Episode 10 - Stefan Molyneux

The OG Fascist Cultist Unc

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SPEAKER_03 0:01

He wanted to tell us something, Freda, about this incredible human being that we will be covering on this fine morning.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Yeah, so our our particular character today, he I looked uh for a biography that he has supposedly penned, or where he sort of talks about his own childhood because I thought it could be fascinating. Now he has apparently in his like Goodreads bibliography and the amount of books he's written, he has written 37 books. I was not gonna sit down and like one does. Yeah, I was not gonna sit down and look through each one of them to figure out which one had the biography. I did look through four of them and I couldn't find it, and I said, fuck this. But um he uh he supposedly does talk about his childhood because uh it was referenced in um I think QAA talked about it because you know we've had live on from them. I think they talked about it. And I think there's this other podcast, uh something like Gurus, like they they basically go through like weird pseudo-science guru type guys. Yeah. And they talk about this as well. Where when he was a kid, I think he like kind of fucking hated his parents. And that's gonna start to make a lot of sense when we get into the episode. He kind of like had this feeling that like something uh that my parents were like, you know, when they were telling me to do stuff, etc., wasn't right. And then he discovered Ayn Rand at a very young age. As one does. Yeah, and then everything clicked, and he was like, Well, turns out my parents are actually demons, like they're horrible people. Like My parents think children shouldn't be starved. Yeah, it's they are the state. And then from there, like he he got this like thesis in his head that every element of society that's fucked up right now, every everything can be distilled to how mothers fail to raise their kids right. And he said that if you just get mothers to be responsible enough or better parents or whatever, then all the society's ills pretty much will slowly disappear.

SPEAKER_03 1:51

I love when I hyperfocus on one aspect of every individual's lives as a means to explain systemic issues. Welcome to another reactionary classic. To me, but like it works, it works. Yeah, to me, I have to admit, I'm trying to go back as far as I can in my life. And uh, when I was about 15 or 16, I did slowly get dragged into the classic, you know, probably what we should cover in some episode, the classic atheist to right winger pipeline. I'm no longer either of those categories, but Stefan Molyneux was the the first guy where I started realizing that something iffy is fucking happening, and I managed to realize it as an incredibly, and I really need to emphasize this, incredibly stupid fucking teenager. Okay, the thing that he hooked me on that I was kind of low-key shocked about is um this form of kind of what on the surface looked like kind of based, kind of chill men's rights uh activist conversations. Specifically, I remember one video talking about circumcision, and keep in mind in my part of the world, unless you're uh a person of uh you know Muslim faith, circumcision is literally not a thing, uh not at all. Yeah, and then I turn I I play this video and he's talking about American Christians, atheists, not like you know, secular people, etc. etc. Intentionally, and keep in mind this is a 15-year-old boy whose dick is growing right now, right? Literally pubating, hearing that in America they are running around cutting little boys like like fucking foreskin off when it's not for cultural or religious reasons. And I was like, What the fuck? Yeah, like literally losing my mind, and he hooked me and he hooked me, and I watched, I remember specifically watching that video and be like, that's completely right. Like everybody should have bodily autonomy and should be able to decide everything that is done to their body by themselves and not just randomly by parents, right?

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Do you do you remember like at what point you realized, oh shit, there's some other stuff here going on?

SPEAKER_03 4:02

When he started calling all women uh filthy whores who were basically that that that classic.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Yeah. So you would say that he hooked you because you were an intactivist. You wanted to make sure that all little baby dicks were uncircumcised?

SPEAKER_03 4:21

I guess he was the one to introduce me to anti-fascist intactivism, and I realized that not all intactivism is anti-fascist, for I saw my eternal enemy, a fascist intactivist. We want to keep all cocks beautiful and full, because that is the right of every man and woman to decide on. While he What would be the fascist intactivist perspective? Yes, he wants to shoot all women because that's how our cocks remain intact, basically. So it's a bit uh it's slightly different. But TLDR, yes, he was, I have to admit, I and before we started uh researching for this episode, I hadn't thought of this. Uh and the second I I thought of Stephen Molly and I haven't thought in a while, I remember sitting in my room on my big ass desktop computer and watching this, and and specifically watching him and being like completely mesmerized by the first video. But again, this is a slight critique to those of you who have spent a longer time in the right-wing funnel. Like this guy from an 8,000 people town in rural buttfuck nowhere Balkans saw through it at the age of 15 after watching a second video.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

So it's you know same same with me, kind of like with because I think we we probably discovered him around the same age, and I'm also from a rural buttfuck, you know, nowhere town in Norway. And I like I was like, this guy is talking to the camera, says he's like a smart and has like a degree and shit, and then suddenly starts talking about like how the West is gonna fall or whatever the fuck. And that's when I was like, What do you mean? Like all this like Western civilization and stuff, you're kind of losing me here. I thought you were gonna talk about like how Christians are cringe and atheists are cool. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 6:02

He he he was supposed to be like critical of stuff that everybody takes for granted. So it was like in the states, nobody questions whether to go snippity snip snip on on their kid, and he's like, Guys, maybe you should think about this. And I'm like, wow, that's a fucking normal human argument.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

And then and then it just And what's so fucking cool is that all the stuff where he says, like, nobody talks about this stuff. When everyone says uh says that stuff, like a lot of people are talking about that stuff. But dumbass kid doesn't know that. Dumbass kid who hasn't been exposed to all these debates, uh, thinks this guy's like suddenly bringing something to light that you know is this it's like horrible injustice in society, just like you know, his uh his other thoughts about child abuse.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

I would say that that is kind of a recruitment tool that a lot of these fringe ideologies will present, which is the idea that they have some sort of secret knowledge, they have access to this key that will unlock all these issues that have been previously confusing you. Because like if you look at the world, that is a difficult and complex circuit, you know, material reality. There's gonna be so many moving parts, and so any reasonable person looking at the complexities of the world is going to have some confusion. And when he offers this like insight, but he wraps it in this like forbidden knowledge, it can't help but be attractive to people that are you know guileless and are looking into these issues for the first time. And I think that's a key recruitment tactic that you're gonna see all over the place.

SPEAKER_03 7:37

That's why it's exceptionally important whenever you're uh learning uh about a new topic to never, ever, ever, even with this show, ever go fully and exclusively with your first impression and the first source, quote unquote. Right? If you don't do that with uh with a doctor that gives you a hardcore diagnosis and you go ask another one, you probably should with uh with particular societal analyses, historical analysis, analysis of systems, etc. etcetera, etcetera. Because there's a very, very, very, very high chance that not only is the first source uh potentially quote unquote problematic, doesn't always have to be, but there's a high chance that by exploring multiple sources you can get closer to uh to some sort of um let's say more more academic and intellectually sound view on a particular topic. Imagine how much would be would be solved, especially like almost everything that we talk about here, all of these particular individuals, but how big of a the the meat of their community, the meat of their community are people that were exposed to them and then just stuck to them. Yeah. Never checked a potential alternative.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

And that is And this guy, he has a very powerful tool to keep that from uh happening, to keep you from checking alternatives, exactly, because he's a fucking cult leader. Around the 2010s, a lot of guys were in their phase of their lives where they were trying to figure out the world and their place in it. At the same time, these people who often had yet to attend a profound or meaningful lecture of any sort, were getting that first-time experience through YouTube lectures by so-called public intellectuals. This is how a lot of people ended up gravitating towards figures like Jordan Peterson. At the same time, Joe Rogan, who we've discussed in the past episode, was starting to take off. One of Joe Rogan's recurring guests in this period is the subject of today's episode. Here's how Joe Rogan described him in his first podcast appearance. Quote Stefan Molyneux is a Canadian philosopher. He runs the number one philosophy show on the internet, Free Domain Radio, and also runs a very popular YouTube channel. The best way to summarize his views is to play a clip from his review of Star Wars The Last Jedi.

SPEAKER_02 9:52

And in that battle, so Luke shows up, and then like every weapon in the known universe is aimed at destroying him. This is the hatred directed of white males. And of course, he's just a projection, he's not actually there. And so the fact that projection is really there, you know, there's a lot of frustration out there in the world. This is why I talk about race in IQ. Iconic. Iconic.

SPEAKER_03 10:17

He did it like do dude like Dear listeners, do you understand how before his time this man was? This is all the entirety of the internet is this now. He talked like this back when people would actually look at you like you're at fucking insane for putting together this particular sentence. Now in mo in a lot of circles, saying shit like this gets you uh why a tap on the back from that the bro you just met who will later get drunk and uh abuse his wife, probably. But it's iconic. It is it is just visionary.

SPEAKER_00 10:51

Yeah, I have to say, visionary. And since then he's been banned off very social media, but returned to Twitter after Elon Musk saw to it that his account was reinstated. A very familiar story. He is an alleged cult leader, well, alleged is doing a lot of heavy lifting. He is a cult leader, uh, possibly an associate of the KKK, a so-called race realist, another disciple of Oswald Spengler, it seems, a sort of less goofy and more bald Jordan Peterson. But the element about him that I want to focus on, which was publicly known at the time Joe Rogan kept having him on, but seemingly severely undercommunicated, is that Stefan Molineux is a deeply fucking evil person, because Stefan Molineux unambiguously runs an actual cult. Welcome to the reaction podcast. This is Stefan Molyneux.

SPEAKER_03 12:18

Very good, very nice. I have never seen a BBL in my life before.

SPEAKER_01 12:24

First of all, come to Southern California and you'll see one every five seconds.

SPEAKER_03 12:29

I think that they're like all the BBLs from around the world uh get stolen and they get shipped to uh California and Dubai. Like that's where all the BBLs go. But now there's more of them in California because there's no BBLs in Dubai anymore. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Honestly, I would I if I if I were single like uh like you guys, like you go, you're single, right? I'm getting married in Dubai. Oh, yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_03 12:57

You just give a single guy vibe. Basically, single, like yeah. I can't okay, because uh you give a single guy vibe. Chad, is that a compliment? I I have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

I forgot. See, this is just called being self-involved. Um but yeah, no, you should go to Brazil. I haven't been, you know. I need to get to Latin America, but you should go. You should go and tell me how it is. I would love to go to Brazil.

SPEAKER_03 13:22

It's literally my favorite country. Unironically, unironically. I do not believe in the inferiority of superiority of one ethnicity over another, except except for Brazil. Brazil, Brasil! We need to get a Brazilian guest.

SPEAKER_01 13:33

I mean, they are it is a cool country. Brazil needs to up Brazil, honestly. It needs to be the new superpower in America. USA is wash. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 13:43

The the real like cultural Marxist conspiracy that is actually real is we do want everybody on planet Earth to look Brazilian. Like that, that is very, very real. And look me in the eyes. Even if you're a white supremacist, look me in the eyes. Wouldn't that be better? Just look at Brazilians. Would that not be better? Now I know that while I'm making this joke, making fun of white supremacists, I'm slightly being racist by generalizing a whole group of people. But that would work. That argument, my friend, would work, except for Brazilians, which is uh one of the most uh multi-ethnic nations and countries on the planet. So huzzah I have won an argument against myself.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Also, uh Wagner Murray should have won the Oscar, but yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:25

Which one? Which one?

SPEAKER_00 14:26

The uh Secret Agent, Brazilian movie. Saturing the dictatorship, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:30

Oh yeah, it's great. Yeah, yeah. I had that in my Discord. We did a movie night.

SPEAKER_00 14:36

Yeah, it's it's a good movie. In preparation for this episode, I went out and looked for how people were talking about Molyneux back in the day. And six years ago, the podcast QAA, whose co-host Liv has been on here, pointed out that Molyneux had been doing online content creation for 15 years. That was six years ago, which means he's now a twenty-one year veteran of this stuff. It can't be undercommunicated to what degree this guy is like a grandfather for a lot of online white supremacist creators. But another far more important thing that QAA pointed out is that Molyneux has a large community of so-called ex-viewers or ex-listeners, with support networks. In the same way you have ex-Mormons, ex-Jehovah's Witnesses, ex-scientologists, or ex-cult members. This is something you don't often see with online content creators. An article in the Times from 2009 tells an incredibly sad story of a teenage boy named Tom from the small English town of Lemmington Spa, just southeast of Birmingham. Tom had a fraught relationship with his mother. But suddenly, according to Tom's mother, uh Barbara, he started seeming more cheerful. On returning from work one day, she found only a note on the doormat that read, Quote, I need to take an indefinite amount of time away from the family. Please do not contact me. I tried to look into the story in the hopes it had a happy ending. All I could find was more articles from six years later, where his mother was still lamenting the loss of her son to a cult leader. In a documentary by Channel 5 UK, Barbara Weed, mother of Tom, said that Stefan Molyneux had told Tom that his parents were abusing him, and that he had to quote defoo them. Defu is a term invented by Stefan Molyneux. Foo, or FOO, capital letters, means family of origin. Essentially, to fix all your problems, you must first abandon your family of origin for a new one. According to Linda Bessner in an article called Remote Control in Real Life magazine, another young woman by the name of Colleen Cowgill, who spent a lot of her time online, used to frequent Molyneux's free domain radio forums, where she came to learn from other members that, quote, everything I interpreted as love was manipulation, and it was all fraud. Barbara Weed, the mother of Tom, obsessively tracked users on Molyneux forums who had left their families, and recorded at least one hundred instances of users who claimed to have cut all contact with their families. The woman, Caugill, managed to leave the cult, but Tom is, to my knowledge, stuck there. Caugh describes an atmosphere of strongly enforced conformity. Those who choose to leave the community are sometimes targeted for doxing and harassment. In 2009, after she had cut contact with her family, the Free Domain Radio Cult had convinced her that her relationship with her boyfriend was problematic, that they were, quote, in a codependent entanglement that failed to meet Molyneux's standards. So she broke up with her boyfriend.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

I'm sorry, that's just really funny. The YouTuber doesn't think my boyfriend meets his standards.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Yeah, because like this guy isn't just a libertarian YouTuber, he's like a self-help guru who uh seems to have it all figured out. He has a total philosophy for life and total philosophy for relationships and how to engage with other people. So to all these people, it seems like he is like a genius. That's you know, obviously one of the elements of what makes it a cult, but the other element is the fact that he specifically and unambiguously pushes for people to isolate themselves and to only be a part of the cult.

SPEAKER_03 18:06

And he doesn't he doesn't do the thing that a lot of right-wing grifters do, where they don't want to dissuade you from giving them money, following them, giving them attention, giving them power, and so on, by only talking to you about topics that they believe you will agree with them on, but then talking about other topics with another demographic or psychographic in their in their particular audience, basically segmenting continuously. From my experience, Molyneux literally wants to tell you what you should think about every single aspect of your life, which creates a different dynamic that is, I mean, it's still grift-oriented, there's no bigger grift than the fucking cult because you don't just want their money, you want fucking everything. But it is the approach is, I would argue, more radical than someone that's like, okay, I'm just gonna be a guy, the the Jews guy, or I'm just gonna be the Mexicans guy, or I'm just gonna be the white replacement guy, or I'm gonna be a couple of these categories. This man, or I'm gonna be the guy talking about women, etc. etc.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Yeah, he does it all.

SPEAKER_03 19:11

Yeah, he wants to give you a hot take on absolutely everything, and to an extent in a very unapologetic way, which gives him an allure of of uh being uh principled, but also as Freda beautifully put, of genuinely being a genius, because this guy has a hot take about every single fucking thing, so you can go and ask him. Yeah, right? Nobody's gonna go ask Candace Owens about fucking uh whether they should buy a house in a rural area or an urban area, yeah. Right? Well, you probably has like one hour rant just about why you should choose one over the other.

SPEAKER_00 19:44

Yeah, I mean, he has a one-hour rant about Star Wars, like he has ever he does everything. One of the things that I uh try to look into, because you mentioned the thing about like you know taking their money and stuff, I tried to look into where like how his funding works and everything, and the only thing I could find was from this article that I've been reading from, where where they mentioned that I think it was like in 2016 or something, he had received like at that time like $350,000 worth of Bitcoin, and the article is like that's not a lot of money. And um, well, if he kept any of that, that's a lot of money. Yeah, of course. And also he had like $58,000 worth worth of like yearly the yearly supporters or something, I think like that. He has basically uh pioneered like a an early version of Patreon, kind of on his own website, where you know how like we have goofy names for our patron like tiers and everything. Yeah, he his top tier, guess what it's called? What? Philosopher King.

SPEAKER_03 20:43

Iconic.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

Iconic, iconic, I can't help Jesus. They've got golden blood, chat. They've got the golden blood. Iconic. We're mere bronze-blooded in this podcast.

SPEAKER_03 20:55

And the context one is for younger people, like we're talking like a long time ago. And this was like just making a thousand dollars a fucking month off the internet back then was crazy.

SPEAKER_00 21:06

Yeah, this around like 2016, this article was written where this info is, but obviously he started making this money in like the early 2000s or like mid-2000s.

SPEAKER_03 21:14

And this doesn't adjust to like ad revenue, this doesn't adjust to like back then, like uh big uh like supporters, be it like big capital or like just the everyday Joe's who fucking love your shit, they just wire you money, right? Yeah, like there's so much of his finances that cannot be accounted for, nor will they will they ever well yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

That's what I wanted to know. Like, has he ever provided like third party audited uh you know accounts for how he uses his money? Not to my knowledge, no.

SPEAKER_00 21:44

His beliefs, because that's the the man. Yeah, exactly. The man. What are you, the RRS, bro? Like it's the abstention of a parent that wants to I'm not being violent to you, so like you let me spend my money however the fuck I want, you know?

SPEAKER_01 21:58

I mean, I'm just struck, you know, we've been calling it a cult, but it really does hit all of the you know attributes of a you know pseudo-religious movement like especially the isolating of members from their social networks and you know what I mean and their friendships and their relationships and their family because they don't agree that we should abolish the government like it it's a it's a very unusual uh way to approach a political movement.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

Yeah but so that that's how it begins. So the uh woman that I mentioned um Cowgill after she broke up with her boyfriend she was you know isolated I think she like was living with her boyfriend so at that point like she had nowhere to live and it took another year before her total isolation eventually and luckily brought her back to her parents. Linda Bassner describes Molino's Freedom Radio as a well marketed self-help empire. And on that note it should be noted that Molen's wife is a therapist who was found guilty in 2012 of professional misconduct by Ontario's College of Psychologists for recommending Molino's defooing that is abandoning your family. Yeah to her patients no so she so she was just on his podcast and said used her authority as a therapist and said this is good. Oh my goodness that's ridiculous which is professional m misconduct.

SPEAKER_03 23:15

And probably implies that like a lot of the at least eloquent sounding on paper psychoanalysis you love doing all the time probably a lot of the kind of pro tips and influence came from from her professional speak. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 23:30

Yeah and yeah it's it's it's fucked up. The self-help stuff for the most part wasn't what brought people into contact with Moliner though. Among the cases I've read of people who were brought into and subsequently escaped the cult, a recurring theme is Moliner serving as their introduction to political theory. Moliner's Goodreads page boasts an impressive thirty seven authored books, the earlier of which tend to discuss what he calls anarchism. Deathon's 65 page book, Everyday Anarchy has a chapter called Anarchy and History. In it he goes on about how the world views anarchists as terrorists with a lust for blood and says quote If we value human life as any reasonable and moral person must, then fearing anarchists rather than political leaders is like fearing spontaneous combustion rather than heart disease. In the category of causing deaths a single government leader outranks all anarchists tens of thousands of times. He then goes on to say quote Does this seem like a surprising perspective to you? Ah, well that is what happens when you look at the facts of the world rather than the stories of the victors. This is such like a fucking call of duty brained like understanding of history, but also like such a common thing. You've been lied to he's bringing the facts you've probably heard that one before. Of course Molyneux had a very different idea of anarchism than what I think those of us coming from a European perspective might have. In an incredibly funny coincidence I own a similar little booklet I picked up at a left-wing bookstore in London called Bookmarks by an author named John Molyneux. The book is called Anarchism a Marxist criticism. Unlike Stefan Molyneux's portrayal of anarchism as a movement of people hounded by and oppressed by governments, forced into the shadows and branded as terrorists, John Molyneux describes it as a movement of hopeful radicals. Anarchism has always had a strong appeal for those who rebel against this rotten society. It says we do not have to live like this. There does not have to be rich and poor, exploiters and exploited, rulers and ruled. There does not have to be war, racism, oppression, and there doesn't have to be domination of the majority by the minority, or even the minority by the majority. Against the ceaseless indoctrination which holds that the mass of people are by nature either stupid or self-seeking and therefore have to be told what to do and kept in line by higher authority, anarchism asserts that we have the potential to live cooperatively and harmoniously. John Moliner's approach to understanding anarchism is empathetic and sees the genuine desire of most often young radicals for a better world. Stefan Moliner's booklet sums up the foundational element of his theory thusly quote Well there clearly are two kinds of leaders in this world those who lead by incentive and those who lead by force. Those who lead by incentive will offer you a salary to come and work for them. Those who lead by force will throw you in jail if you do not pick up a gun and fight for them. It's a very dramatic contrast that he's constructed. Another quick quote those who lead by force will simply tell you that if you do not pay the property taxes to fund their schools you will be thrown in jail. The difference between these two visions of anarchism is that the radicals that John Molyneux speaks highly of in his criticism of them, and the movement that Stefan Molyneux is trying to sell you on through visions of horror and suffering, is that the left wing anarchists are truly envisioning a different world. Stefan Molyneux is debating in favor of the primacy of one element of our existing society over other elements of our society. He argues that we already live in anarchy the only thing left to do is to get rid of the government For instance, like dating, marriage and family, in any reasonably free society these activities do not fall in the realm of political coercion.

SPEAKER_03 26:58

No government agency chooses who you have to marry or have children with, and punishes you with jail for disobeying the rulings voluntarism, incentive, mutual advantage, dare we say advertising all run the free market of love, sex and marriage how the fuck does he use advertising as one of the counterpositions to like being manipulated into something? Literally an entire I mean you know advertising is propaganda adjusted for the sale of commodities usually in the private market. That's why like you just when you when you see a government a Goubermont doing but trying to pitch you a particular way of life like heard there this is propaganda but especially during the 50s and 60s I'm for those of you who are new to the show I'm literally a marketing guy so I'm not pulling this out of my ass. During the 50s 60s there was uh there was a particular switch in which advertising did not only try to sell your product based on the qualities that it represents and the benefits that you can give to your life but what they started doing is bundling the idea that if you purchase something you will reach certain higher stages of uh self-actualization aka of reaching happiness reaching fulfillment etc etc etc and because the private enterprises were doing it and not the government all of a sudden it was good and based and chill and normal propaganda the way apparently Molyneux himself also sees it. But at the end of the day it is doing exactly the same thing. One could argue much more efficiently than any state propaganda ever could because it is not viewed as propaganda therefore it is not immediately viewed with a large dose of skepticism which then because of that very fact allows for the concepts and ideas that are being pitched in an advertising campaign keep in mind these as easy campaigns most of them you don't even notice this is why they probably work a lot better on you than than uh Herder join the army and shit so uh DLDR it's fucking crazy that this guy's like people trying to manipulate you sucks but what private enterprises try to manipulate you it's actually super basic.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

It's awesome yeah and also like the fact that he wants to make dating and everything you know analogous to private enterprise is also very telling yeah because like all run the free market of love sex and marriage is what he's saying like the free market it's the the sexual marketplace it's the fucking like looks maxer terminology before the looks maxers existed. Iconic. Yeah but also like what's also very funny is what you said about like marketing where you know if this was done by governments it would be very like blatant and and obvious. Molinder uses that kind of logic to argue for his version of anarchism where he says like we think of anarchism as in like his right wing I guess like more like anarcho-capitalism as a dirty thing, a scary thing but that's only you know when we talk about it in those terms in reality it's awesome in our personal life it's just bad in I guess in the when the government is doing it or something like that. Like he's he's doing the same thing but arguing for I guess I don't know fucking owning children as slaves or something.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Oh no he definitely supports the free market of children. There's no doubt about that.

SPEAKER_00 30:03

I don't have any citation for that but I'm just making a an educated guess.

SPEAKER_01 30:07

Well I mean it's you know we'll talk more about libertarian philosophy in a bit but there's always been a long-term approach toward things like for example adopting children where they carry their you know commoditization logic to the extreme and basically believe that parents should be able to sell their children.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Yeah and he's talking about how like the dating market is very voluntary and very you know it's just incentive and mutual advantage or whatever. Dating is highly commercialized. Products are pushed by corporations that purport to provide advantages in dating. In some instances with people relying heavily on dating apps corporations exert total control over your dating life by limiting how many people you can contact and offering potential advantages if you have the money to pay for them. That doesn't sound like super free and and open but that's perfectly fine to Stefan because it's the logic of competition and the market. Extrapolate this to other elements of society and you will have those who manage to live safe and comfortable lives while you inevitably will have those who do not due to circumstances of their own making or outside of their control. To Stefan this is fine because there's no government coercion involved no threat of violence if you don't comply. When stripped down to the bones and trust me it doesn't take very long there's not much to it then Stefan's ideology is fundamentally I shouldn't be told what to do.

SPEAKER_02 31:29

So first and foremost the moment somebody uses the word robber barons, first of all they weren't robbers, they weren't thieves, they were producing capitalists who were satisfying the market demand in a voluntary fashion like those rich people accumulated so much money by making other people happier those bastards so they weren't robbers and they weren't barons.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Beyond this simple fact he leaves the question of what's so good about this philosophy and this new world sort of up in the air. When asking himself the question of the nature of democracy and welfare he says that if democracy isn't predicated on a lie and people want to provide welfare, then why do you need a government to force them to pay into welfare? He then flips it around on himself and says but if democracy is a lie, and this isn't the will of the majority, then you would need to force people to provide welfare. He kind of constructs a paradox here in his own argumentation and then he just drops the subject by going The first virtue is always honesty, and we should be honest enough to admit when we do not have reasonable answers to these reasonable objections. This does not mean that we must immediately come up with new answers, but rather just ponder them, and only when we are satisfied that the objections are valid should we begin looking for rational and empirical answers. Which is like okay so your answer is just I don't know lol, but I think this objection is wrong.

SPEAKER_01 32:46

I just haven't figured it out why yet you know you'll find this a lot and anytime you cover a conservative influencers is this exact type of argumentation which is the fallacy of incredulity. They can't come up with an answer intuitively or off the top of their head so they imagine nobody can which to a reasonable person is just an indication that maybe you need to like read more, see more perspectives learn more about the nature of reality but to them it's just confirmation that nobody could figure this out because apparently they're the smartest person in the world and they see all angles. You know and just intuitively me, I look at that and say it's like saying I don't enjoy paying my rent every month, but I am inherently being coerced to do so because if I don't I'll get my ass ripped out of my house the solution to the rent problem isn't just not paying rent it is developing a society that's providing housing as a human right and that requires building infrastructure to replace the process of of paying rent. For him it's just I don't want to pay taxes so taxes must not be democratic.

SPEAKER_00 33:56

Yeah it it's very funny how like if you try to trace a logic ideally we are meant to end up in the same sort of location when it comes to you know the actual solutions to the problems that he's identifying like the government makes me pay money for this thing why is that so or I have to pay for these things or whatever. But that's because like we are fundamentally I guess like just completely wired in a different way when we think about this because his problems start and end at someone is telling me what to do.

SPEAKER_03 34:26

It's it's it's criticizing authority just for authority's sake and not looking at it from the prism of who carries authority.

SPEAKER_00 34:33

There's no systemic element to it.

SPEAKER_03 34:35

Absolutely it it is a it is a completely false dichotomy to believe that the the the fluidity of of authority does not allow a relationship between two human beings in which some form of authority is not exercised by one over another people who analyze things from a systemic perspective people as you said people who actually quote unquote want to improve the world view authority from the prism of how can we make sure that the way it is utilized amongst fellow citizens fellow humans etc etc does the least amount of damage is the least hypocritical is the most efficient etc etc etc it is inherently adolescent it is inherently childish it is inherently lacking of complex understanding of how with all due respect to Mr Molyneux how the world works to just say fuck authority for authority's sake it feels good it's great and sure fuck authority but there is not a a legitimate sustainable way of of governing politics hell why am I even using the word sustainable that is not politics because it misses a a both philosophical but also material category which is as undeniable in human relations as fucking gravity is on the planet right it is a tool and the way it is utilized against or for you will define it from your particular perspective as either good or bad right for him it as a whole being bad is like saying that some of the main reasons why we can't have enough food for everyone is let's use gravity again is because gravity leads to plants not growing as many fruits so fuck gravity.

SPEAKER_01 36:38

Or the system is some sort of philosophic wrong yeah and if you were to counter with some sort of like consequentialist critique where you said like hey we charge taxes in order to pay for a water system which means that when you take a shit it doesn't just flow into the local river right it gets collected and controlled by experts and engineers who process it and render it safe and then we do that for the entire city that's a value that results in you not catching cholera or you not catching diphtheria or you not catching typhoid right and that saves and enhances your life and in order to avoid the free rider problem where some people would you know enjoy the benefits of the sewage control system but not want to pay for it we impose taxes and then we create a sociopolitical reality where everyone understands that you have to pay your taxes and you get these social benefits and that results in human society improving and advancing he rejects that and says if not having typhus is so good people would voluntarily pay taxes so we shouldn't have to pay our taxes and it's baby shit.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

It's stupid baby shit. Yeah yeah basically or he actually like uh explicitly argues in the book that people would voluntarily come together and not pay taxes he doesn't say that because that's that's a bad word we don't like that he instead says that people would come together and create charities private charities or private organizations like that exactly and then they would be better but he never really like argues why or how they would be better. He just says they will be different word Freda it makes me feel better.

SPEAKER_01 38:18

Okay exactly well and the problem is like whenever you try to take these libertarian or you know anarcho-capitalist lathering seriously they have the problem known as history you know where we did live without sewage systems that were provided collectively right but did you have sewage corp 4000 that 3999 a year will clean up your shit. Yeah yeah and and we had you know we had like the ability to buy and sell children if we wanted to it's called the fucking Bronze not only that but like you can look at areas of the world where they don't have those institutions right for a variety of reasons that we're not going to get into but basically there are places where human beings live today and they lack these institutions of government or state power right and what happens does sewage corp come in and build a beautiful sewage system and charge a fee and everybody voluntarily No it fucking just doesn't exist and the people suffer and die.

SPEAKER_00 39:22

Or they struggle together in like in smaller groups in order to create something that can sort of alleviate their suffering but it's never to the same degree as the you know collective mobilization of like a fuck ton of humans. Because obviously it can't be absolutely so the book is an incredibly weird it's an incredibly weird and meandering book that reads like a half-assed manifesto on why bedtime and homework is oppressive or abusive. And I think and I think this is key to what makes Stefan Molyneux so successful. He had once sell an anarchist political theory very much divorced from the radicals in history like the anarchists who were executed in Chicago in 1887 for throwing a homemade bomb at the police who were trying to crack down on a protest for an eight hour workday.

SPEAKER_01 40:04

He obviously doesn't want an eight hour workday he wants uh you to engage in a voluntary contract with your employer for however many hours you have to work yeah of course not coercive at all well I mean can we just do a quick aside about the coercive nature of being a living organism where if you don't have certain you know nutrition water shelter the necessities of life you'll die. So if you set up a system where the worker is compelled by nature to work for someone else or else they die, that is a coercion greater than the Billy Club or the tax collector or whatever the hell else he's complaining about. We all need this stuff to survive but if you put it in the hands of a controlled of a single individual or corporation or whatever they in fact are using violence against me because I don't have access to the necessities of life.

SPEAKER_00 40:57

But but that's a systemic form of violence which he doesn't like thinking about I guess. The European the the left wing anarchism also the American anarchism of the eighteen hundreds was based on a systemic critique, a holistic understanding of all the things that cause suffering in society. The point was to combat all forms of oppression. This isn't the sort of anarchism that Stefan is selling. He's selling an anarchism based on personal virtue and a way of debating yourself or reasoning yourself to answers about society. One immense problem with arguing yourself towards answers regarding something as complex as society as a whole is that it relies mostly or entirely on your intuitive understanding of the world. In an insight article at the Global Network on extremism and technology, talking about a study they did on Molyneux and his community, Daniel Jurg et al discuss what they call a quote super participant, or someone who is a highly involved commenter. After a year of commenting on Molyneux videos, this super participant left the following comment quote Certainty has been something I've craved since I was ten and started reading Descartes's meditations. Molyneux theory and other recent works finally got me there, and it is as if someone has taken their boot off my chest and I can breathe for the first time. All my intuitive understanding of the evils of violence finally felt grounded on the foundation of a reason. This so called obsession with reason or the sort of debate pervert culture is something you see everywhere on the right nowadays. Oh yeah everything is framed as the objective truth and opposing views are framed as emotive, biased or deluded quoting the researchers again We discovered an almost obsessive relationship with logic, reasoning and truth as core values among Molinu's most engaged audiences, who frame extreme ideas as the quote sad truth I mean and there you could just see you could just see like the roots of like the black pill or the red pill, right?

SPEAKER_01 42:53

Like these are just things that you have to swallow. You know you may not like the taste but it's good for you. It's the medicine of of an unfortunate truth and what it is is usually apologia for some sort of crime.

SPEAKER_00 43:06

Yep. Yep This alongside the fact that anarchism appeals to the young is a powerful combo for indoctrinating young and impressionable people. These are meant to be hopeful people with radical politics but Stefan blunted it into a defense of every aspect of the system except for the one that the marginalized can sometimes use to their advantage. This fundamental core of his ideology then metastasized in a very predictable way.

SPEAKER_01 43:34

You know when you study the far right in America and in the world today especially online you can't help but notice that libertarianism is one of the wide ends of the funnel for the radicalization pipeline of the alt right. Many of the most prominent fascists Mile Yanopoulos Gavin McGuinness who was the founder of the fascist gang the proud Boys, Richard Spencer, and hell, even Charlie Kirk, all previously identified as libertarian at some point. Stefan Molyneux is no exception. Stefan began as one of the most prominent figures in the online libertarian and anarcho-capitalist right. And as we've discussed, through his platform Free Domain, he built a large audience around anti-state politics, extreme loisiefair, free market economics, vicious Reddit atheism, and a broad base critique of any government authority. This early content relied heavily on the works of right-wing libertarian thinkers, heavy on the air quotes associated with the Mises Institute or writers such as Lou Rockwell. And just a mic note here, this is some of the most pseudo-intellectual swill you'll ever have. If you ever read this crap, you're going to really find that it is vacuous and garbage. I I I wanna, yeah, I want to comment something on that. Go ahead, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 45:06

Please insult libertarianism for me, please. Yes, yes. There's something so fucking stupid. Because I made a video on like this one libertarian guy who's talking about history a while a long time ago now, who now stopped doing uh videos. His last video was that he was going to an Iron Rand conference, which is fucking hilarious, and then he just dropped off the face of the earth. But um, like you I I'm assuming he probably got pulled into some sort of cult, which is sad. Hopefully they sold his kidneys on the free market. But one of the really sad things uh uh or silly things with these like Mises Institute guys, like these right-wing libertarian thinkers, uh a lot of their like stuff comes from a guy called Murray Rothbard, and I'll talk a little bit about him later. But uh Murray Rothbard, I think it was Murray Rothbard or is or is Ludwig von Mises one of the two, had this theory they called praxeology. And it uh basically is a theory of everything, just like how Molyneux purports to be able to explain everything. And their theory of everything here is basically that human beings act according to incentives. And through this you can reason yourself to an understanding of any phenomena in history or or just in life. And this is a very fundamentally like insane idea, because if you try to understand because if you try to understand any takes five seconds to think of something that disproves that. Like a mother giving her resources to her child. Yeah, well, I mean, they can argue that that's an incentive, or like she has an incentive to do that, but I'm gonna say the part that I find so insane and that I just do not understand how anyone takes it seriously, is that if they extend this to history, which they do, then you kind of like have a situation where you're just trying to understand history based on whatever the fuck you already know and that's in your head, right? You're trying to understand like the world based on just purely what's already in your head. Because if you're only reasoning yourself to something, if it's all a priori, right, before you've even like collected any sort of empirical evidence, whatever, nothing you're kind of identifying, nothing you're kind of like reasoning yourself to, arguing for connecting the document exactly, nothing is connected to the real world necessarily, it's all fantasy, and that's like it's all fucking gobbledygook. Beautifully put for real.

SPEAKER_03 47:11

That's why it's so so often the beginner ideology, right? Yeah, and Mike is gonna go more in depth about that, of course. But that's why it's the BBL of almost any funnel. Hell, it doesn't even have to be of a funnel. Like I remember uh I when I was being exposed to Stephen Molyneux, when I was being exposed to, hey, you can have alternative perspectives on why the world around you kind of sucks at kind of the age when you're realizing, oh my god, there's crazy shit out there, you know, it's not all a rainbow and butterflies because you just wake up and food is on the table and you and the and your goon sock is cleaned every morning, right? Like like people actually you know have to work to do stuff. Yeah, exactly. One day, yeah, or that, you know, you have to do things. Yeah, but you realize you have to do things, and you're like, holy shit, dad, I don't want to do things, and then you start, you know, figuring out if there's a way to fix this world so that you don't have to do things, and and libertarianism is right there waiting for you because it doesn't need you to contextualize anything. That's why the way you now pun intended contextualize Frederick is very good because you can get into libertarianism literally as a lobotomized animal, like like anybody can get it. It's like big guy, bad, freedom, good. Fucking, yeah, fuck the man. You know, it's like, oh my god, fuck yeah, it is completely empty. Don't feel bad about the homeless guy because he fucking deserved it. The ego, ego, ego. Everybody can get into it. That's why it's the entry. That's why it's the entry, hence the BBL. I'm gonna milk that just BBL does. Yeah, just keep bringing up the BBL. You're gonna have to explain this again. Speaking of someone with a BBL mic, please.

SPEAKER_01 48:58

Uh, yeah, no, I actually I have long back syndrome where my back just extends straight down. Uh I'm gonna suffer. Hank Hill ass. No ass. Yeah, that's a hand hill ass. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, actually, I have been improving it uh as an aside. Mike Mike ass update is it's growing now. So good, good.

SPEAKER_03 49:18

Um, baby jump to get Mike a BBL. Let's get Mike a big button. Everybody that's over six dollars uh gets gets me into Alcoholic Anonymous. Everybody who donates more than six dollars uh uh gets me into alcoholic anonymous, uh, gets uh Mike a BBL and uh hires a guy that forces Freda to game maximum two hours a day.

SPEAKER_01 49:47

Oh no, that's not it. You're barely getting started. Yep, you're just loading the spreadsheet updates. Okay, where was I sorry? Yeah, okay, so Stefan Molyneux, early mid-2000s. He described himself as a rational philosopher offering a secular ethics and a guide to personal liberation through voluntarism, a form of anarcho-capitalism that rejects all state authority entirely. And you know, you could hear in my voice that I have a lot of contempt for this philosophy, but let me just give you a little sample of the type of stuff you'll read from the Mises Institute and libertarian thinkers like Murray Rothbard. Here's a an example from his article Children in Rights, quoting him. Now, if a parent may own his child within the framework of non-aggression and runaway freedom, then he may also transfer that ownership to someone else. He may give the child out for adoption, or he may sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract. In short, we must face the fact that the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children. End quote. And this is actually one of the least offensive parts of this article. It also explains how parents have the right to withhold food and treatment from children until their deaths. That there is no positive obligation on the part of parents to care for their children. And because of that, anytime they decide to give up their resources to benefit the child, that therefore grants them a kind of ownership over that child as an extension of their own property. Now they're not permitted to abuse the child, but they can sell the child to a willing buyer. And if you're listening to this, you can't help but be disgusted, right? I'm sure a million scenarios of how a parent might be coerced to sell their child out of desperation and who they might sell that child to, right? But to Murray Rothbard, that's just the market working as intended. If you have an asset, your child, and you need money to live, then it's only right and proper that the free market determine a market clearing price and you sell it to a willing buyer, right? And that is the essence of what they conceive freedom to be. The right to purchase other human beings fundamentally is what they consider to be a freedom from oppression. And I, you know, I I don't know how you can look at that and not imagine the perspective of the sold child, but to them, that perspective is no perspective at all. So for me, you know, over time, you know, Stefan's content, it shifted away from that kind of abstract libertarian philosophy, and it was incentivized by the algorithm and the internet to shift towards the old standbys, culture war politics, immigration fears, race and IQ discussions, and high-pitched squealing about demographic panic. By the mid-2010, Stefan was widely described as firmly within the alt-right online media ecosystem. His work promoted scientific racism, white nationalist ideas, and far-right ideology.

SPEAKER_00 53:32

This shift was prompted by outside forces, but very much predicated on Stefan's ideology and style. The first significant peak in Stefan's engagement on YouTube occurred when he came to the defense of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012. A Florida jury acquitted Zimmerman for a second degree murder. Zimmerman later auctioned off the gun he used to kill Martin with.

SPEAKER_01 53:57

Can I just butt in to give a little bit of context? I'm sure most people listening to this podcast know who George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin are, but Trayvon Martin was an unarmed black child in his own neighborhood who was walking home with Skittles and Arizona iced tea, who was gunned down in cold blood by George Zimmerman, who was stalking the neighborhood and racially profiled him, called the police, they told him to desist, nonetheless confronted Trayvon, and then a scuffle ensued where George pulled out a concealed weapon and murdered the kid. And that is the context of the situation where you would think a radical libertarian would see somebody who was walking in their own community being attacked and murdered in cold blood and see that as a you know invasion of their rights, their freedom. But instead, somehow the white male libertarians found themselves defending the aggressor.

SPEAKER_00 54:56

One of the things that Stefan Molinu mentions in his video very early on, the f one of the first points he makes is that the media is lying to you because the media is referring to Zimmerman, who is Hispanic, as a white Hispanic man. And then Stefan Molinu says this weird thing where he's like, just like they might say Obama is a white black man.

SPEAKER_02 55:20

So, just in case you've been on Marseille, let's talk about George Zimmerman. He is a Hispanic American, oddly enough, referred to in the media as a white Hispanic, you know, the way that they refer to Barack Obama as a white black.

SPEAKER_01 55:35

Which is fucking weird. Yeah. Can I just say again, just to explain, you know, racial politics to people who are uninitiated to America, you may not understand. Hispanic is not a race. It refers to lineages connected to Latin America, but a large percentage of Latin Americans trace their lineage back to Europe and are in fact white. They are perceived as white, they uh they identify as white. In fact, for much of American history, the majority of you know, Hispanic population self-identified as white. So it's perfectly logical, in fact, extremely common for somebody in Florida to identify as a white Hispanic man. That is not a contradiction whatsoever. So Stefan is either stupid and doesn't know this basic demographic fact, or he's lying and misleading his audience of white racists.

SPEAKER_00 56:27

I think it's the latter. Because one of the things that may have helped prompt the virality of Stefan's video was that it was shared and promoted by David Duke, the grand wizard of the KKK. In the aforementioned study by Daniel Jurg et al., by analyzing two million comments left by Monu's audience, they found that before 2014, the most popular terms included words like government, money, market, power. Then in 2014, after Monu began talking about the murder of Trayvon Martin, it shifted to terms like woman, black, Trump, and white. Molinu was pivoting to an outright white supremacy that had always been ruminating in the background of his commentary. Quote Molyneux increasingly evoked this framing of a highly emotive media vis-a-vis him as an objective and rational philosopher, mediating between the ugly truth of objectivism and the wishful thinking of social constructivists. This discourse is highly important in his later discussions on scientific racism.

SPEAKER_02 57:29

Looking at human beings as one species is not biologically valid. We are a variety of subspecies, politically, um uh um ethnically sometimes, uh definitely in terms of gender, in terms of IQ, uh in terms of culture. They these produce physical brain differences that are very hard to remediate when you get older. And so we are a cluster of genetics all fighting to reproduce their own particular genetics. And all of this requires that the IQ can be raised. The IQ of a lot of these countries is 85. That is a full standard deviation below the IQ of Europe.

SPEAKER_01 58:19

What accounts for someone who seemingly was an extremist for individual personal freedom shifting smoothly into an extreme authoritarian fascist who disregarded the rights of those he deemed inferior? Nick Gillespie, a longtime writer for the Coke Network funded reason, admitted in a blog post that libertarians were ripe for radicalization into the far right for a number of ideological affinities. Libertarians believe that private actors have a right of association so strong that it should be government policy to allow businesses to refuse customers for racist, homophobic, or sexist reasons. Furthermore, much of the far right had postured themselves as anti-interventionist in foreign policy, even though Donald Trump has pretty firmly put that idea to bed with his nonstop interventions, which lines up with the purported beliefs of libertarians. Matt Lewis, writing about libertarians in 2017 in the Daily Beast, said libertarianism is somewhat unique in its unflinching support of free speech. In some cases, this free speech is unsavory. If you're anti-political correctness, libertarianism might seem like a good place to land, even if you don't buy into the whole libertarian philosophy. And I would just say that if you are a racist and you're trying to conceal those positions behind some sort of pseudo-intellectual veneer of free speech absolutism, you could just say, hey, I may not like the Nazi racist speech, but I just believe in free speech. So we have to let them do it, guys. We have to let them come to the campuses and tell black students they're inferior, because if you don't, that means you don't support free speech. Even if there is no scientific, you know, or historical or other account for those beliefs, we just have to let people say it because otherwise you'd be impugning my precious free speech. And one of the things that I think is almost belabored at this point is you can look out and see how you know the pro-Palestinian movement has been actively suppressed and punished for their positions on the Gaza genocide or other foreign policy interventions.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:33

I didn't notice, really.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:34

And yet all these free speech absolutists, you know, I don't see them out there defending the right of the Palestinian or the green card holder or the naturalized citizen their views on Israel or Gaza. They're happy now to see the state used to suppress what they perceive to be left-wing speech. Are you familiar with um rebel news? Of course. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:58

Yeah. So I I just had to look up when you when you were uh talking about that, I had to look up how Stephen Molyneux was talking about Charlottesville in 2017. Because it hadn't occurred to me. And turns out he had like a an interview with uh one of the reporters called Faith Goldie, uh, where they both covered, like co-covered the Charlottesville Nazi rally. And uh Rebel News is far right. Faith Goldie was fired for her coverage of Charlottesville because she also conducted an interview with the Daily Stormer, which is like a Nazi, Nazi publication. Yeah. Nazi, yeah, it's we talked about them before, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:31

So clearly there's an ideological relationship between libertarians and those on the far right. If you believe someone has the right to hate speech and the right to exclude someone from a public accommodation or a lunch counter on a basis of their race, you've convinced yourself that defending those policies is morally righteous. It's a short step to defending those policies is outright necessary. And that's basically what's happened, right? A major part of Stefan's transition involved reframing these libertarian concerns about freedom and property rights into arguments about race, national identity, and immigration. As Moon Yu has moved further and further to the fascist right, he increasingly claimed that social stability and free markets depended on ethnic homogeneity and genetic intelligence differences between populations. This rhetoric appealed to sections of the online libertarian world that were already skeptical of multiculturalism, feminism, immigration policy, etc. And I think this is kind of a point that I'm going to continue to harp with him, which is oh, I'm a libertarian that believes in free speech. But that is a, and this is the transitionary argument, right? Which is I believe in this free speech, but that's an idea of white Western men, right? So if you value free speech and our society, you have to defend it against interlopers from these collectivist others who they'll come in and then outvote us and they will abolish our individualists' Western inheritance. And so I may believe in the equality of all people, but you don't, so therefore, I'm gonna take away your rights. Yeah. And so they've kind of debate-lorded themselves into supporting authoritarianism in defense of a libertarianism that they no longer defend as an actual living policy.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:24

It gives a sort of um allure of borderline like knighthood, like I did not want to fight you, but you simply do not understand the way of civilized men, and therefore I will begrudge these honorable Westerners. We yeah. It's like white knighting for uh free speech.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:42

Stephen Molyneux, unsheathing his katana, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:45

Yeah, she thing. And and well, you just have this situation where it's it's common in an alt-right or right-wing spaces now to be like, you know, that's why the West, we've got liberated women and queers. Yeah. And then you ask them what their positions are on as policy of liberated women and queers, and it's like, shove them back in the closet, fire them from the schools, and don't let women get destroyed from a cannon. That's why that, you know, so uh, you know, Western supremacy is based on beliefs and systems that they are trying to undwind. And I, you know, this is almost stereotype at this point for how common this exact kind of line of thought is with the alt-right and the far right and this libertarian right. Now, we should also talk about a concept which we've looked at before, which is audience capture. You know, Melon Yu, he benefited, Stefan Malinu, he benefited from the broader YouTube algorithmic ecosystem of that early 2010s, right? He frequently collaborated with or appeared alongside figures connected to the anti-SJW internet sphere, which we have talked on time and time again. And it's kind of the through line. It's this counter-hegemonic organization around creating a scapegoat that could apply to young men of almost any background. His interviews and discussions with right-wing media personalities help expose his libertarian audience to so-called race realism and far-right talking points while presenting them in a pseudo-intellectual debate lord style. And if you know anything about, you know, a upper middle class, white, underachieving man, there's nothing that he loves more than some sort of pseudo-intellectual online debate. It's important to note here that the conception of the world that the libertarian holds is a just world fallacy. They believe that wealth concentrates in the hands of the deserving, capitalists who, from the sweat of their brow, promote humanity with value and thus rewarded in the free market with wealth. In effect, if you're poor, it's because you deserve to be poor. This explains why the demographics of libertarians are overwhelmingly white and male. It's easy to ignore the barriers and exploitations of history if people who profited look like or were directly related to you. The direct linkage between the far right and the libertarian right in America is embodied by the work of Hans Hermann Hoppe. In a speech to the Mises Circle in 2015, Hopp declared, quote, immigrants have access to public roads, public transportation, public buildings, and so on. Combine this with the state's other curtailments of private property rights, and the result is artificial demographic shifts that would not occur in a free market. Property owners are forced to associate and do business with individuals they might otherwise avoid. He concluded by saying the very cultures that the incoming migrants are said to enrich us with could not have developed had they been constantly bombarded with waves of immigration by peoples of radically different cultures. So the multicultural argument doesn't even make sense. It is impossible to believe that the US or Europe will be a freer place after several more decades of uninterrupted mass migration. Given the immigration patterns that the US and EU governments encourage, the long-term result will be to make the constituencies for continued government growth so large as to be practically unstoppable. Open borders libertarians active at that time will scratch their heads and claim not to understand why their promotion of free markets is having so little success. Everyone else will know the answer.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:28

End quote. If one wants to go further back in the history of the Mises Institute and the academics that influenced Hans Hermann Hoppe, there's, of course, Ludwig von Mises, but there's also Murray Rothbard who we talked a little bit about. I want to stress another aspect of Murray Rothbard. He was a dear friend of Ayn Rand, the intellectual who set Molyneux on his sort of intellectual journey, quote unquote intellectual, I guess. But he was also an associate of a man we've also already mentioned, the grand wizard of the KKK, David Duke. Murray Rothbard argued that IQ could be used in the quote fight against egalitarianism. He viewed any attempt at interfering in this so-called natural order as inherently evil. Things he brought up that were inherently evil in this regard were things like the Civil Rights Act, for example.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:15

So that is the linkage between libertarian and free markets. There are ideas that flow from the minds of Western men, Western white men. Western men, trademark, trademark. And foreign cultures and identities corrupt the political world by introducing foreign collectivist political worldviews. These others are incompatible with the libertarian worldview, and therefore the rights of the immigrant is justly invaded because of the threat they pose to libertarian political fortunes. With the rise of Donald Trump, Molyneux openly began supporting nationalist and right populist politicians, including Trump, Maureen Le Pen, and Garrett Wilders. His rhetoric increasingly centered on declining Western civilization, anti-immigration politics, and conspiratorial narratives about demographic change. This is where the great replacement idea gained significant purchase in even mainstream conservative thought. The idea that free market capitalism was the intellectual heart of the white Western world, and that by allowing immigration, that culture would be corrupted. Leftists, if the person describing the theory, was a mainstream conservative, Jews, if they were alt-right, were inviting the ravening hordes of third worlds to vote for leftist collective politics that would loot the earned wealth of white men. Before we go on, I wanted to take a step back and talk about the incredibly influential online campaign of Ron Paul in 2012. Now, in 2012, we had a situation where Barack Obama was very clearly not going to deliver the wide sweeping change that most people had imagined, and was campaigning as a competent centrist technocrat who could be trusted to keep maintenance of the relatively small concessions he had managed to get in the first part of his first term. And there was a real desire for more radical politics within America. And in 2012, it found its most successful purchase in the campaign of a kooky elderly Texas congressman by the name of Ron Paul, famous for being severely anti-Social Security, in favor of radically curtailing Americans' foreign policy and foreign aid, and somebody who supported the libertarian perspective of drug legalization, he was seen as this radical departure from the status quo politics. And he became extremely popular on places like Reddit, YouTube, and other spaces where young white men would congregate who are desperate for kind of a radical departure from the status quo that was ultimately offered by the Republicans and the Democrats and Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, the most too moderate, stay the course possible politicians that either party could have nominated. And the thing about Ron Paul is he's exactly the type of libertarian that we've been describing, right? He believes in a lot of these pseudo-intellectual race science beliefs. In fact, he had published a newsletter where he had called Martin Luther King Jr. a pedophile and a lying socialist satyr.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:47

One of the things I think is funny about that is that everywhere right winger, when they talk about Martin Luther King, they tend to make him very apolitical. And Ron Paul, I guess, like is a little honest in that he's he says Martin Luther King is left-wing, but I guess had to like sprinkle in the fucking sature, which I don't know what the fuck called. I've never heard anyone call someone a satyr before.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:08

And you know, his newsletters were full of racially insensitive or outright racist statements. For example, in one of his newsletters, he suggested that black activists who wanted to rename New York City should rename it in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. and call it Welfaria, Zooville, Rapetown, Dirtburg, or Laziopolis. And he had another article called The Pink House, where he said he missed the closet and that homosexuals should not speak for the rest of society. And we were all far better off when social pressure kept them, you know, hiding their activities. You know, so basically, Ron Paul represented that hopeful parts of libertarianism in the sense of like, hey, we should pull back our troops from overseas and stop doing so many wars. But when you peel back that layer, you're immediately hit by the core of American libertarian movement, which is barely concealed race hatred. And so when somebody like Donald Trump arises, he creates, you know, an opportunity for that pipeline from libertarianism to fully connect to the far right.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:25

By the way, Molyneux was like a big Ron Paul guy in uh 2012. He made videos criticizing him before that, but when he was running like for the GOP, I think it was it for the GOP? GOP nomination, yes. Uh he basically like was begging people to to go and vote for him.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:39

What an entryist. What an entryist coward. And unluckily for him, for Stefan, you know, his pivot to the far right came a bit too early in the woke corporate era of the late 20 teens and 2020. By 2020, most major technology platforms removed or suspended his accounts for violating hate speech policies. YouTube permanently banned his channel alongside a number of other white nationalist creators. Other services like PayPal cut their ties with him. He was D-bank. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:15

One of the uh, like, or actually two of the people who were also hit with this at the same time was the aforementioned Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke, and Richard Spencer.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:24

So, you know, Stefan Molyneux embodies in his own personal brand the political transition of the right-wing internet from Ron Paul revolutionaries to racist, transphobic, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist fascists of the modern right. His trajectory reflects a broader pattern where anti-government rhetoric, hostility toward egalitarian policies and politics, and the internet anti-feminist, anti-SJW culture has become firmly intertwined with white identity politics and authoritarian nationalism. And I think that's the best way to understand Stefan is start it out with this anti-authority perspective, and then through rotting his brain through race hatred, you got him to support the most authoritarian possible government. Another white man falling for the racial bribe. Hate to see it.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:17

Alright, so my two eloquent friends here have walked you through how Molyneux built his operation, the cult dynamics, the way he packaged white nationalist pseudoscience into a veneer of philosophy and just asking questions, and then the broader pipeline that modded people from libertarian shit into the far right explosive radioactive diarrhea type shit. What I want to do on my end now is zoom out a little and talk about how it ended, or at least how it was supposed to end, because the story of the era leading to Molyneux's deplatforming, the so-called adpocalypse of the late 2010s, tells us something even more important than whatever Stephen's whole life was doomed to represent. It taught us about how the internet works, not how it's supposed to work, how it actually works. So the Apocalypse, one of the most instructive episodes in the history of online media left genuinely underappreciated outside of content creator circles. In order to understand it, we gotta go back to 2017. The world's largest YouTuber of the time, PewDiePie, decided it would be funny to pay a bunch of dudes on the internet to do something on camera, record themselves, and send it back for payment. Back then, pay for cameo was a very, very, very new thing. So like any normal, very stable, rational person, he decided to make the dudes in the video uh write death to all Jews on a board as they dance in traditional African garments in what appears to be a forest. Yes, he he paid a bunch of black dudes to hold up a death to all Jews sign and then posted it without blinking even twice on YouTube. Oh, what a different era. That, ladies and gentlemen and NBs, was the last time internet culture and media was left as a separate space, let's call it that, to mainstream reporting. The Wall Street Journal caught the little quote unquote joke and published an article. What came later was, at the time, fucking unbelievable. A platform that was giving ad placement to absolutely everyone in the YouTube partner program now realized it was playing ads on, well, Nazi shit. Advertisers were of course not very pleased, and not only the ones that ran their product placement through YouTube, but also the ones that gave sponsorships to any and every person with a platform that they could find online. All of a sudden, the free money printing brrrr machine stopped for everyone. Not just online fascists, but everyone. They were all gonna get screened now. And yes, that included quote unquote political voices that were doing the anti-fascist rhetoric as well. I personally have a video back when I was doing videos tackling misogyny and the co-opting of masculinity by reactionary forces, getting 18 plus for misogyny. So take that however you want and the consequences of said apocalypse. But yes, ran to the side to those youngsters in our audience. YouTube before the adpocalypse was basically almost filter-free when it comes to who gets to make cash out of a sizable digital following. If you were big enough, nobody gave a flying shit about what you were saying. They were throwing money at you by they I mean companies. But now corporate executives were reading the Wall Street Journal and texting their marketing interns on whether their fucking ads are playing on videos deemed too uh controversial. The magical question what kind of videos are our ads playing on would end up changing the whole ecosystem forever. A series of investigative pieces starting with the Times in the UK and then picked up by The Guardian revealed that major corporate advertisers were having their ads automatically placed to and on content, promoting terrorism, hate speech, and the far looser term for defining at least extremism. We're talking ATT, Verizon, Starbucks, McDonald's, the BBC, brands that had no idea their money-making name was being paired with stuff that could potentially blow up in their face, at least PR-wise. Within days, you had a mass exodus of advertisers pulling their budgets, not just from YouTube, but from Google entirely. Analysts at the time estimated the boycott in the beginning could cause Google something in the range of $750 million just in the beginning. Absolute chaos. But who could have seen it coming, ah guys? Well, that's that that's the that that that that's the thing. Everybody, everybody, YouTube had been receiving pressure from researchers, journalists, civil society organizations, anti-fascist content creators, and frankly, just ordinary users for years about the far right pipeline on its platform. Years, and nothing meaningfully changed. The moment that actually forced Google to act wasn't moral pressure. It wasn't investigative journalism, it wasn't the countless people who had been harmed by this content, it was corporate advertisers threatening Google's bottom line. That's it, that's the whole story. YouTube is an advertising business that happens to host video. That's how you should always look at it. An advertising business that happens to host video. When the advertising revenue was at risk, of course they acted. When it wasn't, when you could have motherfuckers talking and spilling hatred without any potential pain point being felt on the line go up graph.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:51

When David Duke, the grand wizard of the KKK, could have a YouTube channel.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:55

Exactly. When it was just regular people getting funneled into white nationalism, that was apparently an acceptable externality until it cost them some money. And what did they do exactly? They tightened eligibility to the partner program in early 2018. They introduced what they called limited state demonetization, a kind of half measure where channels that were edging towards policy violations would have ads removed, but the channel itself would stay up. For a guy like Molyneux, who was absolutely playing this game, the platform became simultaneously more restrictive and more permissive in a weird way. He was getting demonetized on individual videos while still reaching hundreds of thousands of people. Now reaching them while being able to say that he's being censored and that they should check out their Patreon. YouTube was essentially saying we will not pay you, but we will let you broadcast. Which, frankly, when you're running a racket built on Patreon donations and listener support rather than AdSense, like we also are. Check out the Patreon, by the way. Great pivot. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:10

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SPEAKER_03 1:23:12

Anti-fascist voices on the internet are being silenced. P A true anti-fascist Patreon by our uh steroids and support us on Patreon. Now getting 50% discount on steroids by supporting us.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:24

I got uh Diamondized once, by the way, for using like footage of like the McCarthyist like red scare trials on YouTube. No joke. It's so fucking funny.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:32

I have like five 18 plus videos where I am like criticizing a very bad thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:38

Yeah, and they're like, you agree with this.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:40

Yeah, I got in trouble for making fun of like COVID vaccine denialists, and they were like, You're spreading COVID vaccine denial. I'm like, no, I was laughing at them. What? They're scared now. Community guideline strike.

SPEAKER_00 1:23:51

It's like, what the fuck? Yeah, they're scared now because yeah, because you're talking about something sensitive. I mean, I though that being said, I don't know how the fuck I did that, but I have like a fucking thumbnail with Adolf Hitler on it, and it's that video is completely fine. They don't care. I have one with a massive SS and Swast on the middle of the screen.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:07

It is my best performing video of all time. Yep, yeah, and it's the aesthetic of fascism, which that particular one, which if you just read the title, afterwards I changed a little bit for it to scream. This is a video that says fascism is bad because it exploded the algorithm loved it because I that's at least my interpretation, because that was the only video and where in the title I'm not saying fascism is bad. I it just says we're gonna talk about fascism, and it's like I love this.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:36

I think mine was the same way because it said capitalism in the third reich, and it's a video or it's a thumbnail where where Adolf Hitler is hiling like a fucking uh like stock taker going up. There you go. That unironically, direct parallel. Yeah, and some people might be like, Oh shit, he's gonna be talking about like how this is awesome.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:55

No. Yep, the Dialgo at least did. I mean, Dialgo understands that a lot of people are gonna think this is awesome, that's why it pushes blah blah blah. That's actually under the algorithm would be a great episode on its own.

SPEAKER_00 1:25:07

True, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:08

And and exactly all of this guys that we're talking about uh gets at a core contradiction of this adpocalypse era. The policy changes were framed as cleaning up the platform, but in reality, the algo that made people like maulin you into stars in the first place, the recommendation engine that kept autoplaying ever more extreme content, the system that rewarded outrage and conspiratorial thinking because those things drove watch time that didn't fundamentally change. This was documented for years. The content was somewhat restricted, sure, but the structural incentives that produced and promoted that content were largely intact. The funnel kept on growing, and so did the BBW. So No, it wasn't a BBW, it was BBL, BBL. So the BBL. Yes, so the BBL. I mean, I don't mind the BBW either, bro.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:09

If you hear, if you're listening to this, please spam pictures of BBLs to Hugo so he understands what it is. All the socials, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:15

So yeah, it in in the in the context of the adpocalypse, M Molyneux tried to keep going. By 2020, his channel did do still really well, 900,000 subscribers. But then on June 29th, 2020, in the middle of the George Floyd protests, in the middle of what was at that time at least, before being to an extent co-opted, a moment of genuine national reckoning with racism in the United States, YouTube finally pulled the trigger. Molly News channel was terminated alongside David Duke and Richard Spencer as part of a wave of bans affecting over 25,000 channels for hate speech violations. They were scared in the corporate executive rooms of YouTube because they were seeing what is happening on the street. They were seeing a relative vibe shift in the United States of America on what is going to be casually accepted and what is not going to be casually accepted as hate speech, and they wanted to prevent another potential scandal like that of the previous adpocalypse. So please don't applaud them for this. They're just running the bottom line. The timing is very worth noting. Uh, YouTube had updated its hate speech policies back in 2019, specifically adding rules against content that very specifically and out in the open, keep in mind, portrays a group as inferior in order to justify discrimination. This is a very long sentence, keep in mind. Molyneux entire intellectual project was built exactly on just saying that a bunch of times in every single video, podcast, and book. The super Scientific race and the IQ stuff, the just philosophical inquiry into why some groups are supposedly less intelligent or civilized. This was his bread and butter, and to his demise, he was saying most of this shit at that point in his career out in the open. This is very important. Because YouTube didn't ban all the peddlers of hatred. One could argue it only banned one percent of them. Like the Daily Wires, the Prager Hughes, and the Jordan Petersons of the time. They fucking flourished. No. They cut down on those stupid enough, or I guess honest and principled enough, to depict their violent bigotry out in the open. The rest were bundled into political content which was supposed to be seen as neither here or there. YouTube my friends incentivized the digital right to adjust the way they pitched their ideas, because the only way you could actually get banned is if you were unironically saying hi Hitler N-word and Zekeiling on screen, which uh in one way or another uh was what Stephen Molyneux did. The smarter guys continued to exist and even thrive. But yeah, how did Molyneux take all of this? He called it an egregious error and a systemic coordinated effort. That's the one time he starts thinking about systemic things. Dom dum dum. He described his channel as quote, and here I'm quoting the quote systemic coordinated effort, end quote. He described his channel as quote, the largest philosophy conversation the world has ever known, end quote. Which is a sentence that really speaks for itself. Okay, fuck it, Socrates dropped in here, goddammit. By September 2020, he'd been banned from PayPal, MailChimp, SoundCloud, and YouTube. And I have to say, if I got banned from PayPal and I had the ego of this guy, I would genuinely start tinfoiling and living in bunkers. Because that is pretty crassy. Does anyone know what the fuck MailChimp is? Back in the day, that was surveying and surveying and sending out mail. So he had a lot of RSS feeds. Oh, yeah. So he was talking to a lot of like older heads via mail, right? So this was a big part of his platform. So getting banned from that was a big deal for him. So his financial infrastructure was basically gone, his distribution funnels were gone, and for someone who had built an entire empire precisely on those platforms, it looked at the time like a meaningful reckoning. But then came Elon Musk. In January 2023, following Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Stephen Molyneux's account was reinstated. Is his return plausible or has his time in the digital mainstream past? Has the right moved on, or will it, as it grows more honest in its thirst for violence, re-embrace one of its founding fathers? I mean like you probab uh mothers, like you would hate that more. Only time will tell.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:29

I do want to point out that hilariously enough, the one thing that Stefan Molyneux, the first thing he said when he uh had his first appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast, when Joe Rogan literally was just in a room with like a table, like a round table sitting next to him.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:44

The first thing Yeah, and now he's just in a room with uh a square table.

SPEAKER_00 1:31:47

Yeah, but yeah, and like the fucking like uh curtains from like the Red Room and like uh in uh Twin Peaks or whatever the fuck. But anyways, like the first thing he brought up when he stepped into Joe Rogan's podcast was that everyone mispronounces his name. And I noticed that we have found many innovative ways to mispronounce his name, and I hope to god he listens to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:32:10

Oh yeah, Stefan Mulinhu?

SPEAKER_00 1:32:13

Yeah, because you called this Stephen, yeah, and Stefan, yeah, it's it's it's also Did I call him Steven? Okay, who gives a fuck? No no no you didn't. You go did. You called him like Molyneux. Something he says is like a mispronunciation, but maybe I'm also mispronouncing it, which would be even funnier, I guess. Anyway, eat shit, stay banned, fuck you. Stefan Molyneux is a pioneer and a monster, but he's not a unique monster. There are countless ones like him out there who peddle a right wing ideology steeped in pseudoscience, destroying young people's lives before they've barely begun. But I want to leave this off on a bittersweet note, because among the countless lives Stefan has ruined, at least some managed to build themselves back. I mentioned a woman named Colleen Cowgill who had managed to leave Moliner's cult. In 2008, she had left Ohio to live with her boyfriend in Atlanta, cutting all contact with her family, as Stefan had required. However, quoting Colleen Cowgill, I found out later that they hired a private investigator to find out my address so they could send birthday cards. Stefan tried to convince her this family had abused her. Dennis Colt convinced her that her boyfriend wasn't living up to their libertarian virtues. So she was convinced to break up with him, which left her isolated and alone. Eventually she made her way back to her family in Ohio, and according to the ReLife magazine article from 2017, was doing a PhD in psychology. I was able to find a Dr. Colleen Caughill at Ohio University, whose listed fields of expertise include psychology of religion and social influence. Thank you for listening.