Stefan Molyneux speaks with Paul Elam on the feminist death threats, attacks and opposition which has impacted the upcoming International Conference on Men's Issues in Detroit, Michigan on June 26-28th, 2014. To get tickets, go to avoiceformen.com
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| Hi, everybody. | |
| Stefan Molyneux from Freedom in Radio here with Paul Elam, who is running the international, why not Interstellar, we're still going to ask him this call, International Conference on Men's Issues, June 26th to 28th, 2014, Detroit, Michigan, at voiceformen.com. | |
| I will be there giving the closing speech, and I'm going to stay around for chats and giggles. | |
| Paul, thanks a lot for taking the time. | |
| So glad to be here, Stefan. | |
| Thanks for having me. | |
| So Paul, I guess the first question that comes to mind is what have you done to upset the nice gentle ladies who tend to protest by writing nice cursive letters to the editors of their local newspapers and so on because it seems that you have ruffled some feathers and what have you done that has made these gentlewomen so concerned? | |
| Oh, I've been an evil, misogynistic bastard that has supported rape, supported domestic violence, and threatens the safety and security of women everywhere. | |
| No, actually, Stefan, what we've done is that we've upset what I'm going to call Literally. | |
| A collection of young college students, they're on daddy's money, because we have challenged their ideology, challenged the ideology that they're getting from the professors that now dominate those universities and who are teaching them that the feminist lens is the only lens through which you can view the world, and that patriarchy theory is the only way you can explain the relationship historically and currently between men and women. | |
| They've got a lot of skin in this game, and there's a lot of money at stake in it. | |
| So when you start talking about things that might affect their funding, they get upset. | |
| Now, their upset, in all seriousness, of course, has expressed itself in some truly evil ways, which have caused massive inconvenience to the gathering of the men and women who want to talk about men's issues. | |
| Well, yes, their objections have been expressed in precisely the ways that they have accused us of being. | |
| They have ignored the fact that this conference is a veritable rainbow coalition of people from different walks of life, different races, different belief systems. | |
| And painted this as a sort of over-the-hill bitter white cis males who are pining for a return to their privilege and are upset because their patriarchal wands have been robbed from them and they can't, you know, control things anymore. | |
| Absolutely absurd on its face, of course. | |
| And anyone who visits the press conference on the 26th at 1pm in the afternoon will see a panel of people that will dazzle them. | |
| When they want to find out what this movement is about, what's going on, that's the place to do it, not in the pages of the Daily Kos or Huffington Post. | |
| And what sort of threats has the conference organizers and speakers and the hotel itself received? | |
| Well, the hotel is sort of yesterday's business. | |
| They contacted us at one point and said that there was so many threats, escalating threats, threats of snipers, threats of, I don't know, you name it. | |
| Of course, they did not provide any proof of that. | |
| They said that's what was happening. | |
| And given the history of feminism, given the fact that 40 years ago, Erin Pizzi was basically run out of her own country by feminist ideologues and that academicians like Richard Gels and Suzanne Steinmetz and Murray Strauss have been We weren't surprised. | |
| But in terms of the current threats, in which there have been a couple, we're not at liberty to discuss because there is a police investigation underway and they have asked us not to release details about it. | |
| Yeah, because of course, a woman that I met at a recent Toronto conference, Senator Ann Cools, the longest serving Canadian senator and a black woman, as if that matters, a really fantastic lady. | |
| I mean, anybody who's making threats against her safety and security is messing with some pretty high-end security issues and can probably expect pretty accurate tracking and contact from law enforcement authorities. | |
| It's not, you know, it's not a particularly light matter to be making threats about. | |
| And we fully expect that there is likely law enforcement efforts going on behind the scenes that we are not even aware of. | |
| I know that when you start talking about attacking buildings, when the management is fully aware that a sitting senator will be present and it's because of her presence, I would expect, I'm sure, law enforcement from both Canada and the United States is well aware of that and looking into it. | |
| So the hotel, I know that there was a security requirement, additional fees that they required from you for security. | |
| I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that played out and whether the feminists who felt that the feminist threats that you were receiving were unconscionable, the degree to which they participated in ameliorating those costs. | |
| Well, again, we are unfortunately, there are two or three different legal scenarios playing out here. | |
| And that, again, something is—and people that know me know that I hate this, but I'm going to have to eat it on this one. | |
| I've been advised by attorneys not to speak of this, not to go into details, because we don't know what litigation and what criminal actions may come after this. | |
| So they've told me to shut up, which is particularly hard for me to do, but I'm going to. | |
| And we'll just leave that at that. | |
| We have a new venue. | |
| And we have in the area there of St. | |
| Clair Shores, Michigan, where the conference is going to take place, there is abundant hotels at different locations. | |
| We've decided to spread things out so that one business does not become the target of these hateful and potentially violent ideologues. | |
| And the management of the VFW is firmly behind us. | |
| They are standing behind having this conference. | |
| They are just as outraged that we are. | |
| They've received several calls. | |
| And to share with you the level of individual that we're talking about here, the commander of the BFW got a call from somebody complaining about the conference that did not know what a BFW was. | |
| I guess that didn't come in their gender studies course. | |
| Now, I'm Try not to be too shocked at this kind of stuff, Paul, but when I picture a women's conference having to move locations and pay massive amounts of extra security costs and face escalating death and bomb and violence threats, the media would go completely insane about this. | |
| Have you had any interest in the media as a whole reporting the degree to which men are being denied and women being denied the opportunity to talk about men's issues in a free and open manner? | |
| Zero. | |
| Almost zero. | |
| We have gotten a few questions. | |
| We do have some large media outlets that are attending the press conference. | |
| And I have spoken with a lot of those people. | |
| They've asked a lot of questions. | |
| We have Time Magazine coming. | |
| Washington Post is apparently coming. | |
| There's other similar large media outlets. | |
| Of all the questions that I've been asked, nobody has asked anything incisive or probing about the threats. | |
| Not that I could really talk about them in detail anyway, but they are not interested. | |
| What they're interested in asking about Is four-year-old satire on my website that is clearly marked as satire and wanting to go after that. | |
| We live, Stephan, in an age of bigotry toward men. | |
| It is absolutely apparent. | |
| You're right. | |
| If this would have happened to a women's conference, the black helicopters would have been circling the building. | |
| There would have been SWAT teams out, and they would have had the conference where they planned it. | |
| It would have been an act of absolute defiance against bigotry and sexism to have it that way. | |
| Society would have been outraged. | |
| It would have made the front page of every newspaper, and it would be on every network television programming, and there would be literally a manhunt for whoever was responsible. | |
| Now, we've been threatened multiple times, and what we've gotten is, Paul, what did you write back in 2004? | |
| Now, I mean, this is something which, of course, has come up. | |
| I wonder if you could explain, and I'm sorry to even ask, because it is such a ridiculous thing to have to explain, but the quotes that are taken from you out of context, I wonder if you could give just a brief background on your purpose in the article in question. | |
| Sure. | |
| Well, one of them that is most often quoted is an article I wrote, and I believe it was four years ago, titled, If You See the Jezebel in the Road, Run the Bitch Down. | |
| Very provocative title, but it was a response article to an article on Jezebel.com where the editors and readers and some of the writers got together and had an open discussion bragging about physically abusing their male partners. | |
| This was not parody. | |
| It was not santire. | |
| They were dead serious. | |
| They were joking and laughing. | |
| As a matter of fact, if people go look for that article, and we link it through the article I titled on my site, you'll find that the subcaption from one of the editors on there was, can women be violent? | |
| Well, all we can say is, don't fuck with us. | |
| It was an abhorrent, and still is. | |
| It's still, to this day, up on the pages of Jezebel.com. | |
| It's a celebration of intimate partner violence. | |
| And I wrote a response in the voice of, well, what if we did this as men? | |
| What if we sat around and talked about bashing women and laughing and joking? | |
| And I pointed out in the article that it was satire. | |
| And that's not normally a requirement. | |
| I don't think Jonathan Swift pointed out that he was kidding about eating babies. | |
| He just wrote the satire. | |
| But I know the crowd we're dealing with, so I inserted a line in there that, of course, this wasn't serious. | |
| And what has happened in the mainstream media and a lot of blogs across the internet, they have cherry-picked the precise part of that satire that they wanted to reprint, and they've reproduced it as though it were serious. | |
| That's the sort of thing going on. | |
| Yeah, I mean, so I've done an article where I read justifications for hitting children and replaced it with hitting women to show just how ridiculous and absurd and horrible it is. | |
| And of course, then people can just say, look, he's in favor of hitting women, which of course is nothing to do with the search for truth or any kind of understanding of what's happening, just grabbing at whatever you can to hurl at someone whose arguments make you uncomfortable. | |
| And that's the level of integrity of our opponents, I'm sad to say, at this point, because really the worst part of this, Stefan, is that a real discussion on a different perspective on gender and a reexamination of power would benefit everyone. | |
| There is nobody that would be harmed by this. | |
| Everybody would gain. | |
| Children would gain. | |
| We're ignoring young victims of parental violence simply because of the sex Of their abuser. | |
| This is absolutely insane. | |
| And those children often grow up to abuse other people, including women. | |
| And they still are so defensive about the subject and so set on not having this discussion. | |
| It just doesn't matter to them that we're creating more abusers in our society. | |
| They don't want their political narrative to be challenged, and that's all they care about. | |
| Which I think is a real tragedy as well. | |
| I mean, there is a I guess you could say there's a prejudice. | |
| That women, a little bit more than men, can argue emotionally and manipulatively. | |
| And it would be nice if feminists in particular would avoid that at all, right? | |
| Avoid cherry picking, avoid quoting out of context, avoid inflammatory emotional rhetoric, but instead look to the actual facts. | |
| That would be going counter to the narrative. | |
| And it seems like they're trying to fulfill the worst stereotypes that are often unjustly applied against women in their responses to the arguments from the men's rights movements. | |
| One of the ways I've characterized the current relationship between feminism and the society at large, and in particular men in the men's movement and women in the men's movement, is that it is like a dysfunctional relationship with a personality disorder, a female, in charge of things. | |
| You see the same exact parallels, the misrepresented quotes, the distortion of facts, the emotional manipulation, The attempts to shame. | |
| If you go look through the repertoire of what modern feminism offers, any sort of criticism, what you will see is a borderline personality acting out in a relationship. | |
| It's exactly paralleled. | |
| Well and I've made the case before as well that a lot of not the equality feminism like the first wave but the second and third wave feminism very much rooted in Marxism and Marxists employ the same rhetoric, the same slander, the same emotional arguments and I think it's sort of the wedding of leftist verbal abuse with some deranged feminism I think produces a very toxic mix that is pretty hard to look at and stomach. | |
| I agree with that entirely. | |
| However, the only caveat that I'll add to that is that even so-called equity feminists, when you ask me who was outraged about the attacks, well, not even equity feminists. | |
| I mean, name me an equity feminist out there, a prominent one, that has stood up and said, wait a minute, what is going on here? | |
| Threats? | |
| You can't have a conference. | |
| You have to move because of people protesting and threatening to do violence and Trying to suppress free speech? | |
| No, there are plenty of equity feminists out there that are now criticizing patriarchy theory and they're criticizing modern feminism as it is. | |
| But they are absolutely looking the other way with the rest of the media as this goes on right in front of their faces. | |
| Well, I would also assume that the media, and I can't speak for others, of course, but I would assume that the media and the equity feminists and others are merely afraid of having the same vitriol directed at them. | |
| And so perhaps they feel that by ignoring it and appeasing it and avoiding it, somehow it's going to diminish. | |
| But that, of course, only adds fuel to the fire in the long run. | |
| Yeah, and you have to consider also, too, that in terms of media, we're talking about consumer culture. | |
| We're talking about advertising. | |
| Modern feminists have been enormously successful at characterizing any dissent as misogyny. | |
| And it is nothing for them to point at a major retailer and say, you support the hatred and violence against women because you stood up and said something. | |
| If you're advertising on a news station that really honestly reported, this is what these people will do. | |
| So we're up against a very powerful opponent. | |
| I think the good news is the Internet, the great equalizer, that it's becoming more powerful every day. | |
| And eventually, I do believe this stuff will get sorted out, but it's not going to be without some defiance on our part. | |
| Yeah, of course, the only thing that is necessary for immorality to triumph, as the saying goes, is for good people to do nothing. | |
| And so, yeah, I would urge people to look into this, to write out against it, to point out that feminists who constantly claim that women are denied a voice in society when threatening to bomb and shoot men who are getting together with other women and with various racial groups to talk about some men's issues, that is absolutely the silencing of the voice of men. | |
| Which has not occurred for women's conferences for over a generation or more. | |
| And therefore, you know, for the people who are concerned about a gender losing a voice, it is very important to not become that which you have fought, to not become what you have despised, and to not deny a voice to others while loudly proclaiming that it is your gender that has no voice in society. | |
| And, of course, these people also won't account for the fact that I get emails all the time and communications from women that are in second marriages to men who are being savaged by family courts. | |
| And the shockwaves from that are destroying their lives. | |
| It's affecting their children that would be from the previous marriage. | |
| And it's just amazing that these Policies that feminists have furthered damage women to the core, millions of them. | |
| And of course, what we're seeing in courts and what we're seeing with the bias against men, we're seeing these are sons of mothers and they have sisters and they have wives and they have daughters. | |
| The impact goes across the board. | |
| So I don't even buy that they're looking out for women. | |
| I think mostly this is a bunch of Marxist ideologues That simply want to control the narrative and the money that goes into it. | |
| Well said. | |
| Well, I certainly appreciate the courage and resolution in planning the conference. | |
| I'm certainly looking forward to attending. | |
| I don't think that the voice of men should be denied access to others, to men and women and various races and so on. | |
| So I applaud you for your courage in moving forward. | |
| I look forward to seeing you and others at the conference and a single act of defiance Can change a narrative. | |
| So I look forward to it next week. | |
| You can check it out at avoiceremen.com. | |
| Are there still tickets? | |
| Can people still get in? | |
| Yes. | |
| Luckily, with the change venue, we have expanded seating. | |
| There are still tickets available. | |
| And I should let people know, tomorrow the price is going up. | |
| So if you want a ticket, get it now, because tomorrow evening the price is going to go up. | |
| Also, let me say that we're also very excited to have you come there, Stefan, your dynamic speaker. | |
| I think you're going to add a great dimension to this conference and make it all the more exciting. | |
| Well, thanks very much, and I will see you in a little over a week. | |
| Take care. |