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.
Hey, Susan, gotta special gif I’ve been waiting to use, and I’m using it just for you.
http://66.media.tumblr.com/c67f59f992d4e8156a2ede7ee1f8205f/tumblr_mifr6dJpyI1s5p5xno1_400.gif
@That_Susan
You two faced người nói dối.
“We older folks need to guard against our tendency to try to control the way in which the younger generations accumulate and process information. which is why I’m using those words as a response to a women who doesn’t want to subject herself and others to racist comments. That’s just controlling the free minds of the students. Your article on racism is precisely the reason why I am right about my topic.”
What I feel cannot even hope to match the experiences of those who had it worse than me, by practically anyone else in the US and abroad, but with the utmost sincerity, quái bạn.
@Paradoxy
My heroine <3
Thanks, Paradoxy. That post of Susan’s was right about where my energy to engage with her drained out of me like some sort of energy vampire leeched out my desire to do much more than watch youtube. I really just couldn’t process all the oh-so-reasonable meanness she was putting down. Unable to see any perspective but her own.
Have another cider or maybe some nice tea and calm down a little! I’m sure you got worked up writing, I sure did just by reading. Thank you again.
@ That_Susan
Slow the fuck down. Read what people are saying. Process it. Think about it. You are posting too much, too quickly, and reiterating the same points rather than writing thoughtful responses. When you do finally catch up on an important point (say, the point about Kentucky’s foster care statistics), you respond to it in an entirely unthoughtful way. You are not creating a thoughtful give-and-take discussion.
You keep saying things like, “a lot of parents are waiting years and never getting to adopt”: then why, for fuck’s sake, are there hundreds of thousands of kids in the foster-care system? Could it be that these people waiting to adopt are too fucking picky? Could it be that they don’t have enough sensitivity to what a huge deal it is for someone to give up their child?
Could it be that your standard of “it should be incumbent upon a pregnant woman who is financially unable to provide for her child, due to the child’s father ‘opting out’, to: ‘begin actively looking for and interviewing adoptive parents, and relinquish her infant at birth’; and that anything less than that means that the child is just SOL for any kind of financial support” … is a pretty goddamn fucked up standard? (Thanks @ eli for confirming just how fucked up of a thing this is to say. Fucking hell.)
Edit: And I missed a Paradoxy. You go, and thank you. Cheers to cider, and not taking shit.
I just wanted to clarify that I think adoption can be an amazing thing for children and the parents who are privileged to bring a child or children into their home through adoption. No, it’s not easy and there are unique challenges involved but these children are very much wanted, chosen children. I don’t want to speak for the adopted nor claim to know what it’s like to be an adoptive parent though, but I can listen to those who are adopted or have adopted (and those who gave a child up for adoption too!).
I *do* have a problem with parents who adopt internationally and then ‘disappear’ their children after treating them like servants rather than kids (Nancy Campbell’s children adopted from Africa – sorry I’m not sure which country specifically, I know it’s a continent), or ‘trade’ them with other parents (disruption), even send them back to the country they were born in (like the woman who sent a young boy back on a plane by himself because he didn’t behave the way she expected). I have a problem with the ultra-conservative religious right couples who browse international adoption sites, selecting a kid as if they were ordering from a restaurant menu, especially when they will be fundraising everything from the adoption fees and travel expenses to everything needed when one adopts a special needs child with immediate requirements to receive extensive medical and basic care like dental work and the parents in question already have 6+ other children, some also special needs. They are spreading themselves too thin and I don’t believe it’s possible for them to give each child in that home the necessary parental involvement. Some of those kids are going to miss out.
Holy shit, she’s still here?
Susan.
Go the fuck away, already.
PI: *applause*
My bullshit quota is full for the day, week and month, and I still have to endure US election shit spreading out into the internet.
Take it from here, mean Fluttershy!
http://i.imgur.com/OarrTPt.png
I was wondering when you were going to go there. So much for the stimulating discourse!
You may want to read the comments policy for a general idea about how we feel here about that kind of attitude, and also check yourself very hard for those prejudices you, as a super-duper left-leaning liberal with decades and decades of life experience, have chosen to leave unexamined.
@ That_Susan
I assume it is now the wee small hours of the morning for you. I hope you are sleeping, and I hope that when you wake you take littleknown’s advice.
Please pause in leaping to your own defense to consider how defensible your statements have been.
Case in point: your belated response to Ooglyboggles :
Ooglyboggles called you out on your failure to address their point, and you still haven’t. Nonpology.
Case in point: your continued assertion that the solution to reproductive complexities is for both gamete sources to decide early in the pregnancy whether to raise, adopt out, or abort the embryo, and to cleave to that decision forever:
Of course PoM is not saying that. You are the one who is saying that is necessary. You are the one who is saying that is desirable.
What other commenters have been saying to you over and over is that it is the welfare of the children that should be paramount, not the question of to whom blame and total financial responsibility can be assigned.
My own comments on this subject:
1) Obstacles to child-raising are not always present, discernible, or immutable at conception. It is unreasonable to expect people to behave as if they were. By your own admission, since the death of your spouse (my condolences) you have accepted government money to help raise your offspring. By your own standards for others, you would have signed a contract in the first trimester to either pay all costs for raising your kids in such circumstances, or to put them up for adoption, no matter how fond of each other you might have gotten.
2) The less capable or resourced ( with money, time, confidence and knowledge) a newly pregnant person is to be able to raise a child, the less resourced they are likely to be in the area of marketing their foetus to those slavering would-be adoptive parents you keep mentioning as an insatiable market.
You keep referring to children as if they are tradeable commodities. You keep referring to parents as if they are more- or less- competent commodity traders.
I’m gonna need another tldr for that.
Susan’s tendency to say horrible shit and then half assedly back pedal is getting tedious. But the assertion that red pill “philosophy” has layers is a beautiful little nugget hidden in those teal deer. What the fuck layers are there? As if it’s deep and meaningful to say “I hate women” in really pretentious language.
To equate feminism which has centuries of activism and academic work behind it and has set and accomplished real goals with a loose network of people who say misogynistic things on the internet is just so beyond ridiculous.
@PI: that was beautiful.
@wwth: that’s what i was thinking. What beauty is there in trying to deny people their rights? In trying to deny other humans as fully realised people?
Do they have some points? Well, you know what they say about a broken clock…
Do they do anything with that? Nope!
I’m thinking @That Susan is nothing more than a sock and possibly a man too.
Also you did awesome IP. Hugs.
@Handsome “Punkle Stan” Jack: “Child support is based on income so if they don’t have a job, they don’t pay, or if the primary caregiver makes more money they don’t need to pay so, like, what are you talking about?”
I don’t know where you live, but there are places where fathers can fall into hardship and then be jailed for falling behind on their payments. I’d tell you to ask Walter Scott of Charleston South Carolina, only he was murdered by a police officer when he got out of the car he was driving and started running after being pulled over, and likely being scared that he’d be arrested again.
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes: Like you and others here, if I’m talking with an individual either in real life or online who’s sharing about their own experience of a rape, I don’t see myself as a court of law or give them the third degree. I accept what they’re saying at face value.
However, if it comes to situations where people are expected to accept at face value that a particular person who’s actually being named is a rapist, that’s where I think it comes down to due process and a presumption of innocent till proven guilty. That’s also where I think many third wave feminists will be faster to listen and believe without reservation when a man is accused by name of raping or abusing a woman, whereas I think they’d be inclined to want to look at things closer if it was a woman being accused by name of raping or abusing a man.
I’ve already said this is a hunch, and a hunch is certainly not a verified fact, so I’ll add that I can be wrong about this. I’m not sure if I need to take back my statement completely, because I do still feel there’s a tendency today to see men as the guilty ones in every kind of negative situation. And whereas some feminists will say they’re viewed that way because of patriarchy, I simply do also see a tendency for feminists to see men in a separate category from women and view them negatively.
@That_Susan: I’m glad you’ve found the solution to all the problems the BLM movement is currently dealing with. Who knew that institutionalised racism could be shared by fathers deciding to GTFO from their children’s lives?
(may contain traces of sarcasm)
Meanwhile, there’s a puppet show going on in an old Cassie Jaye thread,
I cannot believe you are using Walter Scott’s tragedy as a lynchpin for your argument that men should be given a pass from their financial obligation to their children. ONE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH ANOTHER. Dishonest POS.
You are a horrible person. Go the fuck AWAY.
Are we even sure at this point that That_Susan ISN’T JudgyBitch?
Ah, the old “child support is keeping black men in chains (and getting them shot by police)” gambit. Great.
Also: Oh, it’s just a hunch? Well, then by all means, keep repeating it with nothing to back it up! So long as we know that you accept that you could be wrong, it doesn’t matter if you keep repeating it after people explain to you why you’re wrong and why it’s offensive. Don’t bother addressing them. Just keep repeating it. It’s only a hunch, after all.
FFS.
@Sigh: I will rethink the whole idea of parents being able to walk away if they don’t want or aren’t able to raise a baby themselves. This was based on my idea that there was an abundance today of loving people eager to adopt newborn infants of all races — which certainly doesn’t solve the heartbreaking problems for older children in the foster care system, but the older-child issue wouldn’t have to come into play for infants being placed with adoptive parents soon after birth. Or so I thought.
My thinking was based on the four women I know who became pregnant as teenagers and found loving adoptive parents to raise their children. However, all four of those women are white, and as far as I know, their children’s biological fathers are white, too. Also, as far as I know, all four babies were born without any health issues.
My original premise was stemming not from the idea that it’s cool to create children and just walk away from them — but, rather, from the idea that if every baby can have parents who really want to be parents, there’s no need to force anyone who doesn’t want to be a parent to do so (even if it’s just in the financial area).
But it’s not acceptable for biological parents to opt out of parenting if it means their child will be growing up without a family. So maybe a more humane approach to equal reproductive and parenting rights for unmarried parents would be a presumption of 50/50 shared custody, with each parent providing for the child materially while they have the child, and no parent making payments to the other except in special cases that can be decided by the courts on a case-by-case basis.
50/50 custody is also what I feel should be the presumption regarding custody arrangements after a divorce — again, with special situations being evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
For fuck’s sake. Presumption of innocence and due process are for courts. Not blog comments sections. And rape is for some mysterious reason the only crime for which we’re not supposed to form an opinion until after a trial. Gee, I wonder why.
@that_Susan: What if the parents don’t live in the same city? The same province? The same country? 50/50 custody with parents only providing while the child is with them is not the ultimate answer that will fix everything.
For instance, when the child isn’t with you, their room doesn’t just disappear. You are still paying rent on that. Their school fees don’t disappear. on and on.
Also, would you like to be in one school for one week, then in another for another week, then back? How is this 50/50 custody going to work, actually? The child will likely find it difficult to shuttle between homes every other day/week/month/half year. How do you form roots or connections like that?
Apparently in Canada the default is 50/50 custody, but I don’t think it works the way you’re imagining it would.
This idea is bad. It is just bad. You need to examine why it is so attractive to you, and then drop it.
@Viscaria: “My wife had an affair several years ago and conceived a child, who up until recently I had thought was biologically mine. Don’t you think I should be able to terminate my emotional and financial relationship with the kid? Sure, it might completely destroy their life, but what do I care, if they’re not a biological extension of me?”
This is a terrible situation for everyone involved, especially the child. However, I actually believe that most men who’ve been building a strong bond with their child for all those years, WILL opt to continue being a father and accept that this is their own child in every way except biologically.
I see it as important for the man to have a choice. If a few decide to pull out completely, this is no more harmful to the child than having the man remain in their life and resent paying their child support. Most will continue loving and being a dad to the child they’ve been raising, even if they’re no longer able to stomach remaining married to the woman who deceived them.
@Dalillama: “@That Susan
I know this is a waste of time, but I’ll bite once more anyway:
Why do you think that the question of whether someone who is pointing out a problem personally knows someone who is suffering from that problem is relevant to the existence ofthat problem?”
I can’t remember which of my posts you’re responding to, but I’ll try to answer in a general way. When discussing a problem, it can be relevant to personally know someone experiencing it, but at the same time, not personally knowing anyone experiencing that problem doesn’t automatically disqualify you from discussing it.
@Paradoxical Intention – Resident Cheeseburger Slut: I’m very sorry about the abuse you experienced as a child, as well as your negative experiences with men.
I never meant to imply that I’d never met a man who disrespected me. Only that my experience of those kinds of men has been minuscule compared to my overwhelming experience of most men being good, kind, and respectful human beings.
But my personal experience doesn’t trump anyone else’s, just as theirs doesn’t trump mine. We’ll just have to agree to disagree about what the majority of men are like.