Stefan Molyneux Biography

Stefan Basil Molyneux was born on September 24, 1966, in Athlone, Ireland, and grew up mainly in London. At 11, he relocated to Canada. He studied history, philosophy, literature, and economics at Glendon College�at York University in Toronto. In the college, he acted at Theatre Glendon and became part of the debating society. He developed keen interest in philosophy, particularly moral theories, in his mid-teens.

He pursued professional theatre studies at the�National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal for two years. He obtained a B.A. degree in History from McGill University in 1991 and an M.A. degree in History in 1993 from the University of Toronto. He earned an 'A' for his Master's thesis where he analyzed political implications of philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes.

Stefan Molyneux co-founded the Toronto-based Caribou Systems Corporation, an environmental database software providing company, along with his brother Hugh in early 1995. They later sold it in 2000. He started penning down articles for Lew Rockwell's website,�LewRockwell.com, in 2005.

He launched his own podcast Freedomain Radio (FDR) and eventually left his career as software entrepreneur to pursue philosophy full-time through FDR. The FDR community is overseen by Molyneux and one has to donate money to become a member. More the amount of donation, which ranges from $5 to $100 per month, more the access to Molyneux and his works.

A self-described anarcho-capitalist and philosopher, Stefan Molyneux came up with the book Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof for Secular Ethics, in 2007. Writing about it, American philosopher David Gordon mentioned that Molyneux failed miserably and his “arguments are often preposterously bad.”

An advocate of white genocide conspiracy theory, Stefan Molyneux promotes white supremacist views and conspiracy theories through FDR. He has interviewed many South African proponents of the white genocide conspiracy theory. Prominent white supremacists like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimelow frequently appeared in his podcasts.

According to Stefan Molyneux, if a person is not satisfied with their "family-of-origin" or "FOO" relationships then they can disown their parents and family and this process of severing relationship with one’s own family is referred in FDR circles as a deFoo. Defoo.org, a sister website of FDR, facilitates patrons in disowning their families. Molyneux himself ostracized his own parents and his psychotherapist wife, Christina Papadopoulos, also disowned her parents after meeting Molyneux.

It is believed that Molyneux's concept of deFOOing and his online pseudo-therapy sessions led about 20 FDR members of the estimated 50,000 users of the website to disown their families-of-origin. Such incidents made international news in 2008 after parents of an FDR member, who disowned them, went public. A disciplinary panel at the College of Psychologists of Ontario reprimanded Papadopoulos and censured deFOOing in 2012, after conducting a professional investigation on her and finding her guilty of professional misconduct due to her use of the Internet in counselling people to follow her and disown their families.

Stefan Molyneux and his deFOOing concept became subjects of an investigative documentary of Channel 5 in the UK, and also of an episode of the American documentary TV series Dark Net.

Meanwhile, Stefan Molyneux featured on Max Keiser hosted Press TV program On the Edge in 2010, on Alex Jones' InfoWars in 2011, and on libertarian Adam Kokesh hosted RT program Adam vs. the Man in 2011 and 2012.

A self-described men's rights activist, Stefan Molyneux was a panellist at a Detroit conference in 2014. According to Molyneux, feminism is a form of socialism. He believes that violence occurring across the globe is associated with the way women treat their children and any form of misdeed, including promiscuity, drug abuse, and addiction arise from dysfunctional early childhood experiences.

The legal advocacy organization Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), reputed for fighting cases against white supremacist groups, mentioned that Molyneux initially used FDR to firmly state his opinion on anarcho-capitalist ideology, philosophy, atheism, anti-statism, anti-feminism and pseudo-therapy, and later, around 2013 or 2014, his opinions became more politically extreme and racially toned, after his ideology shifted to include far-right and ethno-nationalist thinking.

The Washington Post columnist J. J. McCullough listed Stefan Molyneux among the alt-right's biggest YouTube stars, while he was described by Politico, CBS News, Vanity Fair, New York magazine and Metro as a part of the alt-right; and as far-right by The New York Times, CNN, Business Insider and BuzzFeed News. He supported American businessman and television personality Donald Trump, the 45th president of the US; Dutch businessman and politician Geert Wilders; and French politician and lawyer Marine Le Pen during their election campaigns, in 2016 and 2017.

He interviewed US-based Google engineer James Damore in 2017, following the latter’s dismissal from Google after Damore wrote the Google's Ideological Echo Chamber memo.

He toured Sydney and Melbourne along with Canadian political activist and YouTuber Lauren Southern in July 2018. Australian television channel NITV quoted SBS freelance writer Simon Copland that Molyneux spoke contemptuously about Australian Aboriginal culture before the British colonisation and called it "very violent" while trivialised massacres carried out against the Aborigines saying that Australia’s takeover by the Europeans was less violent compared to other takeovers, and the settlers were making efforts to stop infanticide and mass rape.

Thereafter, Stefan Molyneux went to New Zealand with Lauren Southern where they were scheduled to speak at the Powerstation theatre in Auckland. The owner of the theatre, however, cancelled the booking of the program at the last minute after facing opposition from local groups and citing offensive content of their speech.

He received donations through the PayPal service. After the liberal social media activism organization Sleeping Giants cited biased and prejudiced attitude of Molyneux, which included his promotional activities of antisemitic conspiracy theories concerning the media, PayPal suspended his account in November 2019. Molyneux then released a video in January 2020, where he asked for money from his followers expressing concern of the possibility of not finding a regular job because of making racist comments online. While observers mocked him for this move, the American email marketing service and marketing automation platform Mailchimp, from where Molyneux sent his newsletters, suspended his account later that month.

On June 29, 2020, YouTube banned the accounts of Stefan Molyneux and other white supremacists Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer and David Duke for violation of its 2019 enacted policies against hate speech. Twitter also permanently suspended his account on July 8, 2020, for violation of its policies.