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.
One sign of low intelligence: Claiming you have higher intelligence than those ignorant sheep who keep telling you you’re wrong.
And his talk of the IQ Spectrum makes me wonder if he has too many absorption lines in his IQ.
That’s about the worst example he could have used. There was literally a woman, Katherine Johnson, who calculated trajectories for NASA. Called in to double check the computers trajectory for the moon landing, even. She’s been discussed here before.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_kjohnson.html
He must be a brilliant man, obviously.
@zaunfink
It is a reference to the shirtstorm during the leadup to the philae landing, when the mean stoopid feeemales dissed a man’s outfit. The man in question (who probably doesn’t want to be remember for the shirt thing, has apologised, and almost certainly doesn’t want assholes defending his actions for years to come) wasn’t even responsible for the design of the spacecraft, or its launch or flight planning, but I guess we can’t expect cantwell to understand what scientists do, or how many people might have been involved in the project.
Another thing this idiot has failed to notice is that up until practically the most recent few nanoseconds of the evolution of the human species, there was nobody, male or female, who “could land spacecraft on comets hundreds of millions of miles away”. That kind of technological development has all taken place in far less than the blink of an eye as far as evolutionary timescales are concerned, so it has absolutely zilch to do with any innate biological differences between men and women.
(And this is even leaving aside the far more basic fact that human men and women are not separate species, and all children of whatever gender inherit traits from both mothers and fathers. Since genes affecting intelligence, like genes for hair color and earlobe shape and almost all other human characteristics, are not restricted to the sex chromosomes, evolution has had no means of making intelligence levels sex-specific, any more than it’s made red hair or poor eyesight or musical talent sex-specific.)
Kimtsu : the first part of your post is entirely right, the second one is however wrong, so be careful with it. There is entire species where males and females have very, very different level of intelligence. Including a fish where male are basically just parasites, while females are ten or twenty time as big and are actual, functioning fishs.
It’s true: genes not on the sex chromosomes can be activated or not depending on signals from genes on the sex chromosomes. However, evolution has no reason to make women stupid, and lots of reasons why that would be maladaptive.
@Ohlmann:
Sure, but those species branched off from the eventual human evolutionary path very far back. I didn’t mean to imply that evolution is incapable of producing sex-determined fundamental intelligence differences in any species; sorry if I was unclear.
Yes, in practice nobody have found an actual difference in intelligence between gender (or between skin colors, or whatever arbitrary bullshit bigots can find). But it’s scientifically possible. It’s just not what happened, likely as you say because there isn’t reasons for that.
And, yes, most of human intelligence isn’t due to specific mutations, but to cultures and a brain that for some reason is very adaptable.
@Ohlmann: Yup, well put.
Oh, and here’s another thing I noticed about that idiot’s remarks:
If idiot had been paying attention, he would have been aware that it was Rodger himself who fetishized his self-identified “white male” status, who resented being half Asian and who expressed contempt for nonwhite ethnic groups including Asians. It’s not “demonizing white people” to recognize those facts.
Plank wasn’t trying to claim that white male hate crime is due to some kind of biological essentialism. Rather, the point is that it’s the toxicity of the cultural status of “white maleness” that produces this disproportionate propensity to lash out in hatred and bigotry. That’s in no way contradicted by the fact that Rodger also had nonwhite ethnic heritage.
The “white male thing” isn’t Rodger’s biological white maleness; it’s the cultural phenomenon of his deliberate glorification of white maleness as part of his monstrous status-seeking greed and resentment.
Uh huh. Tell us more about how unsafe you feel when you can’t catcall and “pursue” women.
It’s amazing how much tolerance there can be for misogyny, even in progressive circles.
It doesn’t even qualify for its status as “entry level hate” in many people’s eyes.
There is a collective blind spot.
David a others deserve credit recognizing and exposing hate in all its forms.
tried to talk to a coworker… I got “whadaboutthewhites???”
I want to die, I really do
The manosphere seems to have decided that the shirt guy was singlehandedly responsible for the whole probe on comet mission. Every bit of scientific or technological progress must be the work of a single genius, usually a white male. That’s what the TV and movies say after all! In reality it was a huge group effort and plenty of the team members who made that happen were women. It really is quite a display of ignorance to claim credit for that mission simply for being male and to claim that the mission was in the “we hunted the mammoth for you” category.
The riot and murder are causing a backlash:
A mob in Durham tore down a statue. A devout friend of mine was there, pulling. (Edit: actually i don’t know what denomination he follows anymore, so I snipped that).
The city of Baltimore voted to yank down four monuments on Monday, and contractors were out Tuesday night to do it:
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/world/baltimore-monuments-1.4249069
In Montreal, someone saw a plaque about Jefferson Davis on a department store downtown; it came to light Tuesday morning and was down by evening.
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/montreal/jefferson-davis-confederate-plaque-montreal-1.4248206
And all the sudden, a bunch of my friends started sharing this AMA response about antifa being just as violent as the KKK. Handy list of atrocities inside:
https://antifainternational.tumblr.com/post/159425251484/you-antifa-guys-are-actually-more-hateful-and
@Weird Eddie : please do not die 🙁
@numerobis : eh, I sure hope this will be the tipping point. That it happen now, and not when, say, far right terrorists killed an english elected official, will still depress me.
[Emphasis mine]
Given that shitweasel is a Dumpfucker, the irony here is unbearably heavy.
Hang on a second. Why where there ever Confederate monuments in Baltimore in the first place? The only Confederates who even saw Baltimore were prisoners of war.
White people, what the hell?
“… the leopards won’t eat MY face….”
re: statues, someone, mebbe Limbaugh, was crying about a statue of Lenin in Seattle, why is there no hue and cry for THAT to come down?? Because there’s no large, vocal, armed groups trying to institute Leninist communism here. Hell, there’s statues of Ghengis fucking Khan in the U.S. and nobody gives a shit. If there wasn’t a huge push by Confederate flag-waving bigots trying to reinstitute the Confederacy, in a society that has NEVER STOPPED marginalizing and abusing black people, no one would give two shits about a statue of Jefferson fucking Davis.
The insidious fact about the statues is, the armed bigots aren’t THERE to protect their statuary, they’re there* to reinstitute what their statuary REPRESENTS… and that ain’t mint fucking juleps.
*hey, Buttercup Q., did I get that right? 🙂 🙂 🙂
I cannot give my personal views on Christopher Cantwell, or what I’d like to do to him, without violating this site’s comment policy.
Needless to say he has been outed as a convicted rapist and so has his brother, to my understanding. It should be amusing because it was the radical libertarian/anti-government group he belonged to that outed him.
He’s hated even among the circle of White supremacists because he is an asshole.
According to SPLC (which is probably right, because they have historians available) the statues were mainly put up when they started with the “Jim Crow” laws to reinforce segregation. They were never just meant to “remember history”.
Maryland was a slave-owning state, but it stayed in the Union. Those statues were another reminder to blacks to “remember your place”.
While there may be a dim bulb or two that actually think that happens, I think most know that they say these things to deflect from what they’re actually afraid of: ostracism. You don’t need a judge or jury to rule your name as mud in the eyes of colleagues, family and friends. That’s why the court of public opinion terrifies them and why it’s so vital; if the law will not find against a guy like Jian Ghomeshi, it’s up to us to deny him the satisfaction of a public presence. His documented actions have made it clear he’s not only a serial harasser of women, but an abusive boyfriend and that should stick to every mention of his name in polite society.
If there’s one thing that has dogged me, it’s finding an ironclad solution to cracking the shell of plausible deniability and rationalization that people like this rely on to look themselves in the mirror each morning. Because as Charlottesville demonstrated: these guys will say anything they have to in order to avoid coming to that “Oh shit, are we the baddies?” realization. The only thing that I have ever seen–short of criminal conviction–is ostracism. From one’s job, from one’s family, being rightfully shunned for having such hideous views on race, gender or sexuality. I wish it wasn’t necessary, but if evidence is useless, appeals to humanity are useless, call outs are useless, what is left in our arsenal to bring consequences on people like this?
But this only opens the kettle of fish regarding doxxing… is signal-boosting somebody’s identity justified? I’m weary of that kind of exposure being an anonymous person myself. I’m firmly against doxxing out of concern for the safety of any individual, scumbag or otherwise, yet how else do the people that really matter to white supremacist (boss, parents, significant other) find out how terrible that person is?
I have no simple answers, but I’d love to hear the thoughts of fellow Mammotheers on this. Because I’m convinced that this is how hate gets fought in the most effective manner. Shame and shun these people in any way possible to the point that their dreadful beliefs become a liability.
I love how we’re being asked to “remember history” by people who think Nazis were the good guys in WWII and slaves enjoyed their servitude.
@Weird Eddie – Well played! Please accept this bundle of miners and genius-designed-machine operators to rule over.
I swear, most of the time with these super IQ edgelords there’s no their they’re.
Incidentally, a visit to Statuary Hall last month had me greeted by Mississippi’s own Jefferson Davis and Georgia peach Alexander Hamilton Stephens. Every state in the union is permitted two statues to stand in the Capitol building and evidently, Mississippi and Georgia decided to send the President and Vice President of the Confederacy to stand in the same room as Rosa Parks.
Just says it all, doesn’t it?
oh, my white… brothers….
who’d we expect them to send, Medgar Evers and Julian Bond…?
As far as doxxing the guy in that mob : there is real ethical problems, for example misidentification, or simply the right for them to do errors and thoses errors being forgotten. (I say that because there is some shit I have done I am very happy nobody remember).
But thoses collateral damage can be acceptable to shame them enough so that they understand they just can’t do that. Let’s just try to do it responsibly and preferably without the intent of hurting them.