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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.
LOL, David Pakman is roasting Stefan Foodprocessor as we speak…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E29QyG_uH_Y
I’m loving this.
@Kaczynski_Did_Nothing_Wrong
What long-winded and boring garbage. But yay that I with my lowly ladyparts might sometimes get to participate. Although tell me, do I need ribbons in my hair to go with the pompoms and rara skirt I wear while I cheer the manly men with their manly brains doing manly brain things?
Leaving to one side the astounding idiocy of his premises, even they (when applied with a modicum of knowledge and logic) lead us to admiring the indigenous populations of Australasia and South America. Those people travelled! In comparison, indigenous Europeans merely moved next door.
As a lifelong avid student of actual history: HORSE SHIT.
Also, whiteness didn’t even exist when people left Africa. White people originated in central Asia only around 10,000 years ago, they weren’t driven anywhere.
@Karalora:
Exactly, it’s a variant of the same erroneous “fine tuning” argument that creationists make for the existence of their deity (“look, the values of the physical constants of the universe are so precisely set that if they varied more of a couple of a percent in either direction, life wouldn’t exist at all! Therefore Jesus!” Yes, but there would be no-one to make that observation either. If the physical constants of the universe were conducive to the evolution of sentient purple cephalopods, there would be a lot of wide-eyed purple octopi remarking on how much Calamari Jesus, bless His manifold pseudopods, must love them). The late Douglas Adams had a great parable about this kind of thinking.
Funny also how Really Smart Guys™ like Molyneux can spot when a creationist is making a fallacious argument, but not when they’re making the exact same one…
I’m wondering if David should pass the IP address of our Unabomber fan to the relevant authorities. Probably a blowhard fuckwit, but one can’t be sure.
Molyneux’s defence against the charge of white supremacism – that he recognises that East Asians score on average higher than whites on IQ tests – has been around a long time in white supremacist circles. It doesn’t, oddly enough, lead to them begging China or Japan to rule the planet. If they were as rational as they think they are, it might, in combination with their absurd notion that almost all innovation has come from white people, lead them to question whether IQ tests really tell you anything about the innate abilities of population groups (the Flynn Effect is in fact sufficient evidence of that).
The “our ancestors were driven out of Africa by ebil Africans” line is particularly amusing. Why he takes this line and not “Our ancestors were bold pioneers who strode forth to explore and conquer the world!” is an interesting question in the psychosociology of white racists, who currently seem to prefer whining about imagined persecution to any other approach, although as Molyneux shows, this can be combined with ahistorical claims that whites invented everything.
It’s amazing how many of these arseholes are libertarians.
@Alan Robertshaw
Also finance. Bonus points awarded for arabic lending and investment history not being antisemetic as fuck.
Oh, and law. Middle-easterners famously not pasty white folk, modern conceptions of jesus notwithstanding.
Hmm. I think agriculture wasn’t invented by white folk either, and I’ve a suspicion that most of the animals that humanity has domesticated weren’t courtesy of Stefan’s fantasy pale ancestors.
And, whilst we’re on the subject, I wonder what colour he imagines ancient greeks and romans were. Hint: not homogenously pasty white, as it happens.
Anyway. Apart from sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have brown people ever done for us?
@Kaczynski_Did_Nothing_Wrong (sic):
I imagine women like Émilie du Châtelet, Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and Margaret Hamilton would have whole ossuaries to pick with you on that score.
(PS I suspect your opinion of Ted Kaczynski would be somewhat different had you or one of your loved ones been the recipient of one of his parcels. But you’re obviously in the same class as the witless Proud Boy edgelord types who make jokes about Pinochet’s goons dropping people from helicopters.)
Not only that, there were back migrations into Africa, and existing populations of archaic hominids in Asia and Europe with which homo sapiens mingled and interbred. It was a messy process. Early migrations were driven more by periodic climate change (when north Africa temporarily became wetter and greener) than by the urge to invent mayonnaise.
Too bad for your thesis that women have contributed a host of things to scientific progress, including Kevlar, the circular saw, beer and very probably agriculture itself. And those accomplishments came despite heavy social and institutional barriers. Just imagine what women could have done if they hadn’t been held back.
Technology is only held to be “inherently masculine” because historically, only men were permitted an education (and thus, access to previous accumulated knowledge) and allowed the social freedom to invent. You can’t claim that women wouldn’t have done the same if it were men staying home watching the babies and cooking.
The idea that technology and progress arise from the will to dominate is flawed. Much of technology, except for military applications, arose as a way to ask questions and solve problems, not dominate the earth. “How can we more easily move things from point A to point B?” “Is this curdled milk that sat in the barn all winter edible?” “Which plant will ease my headache?” Solving problems and manipulating the environment is not an exclusively masculine or feminine trait. It’s a human trait.
@ Buttercup
“97% of made-up statistics use the figure “97%”.”
Indeed.
Also dictators rigging elections tend to like that figure too.
It’s a cunning plan supposed to make it look credible: oh, 3% didn’t vote for ’em so it must be legit. Much more persuasive than an overwhelming 98% or a paltry 96%, which would throw doubt on the legitimacy of the whole process. For some reason.
Aside from his grasp of history… has he looked at a map?
Yes, Stefan. Your ancestors were driven out of Africa, into the barren wastelands of the Fertile Crescent, where you survived the short, cool winters with grit and determination.
@David Futrelle
SPOILER ALERT: They’re not going to say diddly-poo about it…unless it’s to cheer Molyneux on.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
So much this. I don’t even want to think about the centuries of wasted effort, how many lives could have been richer, or many lives could have been saved because someone decided it was a better “investment” to have half our species making babies instead of using their full intellectual faculties[1]. Stefan Molyneux points to all these achievements as and I go, “yes, and? That was done by the equivalent of flying on one engine: you and your ideological fellow-travellers have wasted centuries because of your stupid prejudices, and caused untold suffering. You have succeeded in spite of, not because of, yourselves. You need to STFU now.”
[1] It went both ways, of course. There were plenty of men over the centuries who died illiterate and before their time, in pointless wars or worn out in back-breaking work, their potential squandered by a vicious, inbred kyriarchy that the the forces of neoreaction like Molyneux love to idolise, but there’s no doubt that women had the worst of it.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Just to underline this point further, it’s one of the implications of Stefan’s very tweet. This is the thing I’ve noticed about these alt-right skaters is that they’re very good at just throwing out “statistics” that either “sound legitimate” or actually are and just devoid of context, but are meant to play into the existing biases of the actual factual racists. You see this anytime a clown like Molyneaux tosses out “black on black crime” statistics. What they then don’t say is “therefore blacks have a crime bone in their brain”, but that’s the implication they clearly want their audience to conclude, just as Molyneaux wants to conclude here that whites are the superior race.
There’s also a clear tug-of-war going on within the brain of Molyneaux and those like him who want to vicariously live through the achievements of the colonial powers, but don’t want to be held accountable for the plunder that made it possible. So on one hand, they’ll say “white men built the world, aren’t we great?” but if you mention the legacy of oppression and slavery, they’ll say “shut up, that’s all in the past!” Which way, Western man, which way?
Let’s also not overlook the monopoly on literacy, which has only become widespread in the past 200 years or so. Before that, the ability to read and write was practically a luxury.
I imagine this has been discussed…
THE FUCK!?!?!?!?
Until “the Enlightenment”, most of Europe was mired in Catholic intellectual repression, and most of the scientific advancements were made in Islamic schools.
Other commenters have already taken apart the rest of this argument, but I’d like to ask why people so often think “arts and crafts” and “technology” are separate categories.
Well, that’s because arts and crafts are silly, pointless hobbies that don’t contribute to society in any meaningful way, nothing like technology.
There’s no technical skill involved in something inherently feminine like knitting, and everyone knows that clothes and fabric aren’t technology anyway. Nothing like computer programming, a field which has famously primarily involved men from its very inception.
There’s no kind of theoretical framework and historical progress to understand behind the creation of music or painting or illustration or animation or sculpture. (Unless of course a famous white man has done it, and then he’s a genius, obviously.)
No kind of training or practical understanding goes into arts and crafts, it’s just something that females do instinctively, without any thought.
/sarcasm
Because they didn’t have cars back then. Sorry.
Every time I get into a discussion with a Molyneux fan, I get the feeling I’m battling with an unarmed opponent. It’s kind of sad.
@ Pie
Cue Brian and fellow ‘revolutionaries’ (good satirical model for Molyneaux and his ilk) nodding sagely.
@Katamount:
And don’t forget, the printing press was invented in China. Europe was way behind the curve there.
Thanks to the Church, Europe was comparatively backwards for a long time, playing catch-up with more advanced ancient civilizations: China, Egypt, the Incans, the Mayans, etc. Far from being the spearhead, Europe was more of a crossroads/colonizer that borrowed technologies from many different cultures. You have to erase an awful lot of history to think whites have always been front and center for human progress.
@Moon_custafer:
It’s annoying how women’s creations are dismissed as “crafts”, while men’s creations are labeled “inventions”. Women experiment with food and they’re just another pioneer housewife/artsy food blogger. Men experiment with food and they’re hailed as chefs and get TV shows and Michelin stars. (With some exceptions, like Rachel Ray and Ina Garten).
@ Catalpa, Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
For all I respect Elizabeth Zimmermann for reviving interest in knitting, popularizing circular needles and seamless techniques, etc., I really *hate* her term “unventing,” for playing into this mindset as well as for being cutesy.
(thinks about it some more)
I think some people may draw a less-sexist but still inaccurate division between technology and crafts, where anything invented in their own lifetime is technology, and anything around when they were born is just part of the established universe. People seldom think of tables and chairs as technology, frex. Sort of a variant on Douglas Adams “anything around when you were a small child=normal/anything invented when you were between ten and thirty=cool/anything invented after that=horrible newfangled stuff that’s wrecking society” division.
@cat mara, other people wishing for a ContraPoints video on Molyneux
Shaun semi-frequently debunks Molyneux, which is why I knew about him. The white supremacy isn’t actually new – he’s been on the Great Replacement train for some time now.
Shaun’s Molyneux videos in chronological order:
1. Stefan Molyneux’s Fall of Rome – A Response – https://youtu.be/BHW3Y_p2llo
2. Immigration & the Fall of Rome – https://youtu.be/WqCCx4wj79o (This isn’t so much about Molyneux, but it is a follow-up to his previous Molyneux video and also quite entertaining.)
3. Stefan Molyneux’s Native American Genocide – A Response – https://youtu.be/Xd_nVCWPgiA
4. The Truth About “The Truth About Wonder Woman” – https://youtu.be/33FH1Jl62cY
For being such an intellectual ponce, Molyneux needs to get his self a copy of Guns, Germs and Steel or something. I’m not an anthropologist, just an interested layperson, and even I know that humanity spread from Africa due to the Saharan pump, the cyclical desertification and fertilization of the Saharan desert. Humanity enters from the south during the fertile years, and then spreads in a diaspora during the desertification phase. He might also learn that there was nothing about the humans living in Europe that made them special inherently, it was geographical luck that gave them political dominance – and that dominance came much later than he supposes.
I’m just a dummy, and even I know that.
Ahem. Now, then.
@Kaczynski_Did_Nothing_Wrong
Welcome to WHTM! Where we talk about the sorts of things we like, laugh at the foibles of misogynists, and flay trolls alive over pits of hot coals. I’m sure that doesn’t apply to you, though, ha ha, no, entirely safe.
Tell me, why is it that the world run by women would be so devoid of scientific or technological understanding, as your lurid depiction of the gynocratic dream-time depicts? You allude to the idea that science and progress are male concepts but if you could just be explicit and hit that nail square on the head, that’d be nice. Because – y’see, I don’t entirely disagree with that thought, but at the same time I also vehemently disagree with parts of it. So it’d be nice to know what you mean specifically.
takes out notepad and pen
Thank you and welcome!
On the point of arts and crafts as an extension of technology, I’m reminded of a pair of historical tidbits I came across in my studies.
The first comes from a very fascinating humanities course I took in Engineer School, which was “Science and Technology in the Realms of Islam.” The “Realms of Islam” part was critical because it wasn’t so much that the religion lead to those breakthroughs, but the power structures in place that offered scientists and scholars the support necessary to make their breakthroughs. When they weren’t at war with each other, the Caliphs were always out for the latest big scientist to draw to their court so they could brag that they were the real center of learning and commerce.
Case in point, Al-Jazari’s Robot Band. Ismail Al-Jazari was the court engineer for the Artuqid dynasty and while he is remembered for his numerous mechanical wonders, he was employed to do so almost entirely for the amusement of the Caliph and his court. The Robot Band, while an engineering marvel, was simply another thing that the Artuqid Caliph could show off to his rivals and say “Haha, do you have a Robot Band? I think not!”
It was the same reason they built universities and enormous libraries: not for the altruistic reasons of knowledge generation, but to show up the neighbouring Caliph for not being as wealthy/cool.
In short, dick-measuring contests.
The second thing I’m reminded of is the fact that a lot of the “arts and crafts” being spoken of were created from craft materials themselves, and those crafts involved a lot of scientific work.
Look no further than the creation of dyes. Mass production has skewed our understanding of dye fabrication, but these colours that we see in old tapestries were not easily created.
Again, huge props to Sir Tony Robinson for his Worst Jobs In History series. There are two segments where he interviewed Ancient Dye Researcher John Edmonds, who demonstrates dye extraction techniques used before the Industrial Revolution:
In this clip, he makes blues from woad:
https://youtu.be/8QUd-cTNT8o?t=1840
In this clip, he makes Tyrian purple from crushed Murex rock snails:
https://youtu.be/J_TEiWkzQXM?t=2558
Both techniques required a lot of informal chemistry to get right. We take these things for granted because they’re just coloured fabric, but a lot of work went into it.