By Paul Elam: Till yesterday, I had just about decided I was going to be able to avoid writing on Charlottesville, Virginia, where a protest of the removal of a statue of Civil War General Robert E. Lee escalated to deadly proportions when protestors and counter protestors clashed in the streets.
It’s not that I don’t have opinions on the matter. I’ve got plenty. I had just hoped to pass on this one because the fracas is only tangentially applicable to the men’s movement – and because people tend to get stupid when you talk about these matters honestly.
However, true to their typically disingenuous form, Salon.com has pulled A Voice for Men into the controversy. There is an article by Amanda Marcotte revealing that one of the ringleaders of the white supremacists who were staging the Charlottesville rally formerly wrote for AVFM. Marcotte attempted to establish that the men’s movement was a gateway for violent racism. She linked to a HBO broadcast of a Vice Magazine documentary in support of her article.
The title of her article perfectly reflects the sentiment she was shooting for. “Weeping Nazi started off as a men’s rights activist, which is hardly surprising.” It was subtitled, “Christopher Cantwell’s trajectory from men’s rights to white supremacy is sadly typical for the alt right.”
Weeping Nazi, by the way, was a reference to Cantwell getting maced a couple of times during the melee. Cantwell, incidentally, had a few pieces published by AVFM a few years ago.
Using this guilt by association, Marcotte makes the men’s movement and me personally a target for blame in the Charlottesville disaster, and in that, I suppose, a candidate for retaliation. So, if you are against me speaking to the matter, get your down vote and nasty comment ready. I will leave you to imagine my concern about your objections.
Now, this entire mess is complicated. And I suppose it is my job in this talk to not just point to the Marcotte’s trademark mendacity, but to uncomplicate matters, even if I know that uncomplicating matters will piss even more people off. That’s the trick about matters like this, especially those with racial implications. Any intellectually honest critique gets you placed directly into the crossfire.
Such is life in a society driven by the raw emotionalism of cable news and websites like Salon.
With that I want to start this talk with what I consider to be a succession of relevant truths, starting with Christopher Cantwell and moving forward to the bigger picture of racism, free speech, political violence and America’s future.
Truth #1. Christopher Cantwell did write articles published by AVFM. None of the pieces we published included racist or violent sentiments.
Truth #2. Christopher Cantwell was disinvited from writing anything else for AVFM after I discovered advocacy for politically motivated violence he had penned on his own blog. This was in keeping with AVFM’s anti-violence stance that has been in our founding principles since inception.
Truth #3. Christopher Cantwell made his disagreement with the decision to no longer publish his work quite public, blaming liberals at AVFM for the decision.
Truth #4. It was not liberals at AVFM who made the decision, it was me. And I am not a liberal. I am a conservative who doesn’t see violence, or the people willing to engage in it, as a healthy or legitimate means of effecting political change.
Truth #5. Christopher Cantwell has and must have a right to express his opinions without being sprayed with mace or subjected to other forms of violence aimed at silencing him. I did not want his work at AVFM, but that is my free speech being exercised through control of my own intellectual property. The question of whether he has the right to express himself on his own ground, however, was never even a question worth asking. He either gets to speak his mind or eventually none of us do. The only way to not know that is by lying to yourself.
Truth #6. Christopher Cantwell’s opinions and beliefs, however distasteful to some, do not confer moral superiority or extralegal privilege to those who want to silence him. Calling yourself anti-fascist or anti-racist does not give you the license to pick up a baseball bat and wade into a protest swinging it at people. You may think it does, and you certainly have the unquestioned right to say so. But when you do that in practice, it leaves you fairly and legitimately in the crosshairs of people protecting their freedoms. Make of that what you will. I don’t care.
I note this is the bone that the left media has been picking with President Trump. Their claim is that Trump erred by stating the fact that there was violence and wrong doing on both sides. That was his big sin, and naturally it is proof of his racism.
As we all know, racism is bad. It’s very bad: an overarching, absolute evil. So, in a clash between people who are supposedly racist and those who are supposedly anti-racist, the supposed anti-racists aren’t guilty of immorality or criminality due to the alleged moral superiority of their cause. That, of course, is utter bullshit that corrupts the very idea of constitutional freedoms. It’s just another excuse for another kind of evil.
But it is a powerful form of bullshit. It even had President Trump, who is a remarkably resilient and steely resistor to pressure for political correctness, failing, when he relented to pressure to name groups he didn’t include Antifa and Black Lives Matter, whose utter hatefulness and propensity for violence has been on full public display for some time.
And while I am pissing some people off, I will add that virtue signaling is a direct path to rationalizing violence. There is a lengthy historical record of white men reacting that way to the fear that blacks would rape their women. That record makes Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic and a fender bender.
Moving on to the matter that sparked this fiasco, Truth #7. From pre-revolutionary war history to modern times, we have made heroes of men who owned slaves. They are indeed immortalized in monuments across the land but only a minority of which are even associated with the American Civil War. They include the names of founding fathers like Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Hancock. Even George Washington, our first president, the namesake of our nation’s capital whose image is emblazoned on our currency, was an owner of slaves.
Truth #8. The racism that inarguably lingers from that history is nothing compared to problems that are more self-inflicted in nature. The biggest modern threat to the black community is the black community. A short walk through the blood-filled streets of Chicago should be enough to convince anyone of that. The number one cause of death for black men aged 15-34 is other black men.
Truth #9. While black on black violence represents a community turning its problems inward on itself, the primary architects of that rampant misery are white liberals, with the complicity of virtually every widely recognized black civil rights leader and organization.
By stringing entire inner-city enclaves out on public assistance and financially rewarding black women for having children without having fathers for them, they created a dangerous culture of fatherless black boys who find father figures in gang leaders and other criminals. The impact of the right’s war on drugs and the left’s Violence Against Women Act created two more very deep, terrible wounds. The amount of despair resulting from this is incalculable, and it desperately needs attention.
Truth #10. The police presence that always follows the folly of right-left politics is poorly-trained, poorly-paid, poorly-educated and woefully under-screened for psychological problems, like excessive physical aggression. The screening and the training are closely related. Most any given episode of “Cops” is enough to show that police are prone to use violence as a first option, often without discretion and frequently as a thuggish, abusive response to mental health crises that could be managed non-lethally, and with far less violence. The most reliable predictor of whether police abuse will occur is sex, not race, with men on the short end of the stick and black men on the shortest end.
Truth #11. Tearing down a statue of Robert E Lee isn’t going to solve this problem.
Truth #12. Blaming President Trump, especially when people like President Obama are more a part of the dysfunction, isn’t going to solve this problem.
Truth #13. White nationalism is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #14. The Ku Klux Klan is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #15. Antifa is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #16. Black Lives Matter is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #17. Hack journalism by mendacious political operatives like Amanda Marcotte is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #18. Truths 1-17 are all factors making this problem worse, because they all point us directly away from any solutions that might be employed, creating false boogeymen in the process. Just because some racists are anti-feminist doesn’t mean they have anything close to answers.
Not that the wrongly labeled anti-racists are any better. At the end of the day, after you tear down every Civil War monument in the nation, and after you rename a thousand towns, cities, streets, schools and parks, you will still be left with scores of impoverished, fatherless black men killing each other, and police, doing the bidding of politicians from both sides of the fence, responding to the core problems with the politically expedient abuse of the victims.
As we’ve seen play out throughout our history, blacks are just the canaries in the coal mines. White culture isn’t exempt from the same debilitating effect of political policies and feminism. Most of the protestors surrounding and participating in the destruction of the statue of Robert E. Lee were white. They are the same breed of white people who manufactured and presided over the ultimate destruction of the black family. And I will lay dollars to donuts that the clear majority of those white thugs came from homes without fathers. They weren’t just stomping on Robert E. Lee, if you know what I mean.
All this, mind you, is just a superficial examination. The forces behind the rise of violence on the streets that is surely on the way, don’t care about the destructive impact of fatherless children. They don’t care about racial equality, either. And they don’t care about our real history except to the extent that in the case of the radical left they want to erase it.
Does anyone really think that the sole objective here is to create a culture that quits glorifying the leaders of the South in the American Civil war? Does anyone really think that is all they want to destroy?
If you do think that, you are foolish. There are already calls to destroy Mount Rushmore. One of the counter protesters in the HBO sham documentary said something to the effect that just getting rid of Lee didn’t mean much when the slave owner was still sitting on top of the hill at Monticello. She was of course referring to Thomas Jefferson.
This is not about ridding proper, enlightened America of the hailed images of Southern Civil War Heroes. That is just the target of opportunity. What they mean to do is to rid America of America. They want to destroy our history, all of it; destroy our icons, our way of life and our freedoms.
In fact, you’ve been seeing this happening right in front of your eyes in the corporate wing of the modern left. Google, with its search engine delisting of speech it does not approve of, is now leading the way. And Google is not alone. A Voice for Men, the site that rejected Christopher Cantwell’s violent rhetoric, is blocked by Norton’s safe search so that many people in public hotspots can’t see the site.
O2 in the UK has done the same thing, preventing many people from reading A Voice for Men. And this has been going on for years.
The real battle over this is yet to come. So far, it is mostly extremists who have shown up. Virtue signal all you want about terrible they are, the only reason the Christopher Cantwells of the world are here is because the political establishment has failed to do its sacred duty to uphold the constitution. The Charlottseville Police Department put on a clinic in that for sure.
But don’t expect help from a Republican party who threw the constitution under the bus a long time ago. The collective silence of Republican snowflakes who don’t want to be accused of being “alt right” has left the fight in the hands of the wrong people. They are no different than Democrats who have surrendered their political advocacy and will to the likes of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
This is normally where I would try to offer some sort of solution to the problem. I don’t have any. Well, take that back. I could suggest the destruction of cultural Marxism, the restoration of fathers in the family and the furthering of a non-violent men’s rights movement that has solutions to these pressing social problems. But that would mean taking on gynocentrism head on.
For all that is worth I could also recommend that politicians have balls, tell the truth and put the welfare of the American people over their continued quest for power. Oh yeah, and the media could start reporting news honestly.
Like I said, I don’t have any solutions.
The best we will do for now is to continue to foster red pill philosophy, encouraging men to go their own way, support those who work for change in the ways they are able, and importantly, to expand this intellectual refuge for people who just can’t swallow anymore blue pills.
We can’t yet fix the boatload of stupid that has spread across American culture on both sides of the political aisle. I don’t know if we ever will. It may just have to crash and burn before anything meaningful can rise out of the ashes. But that, too, is probably a pipe dream. Ashes have a way of rising and turning into the same crap that started the fire.
It’s not that I don’t have opinions on the matter. I’ve got plenty. I had just hoped to pass on this one because the fracas is only tangentially applicable to the men’s movement – and because people tend to get stupid when you talk about these matters honestly.
However, true to their typically disingenuous form, Salon.com has pulled A Voice for Men into the controversy. There is an article by Amanda Marcotte revealing that one of the ringleaders of the white supremacists who were staging the Charlottesville rally formerly wrote for AVFM. Marcotte attempted to establish that the men’s movement was a gateway for violent racism. She linked to a HBO broadcast of a Vice Magazine documentary in support of her article.The title of her article perfectly reflects the sentiment she was shooting for. “Weeping Nazi started off as a men’s rights activist, which is hardly surprising.” It was subtitled, “Christopher Cantwell’s trajectory from men’s rights to white supremacy is sadly typical for the alt right.”
Weeping Nazi, by the way, was a reference to Cantwell getting maced a couple of times during the melee. Cantwell, incidentally, had a few pieces published by AVFM a few years ago.
Using this guilt by association, Marcotte makes the men’s movement and me personally a target for blame in the Charlottesville disaster, and in that, I suppose, a candidate for retaliation. So, if you are against me speaking to the matter, get your down vote and nasty comment ready. I will leave you to imagine my concern about your objections.
Now, this entire mess is complicated. And I suppose it is my job in this talk to not just point to the Marcotte’s trademark mendacity, but to uncomplicate matters, even if I know that uncomplicating matters will piss even more people off. That’s the trick about matters like this, especially those with racial implications. Any intellectually honest critique gets you placed directly into the crossfire.
Such is life in a society driven by the raw emotionalism of cable news and websites like Salon.
With that I want to start this talk with what I consider to be a succession of relevant truths, starting with Christopher Cantwell and moving forward to the bigger picture of racism, free speech, political violence and America’s future.
Truth #1. Christopher Cantwell did write articles published by AVFM. None of the pieces we published included racist or violent sentiments.
Truth #2. Christopher Cantwell was disinvited from writing anything else for AVFM after I discovered advocacy for politically motivated violence he had penned on his own blog. This was in keeping with AVFM’s anti-violence stance that has been in our founding principles since inception.
Truth #3. Christopher Cantwell made his disagreement with the decision to no longer publish his work quite public, blaming liberals at AVFM for the decision.
Truth #4. It was not liberals at AVFM who made the decision, it was me. And I am not a liberal. I am a conservative who doesn’t see violence, or the people willing to engage in it, as a healthy or legitimate means of effecting political change.
Truth #5. Christopher Cantwell has and must have a right to express his opinions without being sprayed with mace or subjected to other forms of violence aimed at silencing him. I did not want his work at AVFM, but that is my free speech being exercised through control of my own intellectual property. The question of whether he has the right to express himself on his own ground, however, was never even a question worth asking. He either gets to speak his mind or eventually none of us do. The only way to not know that is by lying to yourself.
Truth #6. Christopher Cantwell’s opinions and beliefs, however distasteful to some, do not confer moral superiority or extralegal privilege to those who want to silence him. Calling yourself anti-fascist or anti-racist does not give you the license to pick up a baseball bat and wade into a protest swinging it at people. You may think it does, and you certainly have the unquestioned right to say so. But when you do that in practice, it leaves you fairly and legitimately in the crosshairs of people protecting their freedoms. Make of that what you will. I don’t care.
I note this is the bone that the left media has been picking with President Trump. Their claim is that Trump erred by stating the fact that there was violence and wrong doing on both sides. That was his big sin, and naturally it is proof of his racism.
As we all know, racism is bad. It’s very bad: an overarching, absolute evil. So, in a clash between people who are supposedly racist and those who are supposedly anti-racist, the supposed anti-racists aren’t guilty of immorality or criminality due to the alleged moral superiority of their cause. That, of course, is utter bullshit that corrupts the very idea of constitutional freedoms. It’s just another excuse for another kind of evil.
But it is a powerful form of bullshit. It even had President Trump, who is a remarkably resilient and steely resistor to pressure for political correctness, failing, when he relented to pressure to name groups he didn’t include Antifa and Black Lives Matter, whose utter hatefulness and propensity for violence has been on full public display for some time.
And while I am pissing some people off, I will add that virtue signaling is a direct path to rationalizing violence. There is a lengthy historical record of white men reacting that way to the fear that blacks would rape their women. That record makes Charlottesville look like a Sunday picnic and a fender bender.
Moving on to the matter that sparked this fiasco, Truth #7. From pre-revolutionary war history to modern times, we have made heroes of men who owned slaves. They are indeed immortalized in monuments across the land but only a minority of which are even associated with the American Civil War. They include the names of founding fathers like Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Hancock. Even George Washington, our first president, the namesake of our nation’s capital whose image is emblazoned on our currency, was an owner of slaves.
Truth #8. The racism that inarguably lingers from that history is nothing compared to problems that are more self-inflicted in nature. The biggest modern threat to the black community is the black community. A short walk through the blood-filled streets of Chicago should be enough to convince anyone of that. The number one cause of death for black men aged 15-34 is other black men.
Truth #9. While black on black violence represents a community turning its problems inward on itself, the primary architects of that rampant misery are white liberals, with the complicity of virtually every widely recognized black civil rights leader and organization.
By stringing entire inner-city enclaves out on public assistance and financially rewarding black women for having children without having fathers for them, they created a dangerous culture of fatherless black boys who find father figures in gang leaders and other criminals. The impact of the right’s war on drugs and the left’s Violence Against Women Act created two more very deep, terrible wounds. The amount of despair resulting from this is incalculable, and it desperately needs attention.
Truth #10. The police presence that always follows the folly of right-left politics is poorly-trained, poorly-paid, poorly-educated and woefully under-screened for psychological problems, like excessive physical aggression. The screening and the training are closely related. Most any given episode of “Cops” is enough to show that police are prone to use violence as a first option, often without discretion and frequently as a thuggish, abusive response to mental health crises that could be managed non-lethally, and with far less violence. The most reliable predictor of whether police abuse will occur is sex, not race, with men on the short end of the stick and black men on the shortest end.
Truth #11. Tearing down a statue of Robert E Lee isn’t going to solve this problem.
Truth #12. Blaming President Trump, especially when people like President Obama are more a part of the dysfunction, isn’t going to solve this problem.
Truth #13. White nationalism is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #14. The Ku Klux Klan is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #15. Antifa is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #16. Black Lives Matter is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #17. Hack journalism by mendacious political operatives like Amanda Marcotte is not going to solve this problem.
Truth #18. Truths 1-17 are all factors making this problem worse, because they all point us directly away from any solutions that might be employed, creating false boogeymen in the process. Just because some racists are anti-feminist doesn’t mean they have anything close to answers.
Not that the wrongly labeled anti-racists are any better. At the end of the day, after you tear down every Civil War monument in the nation, and after you rename a thousand towns, cities, streets, schools and parks, you will still be left with scores of impoverished, fatherless black men killing each other, and police, doing the bidding of politicians from both sides of the fence, responding to the core problems with the politically expedient abuse of the victims.
As we’ve seen play out throughout our history, blacks are just the canaries in the coal mines. White culture isn’t exempt from the same debilitating effect of political policies and feminism. Most of the protestors surrounding and participating in the destruction of the statue of Robert E. Lee were white. They are the same breed of white people who manufactured and presided over the ultimate destruction of the black family. And I will lay dollars to donuts that the clear majority of those white thugs came from homes without fathers. They weren’t just stomping on Robert E. Lee, if you know what I mean.
All this, mind you, is just a superficial examination. The forces behind the rise of violence on the streets that is surely on the way, don’t care about the destructive impact of fatherless children. They don’t care about racial equality, either. And they don’t care about our real history except to the extent that in the case of the radical left they want to erase it.
Does anyone really think that the sole objective here is to create a culture that quits glorifying the leaders of the South in the American Civil war? Does anyone really think that is all they want to destroy?
If you do think that, you are foolish. There are already calls to destroy Mount Rushmore. One of the counter protesters in the HBO sham documentary said something to the effect that just getting rid of Lee didn’t mean much when the slave owner was still sitting on top of the hill at Monticello. She was of course referring to Thomas Jefferson.
This is not about ridding proper, enlightened America of the hailed images of Southern Civil War Heroes. That is just the target of opportunity. What they mean to do is to rid America of America. They want to destroy our history, all of it; destroy our icons, our way of life and our freedoms.
In fact, you’ve been seeing this happening right in front of your eyes in the corporate wing of the modern left. Google, with its search engine delisting of speech it does not approve of, is now leading the way. And Google is not alone. A Voice for Men, the site that rejected Christopher Cantwell’s violent rhetoric, is blocked by Norton’s safe search so that many people in public hotspots can’t see the site.
O2 in the UK has done the same thing, preventing many people from reading A Voice for Men. And this has been going on for years.
The real battle over this is yet to come. So far, it is mostly extremists who have shown up. Virtue signal all you want about terrible they are, the only reason the Christopher Cantwells of the world are here is because the political establishment has failed to do its sacred duty to uphold the constitution. The Charlottseville Police Department put on a clinic in that for sure.
But don’t expect help from a Republican party who threw the constitution under the bus a long time ago. The collective silence of Republican snowflakes who don’t want to be accused of being “alt right” has left the fight in the hands of the wrong people. They are no different than Democrats who have surrendered their political advocacy and will to the likes of Antifa and Black Lives Matter.
This is normally where I would try to offer some sort of solution to the problem. I don’t have any. Well, take that back. I could suggest the destruction of cultural Marxism, the restoration of fathers in the family and the furthering of a non-violent men’s rights movement that has solutions to these pressing social problems. But that would mean taking on gynocentrism head on.
For all that is worth I could also recommend that politicians have balls, tell the truth and put the welfare of the American people over their continued quest for power. Oh yeah, and the media could start reporting news honestly.
Like I said, I don’t have any solutions.
The best we will do for now is to continue to foster red pill philosophy, encouraging men to go their own way, support those who work for change in the ways they are able, and importantly, to expand this intellectual refuge for people who just can’t swallow anymore blue pills.
We can’t yet fix the boatload of stupid that has spread across American culture on both sides of the political aisle. I don’t know if we ever will. It may just have to crash and burn before anything meaningful can rise out of the ashes. But that, too, is probably a pipe dream. Ashes have a way of rising and turning into the same crap that started the fire.
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