Port Townsend's Resident Edge Lord
Port Townsend Mayor David J. Faber, says he has "Vaush Politics". What does that mean?
In my last post, we discussed the odd behavior of Port Townsend Mayor David Faber and how his admission of having “Vaush Politics” explained that behavior. In this post I’ll explain what that means. If you haven’t read the previous post, I have linked it below.
So, What Is A Vaush?
Ian Kochinski, also known as Vaush, is a Seattle based youtuber and twitch streamer who is known for debating and discussing politics with people all over the political sphere. Kochinski describes himself as a progressive, anti-facist, and libertarian socialist. He employs similar tactics as those used by the far right to attract followers. His following is mostly made up of young men vulnerable to radicalization who were led to him by the algorithm. Knowing that Vaush is pulling from the same pool as the far right explains a large part of their behavior.
The radicalization of young men is driven by a complex stew of emotional, economic and political elements, many having nothing to do with social media. But critics and independent researchers say YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens.
-The Making of A YouTube Radical (possible paywall)
We aren’t going to fully explain Vaush’s politics here, but I will get into his treatment of women, his stance on pedophilia, who the men who follow him are and how the increasing authoritarian nature of the far left is putting women between a rock and hard place.
He Calls It “Ironic Misogyny”
On March 9th of this year, Vaush gained attention by tweeting at author J.K Rowling. Rowling responded by putting his shame on blast and sharing it with her 13.9 Million twitter followers
His Tweet was so bad, prominent trans activists also called Vaush out and admitted his particular approach was ultimately unhelpful to them.
Vaush argues that it is morally necessary to be sexist to J.K Rowling. His argument for this is predictably weak, however. It is quite obvious that he is trying to create an intellectual sounding reason to justify mistreating women who he has declared “bad people”.
Vaush and his supporters, who are overwhelmingly male, love to hide behind the “it’s a joke” excuse. I watched a YouTube video of two men discussing the twitter exchange between Vaush and Rowling where they claimed that Rowling was “pretending” not to know what ‘shitposting” is and being overly serious about an “obvious” joke. Shitposting is defined as “the act of using social media to post content that is satirical and of ‘aggressively, ironically, and trollishly poor quality.’ Shitposts are intentionally designed to derail discussions or cause the biggest reaction with the least effort.” In practice, it’s a lazy way to avoid taking ownership of saying shitty things and being an asshole just for the sake of it. If it’s only a joke when someone gets offended, it’s not a joke.
Edit: after publishing this, Faber's business partner Sam Feinson did the thing.
The people who regularly get offended though, are women. There are too many examples to list of women mentioning that they could not subscribe to Vaush because his treatment of female guests and overall “humor” made them uncomfortable.
For instance, female Youtuber The Authentic Observer recently called him out for the way he spoke about her when reacting to one of her videos. Aside from the usual pejoratives, he described her clothing and facial expressions as “asking for it.” Her response:
“…I’ve met men like this before. Who claim to be feminists but who really don’t think much of women. I think there is a lot of disdain for femininity on the left and I don’t want to be harsh but I find guys who have those sort of feelings towards femininity to be be sorry excuses for men. Im not trying to be mean, I am being completely serious here. It’s simultaneously aggressive and pathetic and being around it feels…well, whatever the opposite of safe is. Ill at ease.
You can sense the disdain for you rolling off them. You can fell this really nasty, angry undercurrent and it is never surprising when they reveal themselves.”
-The Authentic Observer
Due to the graphic language Vaush uses, the following video will need to open in a new window.
If you are unable to watch the video, I will provide a brief description. In the video Vaush is reacting to Chelsea Mitchell, a young woman in Connecticut who was part of a federal law suit looking to maintain sex-based boundaries in her state.
Vaush constantly pauses the video to spew nothing short of raw contempt and rage at Mitchell. He minimizes Mitchell's story by subjecting it to non-existent thoughts that he pulled from poorly written porn. He never makes any solid counter arguments; it is all insults, swears, and slurs.
“I wish this dumb bitch wasn’t in high school so I could fully go off on her”
At one point a commenter, who is assumed to be female, states “don’t erase us.” He becomes visibly irate at the comment and tells the user to kill herself.
This isn’t the first time I have come across a progressive male expressing such anger. Tik Tok user @thisisbensilver seems to have the same anger problem. (and same…face?)
Allies or Temporarily Embarrassed Trans Women?
"To right wing men, we are private property. To left wing men, we are public property. In either case, we are not considered to be humans: we are things.”
—Andrea Dworkin. Right-Wing Women.
Do not mistake progressive men’s supposed support of trans rights for altruism. These men aren’t really that angry on behalf of trans people: they are angry for themselves. This is personal for them because they recognize the situation for what it is. Their anger is righteous because it is about their rights as men to identify as a woman or “non-man” and not only access women’s spaces, resources, and opportunities but their rid themselves of the label “cis” white man, also known as the ultimate evil and the source of all world problems.
Similarly, progressive men are only willing to support ‘women’s rights’ as long as they get something out of it. This so-called support is just another extension of men's entitlement to women's bodies. They want to be the ones who decide what a woman is, based on the experiences their male bodies can access. This can be seen in discussions of pregnancy and childbirth—women no longer experience these things, ‘people’ do. If men can’t experience it, then it is not worthy of being called a woman’s experience.
If a woman isn't a willing mouth and open legs, if she isn't heaving breasts in a sundress, if she can not be accessed by man, then what is she?
Left Man uses liberal feminism as a smokescreen to mask his misogyny. He is unwaveringly committed to the “sex work is work” and “porn is empowering” ideologies. So long as there are a few female voices claiming that women freely choose to rent out their body parts for men’s one-sided sexual pleasure, the social structures that underpin porn and prostitution worldwide — the racism, colonialism and misogyny — can be set aside.
Julie Bindle ‘The sly sexism of Left-wing men’
To men like Vaush and the mayor of Port Townsend, the answer is clearly “there is nothing else” and they will gleefully support the assault, harassment, dismissal, and abuse of any woman who claims that women are more than what men define them to be. This leaves US women in a very difficult position in our current political climate. We can either support Republicans, who are willing to acknowledge that sex is real and that children cannot consent to experimental medical treatments, or we give those things away in effort to reclaim abortion rights across all states.
We cannot afford to sacrifice either, nor should we have to.
On Child Safeguarding
Vaush’s comments regarding pedophilia and age of consent often came up in reporting on his exchange with Rowling.
Vaush is rather notorious for his views on the age of consent and child porn. His supporters often claim that he is taken out of context, much like they say that it’s “just a joke.” Tik Tok user @bright.skin._ does a good job expressing how there is no “context” that would make the things Vaush says ok.
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What does this mean for Mayor David J. Faber? Well, he isn't a complete idiot and is not on record agreeing with these specific ideas from Vaush; however, he also hasn’t condemned them and continues to align himself with Vaush as a whole. Furthermore, his support for the local YMCA to employ a male to provide intimate care for young girls showed obvious disregard for child safeguarding. He was also the former president of a non-profit teen resource center called “The Boiler Room.” Under his leadership, the teen center became a hub for transients, and this exposed the vulnerable teens to drugs, abuse, and sex work.
Click here to read the 2018 Port Townsend Free Press reporting on The Boiler Room.
The Boiler Room leadership has admitted that they lost control of their facility. They let their youth service program become a hangout for transients and people no parent would want within arm’s reach of their teenage daughter or son. The Boiler Room leadership could not decide whether it was better to be perceived as “welcoming” and “nondiscriminatory” or take action to preserve and protect its original, laudable mission.”
-Port Townsend Free Press ‘Lessons from the Boiler Room’s Failure, and Our New Comment Policy: Updated’
Progressive men like Vaush and Faber believe that virtue signaling is more important than actual, sustainable progress. They are the type that often evokes “intersectionality” as a buzz word but rarely use it as the class analysis tool it was meant to be. They do not identify the intersection where the needs of the most vulnerable groups overlap and work from there, as true intersectionality would lead them to do. Instead, they just call support of whoever they deem to be the most vulnerable “intersectionality” and hold it against everyone who is not that group. This leaves a large hole for other vulnerable groups such as children, women, and the elderly to fall through the cracks because their vulnerabilities are never acknowledged as relevant.
These failures will continue to happen as long as the people pushing “woke” politics and holding public office don’t have skin in the game. Both the men and women who push for the erosion of women’s spaces are middle or upper class people who have little to no need for single sex spaces. They are more likely to have access to private clubs, have their own pools, use private shoppers, and exist outside of the spaces used by the general public.
In the past, male progressives like Faber performed female allyship by saying the things the women wanted to hear. They needed to show their enlightenment by proving they were not like other men. That they truly understood, and were sympathetic to the struggles of women. With the rise of trans identity however, the mask is off. This was never about sincere concern for women as a class, but about the power they found in the activism. They are no longer beholden to women to prove this enlightenment or access this power, they can now get it from other men.
If you think we’ve covered all the problems with Faber, we aren’t quite done. There is still the issue of his behavior leading up to Julie Jaman’s press conference on August 15th and his role in endorsing an Oregon based “anti-fa” group. And finally, there’s his telling response to a group of 35 women who were surrounded by hundreds of mostly male counter protesters. Women who were focused on talking about women’s rights, who didn’t even mention transness, were shouted down, assaulted, intimidated and harassed. Property was destroyed, a shoe was stolen right off a woman’s foot, and elderly women were shoved and injured. These women were denied due process and were unable to safely access the city council meeting. Faber’s thoughts? “What an incredible night…”
