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By David Futrelle
It’s been clear for some time that YouTube philosopher-thing Stefan Molyneux is a huge racist. But until recently, he’s tried to be a little bit coy about it.
No more. Last week, he announced he was open to white nationalism. This week, on Twitter, he made his white supremacy all but official.
On Monday, he offered this weird paean to his caveman ancestors, portraying them as prehistoric heroes cast out of Africa by its resident caveman meanies:
My ancestors were driven out of Africa and struggled to survive winter and hunger.
Over thousands of years, they became smarter and wiser through suffering.
They made the modern world.
Now the Africans say we are “privileged” & thieves.
No – suffering made us.
No more guilt.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 3, 2018
Yesterday, he demanded that people of all races express their gratitude to white dudes:
From 800 BC to 1950 AD, 97% of the world’s scientific advancements occurred in Europe and North America.
98% of the significant figures were male.
No white males, no modern world.
Fact.
I’m grateful.
Are you?
End the hate.
Aspire to admire, whatever the race.
— Stefan Molyneux, MA (@StefanMolyneux) December 5, 2018
Like a lot of white supremacists, Molyneux still insists he’s not a white supremacist, noting that when he talks about race and intelligence tests he acknowledges that “whites score lower than East Asians.” But his denials are a bit hard to square with his insistence that white guys are basically responsible for everything good in the world.
I think it’s kind of a big deal that one of the biggest icons of the Men’s Rights movement is now openly spouting white supremacist talking points.
Wait, some might say, Molyneux isn’t really an MRA, is he?
No, Molyneux doesn’t identify primarily as an MRA — he’s usually described as a “libertarian philosopher” or something like that. But he adopted the label back in 2014, explicitly declaring himself an MRA during a very well-received speech at a conference organized by Men’s Rights hate group A Voice for Men — and since then has been warmly embraced by the movement. The admiration is mutual.
He’s made numerous videos with people who are big in the small world of Men’s Rights activism, among them AVFM head boy Paul Elam, documentary director Cassie Jaye, “Honey Badger” Karen Straughan, and “Myth of Male Power” author Warren Farrell, the ideological grandfather of the Men’s Rights movement and someone Molyneux calls a “good friend.”
Molyneux’s videos and internet radio shows have been featured dozens of times on A Voice for Men, where a regular contributor once gushed that “[m]y respect for Stefan Molyneux knows very few bounds. … He is incredibly smart.” He’s been linked to even more often on the Men’s Rights subreddit, currently the biggest and most active MRA forum online.
Bigots rarely stick to only one kind of bigotry, and so it’s hardly a shock to see the viciously misogynistic Molyneux — who’s been railing angrily about alleged “female evil” for at least five years now (and shows no sign of stopping) — fully embracing his worst racist instincts.
Molyneux is hardly the first Men’s Rights activist to do so: “Crying Nazi” Christopher Cantwell was an A Voice for Men contributor before he became a violent white supremacist.
Most MRAs have never had a problem with Molyneux’s extreme misogyny. It remains to be seen if any prominent MRAs step up to criticize his ever-more-open white supremacy. So far I haven’t heard a peep.
Wow! You could fill the nonfiction section of a big city public library with what this joker doesn’t know about history and anthropology. Why are right wing pundits always so eager to show off their ignorance?
97% of made-up statistics use the figure “97%”.
And he’s still allowed on youtube?
Did racism HQ just order all their public figures to start talking about white people enduring cold temperatures better? I will not be surprised to see Tucker Carlson followed by Trump spouting this nonsense.
@wwth
I was thinking this, too! It’s like some sort of memo went out.
Someone seems unfamiliar with maths, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine.
If I was a white supremacist I think I would at least try to avoid saying things in public which are so completely and utterly moronic that nobody even knows where to start with them.
In addition to espousing white supremacist and MRA views, Molyneux has been accused of encouraging his fans to break off all contact with their families if they experience push-back or criticism of any beliefs they might have picked up from him. Cult, much?
Just to add: I really hope someone like ContraPoints does a takedown on Molyneux at some point (she’d be ideal because I imagine she’d knock his philosophical pretensions down without breaking a sweat), he deserves it
Even to the (limited) extent that it’s true that most of the celebrated prominent scientists have been white men…why do these jokesters always assume that there is something inherent to whiteness and maleness that makes for good scientists and inventors? Do they seriously think that if the accidents of history had gone a different way and (for example) South Asian women were the demographic who had taken control of most of the world’s wealth and power and used their position to bar all others from institutions of learning; that humanity would therefore have remained in the Bronze Age?
White Man Who Has Contributed Nothing To Society Besides Being A Toxic Waste Of Organs Wants Credit For All Of The Good Things White Men Have Done Throughout History While Accepting None Of The Blame For The Bad Things – Read more at whatelseisnew.duh
@Karalora
I doubt that their stunted imaginations could possibly conceive of any such scenario that didn’t put white dudes like themselves on top.
“Libertarian philosopher” — now THERE’s an oxymoron for ya.
Also, “driven out of Africa”? No, dopey, they LEFT. Nobody “drove” them. Always with the white-persecution narrative, these clowns.
@Cat Mara
That would be amazing, I love how contrapoints makes tearing down garbage like this look so effortless while also being hilarious. If you haven’t heard of the youtube channel Some More News (in which case I’d strongly urge checking it out, and if you do, your welcome), I think he’s very similar to contrapoints, not in the style of his videos obviously but in that he makes brilliant arguments and is hilarious in the process. It would be awesome if he did a video on MRAs too, but I think the only reason he hasn’t is because they just aren’t relevant enough.
lol these people live in a poorly designed video game https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/1070322039792103424
@karalora
I’m not sure I agree 100% with that. While I agree that white Europeans mainly did as well as they have due to simple accidents of history rather than any inherent superiority, I think science and technology, not to mention the very concept of civilization and “progress” is inherently masculine. It’s an expression of the instinctive male desire for conquest. That’s not to say women can’t participate, but I doubt they could have developed in a truly matriarchal society because women (barring a few rare mutations) have very different drives than men.
That’s not to say women are inferior. On the contrary, history has already proven that “civilization” was a terrible mistake. Everything on the planet is going to die due to the effects of global warming within the next few hundred years (if that), unless somebody starts a nuclear war first. Everything science promised, colonizing outer space, functional immortality, etc. all turned out to be a pipe dream.
A female dominated society would have given us billions of years of mothers raising and loving their children, elders sharing stories with the younger generations of their tribes, arts and crafts, music and people living meaningful lives before the sun finally turned into a red giant and ended it all. Instead humanity got a few thousand years of bloody war and slavery with nothing to show for it but lots of high tech toys only a small percentage of the population ever got to play with and a lot of pointless facts there was never time to do anything practical with. Then death and desolation for the rest of time.
chief manatee- vox day had the brilliant idea that if they could get people to associate cold weather with white people, they could trick sjws into fighting for global warming
Molyneux thinks immigration is bad, which is amusing given that he’s an immigrant to Canada. And an Irish one to boot. It wasn’t that long ago in the scheme of things that the Irish were considered unacceptable immigrants by many North Americans.
But how else could they get the jaw-dropped silence that lets them pretend they’ve won the debate?
Oh, good. Evo psych.
@Kaczynski_Did_Nothing_Wrong
I know I shouldn’t mock a person’s username since mine is nonsense, but I think I got the right to since I don’t have a title that says “a domestic terrorist bomber did nothing wrong.” And considering this troll is spouting similar nonsense as Ted Kaczynski that doesn’t say good things about our new “guest.”
Oh please Mr. “The Unabomber did nothing wrong”, tell me more about how I’m biologically compelled to care for babies and do cute little arts and crafts and not worry my silly little head about anything scientific. I sure love being told about what my internal motivations and drives are by some dickhead who’s pulling hypotheses right out of his ass.
Hey how about you engage in that “inherently masculine” practice of scientific method and actually provide me with peer-reviewed studies that show that women inherently have different motivations than men do. And make sure that they account for the social pressures applied on people according to the gender which they have been assigned.
Oh, and while you’re at it, how about you show how science is to blame for the disaster course that the world is set on, rather than, oh, I don’t know, greed and selfishness and nearsightedness. Because I’m pretty sure that the scientists have been telling polluters to cut that shit out for a long long time now. So please, show me how science is to blame for the rapacious actions of rich assholes.
Or, y’know, fuck off. I’m good with either of those options.
@WWTH:
With a heaping side-order of gender essentialism!
Welp, looks like Karalora got a first hand answer to their question.
Oh good – a weeaboo for a domestic terrorist. Stop role playing – you are embarrassing yourself.