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Jan. 15, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:48
1255 True News 16 -- Media Accusations Part One

Responses to the recent articles about Freedomain Radio.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefano Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is True News, current events clarified, number 16, 14th of January 2009.
Happy New Year to you.
Free Domain Radio in the news.
The facts behind the accusations.
So, my philosophy podcast, Free Domain Radio, has recently been, shall we say, featured in the mainstream media.
The articles and radio shows and so on were slanderous and factually inaccurate, so let's review the facts.
What are the accusations against Freedom Aid Radio?
That it is an online cult.
That it is a virtual cult.
That it is a cyber version of a therapy cult.
See if you can see the pattern.
It is the internet cult that stole my son, says a politician.
It is deeply sinister.
A website that brainwashes youngsters into disowning their families and vanishing into thin air.
The British newspaper, the Daily Mail, has insinuated connections to unrelated teen suicides in Wales.
What are the accusations against me?
Well, here's an article titled, How a Cyber Philosopher Convinced Followers to Cut Off Family.
That Steph convinces vulnerable people that they should hate their parents and should leave their family.
Stefan Molyneux encourages people to cut contact with their parents, and so on and so on and so on.
So for those who don't know what is Free Domain Radio, it's a completely free philosophy website.
It has all the usual stuff, message board, podcasts, books, videos, chat room.
There's no charge. Whatsoever for any of the online resources, people who find them useful, the free books, the free podcasts, the free articles, and so on, they can donate if they like or not.
They can come, they can go.
It's a website. I think you understand what that means, I'm sure.
Free Domain Radio was also a top ten finalist in both the 2007 and 2008 podcast awards in the education category.
A little bit about me.
I've been a software entrepreneur.
In the 90s, I co-founded a successful company.
I worked for many years as a chief technical officer and in marketing and in sales.
I've been around the world to Europe, to China, to America, doing sales and presenting at conferences and so on.
I also studied English literature at York University in Canada.
I hold an undergraduate degree in history from McGill University in Montreal.
I earned a graduate degree from the University of Toronto.
These are all Ivy League schools here in Canada.
They are the top three. I received an A for my master's thesis, analyzing the political implications of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, Hobbes, and Locke.
It's a little bit about me.
About a year and a half ago, I took a 75% pay cut, left a career of 15 years in the software field to focus on philosophy.
So it's more of a labor of love than a path to riches, I guarantee you.
So what has actually happened?
What are the facts? Earlier this year, a young man in a call-in show asked me if I had any thoughts as to why he might have a particular obsession.
After I offered a tentative or possible theory and expressed it as a tentative and possible theory, it turned out to be a terrifyingly and horrifyingly accurate theory.
This young man burst into tears.
He expressed deep grief and And anger about being physically terrorized as a child by his father, who repeatedly and reportedly kicked in windows, trashed entire rooms, verbally abused him, and so on.
This happened about every two weeks or so throughout his childhood and was utterly terrifying.
His father is a very large man.
It was utterly terrifying to him.
And he became extraordinarily emotional about this abuse that he reported to have suffered for so long.
He confirmed, because I asked, I said, well, did your father have the ability to control his temper if he wanted?
I mean, did he ever punch a teacher or smash up rooms at school or in front of people who would have some authority over him?
In other words, was he suffering from some biological disorder which he was not able to control?
No. Apparently the response was no.
I then said that the abuse that this poor young man had suffered as a child for 18 years was completely immoral.
I'm shocked that this is even remotely a controversial statement.
Now, later in the call, this young man said that he was physically incapable of leaving the family household.
I reminded him that this was physically possible Of course, the choice to stay or to leave is his, but it is physically possible, which is true.
And as a philosopher, I think it's important to deal with some basic facts.
So, here are some quotes from the actual show.
I said, what do you mean you can't get out?
I'm not saying that you should, but let's deal with the reality of the situation, i.e.
that it is physically possible for you to leave.
I said, you could choose to stay.
You could choose to room with a friend.
Again, these are quotes from the actual show that all the reporters have listened to.
I also told him that my feedback is a purely amateur diagnosis, so take it with all the grains of salt in the world.
Now, as I was ending the conversation to move on to another listener, the young man abruptly brought up the logistics of leaving home, saying, I need to get away from these people.
These are his words and not mine.
I actually, and you can hear this in the show, I suggested ways for him to extend his stay at home by minimizing the conflict with his parents, spending less time at home and so on, more time with friends.
And if you want to hear the show, you can just go to freedomainradio.com.
There's a link to it from the homepage.
Here are some more quotes from the show.
The young man said, this is all just a very strong yearning or urge to just say get out, describing his own feelings.
I reply, the important thing to keep in mind is that the decision to leave or stay has got to be yours.
It can't be anyone else's.
Unless I'm explicitly reminding him that his thoughts and feelings are all that is important and that I'm explicitly not telling him what to do.
How could I? It's his family.
It's his life. At no point in this conversation did I tell the young man to leave his family.
And this is just a good point to understand when it comes to understanding the sleazebag tactics of the media, which is everyone's, oh, it's a cult.
It tells people to leave his family.
There are thousands of podcasts and books and articles and posts on the board.
You'd think that out of all of that, somebody could find at least one time Where I actually said, go leave your family, no question, no debate, go leave them.
Even if I said that, so what?
But I didn't. And of course, nobody can provide evidence of where I did.
That's an important fact to look at when you're trying to figure out some basic bigotries within the media.
I do say to this young man, I did say, and of course I completely stand by this, that the abuse he suffered was absolutely immoral and that adult relations are voluntary.
It's called freedom of association. It's actually quite an important principle.
And you may disagree with me.
You may say, well, no, whether you suffer abuse or not, adult relations are not voluntary, in which case you really need to agitate for banning divorce so that husbands can continue to abuse their wives or vice versa until the end of time, if adult relations...
Or not voluntary, then start with that.
Now, in my free book on the philosophy of relationships called Real-Time Relationships, The Logic of Love, which this young man says in the show that he had read, I recommend trying to work things out with your family and engaging a professional therapist to help you through the process of negotiating better relationships when you have dysfunction or have experienced dysfunction within your family.
So, of course, you don't hear any of that in the media either.
I did not speak to this young man for months and months after the show.
Why would I? And when you call in a radio show, do they call you back the next day to say, how you doing?
No, I moved on with the show.
I did contact him after a couple of months when these articles began coming out that were being driven by his mother to see if he was okay and to offer my sympathies for what she was doing.
Second important fact, I didn't charge him a penny before or after for any feedback or PDF books or audio books or podcasts or access to the board or access to the chat room or access to the website.
Not a penny.
Now, he later told me very explicitly that he tried to work things out with his family for a long time after we talked.
He requested protection from his father, who he still felt physically threatened by.
He suggested family or individual counseling.
He tried to make his needs known.
He tried to negotiate better conditions, less violence, less intimidation, and so on, and requested protection from his mother.
His pleas were all rejected.
I think that's a terrible shame.
I think that is a terrible shame, and I wish things had gone differently.
Another thing, of course, never mentioned in the media articles about this very sad incident, this tragedy, is that this young man also attended regular sessions with an accredited therapist before, during, and after the process of talking to me, of working things out with his family, of taking a break from his family, and his therapist fully supported his decisions.
Again, not something that's ever mentioned because it doesn't fit the bigotry of Steph, the cult leader, right?
So, what happened? In consultation with his therapist, this young man took a break from his family.
He's gone off to university, he's having a wonderful time, he's traveling around, he's really enjoying himself, and he reports that he's very, very happy.
He left a note stating that he needed a break and requesting space to work through these issues.
Now, shortly after he moved out, his mother, who is...
Almost inevitably, a politician began barraging the media, saying, cult stole my son and it's all false and blah, blah, blah.
And in conjunction with some reporters, Kate Hilburn from The Guardian, 2.5 from The Globe and Mail.
And there was also an article that was not quite as horrendous from Tom Whipple of The Times.
She's contacting the media saying, Steph's this internet cult leader.
That's the only reason my son left is that he's running this cult which destroys families.
And she handed out identifying details which were then published in newspaper articles about her son.
Remember, he spoke to me.
Anonymously. There's no names.
I can't remember. I think he may have used his first name.
But he's just some guy talking about his family in the world somewhere.
There's no identifying details about him or anything like that.
But his mother hands out childhood photos of him and gives identifying details and starts hounding him through the media.
If you want to hear this young man's side of what happened, which I think is important, and this was something which was supposed to be Tom Whipple from the Times contacted me saying he was going to do an interview.
I talked to Tom and we agreed.
We said, look, we would be happy to talk to you, Mr.
Whipple, but the only way that we'll ever talk to you is if you have a link to the full interview on both the print and the internet versions of this article coming out from the Times, which came out recently.
And we confirmed this three times, got explicit commitments from Mr.
Whipple, both verbally and in emails, that this was going to be the case.
And then, sadly and dishonorably, I might add, Mr.
Mr. Whipple emailed me a couple of minutes before the internet version of the article came out saying that the Times was reneging on its commitment after getting the interview and after writing it all up and that it was going to renege on its commitment and not going to publish links to the full interview.
But you can pick up the full interview, which I think is worth really worth listening to at freedomainradio.com/times.
So let's have a look at part seven.
Out of the 35,000 plus, probably closer to 50,000, maybe by now, but 35,000 plus current listeners, reporters have only talked to and quoted members from two tiny bias groups.
One, a message board populated by a dozen or two dozen people that over the last few years I have banned from free domain radio for being creepy and abusive.
And these are the people who've openly admitted to being sources to these articles and so on.
They're pointing reporters at podcasts and all this sort of nonsense.
And if you'd like to see the kind of interactions that go on, and be warned, the language is truly foul, that go on on this board, and I think you will be able to understand why I banned them from Free Domain Radio, you can go to www.fdrurl.com forward slash LIMI,
or LIMI. The second group of people who have been quoted by the mainstream media are parents, a few parents, whose adult children have taken breaks to get professional help or to continue the professional help they were getting for the significant abuse they claim to have experienced as children.
Out of the 35,000 listeners, these are the groups, the only groups that are being talked to.
This highly biased group represents 0.07% of my listeners.
The fact that they were banned from FDR for abusive behavior is never mentioned in any of the articles.
One of the parents was banned as well.
None of the 35,000-plus happy and satisfied listeners were ever contacted for their feedback about FDR. Thousands, of course, are instantly and immediately available through email on the Freedom Aid Radio message board, but again, that does not conform with the bigoted story, so these people are not contacted.
So, why did I do what I did, and why do I completely, utterly, and totally stand by it now?
Well, these are the theories.
These theories are always open to rational review and correction, but this is where I'm coming from as a philosopher.
You're welcome to take issue with the theories, but there's not much point taking issue with the conduct if you don't understand the theories.
I maintain and always have that honesty is the first and most important virtue.
I also maintain that the initiation of the use of violence is immoral.
I detail my ethical reasoning in my free book, Universally Preferable Behavior, Irrational Proof, Secular ethics, you can pick that up at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
I have an 18-part introduction to philosophy audio and video series, which I build these principles up from a definition of philosophy all the way through to politics.
So that's just a very brief tip of the iceberg, what's going on in theory.
So how is that practiced?
How do I practice that?
Well, in the call-in show, the young man asks me why I thought he might be obsessed with animal rights and feel hostile to those who weren't interested in animal rights.
Well, it occurred to me that as a child, he might possibly have witnessed an authority figure treating animals cruelly, which gives him a sensitivity to animal rights.
I believe that honesty is the first virtue, so when I'm asked for feedback, I will honestly speak my thoughts, not as true, not as conclusions, not as facts, but as my thoughts, as a possible theory, as what I think is potentially going on in the situation, and that's, of course, what I did.
The brutal violence that the young man repeatedly and reportedly endured as a child falls directly into the category of the initiation of violence, which I've already established as utterly immoral.
I am a universalist as a philosopher.
I believe in universal, objective, and absolute moral rules, and I think I've taken a good run at proving the validity of these concepts in this book on ethics and in podcasts and in videos and so on.
Because I'm a universalist, I don't have the luxury, like a physicist, I don't have the luxury of saying that moral rules stop on the family doorstep.
Violence which occurs within the family home is just a subject to moral rules, to criticisms of immorality, as violence which occurs in an alley, in a war, in a prison, wherever.
So, this is the theory and this is the practice.
The fact that it's shocking to people that I call child abuse wrong in adult relations voluntary is kind of shocking to me, but I guess it says a lot about where we are as a culture in terms of the protection of children.
Now, unusually for me, I'm not a big swearer, but I did use some strong language in this show a little bit, and I wasn't enraged, but I was simply pretty emphatic.
I used a few choice words to describe a very large adult man who, according to his son, voluntarily and repeatedly bullied and terrorized a helpless...
Dependent and innocent child.
I stand by that completely.
There are things in ethics which are very complex, which are very ambivalent, which are suffused with a kind of grayness or complexity.
Lifeboat scenarios.
Abortion. Proportional response to force.
These are all complex. Intellectual property rights.
Whatever. These are all complex ethical issues.
Child abuse is not one of them.
There are lots of complex issues around ethics and virtue.
Terrorizing and bullying children, exposing them to significant physical danger, hurling things, screaming at them, trashing rooms, smashing up windows, terrifying them for years is not a complex moral issue.
Now, you may believe that this guy didn't do anything wrong.
It wasn't very bad or whatever.
That's totally fine. Then basically you don't believe that people can act badly.
Well, look, if child abuse is not wrong, let me, let's be clear with each other, if child abuse is not wrong, nothing is wrong, including anything that I do.
So criticizing me in the face of 18 years of reported child abuse?
Come on. I mean, let's get our priorities just a little straight here.
Look, a philosopher focuses on rational and empirical truth.
Otherwise, you're just some guy with an opinion.
If you come up to me and say to me, Steph, the earth is flat, I'm going to correct you.
When the young man told me that it was impossible to leave his family home, I corrected him, because physically, it is possible.
I didn't tell him to leave, but I said it was possible.
I mean, if some guy thinks he's in a room that's locked, and I say the door's unlocked, and then he throws the door aside and runs for the hills past me, I mean, is that anything to do with me kidnapping him?
Of course not. Now, maybe you think that I'm completely wrong and egregiously incorrect in what it is that I'm doing.
Well, so then you need to criticize the ethical theories in particular and then the resulting practices.
Here's how to go about it if you want to act with a modicum of intelligence, maturity, and responsibility.
You can prove that honesty is not a virtue and I should have lied in my response to the young man.
That's a possibility. You can prove to me that lying is virtuous.
You can prove that physically terrorizing and bullying a helpless independent child for years is not immoral.
You can prove that the evils of brutal abuse become somehow virtuous if they're systematically inflicted for 18 years or if the victim did not choose to be there and cannot leave.
There's lots of Moral arguments that you can make that will overturn what it is that I did.
I am happy to hear them.
Feel free to make the case.
But seriously, people, come on.
We know what is really going on here.
Let's look at an analogous situation that is pretty clear.
If a woman who had been sold to a husband as a child bride called a feminist show...
Asking for help and revealing and sobbing about 18 years of systematic physical violence.
And the host of this show reminded her that spousal abuse was utterly immoral and that she was able, legally able and free to leave her husband.
Come on, what would you think?
Would you call that show a brainwashing cult?
And of course, every abusive husband in the world got angry at feminists who began talking about spousal abuse as immoral.
And they claimed them breaking up families and brainwashing my wife and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, imagine if my wife loves me devotedly.
I think that my baby, my new baby, loves me devotedly.
I certainly love her devotedly.
If my wife listened to a show which said, wife, a beating is immoral and you're legally free to leave your husband, would she be troubled?
No, of course not, because I love her and treat her like the goddess that she is.
So, I think we can understand who has problems with a clear definition of abuse.
Now, of course, everybody's focusing on what is called the DFU, which is just shorthand, and it's not even my shorthand.
FU stands for family of origin, which differentiates if you're married from your current family and so on.
Everyone says, oh, the show is about breaking up families and blah, blah, blah.
So these are all facts available through the website.
You can go and check them yourself using the search tools.
Is family separation a large topic at FDR? So, on December 13, 2008, there were 140,158 board posts.
A search for family separation topics, 609 posts in total.
I didn't count all these up because it would take forever, but let's be conservative and say there are only four responses per thread, which means 152 initial posts about family separation or taking a break from family issues.
In other words, 0.1% for approximately 1 in 1,000 board posts initiates a family separation topic.
Is that a large topic?
If so, then 99.99% is a fail.
Okay, let's look at the podcasts.
This is a little outdated, but it's very close.
Of the 1,231 Free Domain Radio podcasts, 16 have DFU in the title or description, which is less than 1.3%.
A grand total of 37 have the word family.
Of the 16 shows, 13 were in direct response to listener questions.
Thus, a grand total of 3 shows out of 1,231 consist of me initiating a DFU topic, or 0.24%, 2.4 out of...
1,000. Is that a large topic?
Is that really all we talk about?
Well, if you can't figure that out, I'm not even going to show you the math.
Let's have a look at the DFU topics compared to some other topics.
Politics. 26% of the podcasts are about politics.
These are rough, right? 21% are about philosophy.
11% are about economics.
7.75% about religion.
5% about history. DFU, 0.24%.
would you consider that a very large slice of the pie?
I would say not.
What else do we have in terms of facts?
So, over the course of Free Domain Radio starting a couple of years ago, there have been probably, and this is really conservative, 50,000 total listeners.
15,000 probably come and gone, 35,000 current.
So there have been a grand total of, that I know of, 20 or so family separations where children have complained of significant and horrendous physical, sexual, or emotional abuse that has gone on for years and is egregious.
So of the 50,000, there have been 20 family separations that I know of, which is 0.0004%, or 1 out of 2,500 people.
People or families where somebody's listening to FDR. I don't tell anyone to leave his or her family.
How could I? I mean, that's such a personal and horrible decision.
And I always suggest therapy.
Nobody should ever even consider taking a break from family of origin without talking to a therapist.
To my knowledge, almost all of these separations have involved significant and long-term child abuse, or at least reportedly so, have been supervised by a professional therapist way outside of anything that I do.
I have maybe a little bit of moral clarity to bring to the issue, but people talk to therapists because I'm not a therapist.
I'm not a counselor. I don't have long-term one-on-one sessions with people where I help them work through their emotional issues and blah, blah, blah.
I bring some moral or intellectual...
Or perhaps artistic clarity if we're talking about some more personal aspects, but I don't do therapy, of course, I'm not a therapist.
Almost all of these separations have been preceded by significant attempts to resolve family conflicts almost always with the guidance of a professional therapist.
Oh yes, I target teenagers, apparently.
I am trying to find vulnerable teenagers to, I don't know, lock in my basement and wax my car and blah blah blah.
So I don't know, of course, the demographics of your average free domain radio podcast listener, but I can figure out through YouTube the demographics of those who are watching the videos.
We have over 900,000 video views, so 23% women, 77% male, not too shocking.
The largest demographic is people even older than me, 45 to 54.
Second largest, 35 to 44.
Third largest, 55 to 64.
Fourth largest, 25 to 34.
Fifth largest, 18 to 24.
And then 13 to 17, tied with 65+.
So, am I targeting teenagers?
Yes, because teenagers are absolutely fascinated by bald guys rambling on about philosophy.
Of course not. And this is just nonsense.
And again, these facts are all...
Available for the asking, right?
Nobody bothers, right?
So I just don't want to keep this too long.
Does Freedom Aid Radio fit even one of the eight standard definitions of a cult?
We will talk about that in True News 17, the next one.
But let me just sort of finish off with two little thoughts that I think are important, or at least I hope that you will find important.
This mother, this politician, she says she's motivated because she's so concerned for the safety of this young man and she feels he's been absorbed into some cult because he listened to a couple of podcasts and had a 50-minute conversation with me.
It's a little hard to reconcile.
I mean, again, if I were a reporter, which is probably why I'm not, I mean, these would be the questions that I would ask, which is, dear politician mother, if you say that you're so motivated by...
Your son's safety and so on.
Why is it that you did not act to protect him when he was suffering this bullying and physical terrorizing by his father for 18 years?
Because you claim to be so motivated by a desire to protect your son now that he's out in the world and gone off to university.
If you're so concerned with protecting him, why did you not do anything to protect him from this violence and this danger he was exposed to as a child?
Tell your husband he has to get into anger management, get him to a place of safety, say it's absolutely unacceptable and that he has to find some way to not do this kind of violent behavior.
These are all possible, right?
Now, of course, some people have made the case to me and the reporters have made the case.
You can hear this in the Tom Whipple Times interview.
They say, well, maybe she was helpless in the face of this aggression, this male aggression on the part of this young man's father. - Yeah.
That's complete nonsense.
I mean, to put it as clearly as I can...
This politician feels that I am aggressive and destructive in what it is that I do.
And is she helpless in the face of that?
Why, no. Of course not.
She is moving heaven and earth To move the media to portray me as some kind of crazy, culty, weird guy, right?
So, in other words, when her interests are threatened and she feels that she is unjustly subject to male aggression on my behalf, she moves heaven and earth.
She'll stop at nothing. She'll move.
She'll do whatever it takes to protect her own interests.
Unfortunately, in the face of this young man's father's aggression against him, she did not.
Lift a finger, reportedly, to help him.
So the idea that she's helpless in the face of male aggression is nonsense because she's acting very assertively, let's say, to attack me because she feels that I have done something terribly wrong.
That the only problem with her family, with these 18 years of reported terrifying abuse and bullying, that the only problem is that I had a little chat with her son.
Without that, of course, there would be no problems, and it's all me.
Of course, that's standard defensive projection on the part of this sort of person.
One last little point, if you will indulge me for a second.
This young man, and I asked him about this, this young man grew up in a community.
He had extended family, there were people in the neighborhood, and so he said that hundreds of people knew about This violence, right?
His father kicking in windows, screaming at the top of his lungs, smashing up rooms, and so on.
This terrifying violence that he was subjected to as a child.
If you know someone like this, some kid who's in this kind of situation, please do something about it.
Don't let it last so long.
Don't let it last so long. I'm getting all of these Complaints that I'm doing bad things to families and children and so on.
Because I say it's immoral and relations are voluntary, which is true.
But he grew up in an environment where nobody lifted a finger to help him.
To help protect him from the violence that he suffered, which I think is absolutely appalling, morally terrible.
Having gone through what I've gone through over the last couple of months, I can understand why people are hesitant to lift a finger to help protect children who are being subjected to this level of violence.
I really do, because the abusive parents can really go for you, right?
They can really whip up a frenzy and get the villagers picking up the pitchforks and the torches to come after you.
And that's fine if you don't want to do it and I've had to do this a number of times in my life when I've seen a child who's being harmed by a parent to step in and say this is not the way you need to do it differently and here's why and blah blah support the kid.
It's not a fun thing to do.
I understand that and obviously hundreds if not more people did not do this with regards to this young man which I think is absolutely tragic and not honorable at all, right?
And that's fine. If you don't want to do that, that's fine.
But then there's no point or it's embarrassingly obvious why you would come after someone who did stand up for a child who had been abused, who did tell him that the abuse he suffered was wrong and that adult relations are voluntary and he's free to choose to see these people or not see people as he sees fit.
Coming after me...
All it does is indicate a bad conscience on your part, that you may have known a kid like this, or that you didn't do something, or perhaps you are an abusive parent, in which case, please get the help that you need, right?
Don't let it get to this extent.
The real tragedy here is that nobody stepped in to save this kid over the 18 years before he had a very short conversation with me.
That is the real tragedy in this entire story.
And I think that to be responsible, we really do need to focus on that and give this young man the sympathy for That he so much deserves, given now that he has gotten away from this situation.
Now he's being pursued and hounded and slandered by his mother and his father.
It's absolutely wretched.
Just terrible, terrible behavior.
And I hope that you will not participate in this.
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