“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled.” – Mark Twain

Well I finally had a chance to watch Roosh vs. the bloggers – there are no journalists left in the world – debate (it was anything but a press conference) and it was about what I expected. Every opportunity these bloggers had was to call him on his beliefs and his position on the state of the world with the intent to dismiss, marginalize or ridicule him.

By my estimate, there wasn’t a single blogger present who was older than 30 and each took turns couching their questions in terms that would challenge his perspectives with respect to their own. They weren’t there to report; they were there to debate questions they’d already written their own answers before going in because, like Roosh, they live and die by the impressions their readers/commenters. Roosh tried to classify them as ‘establishment’ or ‘the media’, but in reality they are bloggers – ‘journalists’ in name only. What they really are is outrage brokers and together they have a symbiotic relationship.

Roosh manufactures outrage, they distribute it to the cubicle workers who want to feel engaged in a world outside their cubes. Roosh cancels the meet ups, the cube workers feel like they’ve won a battle with edgelord shit-head misogynists and the Rooshites (preemptively) declare a victory for raising awareness of the ‘free speech’ Social Justice Warriors want to curb. Ding, ding! Return to your corners for the next round.

All this does nothing to benefit men in the Red Pill awareness even marginal Roosh proponents want to believe is the good that comes from this circus. “At least he’s raising Red Pill awareness. Any press is good press, right?”

Wrong. Ask Subway if they think the press their spokesman Jared Fogel generated with his 15 year sentence for child pørn charges was helpful in raising awareness of how great their sandwiches are. Not that anyone is boycotting Subway sandwiches, but likewise, no one’s minds are changed after Roosh had this presser. Not the bloggers or Twiteratti that hate him, not the Neomasculists who were already onboard with him and certainly no one that’s never heard of the ‘sphere in a public fashion.

Team Roosh and team SJW are still what they are. The fact that we get women and men IRL who know about this “leader of some MRA group who wants to legalize rape” should be evidence enough of the reach this quick hit, easily digestible ‘outrage bite’ has.

It’s easy to say that fence-riding men who’d never heard of the manosphere (the manosphere Roosh disowned, remember?) will be made aware of it and embrace it, but that’s a convenient and unmeasurable metric to justify what really amounts to a very damaging PR fuck up. Or maybe it wasn’t a fuck up? Maybe it went exactly as planned; maybe even more successful than planned.

Let me be clear, this is not an apologetic. Roosh masterfully turned (intentional or not) this to his advantage by playing all the bloggers present in the room to his narrative on his terms. He did exactly what he should’ve – no apologies, no admissions of guilt, and he forced these tools to play the cards he was dealing. He was handed a golden video op on a silver platter by these young journalists bloggers who knew going in that they were compromising the “journalistic integrity” their communications class teachers told them they had.

My concern isn’t how he handled this, it’s why he put himself (and other men who admire him) into this. My concern is that any genuineness he might’ve had about Neomasculinity is suspect of being just a vehicle for his own notoriety. If that’s the direction he’s chosen to go, if that’s how he’s decided to turn a dollar, I wish him good luck, but he’s become a dishonest broker of outrage at the expense (in some cases physically and financially) of the men who believed he was sincere.

If you read through the Deadbedrooms or Divorce subredds, there are countless men there who would save or change their lives if they embraced Red Pill awareness, but for whatever reason they get violently hostile at any mention of a TRP solution to their circumstances. How many of these fence-riders will look at Roosh and just have all those biases confirmed about TRP now?

Roosh is just playing a character now; one that the outrage brokers want and need:

I wrote about exactly this dynamic on Return of Kings in the only guest post I ever wrote for the site:

If the “postponement” of the ABC 20/20 manosphere “exposé” has taught us anything it’s that the writers seeking to cast light on the manosphere are looking for crazy. They need crazy because it’s the only thing they know how, or have the patience, to confront in as minimal an effort as it takes to type a few paragraphs dismissing it as misogyny. Writers (vichy male writers) like R. Tod Kelly are also lazy. They see an opportunity for outrage that sells advertising. They wanted Stormfront and what they got was a global consortium of rational, well reasoned men with jobs, families and intelligence, men from all walks of life, all ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds expressing ideas that don’t fit into an acculturation of feminine primacy. If you read Matt Forney’s 20/20 interview post you’ll see the desperation for crazy in their producer’s attempts to provoke him to become what they think he should be – a frothing, angry, hate-fueled misogynist. That would make it easy for them, they know how to sell crazy. The copy gets approved, the crazies get marginalized and we move on to the next Mabeline commercial. But they didn’t get crazy from Matt, or Roosh (okay Paul Elam looks a bit like Charles Manson in a certain light)—they got well reasoned, sensibility that was hard to argue against, so they attempted to prompt the crazy by barraging Roosh with questions about rape in the hopes that he’d blow up. He wouldn’t. They wanted it to be easy. They wanted to know all they needed to know about the manosphere by sourcing Manboobz, interviewing three manosphere bloggers and then trot out the crazy, show off the carnival freak, demonize and marginalize him and frog march the crazy off the stage. They wanted fringe, the easy kind of fringe that their journalism, communications and women’s studies classes taught them the easy answers to confront it with. But the manosphere isn’t fringe. For as much as R. Tod Kelly, or the producers at ABC would like it to be, the manosphere is too broad, too comprehensive, too diverse for anyone unfamiliar with it to really understand it, much less deliver an unbiased objective opinion of it. So Kelly follows formula and makes the same lame attempts at simple aspersion and misogynistic dismissal 20/20 had already failed in doing (as evidenced by their segment’s postponement). The Daily Beast wanted its formulaic red meat, but Kelly is just dishing out ABC’s cold left-overs.

The MSM wants crazy. Crazy gets clicks. There was a time Roosh would’ve responded with far more measured and reasonable responses to these allegations, now he’s found it necessary to adopt the crazy that the MSM wants. He did it artfully, but he’s given them the ugly caricature, the black & white melodramatic misogynist who’s easy to hate.

They want a villain, a misogynist, a chauvinist, a caveman and a guy easily ridiculed in a feminine-primary social order and it appears Roosh is more than happy to give that to them if it means he can profit from it.

The problem with delivering the crazy is that Roosh does so at the expense of men who would otherwise benefit from genuine Red Pill awareness. I approach Red Pill awareness from a bottom up perspective because it is important that men effect real change in their lives and their thinking on a personal level.

I disagree on many ‘doctrinal’ tenets of Neomasculinity for any number of reasons, but the core Red Pill principles Neomasculinity appropriates are still there. Roosh does Red Pill truth-seeking men no favors by making a mockery of those very core principles he claims for the basis of Neomasculinity with his readiness to play a dangerous game with those men’s lives for his personal benefit. All Roosh does in playing this character is polarize men into a team mentality with no real change beyond an Us vs. Them shift.

It might feel good to rally and shake a fist at SJWs and feminists, but it does nothing to educate a man with Red Pill awareness so he knows why he’s in the social conditions he finds himself with women and a large feminine-centric social structure. That takes far more effort and personal investment in that man than simply recruiting him with an easy cause and an easier enemy to hate.

Roosh calling for public meet ups on a RoK six weeks in advance on a site that claims 1 million unique hits a month is not just “a chance for likeminded guys to get together for a beer” it is the bait and the time needed to draw a response from exactly the opposition he’ll complain is out to get him when they predictably do. Granted, that opposition took the bait as predicted, and along with it the outrageous capital he’d hoped to generate, but he’s only going to be able to cry wolf like this so many times before he marginalizes not just himself, but the validity of Red Pill awareness.

In fact that may be forthcoming sooner than he expects. Of course the outrage brokers he hopes to offend will be more than happy for the blog fodder, but at some point he’ll become passé and like PT Barnum he’ll be forced to up his game due to people rolling their eyes at another one of Roosh’s set ups. This is the same formula he’s been using since the London stop of last year’s world tour; he’s got to go bigger on the next push to keep the interest going.

Satire and Irony

Roosh suggesting the legalization of rape on private property wasn’t satire. It was irony, it was juxtaposition to expose a counter point – that women need to accept at least some responsibility for the consequences of their sexual indiscretions – it was illustrative sarcasm, and it was an allegorical thought experiment, but it was neither satire nor parody.

It was an essay in exposing the duplicity of women’s hypoagency – the idea that certain individuals (e.g. women) lack agency in their own actions. They lack control. They are not actors … rather, they are acted upon. The corollary to that argument being that they are not responsible for their own actions. Yet the cultural narrative of the omni-empowered, Strong Independent Woman® is completely at odds with exactly women’s hypoagency with regard to rape. They are powerful and purposeful when it serves and entirely unaccountable and blameless when it’s not convenient.

There was an “entirely serious” article written by Femitheist (on Vice no less) not long ago ‘suggesting’ the systematic culling of 90% of the male population. It turned out to be less-than-serious, but it was written in the same vein as Roosh’s rape legalization “satire” to illustrate a counterpoint.

Difference? A woman wrote it.

If a woman had written, verbatim, what Roosh had, the irony wouldn’t have been intentionally missed. There would’ve been some friction for suggesting rape is any woman’s fault, ever, under any circumstance (hypoagency) – and it would be even more salient had an anti-feminist woman wrote it – but readers would’ve gotten the gist of the irony. Just as they eventually did with Femitheist’s article.

If a homosexual like Milo Yianopoulos had written it, he’d have been met with the same friction, perhaps even more censorship at his speaking engagements, but readers would’ve gotten the irony – and with a giggle because he’s a cheeky Brit with fabulously gay bleached hair.

Outrage Sells

We live in an age of outrage media. I’ve written in the past about how women need indignation as part of their innate solipsistic make up, so it follows that in an era where men are feminized to the point that they think wearing skirts and heels are a legitimate form of protest against mass rape that fem-men would also lap up the same indignation. They lap it up because they identify with the feminine, with being women themselves.

All one need do today is search for “Rapsit beaten by” on YouTube or Google to see just how far that rape hysteria has ensaturated society. Label a man a ‘rapist’ in the slightest degree of seriousness and you have carte blanche to kill him or destroy his life and livelihood. No doubt Roosh is aware of this judging from the volume of death threats he’s received for the mere perception that he may be a rapist or the oblivious lack of critical thought that he’d seriously advocate for legalizing rape.

He knows this because he’s written, in my opinion, one of the most insightful essays on exactly this social order – The Most Insidious Method of Control Never Devised.

Roosh wrote the seminal essay on how insidious the threat of “stealing a man’s bread” has in controlling his decisions and silencing him. This is why it pains me to see Tweets like this after so elaborate an effort of publicity at the potential cost of other men’s bread – men who believe in the sincerity of what’s only a vehicle for his notoriety now:

https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/696825522727317504

I had to reconsidered doing this breakdown of Roosh’s very blatant attention trolling at the expense of anyone who would’ve thought his intents were genuine about organizing a world wide meeting of the tribes. I’m in a difficult position here.

By posting I get tagged with not being cooperative to the manosphere on whole by exposing Roosh for the marketeer he’s regretably turning himself into. On Twitter and the previous thread I get accused of cutting Roosh off at the knees for not being a team player because “any press is good press” (false) and even if he is the Svengali he is, well, at least the ‘sphere is getting some spill-over publicity.

I say that’s bullshit, and then I’m reminded of my own reasons for involving myself in writing what I do and who I write for.

Not only is it bullshit, but it’s bullshit that damages the capital that the ‘sphere collectively has developed for over a decade now. Roosh isn’t making any new converts to Neomasculinity or anything else with this, and while his epic trolling of SJWs and fem-stream media bloggers deserves the highest praise, it’s regrettable the cost should come from men who are genuinely looking for the answer Red Pill awareness provides.

The Red Pill Monthly

Niko Choski and I will be discussing this post and other topics on the next installment of The Red Pill Monthly youtube Livecast this Friday, February 12th at 10AM Pacific Standard Time.

You can follow the link here.

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