Is Pick-up Artistry Dead in the Era of MeToo? With Matt Cross | Fireside Chat 282

"You can't appeal because there's nothing to appeal. You're just screwed and you just have to pay."Hannah Wallen, Mike Stevenson and Richard the Lionhearted go back into the Daily Mail's investigation of Britain's Child Maintenance Service, on the question of whether any of it is a glitch.Also: the father whose nineteen thousand pounds the CMS took straight out of his bank account after a judge had already ordered it refunded, who had to abandon the building work on his house and left his family without a kitchen for eighteen months; the policy that when the CMS is found in the wrong it doesn't refund you, it advises you to sue your ex for the money; and other horror stories from the depths of Child Support hell."Our bad, but we're not going to give you the money back. Our bad, but we're not going to compensate you for the time we stole from you while you were sitting on your ass in jail for something you didn't do.""If my company did this to my clients, people would go to jail. Not the customer, either. It would be the people making the mistakes, in scare quotes. It's not a mistake when you do it on purpose."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"She literally got the guy who was working on a potential cure for cancer fired. Because she didn't like him."Brian, Hannah Wallen, Dr Randomercam and Mike Stevenson on the news that the feminist-run Title IX process on college campuses is, apparently, insufficiently feminist: sixteen students found responsible for sexual assault across four years of Cornell records, two expelled, and a former student telling CNN that the man her panel found responsible got a written reprimand, probation and a reflection paper. Nowhere in Cornell's own documentation does the word rape appear, and the panel goes through what a campus finding of "sexual assault" can be built on — a hug, a kiss that was consensual at the time and retracted later, a catcall, an innuendo overheard across a room, or a man saying his name is Hugh Mungus.Also: Paris on fire again, with protests in Spain, Italy, Albania, Portugal and Greece being billed as cost-of-living demonstrations; the Russell Brand trial, where prosecutors call him a ruthless, calculating and manipulative sexual predator, the jury can hear his accusers but not see them, and one allegation dates to a Labour Party conference in 1999; what the word rape meant before it meant this; and the scientist who beat the allegation and took a settlement, and the aging and cancer work he lost those years to."History's kings and queens were a bunch of thieving bastards. And future kings and queens will be a bunch of thieving bastards. History's politicians were a bunch of thieving bastards. Today's politicians are a bunch of thieving bastards."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"All women will sell you a fantasy. I mean, they're like frigging car salesmen. But then once you take that car home, you start to see gremlins."Brian interviews Matt Cross, dating coach and pick-up artist, host of The 33 Secrets, who has been teaching cold approach since the mid-1990s.Also: why he says women's selectivity hasn't moved in twenty years, and what has — attention from men who are out of their league and not looking for a relationship, which he says they almost all misread as availability; the married men who sign up to his programs to re-attract their own wives; women prioritising how moral they look over whether they were in the wrong; and his claim that millennial women were the woke peak and women in their twenties are reverting to baseline."You just surround yourself with other hot women and then other hot women will want you too. Suddenly you become attractive because they see you around other women. It's nuts.""Women have a very big problem with accepting any accountability at all for any wrongdoing. What they prioritize is perceived morality."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"Your frankly quantum concept of consent — it's both consent and not consent until you open up the rape box."Brian and Alison on the Call Her Daddy episode where Alex Cooper and her guest, Kate Manne, an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell, take on the Cornell 7 case, and on what Jane Doe's own sworn statement describes her doing.Also: a defendant moving to have the Cornell 7 special prosecutor recused over her public statements, and to have grand jurors asked whether they've seen them; the line in Doe's own account where she tells a man the next day he might not remember what she did to him; the survey finding that men who answer on the fifth follow-up report far more assault than men who answer on the first, because men bounce off these questionnaires; the enrolment figure below which administrators expect women to stop applying; and a fraternity brother raped by a woman."I am sexually liberated modern woman. Hear me roar and snort ketamine off a guy's dick.""Men in colleges are like the whores in a whorehouse. And you know how the customer is always right."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"Hey, look, I have this blunt instrument that I don't understand. I'm going to thump you on the head with it. Surely that will work."Brian and Alison on the fourth instalment of Rachel Wilson's debate with Kyla, also known as NotSoErudite, who spends this round arguing that coming off the gold standard and the Triffin dilemma killed the family, and that feminism couldn't possibly have.Also: the Canadian Centre for Men and Families creating services for men on under a million a year; men with homemaker wives working less than other men rather than more; the number one regret of men in hospice; Saudi Arabia's native fertility sitting close to three once you control for immigration, and secular Israeli Jews above replacement; the liberal college graduates who never married and so never turn up in the population the college studies examine; and coming off the gold standard and feminism getting a tsunami of funding."Everybody thinks Muslim men are some kind of different species. They're not. They're exactly as custodial.""You don't have to take anything away from women. Just stop giving something to women."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"The agency has since stopped recording minutes at these meetings."Hannah Wallen, Mike Stevenson and Richard the Lionhearted on a Daily Mail investigation into Britain's Child Maintenance Service, which found at least one more father who killed himself after years of being overcharged.Also: a man whose earnings the agency inflated by ten thousand pounds, leaving him paying more than double what he owed; another whose debt it multiplied by ten; one father who got six letters in a single day, each naming a different sum; the comparisons being drawn to the Post Office Horizon scandal; and women coerced into naming a man as the father, the men later cleared and never compensated."Is child support as corrupt in the UK as it is in the US?" "Yes." "The question isn't just that, but is it more?" "Yes."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"Give me a call when you're ready to say, We were wrong, Doc! Please help us! And I will spontaneously laugh in your face while disintegrating into the grass. And thereby touching the grass as I disintegrate into it."Brian, Hannah Wallen, Dr Randomercam and Mike Stevenson on the Cornell 7 developments: the Title IX panel handing down suspensions, probation and expulsions, and a complainant who told police parts of the night were "pretty okay" and that she agreed to a threesome, before saying she could state with 100% confidence she was raped.Also: Shane Gillis's SNL monologue and the cancel culture that was supposedly over; Bernadette Greene-Placentia, the Arizona Democrat who says two men knocked her unconscious and assaulted her while she was out repairing campaign signs alone at 2am, told her campaign team before her husband, and waited seventeen days to give the sheriff's office a statement; the share of undergraduates identifying as neither male nor female falling since 2023; and what harassment law actually requires you to have intended."I would argue that consent doesn't exist. Not for men. There's no such thing, and you should stop playing this game. It's an illusion."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"There are so many Save the World NGOs and Save the World LLCs in this state, you'd think we would have saved the world by now."Brian interviews Phillip C. Parrish, retired Navy lieutenant commander, intelligence and counterterrorism, who went public on Minnesota child-care fraud after coming off orders in 2017, and who ran for governor in 2018 and then for lieutenant governor on Mike Lindell's ticket. Parrish talks about the Duluth model, which he dates to 1977 and the work of Pence, Paymar and McDonald.Also: seventeen years he didn't call domestic violence, at six foot four and 240 pounds; four years of marriage counselling in which separation was never once suggested while he was being abused; a hundred and ten billion dollars of Minnesota spending since 1977 for fake services, fake clients, and agency bloat that never touches a child's life; and what he tells men to keep: texts, screenshots, dates and places."If I had behaved like she was behaving, I never would have seen my children again.""I had to fight with every inch of my life to just get joint legal and joint physical custody."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"Make sure you're flagellating yourself not because you're not feminist enough, but because you're too feminist."Brian hosts political theorist Stephen K. Baskerville — author of Taken Into Custody and Who Lost America?, and of the recent essay "The Tragedy of Conservatism" — on family courts, the accusation industry, and why the professional Right won't touch either.Also: the outrage that turned up for the civil rights movement and never for fathers; invading the churches and taking over the men's groups as the place to start locally; conservatives reaching for "feminism is Marxism" as a crutch; the allegations reaching past divorce court into the military, the universities and politics; and the one demand he says should never be compromised — give them their children back and leave them alone."If you can't regain control of a congregation, you're not going to regain control of a nation.""Women naturally have a monopoly on reproduction and its terms. And if men don't demand to share it equally, then the women will monopolize it."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online

"She's applying these talking points not as topics of debate, but as gotchas."Brian and Alison keep going through Rachel Wilson's debate with Kyla, also known as NotSoErudite, on whether feminism has done more harm than good — Wilson arguing it has, NotSoErudite looking anywhere else for a culprit.Also: Claudia Goldin's finding that the 1970s was not a spike in women's employment but part of a rise already long underway; the Gulf states as the gotcha, and why fertility is falling faster in the debtor Muslim nations than the creditor ones; sixty thousand dollars of average student debt and a first child at 31; share buybacks against capital expenditure as a symptom of an economy moving from production to signalling position; and a man trading his own fertile years for money he'll have at forty."Not even the communists wanted to do that. The Nazis still had children and marriage. The only one of the big ideologies that specifically said, hey, we're going to kill family, was feminism."Support the show: feedthebadger.com/supportSend us a message: feedthebadger.com/justthetipJoin the community: badgernation.online