By David Futrelle
One of the most chilling moments in Vice News’ new mini-documentary on the #UniteTheRight rally this past weekend comes at the end, when reporter Elle Reeve sits down with a well-armed white supremacist named Christopher Cantwell, who tells her, among other horrific things, that he thinks the ISIS-style car attack on counterprotesters that left activist Heather Heyer dead was “more than justified.”
To longtime readers of this blog, the name Christopher Cantwell may sound vaguely familiar. That’s because only a couple of years ago Cantwell was a regular contributor to the flagship Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men — where he offered his opinions on such subjects as Elliot Rodger, IQ, and “Rape accusation culture.”
I didn’t write much about Cantwell at the time, though I did point out on one occasion that he was roaming around Twitter telling people to kill themselves in an assortment of gruesome ways. AVFM founder Paul Elam responded to my post on Cantwell by offering excuses for his harassment — and telling me to kill myself.
Now that Cantwell has been brought to the attention of a national audience, it’s worth taking a look at what he wrote for AVFM, which at the time was by far the most influential Men’s Rights website.
Cantwell on Elliot Rodger, guns and feminists “who demonize men and white people.”
In the last few days, ever since Elliot Rodger’s killing spree in California, media has been absolutely buzzing with hysterical propaganda against guns, men, and white people. Should you happen to be a white male gun owner, you might well be Satan himself according to some of these people. … it is a very real threat to my safety. …
The more disturbing trend is one I’ve also been combating on my blog for some time. Radical feminists and “anti-racists” who demonize men and white people. …
I was shocked and terrified to hear Elizabeth Plank say “This is a white male thing” on MSNBC, despite the fact that Elliot Rodger was half Asian.
Cantwell on “rape accusation culture.”
What do you end up with when you throw out ever legal standard that has ever existed and replace it with feminist hysteria?
Rape accusation culture.
No evidence necessary, just point your finger, ladies, and men will go to prison. Just say the word and their reputations and careers will be ruined. Simply bat your eyes at a policeman and he’ll snatch up any ex-boyfriend you feel jilted by. Sure, it won’t stop any actual rapes, but that was never the point. The point is the same as everything else that feminists promote: to demonize an entire gender and engage in a never-ending quest to quench the state’s insatiable thirst for more power.
Cantwell on women in STEM:
There’s no way women could possibly have any responsibility for their own choices in education or career, according to feminists. Everything has to be because of men. …
Certainly it couldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the vast majority of the world’s geniuses are men. … Male geniuses outnumber female geniuses eight to one.
Cantwell on the tyranny of low-IQ people:
A society needs leaders and followers. In men, we see very high IQs figuring things out and working out these complex ideas. They document them in easy-to-understand ways for those of lesser intelligence in society and make technology available to all of us. We also see these low IQs, which are more suited to, say, mining the resources that this technology requires and operating the machines the geniuses designed.
Women, traditionally carrying the role of raising children and supporting the men who designed and operated the machinery, needed to be somewhere in the middle. They couldn’t well manage the many complex tasks their role in society required of them without being smarter than the worker drones, but there wasn’t any need for them to be super geniuses who could land spacecraft on comets hundreds of millions of miles away either.
Unfortunately for men, these women of average intelligence do manage to outsmart and confuse so many of us on the lower end of the IQ spectrum. That’s how you end up with college age males chanting idiotic feminists slogans at demonstrations.
For those of us at the upper end of the IQ spectrum, we are sentenced to a lifetime of watching stupidity like this run rampant. We will watch in horror for all of eternity as idiots dominate the headlines with their hysteria, responsibility avoidance, and demands for state privilege disguised as “equality.”
Cantwell on street harassment:
Oh, the horrors these American women have to go through. They dress up in tight clothes designed for the specific purpose of showing off their ass and tits to attract men. When their choice in clothing does exactly what it’s designed to do, they complain about it.
Cantwell on feminist attempts to fight street harassment:
What this is about, just like most feminist garbage being peddled, is giving women the power to have men arrested for anything without any evidence at all. That they’re mere discomfort is a criminal offense that should justify the kidnapping of men doing exactly what men are supposed to do: pursue women. Turning the tides of this fabled “patriarchy” they feel has so oppressed women over the years into an actual matriarchy in which women can have men caged with a snap of the fingers.
Somehow I’m not all that shocked that Cantwell has gone full white-supremacist.
EDIT: Fixed Cantwell links; they all go to archived versions of the AVFM posts now.
Toxic masculinity, misogyny & white supremacy go together really well. Not at all surprised, bigotry only begets bigotry.
Why do MRAs always assert that all a woman has to do is point to a random man and say “he raped me!” and the man will go to prison? Do they somehow actually believe this is the case? Or are they just preemptively calling women liars in an attempt to prevent women from reporting? I can never tell with them.
I love how MRAs get so outraged if you tie their “movement” to white nationalism, yet they keep hosting white supremacists and holocaust deniers on their sites.
It was almost funny watching that lady interview him.
“These people, they’re so violent!”
“So, you’re against violence.”
“Well no, I’m very pro-violence, but … well, look at them!”
But the parts dealing with the aftermath of the attack were hard to watch – and it was disgusting how Cantwell tried to argue that the man who committed vehicular homicide was clearly – clearly! – acting in self-defense. What a cowardly shitbag.
@MrsObedMarsh
“They had it coming we were the victims. He had no choice but to run over and kill a person.”
I am not surprised by this at all. Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia… The more you go down one of these paths the more open you become for all the others. That kind of hatred only ever produces more hatred.
What I don’t understand is when minorities engage in some of this. Attacking other oppressed groups is not only morally wrong (although that should be enough), but it’s also just really foolish. The hatred they’re helping create will ultimately turn around and target them too. Or to cite that famous quote: “First they came for…”
Anyway, it is ironic how MRAs like to use the term feminazi, considering how close a lot of their ideology is to actual naziism.
Why can’t it be both?
So the look on his face in that screencap as he raises that gun is the expression of a person who has no visceral conception of what the implement in his hand is capable of doing.
Because majorities become adept in turning minorities against each other. It keeps us divided and less effective in getting real change.
I’ve been saying for years how dangerous these people are but so many people didn’t listen to me.
True. It’s incredibly frustrating. My uncle is gay and unfortunately, a huge xenophobe. He’s ready to vote for people whose policies are actively hurting him, but as long as they’re tough on immigration that’s fine with him. And sadly, there’s no arguing him out of it.
Yeah, a rape accusation can ruin someone’s career so badly that two of the last four Presidents of the United States faced rape accusations. Feminists just have to point a finger and men are jailed, and by “jailed” I mean “immediately supported by a flood of the worst people in the world”.
The venn-diagram of the two really is just a circle.
Somebody needs to sit President Asshole down to watch this. Especially the parts that reference his family and how Trump gave his daughter to the dirty Jew.
Goddamned contemptible excrement.
Does anyone know of a possible contact for the counter group involved in the protests? A friend and I are planning to organize an event to raise funds and show support for the opposition of the white nationalist movement.
everything is so fucking exhausting.
I’m just amazed a dude with this much seething misogyny and hatred let a woman interview him in the first place.
I’m tired of these trash people and their simplistic Constitution interpretation “free speech” rigamorole. I’ve talked about Fighting Words since 1998. I’ve screamed about these online Nazi fucknuggets for years. I’m tagging out. To paraquote Dream Hampton, I’m tired of fighting racism, White folks. YOU do it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_words
Free speech isn’t consequenceless speech. Make it work, allies.
1st, gross. 2nd, the fuck we are, and the fuck they’re not. My girl pursued me, thanks much. Just cos you can’t imagine a woman actually wanting your fashy ass (from experience, no doubt), don’t mean everyone else is the same…
Funny thing, Chris–that’s exactly how I feel watching you and your pals!
(I put the blockquotes on “reverberate” so everyone could savor this).
Note: I’m not knocking him just on the basis of one typo. But if you’re gonna boast about your sooper genius IQ and why it makes you Supreme Ruler of the Lowly Miners, your spelling and grammar had better be impeccable.
Not this shit again. Look. Historically speaking, being a woman or PoC is like running a race with a 50-lb. bag of sand around your neck. You have to be extraordinarily fast to even compete with the people who aren’t wearing a bag of sand around their neck.
Then you get numbskulls like this guy, denying that the bag of sand exists, but then using women’s continual underperformance as justification why they should keep on wearing those bags of sand.
Tell that to the numerous accusers of Bill Cosby and Donald Trump. Neither of them has seen the inside of a jail cell.
The guy brought four guns and a knife. Peaceful protest my ass.
AP Style Blog on “Charlottesville and usage of the term ‘alt-right'”:
This isn’t a new position, they’ve said something similar in the 2017 style guide. But at least one real news source has seen them for what they are. This is the first time I think they’ve stated “meant as a euphemism to disguise racist aims” though.
I usually hate talking about this, but as a certified female “genius” trained in the scientific method (and knowing how full of BS IQ tests can be, particularly when there are education disparities or you’re trying to distinguish levels within and above “gifted”), these right wingers should know they are some of the worst thinkers I’ve ever had the displeasure of having to watch grow in influence.
There is not much wrong with ignorance in and of itself, and nothing wrong with not being as “IQ smart” as a genius, but they don’t even try to correct their biases and ignorance. Trying (not pretend trying!) is the difference between somebody who is ignorant and well-intentioned, and somebody who is ignorant, lazy, and obsessed with their ego.
Not to mention that being a genius doesn’t automatically make you good at thinking. Your self-justification and narcissism “circuits” can get just as supercharged as your math “circuits”, or you can be a math genius completely lacking exceptional empathy or verbal skills, or vice versa.
Again, not a big deal, but more to the point that the power of your brain CPU doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t choose to put good software on it. I know many who aren’t geniuses who have accomplished a great deal more than several geniuses I’ve run into combined.
Also, geniuses aren’t quite as uncommon as the braggers and liars would like you to visualize them being – and with white women having gained a lot of educational privilege over the past couple decades, I would be really surprised if a study done today was able to replicate that, or if “8 to 1” was actually accurate in the first place. I could’ve sworn the thing I once saw that claimed to show a difference claimed something closer to 2-4 to 1, but I don’t feel like swimming through a swamp of MRA search results to find it.
It’s convenient how they always leave out the widely known modern consensus that women have slightly higher average IQs than men, despite “having” significantly lower IQs decades ago. (That difference between equality may also be some kind of measurement error, for all we know. – at least I’ll admit that possibility >:/.)
TL;DR he’s full of it and should deal in actual arguments, not appeals to an authority that isn’t actually that applicable
By the way, I’ve run into his type before at work. It always goes the same way – he butts into what I’m doing despite being in a different field, gets noticeably mad at me for knowing things he doesn’t know, interrupts me and implies I’m incompetent every time I try to explain an answer that isn’t yes or no, very unsuccessfully attempts to convince everybody I’m emotionally unstable after I calmly stop, tell him I’ve got work to do and need to be left alone, and gets thrown off site for throwing an angry fit.
It is never a pleasant experience, but knowing that’s how guys like this come off in a healthy workplace setting has 1) reminded me how lucky I am 2) also given me hope society is on its way to rejecting them. I hope that ends up being the case, and soon.