By David Futrelle
Our old friend Stefan Molyneux, the racist YouTube “philosopher” and sort-of cult leader, has a new obsession. Can you guess what it is?
Hint: I starts with a “c” and rhymes with “momunism,” as in “momunism unleashed the coronavirus on the world.”
So people who catch the coronavirus turn into communists? I’m a little confused here.
In addition to yelling about the “totalitarian Chinese communist government that unleashed a worldwide pandemic,” Stefan also enjoys calling people he doesn’t like communists.
Like, for example, Hollywood, the media, and academia:
… and Bernie:
… and Obama:
… and Swedish feminists.
… and people who worry about overpopulation:
… and people who worry about racism.
… and even the forces of capitalism themselves:
About the only thing he doesn’t think is communist is … communist China?
WAIT A MINUTE HERE
So Stefan has spent much of the past several months attacking communist China, and communism in general, for “unleashing” the coronoavirus on the world. But back in December he was saying that China isn’t communist?
You’ll have to find a more experienced Stefan-Molyneux-explainer to explain this one to you, because honestly I’m just baffled by this one. I guess anticommunism is more complicated than I thought.
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…And thus the snake consumes its own tail, like a fucking dolt.
My uncle said something about China “creating” this virus. and that they would somehow make money off it by selling..respirators or something (???)
Pandemic Fact: Dealing with my racist relatives over zoom is just as annoying as in real life. Yay!
“You go into debt to pay for your own Marxist indoctrination.”
So Stefan thinks it’s bad that people have to go into debt to finance their educations…but he hates Bernie Sanders?
OK, Boomer.
You heard it here first, folks: communists created capitalism to make capitalists look bad!
This is like that ‘I’m not saying it’s Aliens, but…” meme.
If I had the graphics skills, and knew what this Molyneux guy looked like, and could be arsed, I’d make an image but with ‘communists’..
Yeah, I think we all know what he means by “communists.”
Well, China has contained their pandemic far better than the US did. Say what you want about communism, but the US is a mess right now.
Assigning political ideologies to non-political terms is pointless, but “struggle” is probably a fascist term then. It wasn’t a communist who titled his autobiography My Struggle.
What does it say about capitalism that all its defenders are racists? Hmm…
The thing is, almost no white supremacists have actually had their lives destroyed. The ones in Washington are doing just fine. It’s like ranting about “cancel culture”: almost nobody actually gets “cancelled” for good.
@Karalora
I think his point was that he doesn’t want women being educated. Because if they are educated they are more likely to have the tools and empowerment to see through his bullshit.
I think there’s some truth to this. This coronavirus has exposed just how inadequate capitalism, especially its rawest form as demonstrated in the U.S., is at dealing with crises of this nature. Inelastic demand sounds like a cute thought experiment when you’re talking about rare baseball cards in a lecture hall, not so much when human lives are at stake. That’s not even getting into the specific phenomenon of the U.S. Democrats openly engaging in many of the same racist, misogynist, voter-suppressing bullshit that was supposedly reserved for the Republicans. Alyssa Milano’s response to Biden says it all, really. And Biden himself has managed to change my mind about the importance of voting in the general election.
I don’t know how much longer I can take the Bernie Bro epithet in stride. It’s long since become a snarl word and a tool of whataboutism.
Another painfully almost correct statement. Birth rates in developed countries tend to be pretty low. So who is being talked about when people express concern about overpopulation?
Oh please let’s not do this here.
Trump is literally genocidal.
@WWTH
To add:
I’m getting rather annoyed with so many people on the left who are choosing to stay home or write in and are asking if Biden is actually any better than Trump. This is a position of privilege, one only held by people who know they can survive another 4 years of Trump. It’s not a position held by POC, LGBTQIPA+ folx, or other minorities.
I get that Joe Biden is not a great candidate. I don’t like him myself. However, I’m not going to just let fascists win because a better candidate dropped out. It is truly reckless. Is Joe Biden going to make all the great changes that we would hope for? Probably not. But Trump is infinitely worse. People will die because of this election if Trump gets elected. I don’t look forward to voting for Biden in the general, but I need to do it.
Alexis Filth said it best on Twitter when she said something to this effect: Biden is a stomach bug, Trump is stage 4 cancer. We don’t have an option where we don’t get sick, but we can choose how sick we get.
…And that would be according to the official numbers released by China? The same China who has discredited and/or silenced and/or disappeared any of their own healthcare workers who have publicly contradicted said official numbers?
You’ll pardon me if I’m not completely convinced of their government’s official efficacy with regards to the pandemic response.
First, does Molyneux think anyone at all gives a shit that he has an M.A.? Does he think it’s impressive? Hell, I have a J.D., and I haven’t appended that to my signature since, well, ever. And to me, having an M.A. simply marks one as a failed Ph.D. wannabe. Wassamatter, Stefan, couldn’t handle the work?
Second, I’ve been a Democrat, and a liberal one, for longer than he’s been alive. I protested the Vietnam war, I voted for McGovern, and I’ve worked on presidential campaigns, and I have never, never met a communist. For that matter, I never read Saul Alinsky, either, which means I am a normal Democrat, and not one of the mythical creatures the Republicans get so freaked out about.
Come to think about it, no one but Republicans cares two shits about communists or Alinsky. The rest of us have lives.
And Biden isn’t? I think people need to seriously consider the implications of his own words (and actions!) when he says that things are going to stay the same under his presidency, and when he straight up dismisses the issues experienced by younger generations.
Whenever this is brought up, there’s this false dichotomy where either you do everything you can to vote for the lesser evil, or you might as well be voting for the greater one. So I guess I should qualify that I’m only talking about the presidential vote, not about the other various important seats that are up to be filled, many of which I’m sure are being contested by decent people. And I guess I don’t really care either way if someone wants to hold their nose and vote for Biden. I just think it’s pretty understandable if people end up not doing that because of… all this. The Biden campaign right now seems to think voters will turn up to pick him, just because he’s not overtly fascist, even if it means literally risking their lives. The Bernie campaign was already drawing resources and attention away from other activism, so would people say the same sacrifices will, or should, be made for Biden?
Trust me, actual communists don’t read Alinsky either. Hell, community activists don’t read Alinsky anymore. I got a BS in Community Development and read all of five pages of Alinsky the whole bloody time.
Sorry mate, “overpopulation” is right wing or ecofascist bs, designed to justify continuing to shit on the post-colonial world.
Stefan: Everything I don”t like or don”t understand. Is was made by communist or is communist. I believe this because I don’t understand communism.
Impish Pepper,
Do you have any slightest fucking idea how impossible it will be to cling to whatever gains have made been the past handful of decades, let alone ever make any new progress in the next handful of decades if Trump gets to pick two more Supreme Court Justices? Not to mention all the other federal court positions?
Do you even care?
Are you so eager to punish white suburban boomers who love Biden that you’ll condemn all the mariginalized people to what a 7-2 right wing SCOTUS will bring them?
Don’t ever fucking claim to care about the rights of marginalized people if you’re going to enable that.
You know why the right has been so successful? Because they vote with the courts in mind while playing the long game starting from the bottom up by changing their party bit by bit to serve their agenda. Have a little discipline and strategy if you want the left to be successful in the US. No one is asking you to love Biden. I sure don’t. But you’ll have a lot more success putting your energy into state and local races and congressional races and voting for the presidential candidate who won’t put a young Federalist Society die hard into every court positions that opens up then taking your ball and going home.
For fuck’s sake.
Why on earth you decided to this in these comments, I don’t know, but don’t expect this kind of bullshit to be tolerated.
You can argue that China’s not traditionally communist (because it’s also pretty capitalist). But it’s not like Molyneux is going to say anything that makes sense. Take this:
Then why has Communist Canada (/s) questioned the usefulness of face masks for folks who don’t have symptoms and is telling people not to wear surgical-type masks so more can go to health care workers?
@jsrtheta – Okay, I know you’re not serious, but I did an MA without intending to go further. Then again, I am somewhat lazy 🙂
@An Impish Pepper
Even if Democrats can hold on to the house, and even in the unlikely event Dems take the senate, if Trump is re-elected we’ll still spend the next four years fighting a dictator wannabe who will just use executive orders and corruption to do what he wants.
And of course, as WWTH mentioned, the courts. RBG is unlikely to make it much longer, and if Trump gets a 7-2 Supreme Court, Roe v. Wade, gay marriage, and other things we worked for decades to achieve are good as dead.
I really don’t see how you can look at Biden and Trump and say “they’re both equally bad, fuck it, not voting for either.” You’d be throwing millions under the bus. Biden’s not great, but he’s not a fucking mass murderer.
Hate to break to ole Stevie, but the Canadian media probably pays more attention to Corey Hart than they do to him.
Given his comment about racism quoted above I wouldn’t be surprised to see him go openly white supremacist. That’s straight out of their playbook.
I dunno, some of us are getting pretty fucking sick of being thrown under the bus in a futile effort to get the white moderate onside. Biden will fix exactly nothing, and has already promised to capitulate to Congressional Republicans on all issues. (Sorry, ‘work with’ them. I’m also heartily sick of people pretending there’s a difference.). He has no actual policy positions, no plans to make the slightest improvement in the status quo, and on a personal level he’s a rapist, and I can’t really see “Vote for our rapist, he’s less evil than their rapist” as a compelling argument. There comes a point where the supposedly ‘lesser’ evil is still too fucking evil.
The double standard is palpable but that’s not surprising given how the last time went.
When Warren dropped out, people here said some really horrible reductionist things about Bernie supporters and I figured, hey, maybe I won’t begrudge them too much since they did just lose the person they wanted on the ticket. And then, after Bernie drops out, I say something that admittedly may have been a bit hyperbolic, and now you’ve all constructed a Bernie Bro narrative all around me, telling me I believe the opposite of things I actually believe. And it’s clear from the responses that no amount of nuance I give will change your minds. I get enough of this kind of abuse outside the internet.
Question: Can anyone think of some bad predictions that Stefan Molyneux has made? Because I read his twitter for a bit and saw this gem:
https://twitter.com/StefanMolyneux/status/1248426005196201985
Because I’m betting he’s made some that by his own logic should get him fired.
God, I wish we were as powerful in the real world as we are in the minds of reactionaries.
Re: voting for Biden
I don’t believe the leftists who aren’t going to vote for Biden can be held responsible for Trump’s victory. I believe Trump and the Democratic Party are going to be responsible for Trump’s victory, through the political maneuvering (and inhumanity) of the former and the incompetence and inhumanity of the latter.
I say this as someone who will be sacrificing my lefty purity points to vote for Biden in November, because I live in a purple state and I might as well throw my infinitetesimal weight behind a marginally less genocidal conservative rapist. I say this with the full expectation that my vote will not make a difference.
The writing is pretty much on the wall. Besides the encumbancy advantage, the electoral college advantage and the deeply entrenched mechanisms of voter suppression benefitting Republicans, Trump has something behind him that Biden never will — enthusiasm. Because despite accusations of non-voters being privileged and detached, the truth is that most people don’t vote. And the people the least likely to do so tend to be the most socially and economically alienated. You’re not gonna convince those people that Joe “nothing will fundamentally change Biden” is gonna make their lives better.
Peoples’ lives aren’t gonna get better on a large scale any time soon, and that’s absolutely devastating. But voting is far from the most useful way to fight. I’ll keep engaging in local politics, and I’ll never stop working and organizing for those people, cause there’s really no other recourse.
@An Impish Pepper
Maybe you can manage to be a little bit stoic about this epithet, which has always been negative. Do your best. I’ve been stoic about it for years now. And even though I wish Bernie were still in the race, I’m going to exercise some common sense and vote for, yeah, a guy with deep corporate ties who’s been accused of sexual assault but who isn’t going to appoint an extreme right-winger to the Supreme Court when 87-year-old Ruth Bader Ginsburg can’t do her job anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Bro
I think a closer analogy is that the patient already has cancer, but it may well be treatable…as long as we stop the arterial bleeding that is also happening. The people pledging not to vote because they don’t think Biden is good enough are basically saying that bleeding and cancer will both kill you so there’s no point in treating either one.
Biden is not great. In many ways, he seems pretty terrible. But the one thing we’ll definitely still have with him is more chances to try to do better in the future. He at least won’t actively destroy the Republic.
The only point where he have a hint of truth is that the totalitarian chinese governement made the pandemic worse.
Just as well, the other governement didn’t react perfectly either. The US one is visibly a shitshow, there are some indication Russia and Iran are too.
I disagree with the idea the pandemic showed that capitalism, or any economic system, is inadapted, since the problems are fundamentally political. However, it could prove the states are actually useful actors. I do suspect it will take more than that to convince people to stop voting for dolts that say the state is the greater evil of everything.