This video by Bernard Chapin warrants a response here because he raises some issues and fabricates some canards that need to be addressed.
Then I will happily move on.
The false premises Bernard is operating from here are so numerous that I won’t take time to address all of them. I’ll just stick with those that stand out the most. And I will ask those of you who understandably don’t care for infighting to bear with me on this one. After a couple of times responding minimally to this man’s foolishness, even his attempts to come to the site bullying to get his way, I am not inclined to issue any more passes.
That being said, fuck up number one here is the claim that AVFM “renamed the men’s rights movement.” I don’t know if Bern bothered to read the post on the matter, or if he bothered reading it for naught because he just doesn’t understand what it means. AVFM made an editorial decision to refer to what we do here as men’s human rights activism. Last I checked, it was within our rights to do so, and was not an infringement on Bern’s or anyone else’s freedom of speech.
Like most tradcons, Bernard is all about free speech and property rights till you make a decision for yourself that he disagrees with. AVFM has never claimed to represent the men’s movement as a whole. Indeed I have taken great pains, as I am now, to remind people that the editorial team here never claims to speak for anyone other than the management of this website. Any single entity claiming to represent this entire movement is in la la land. I dare say I am much more in tune to that reality than is Bernard Chapin.
I am also experienced at this enough to know that we are never served to be in the business of herding snakes with a stick, which is precisely analogous to the idea of trying to make every supporter of men’s rights follow AVFM editorial guidelines everywhere they go. Hell, I can’t even get Bernard Chapin to read and understand the difference between an editorial policy and universal edicts, so I don’t think I would waste my time trying to put every MRA, or MHRA as we call them around here, on a leash.
Bern knows better than this. Why he is painting this bullshit picture is anyone’s guess. Well, it is actually not much of a mystery. I know exactly why he is doing it, which leads us directly to the next point.
Bern claims that AVFM has become politicized. Really now? Where is the reference for that, Bern? Oh yeah, I forgot, you don’t have one. It is just another absolutely empty claim.
Allow me to inject enough reality in here to compensate for Bern’s lack of it in this video. The problem he has is with our Managing Editor Dean Esmay, who has political views largely different than Berns. (Largely different than mine as well, not that I give a fuck what anyone’s personal political beliefs are).
Has Dean Esmay used his position here to push those views in articles or in any other management function? NO. HE HASN’T. He has written on men’s rights issues and that is it. Like all of us, he has at times let some of his beliefs be known, but that is hardly pushing a political agenda. I have made it no secret that my leanings are Libertarian, and particularly anti-statist. Has the site made an official endorsement of the American Libertarian party? Even of Ron Paul, of whom I am a big fan?
Uh, no. Why? Because we don’t do partisan politics here. Those with more than a couple of brain cells to rub together already know that.
Believe it or not, I watch most every detail of what happens on this site, and if Dean or anyone else were using campaign posters for article graphics, or endorsing candidates, or political parties it would not likely slip past me.
Just sayin’.
As hard as I look, though, I cannot match BC’s ability to catch those things when they are not even there to be caught. The man has speshul talent.
That is one of the most difficult parts of what I do, and for which I am the most proud. AVFM is and always has been non-affiliated with any political party. I aim to keep it that way.
Again, where is Bern’s evidence that things are any different than this? Well, again, he has none. It is just hot air oozing up from the wandering cauldron, and it smells like it, too.
I know the reason for all this. It is called personal projection. You can grab any number of Bern’s videos and hear him assert with regularity that the men’s movement MUST be a left vs. right issue. No ifs, ands or buts, Bern has declared that one official for all of us. Much like what he is accusing AVFM of doing now. Never mind that the most successful men’s rights website ever has based its entire editorial stance on rejecting that idea. It’s true anyway, cause Bern said so.
Bern is a right wing doorman. That doesn’t mean he does not make some really good videos. I have enjoyed them and will no doubt continue to enjoy them. But I always keep his message in proper perspective. Despite the fact that issues that affect men and boys, politically speaking, emanate with roughly equal incidence from the so called left and the so called right, from liberals who Bern can see and from Tradcons –Traditional Conservatives who Bern makes the asinine, borderline retarded claim do not exist — he calls us all to right wing politics as a solution. As though all you have to do to end the wholesale attack on men and boys is to defeat the left. He is a true believer in this, even while his tradcon buddies in the Senate just helped pass VAWA again. Even as invisible, non-extant penis bearing traditionalists fuck men over in family courts and send our boys to die under a right of center banner for commercial interests.
Someone on Bern’s channel who supported the above posted 11 minutes of bullshit commented there that his articulation of this was why people were starting to gravitate toward him. In Bern’s one moment of getting it right, he pointed out that this was not true.
Points for insight on that one. The fact is, and I don’t say this to be cold, that my video channel has outgrown Berns, and I almost never post videos.
The reason this website has become so wildly popular, and such a threat to the Feminists and Traditionalists (FATS) is because we are not choking down any more of the swill produced by a false, two party “dichotomy” in which it just so happens that men end up on the fucked end of the stick, for the benefit of THE STATE.
Men are waking up, Bern, and you still have one eye closed.
If there is to be any dominating political philosophy at AVFM, it will be anti-statism and nothing else. And it matters not to me if we offend anyone, from the most left leaning supporter of Obama, to the likes of Bernard Chapin, who only imagines he is not a useful idiot for a fake two-party system run by statist thugs who are fucking men over left and right.
Let’s save the red pills for those who don’t choke on them.
