(Link to live tweet, archive.)
As I noted the other day, after I posted the exchange I had with Nathan Alberson where we set the terms of the interview Nathan responded by posting excerpts of the exchange designed to make it appear that we had come to a different agreement (see internet archive for snapshots of the page). Nathan’s edited version of the exchange leaves out our agreement to have a back and forth exchange, and it leaves out the part where Nathan wrote*:
I’d like to sincerely understand and present your point of view, even where our camp diverges.
These are critical omissions on his part, because Nathan has persistently claimed that I’ve misrepresented our agreement in these regards. By leaving out carefully selected portions of our agreement Nathan is deceiving his listeners. Yet at the same time Nathan hasn’t been so bold as to outright accuse me of making up the parts he strategically omitted. Either way, what he is doing here is deceptive. Here is Nathan presenting this deception under the guise of setting the record straight in the second podcast (emphasis mine)**:
I’m going to go ahead and read this email, because it’s been the subject of some controversy and some confusion. I’m just going to read this entire email.
Hi, this is an email to Dalrock from me, Nathan Alberson.
Hi, We’re putting together an episode of our podcast Sound of Sanity on Red Pill, Game, MGTOW, all that good stuff. I wanted to see if you would consent to a phone interview sometime in the near future. I’d like to get as clear an articulation of your views as I can, and present it to the world. The questions would be quite simple I prefer simple questions that allow for more elaborate answers, as needed.
And then I listed seven questions. These are the same questions that you can actually see if you read the transcript of our email exchange, who are you, what are the problems facing men today, basic questions about who he was, what he was doing, how his work interacted with the manosphere, and what the manosphere was, which was what the episode was going to be about.– Yeah, what we were going to be able to do with that hopefully would be to have a couple of audio clips for you guys of someone in the manosphere saying this is what it is, this is what red pill is, this is what mgtow is, this is who I am, this is what I’m concerned about, this is why I do what I do, and then be able to go with that, build off of that, into explaining to you something of this world.
Nathan – Uh, so just to finish the email, I said, after I listed those questions I said full disclosure: as you probably know, we don’t agree on everything. If I’m not mistaken… which, given where we’ve landed on Dalrock now it might sound like I’m being a little soft on him. But I actually didn’t know him that well at the time, and so I was really just wanting to understand his point of views. But I did know that he had said some negative things about my pastor, so here I say quote If I’m not mistaken, you see the work of my pastor and others like him as somehow undercutting the concept of female moral agency. I see your work as needlessly undercutting male responsibility in the name of establishing female moral agency. The podcast may ultimately reflect these differences, but I’d like to give you a fair chance to say your piece. This won’t be “gotcha journalism.” Actually, in that spirit, I’ll warn you about the potential “gotchas” right now: I would like to press you a bit on the misogynists that work like yours seems to attract. I’ve seen more than one commenter in your archives say that a woman needs a good old fashioned spanking. I see in your “comments policy” you ask people to refrain from discussing marital corporal punishment. It seems to me that if you have to ask people to refrain from that topic, you may be attracting the wrong sort of people. I’d like to ask you frankly about that and let you answer however you choose. I hope that sounds amenable to you. Thanks, Nathan
– You could, if you pull that quote out of context, “I want to present your views to the world” you could get the idea that we want to do a whole episode on Dalrock and on promoting his views and giving him a chance to speak and use our platform to promote his views.
What Nathan has to know is that if his listeners look at this closely they will see that in fact we didn’t agree to use his original list of seven questions like he claims. In the part of the exchange that he strategically edits out Nathan reworked the list into nine questions. If his readers look at this post for example, they will see where I listed questions 8 and 9. If they look at this post, they will see that Larry Kummer of Fabius Maximus suggested I add a note clarifying why Nathan was referencing question 8 in his reply to my answer to question 9.:
Nathan: “I’ll have some follow-up questions, but I’ll let you answer question 8 first, and then we can hit a few things in more depth as needed.”
You might add a link to the previous post (the answer to his question 8), for people not reading these posts sequentially. They might wonder why you didn’t answer Nathan’s question 8.
Nathan edited his comment referencing question eight out of his presentation of the interview, and in fact omits the question numbers altogether in his version. But as clever as he was in this regard, he forgot that it wasn’t just the numbering that he changed when he reworked the questions. He reworked the wording as well. And while Nathan was careful to leave out the question numbers, he presents the revised wording of his question in his edited version of the interview. See the bold section in this snapshot from the Warhorn page taken today (archived here):
Note that his wording of the question here can only be found in the parts of the email exchange that he implies never happened. He was careful to edit out the question numbers, but he forgot that he also changed his wording as we were coming to our agreement on the interview. Also note that this isn’t an innocent mistake, as the parts of our agreement that he is omitting here show that my characterization of our agreement is in fact correct, and refute his claims about our agreement.
Related:
Note: Unless something unexpected comes up I plan on this being my final post on the subject. My readers already see Warhorn’s deception, but I wanted to clearly spell this out for anyone coming across the question in the future before closing it out.
*However, Nathan did make two similar statements in the original email, so even without the third promise it is clear that he did not keep his word.
**Part of Warhorn’s deception here is pretending that my objection was that they didn’t dedicate their entire podcast to presenting my views. But that isn’t true. My objection was that in the lead up to the interview Nathan repeatedly told me he wanted to present my views to his audience, even if they also explained why they disagreed. Yet after the podcast Nathan stated to his readers that their goal was to avoid presenting my views in the podcast. See his comments here and here. I never expected my views to go unchallenged, I merely expected Nathan to keep his word.
Leave a Reply