The Canadian media is developing a grudging new respect for RooshV:
The man Canada couldn’t keep out: ‘Pickup artist’ unbowed despite public condemnation over lectures
For a man fuelled by controversy, the self-proclaimed “pickup artist” known as Roosh V doesn’t like talking to the media — “I’m a bit squeezed for time,” he said Tuesday, politely rebuffing requests for comment on public condemnation that his speaking engagements in Canada aroused.
“I have my own media channels. It’s not worth my time to talk to reporters,” he said in an email to the National Post. To a Toronto radio station he was more dismissive: “Bell Media can go to hell.”
Daryush Valizadeh, who goes by the name Roosh V and writes about convincing women to have sex, says he gave his lecture in Montreal to a group of 34 in a secret location, travelling in disguise, before he was spotted and chased out of a restaurant and down the street by a small, angry mob on Saturday.
In anticipation of his scheduled appearance in Toronto on Saturday, Toronto mayor John Tory denounced him and his views as a form of hate speech. “While free speech is the law in this country, promoting violence against women is wrong,” Tory tweeted. “I am calling on those hosting this tour to do the right thing — cancel this show.”
We won. Men won. Free speech won. Here’s my Montreal victory speech:
Roosh (@rooshv) August 09, 2015Toronto and Montreal were the two Canadian dates on a tour his website says also includes Berlin, London, Washington D.C., and New York City. In the face of it all, the American blogger appears unbowed, lampooning his detractors in social media for being ineffective and hysterical.
This is what happens when you don’t back down and you don’t flinch in front of the media heat. Roosh is now “the man Canada couldn’t keep out”. I am now “the most hated man in science fiction”. From National Post to Newsweek, from Le Monde to a media outlet that shall remain nameless until the piece runs, the international media is no longer content to let our enemies talk about us, they are asking us to speak directly for ourselves.
That doesn’t happen when you cringe, and apologize, and recant. That doesn’t happen when you flee from criticism like a coward. You have to earn your right to be heard, because no one is going to take you seriously if you don’t stand by what you have said in the face of disapproval. It is only those without character who can expect to avoid repeated attempts to assassinate it.
Milo has some thoughts on the failed Canadian attempt to deny Roosh a platform:
No-platforming, a favourite tactic of the progressive left, denies us, the public, the ability to interrogate a speaker ourselves. It’s not only illiberal and profoundly anti-intellectual but it can create a halo of martyrdom around people who are already pushing at an open door – such as men’s rights activists, who rightly point to dozens of structural inequalities in the way men are spoken about and treated in today’s uber-progressive societies.
Of course, no-platforming is a dangerous strategy, because if the wrong sort of man is no-platformed, he will simply go off and build a new platform, one over which those who previously denied him a platform will not only lack control but even a modicum of influence.