By Scott B
In a podcast recorded just days before his conviction last month, former UFC heavyweight champ Cain Velasquez reflected humbly on his attempt to kill a California man accused of molesting the fighter’s 4-year-old son.
“We cannot put the law in our hands,” said Velasquez, who fired gunshots at a Chevy Silverado the suspect was riding in during a high-speed chase, accidentally striking the man’s stepfather while a nearby elementary school was letting out for the day. “What I did was very dangerous to other people, you know, not just to people involved but to just innocent people.”
But Joe Rogan apparently knows better. “[Harry Goularte Jr.] molested his son, multiple times,” the podcast king said last week. “[Velasquez] did what every father would have done…He should have never gone to jail…If he killed that guy, the world would have been better off.”
Never mind that the suspect has pleaded ‘Not Guilty,’ or that due process is still a thing. Rogan’s fantasy, meant to flatter both himself and the legions of fratboys and less-privileged young men who have earned him hundreds of millions of dollars, is that “every father” – mothers are not heroes, I guess – would have done what Velasquez, then 39, did. Real men would put their livelihood and freedom on the line to right a horrific wrong.
That’s a little like me, sitting on my sofa and buried in tortilla-chip dust, watching Max Holloway point to the middle of the cage and imagining that I, too, would have challenged Justin Gaethje to a duel before knocking him unconscious.
Not that we can’t relate to Velasquez’s rage. Who among us hasn’t fantasized about beating up our child’s bully, or the bully’s parent? I understand acting out of anger. In my 20s, I brawled with a bartender who loudly professed that Jews deserved to die in the Holocaust. Today, age 60, I’d like to think I instead would sit down and engage the guy in calm conversation.
But in general, we men tend to overestimate our willingness to take life-or-death risks – to be, in a word, heroes. Meanwhile, we underestimate our capacity to think rationally in a stressful situation. Velasquez’s reaction was understandable but also reckless, selfish, and counterproductive. If he had successfully iced Goulate Jr., his 4-year-old likely would be married with children before dad was freed from prison.
Rogan’s delusional “every father” claim is easily disproved with statistics. RAINN, a nonprofit that operates the National Sexual Assault Hotline, says an estimated one in 9 girls and one in 20 boys under age 18 suffer sexual abuse or assault at some point during childhood, significantly raising their likelihood of abusing drugs, developing PTSD, or suffering a major depressive episode as adults. Yet chances are that you, dear reader, don’t know a single person who has tried to kill an accused pedophile. I certainly don’t.
Do you know why? Because taking sweet revenge on a monster would only magnify our child’s sexual-abuse trauma if we ended up dead or in prison, our coffin or orange jumpsuit etched indelibly in their memory.
Velasquez already missed 8 months of his young son’s life while awaiting trial in prison. He will be behind bars as much as a year-and-a-half more now that he has been convicted. Does a 4-year-old pining for his dad give a damn that a generation of keyboard cowboys are doling out attaboys under the #FreeCain hashtag?
Cain Valesquez, it turns out, is a far wiser person than manosphere manipulator Joe Rogan. He knows how much his four-wheeled wrath cost him and his family. He knows he was lucky not to ram a pedestrian during the 11-mile, high-speed chase, nor to have struck a young student in the crossfire, someone else’s son or daughter. Velasquez even may see the irony that an ex-champion who delivered 10 knockouts in 15 UFC fights would use a semi-automatic handgun to settle a score.
Rogan, no doubt a cunning businessman, has made a fortune riding the crest of male rage. To millions of young men searching for a father figure, Rogan’s muscular opinions fit the bill. It’s too bad he doesn’t put his enormous platform to better use.
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