines with the long boom arms with a basket on the end that people stand in to work at height.
The machines that shake cherries out of trees are called, rather unimaginatively, cherry/tree shakers.
@Viscaria
If only, then I too would be able to debate people who treat me as either invisible and not uppity or as a “model minority” at their convenience.
That_Susan, what do you make of this article:
http://everydayfeminism.com/2016/06/racism-against-asian-americans/
I’d love to hear your opinion of it.
@alan
Well I could argue that the employees are still involved in the shaking, but I feel that’s just splitting hairs.