Business email: info@contrapoints.com
I don't know what my speaker's fee will be (if anything), but I have not been promised anything extravagant. I am not doing the event for profit or self-promotion but because I believe it is the right thing to do.
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Try to remember what you thought and felt growing up, before any exposure to leftist thought, or to personal experiences that changed your preconceptions. I personally aim to be that informant, that intervenor as often as possible.
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I'm not claiming to be a special sorceress who's magically better at this than anyone else. Others are more experienced, more educated, more articulate than me. My success rate even breaching the surface is probably no better than 1 in 10.
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But I'm willing to try, willing to improve. Also, *this is my job.*
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I've received hundreds of messages from people telling me that my videos have helped pull them away from the brink of the Alt-Right. Or that I've persuaded them as to the validity of non-binary gender IDs.
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And this is not because I'm some sort of magic savior. I'm not. It's just that this is what I do all the time. For an audience of hundreds of thousands. And a few hundred of those have been affected in some way.
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So when people say "trust my experience: you can't persuade a bigot," I want to respond: "well, what about my experience? Am I supposed to just discard that?"
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Now I know many of you may generally agree with what I'm saying here but still think that this particular event is a really bad idea. And that's fine. That's allowed. I thank those of you with constructive criticism, and I will take it into consideration next time.
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Unfortunately, much of the criticism I've gotten has not been constructive. It has been intensely hostile and often outright libelous.
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Once the outrage is up and running, the empirical facts of the case are lost to the overwhelming sentiment that I am a traitor. And once that feeling takes hold, evidence must be constructed to justify it.
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Hence these unhinged inferences: year-old holocaust denial comment -> anti-Semitic group -> fascists (+ ticketed event) = ContraPoints is hosting a Nazi fundraiser.
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The purpose is to insist that I am as sinister and evil as possible. And twisted psychological motivations are stipulated to explain my behavior: I'm selling my soul for profit, am desperate for the approval of transphobes, etc.
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It's the same pattern of wild hyperbole, amplified half-truths, interpreting things in the least charitable possible way that leads to "Chris Ray Gun is a Nazi" and other overblown, outrage-driven articles of Twitterverse common knowledge.
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The point is not that CRG hasn't said shitty things. It's not that there aren't valid criticisms of my going to the Vancouver event. It's that an environment of wildly vitriolic & exaggerated accusations makes it difficult for the accused to hear anything but irrational rage.
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That's it for Thread 1. Gonna go refill my drink and start a new thread on how I'm going to do things differently from now on.
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End of conversation
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