Guys, wait up!

Racist, woman-hating fantasy author Theodore Beale (aka Vox Day) is upset that people are calling him racist. I mean, it’s not like he called all black people “savages,” he objects; he merely called one black woman — speculative fiction author NK Jemisin — a “half-savage” in a portion of a blog post that, he complains, has been taken out of context. Indeed, he sniffs,

the fact that the same ungrammatical excerpt chopped out of the middle of a sentence keeps being trotted out again and again should alert the dialectical mind to the probability that there simply isn’t very much, if any, there there.

Ah, context! A lot of shitheads who say terrible things complain, when others point out these terrible things, that their words have been taken out of context. So I thought I’d do Vox a little favor here and provide the context to his infamous quote so we can all see how much there is there. 

You may notice that the context here does not actually make Vox look any less racist.

I’ve taken the liberty of bolding the especially egregious bits, though to be honest there isn’t much here that isn’t egregious:

Jemisin has it wrong; it is not that I, and others, do not view her as human, (although genetic science presently suggests that we are not equally homo sapiens sapiens), it is that we simply do not view her as being fully civilized for the obvious historical reason that she is not.

She is lying about the laws in Texas and Florida too.  The laws are not there to let whites ” just shoot people like me, without consequence, as long as they feel threatened by my presence”, those self-defense laws have been put in place to let whites defend their lives and their property from people, like her, who are half-savages engaged in attacking them.

Jemisin’s disregard for the truth is no different than the average Chicago gangbanger’s disregard for the traditional Western code of civilized conduct. She could, if she wished, claim that privileged white males are responsible for the decline of Detroit, for the declining sales of science fiction, even for the economic and cultural decline of the United States, but that would not make it true.  It would not even make it credible.  Anyone who is paying sufficient attention will understand who is genuinely responsible for these problems.

Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males.  If one considers that it took my English and German ancestors more than one thousand years to become fully civilized after their first contact with advanced Greco-Roman civilization, it should be patently obvious that it is illogical to imagine, let alone insist, that Africans have somehow managed to do the same in less than half the time at a greater geographic distance.  These things take time.

Being an educated, but ignorant half-savage, with little more understanding of what it took to build a new literature by “a bunch of beardy old middle-class middle-American guys” than an illiterate Igbotu tribesman has of how to build a jet engine, Jemisin clearly does not understand that her dishonest call for “reconciliation” and even more diversity within SF/F is tantamount to a call for its decline into irrelevance.

In case you want a bit more context, elsewhere in the same post he 1) mocked a man for taking his wife’s name, 2) suggested that one of his female critics was totally not as hot as his wife, the mysterious “Spacebunny,” and 3) reminded anyone who had forgotten that he had “three Billboard-charting club hits,” a fact that evidently makes him irresistible to women.

You see, Vox was briefly a member of a largely forgotten techno group called Psykosonik more than two decades ago. Well, “largely forgotten” by everyone but Vox, that is.

CONTEXT!

Jeremiah True, seated on floor, protests his exclusion from a class discussion section

The story of Jeremiah True — the Reed College student who made headlines last month as a self-proclaimed free speech martyr, and who was arrested last week for harassment and sexual abuse — only seems to get stranger the more I look into it.

The latest development: On Friday, True pled not guilty to charges that he groped two young women on a high-school Rugby team who were practicing in a Portland park; he remains in custody.

We now have some more details on what he’s charged with. The Oregonian newspaper has reported that

According to a probable cause affidavit filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court, True walked up to and caressed the hair and arm of a female who was among a team of students practicing at Normandale Park …

True walked off, talking to himself, but returned to the park about 30 minutes later and approached a 17-year-old female and touched her breast with his open hand, and make a remark about her chest, the affidavit said.

Several witnesses restrained True until police arrived.

Portland police Officer E. Lamonte Johnson said True’s pupils were constricted and he was responding irrationally to questions and appeared to be under the influence of a controlled substance… .

This is not the first instance of disturbing behavior from True since his story originally hit the headlines. In late March, he engaged in a bizarre series of protests against Pancho Savery, the Reed College professor who had banned him from class discussion sections for his disruptive behavior. These protests got him booted from campus.

Then last week, he posted a bizarre 114-page manifesto online in which, among other things, he declared himself “the most powerful man in the Free World.”

First, the protests. On March 30th, according to a detailed account in the Reed College Quest,

True sat on the floor at the front of Vollum Lecture Hall during Hum 110 lecture under the chalkboard which read: “Restore Jeremiah True to their Conference” and “Your hypocrisy is showing Dr. Savery.” True remained on the floor wearing earbuds and removed his shoes while Professor of English & Humanities Laura Liebman proceeded to lecture on Virgil’s Aeneid. At the end of the lecture, True yelled out “Cowards!” to the general audience.

Just before 10 a.m. that same day, True stood outside of Professor Savery’s Humanities 110 conference on the third floor of the Performing Arts Building. When Professor Savery and the Humanities students began class, True approached the glass windows of the class, looking at the class and staring into the room. According to Professor Savery, the students were “upset and disrupted” by his presence, and the class proceeded to lower the blinds.

True persisted, walking back and forth along the length of the glass wall, occasionally peering through the cracks in the blinds and into the classroom. Professor Savery says, “I think people [in the conference] made the decision to ignore him, so as to not let him take class away from them because they thought that had happened too many times. We tried to have a normal class and ignore his presence.”

True showed up outside Savery’s next class as well. One student told the paper that

“[True] was stalking back and forth by the floor-to-ceiling glass windows, aping and mimicking Pancho’s [the professor’s] gestures, glaring at Pancho, flapping his arms, and making strange theatrical movements. It was one of the worst conferences we had, and everyone was extremely quiet,” Garriss says, “If he was protesting, I don’t know who his audience was.”

School officials were called to the scene and asked True to leave; he did, only to return five minutes later. The next day, he was banned from campus pending the result of an investigation.

Last Wednesday, a day before his arrest, True posted a bizarre document that he described as “The Senior Thesis of Jeremiah True ‘18.” (True is a Freshman.) In it, he declared, among other things, that “[m]y controversial actions both online and offline have partly been a sociological experiment and partly been performance art.”

He described Prof. Savery as a “Clever Devil” and claimed that

Within this document, I will claim that Pancho ghost-wrote much of what I was saying, and I believe this to be true. While he did not directly aid me in writing any of this document or previous documents, I have adopted his philosophy on life so entirely that I fully consider myself to be the disciple of Pancho Savery and would bow down and worship him if he would let me. After I met Pancho Savery, I became a completely different person, and I don’t know how to explain it. I love Pancho like I love my family. He has put more faith in me than anyone in my life ever has. It has been by his power alone that I learned what it means to be a father, to be a teacher, to be a Reedie, to be a Black man, and to be a Philosopher-King.

After admitting that he had gone “too far with my protest of Pancho’s conferences,” he went on to say that

The actions that I performed outside of Pancho’s classes were, to me, tame. When I was warned that I was being disruptive, I was completely incredulous, as I had not been loud or naked, nor had I attempted to forcefully gain access to the classroom. I did not realize how low the bar was set at Reed for what constitutes disruption, and what constitutes threatening behavior, especially since I have observed White DMABs perform aggressive behavior without consequence.

DMAB stands for “designated male at birth.” I can only assume he is using the term sarcastically.

He claims that his disruptive behavior was a part of a deliberate if indirect plan intended to open a debate about free speech.

Rather than challenge a noteworthy scholar of the First Amendment [ie, Prof. Savery] , I instead chose to play upon the nation’s perception of Black men in order to foster the belief that I was disruptive in class. This was further reinforced by Dr. Savery’s insistence that I was disruptive in class and my numerous instances where I engaged in using profanity.

So far I’ve only read portions of the entire 114-page document, but what I have read veers wildly between lucid arguments and bizarre assertions; his thinking (as has been the case in his previous statements) appears highly disordered and grandiose.

In one of his most grandiose moments, he declares himself

the most powerful man in the Free World. Stop me. …

I am the God of MRA’s, Anti-feminists, Anti-Marxists, Libertarians, and White, heternormative men and women everywhere. I also claim that I am the God of Reed, as I have called forth miracles and created earthquakes in the student body. Kanye has nothing on my ego. Eminem thinks I’M his Rap God. … I am a misogynist and a misandrist, a racist, and a feminist.

Despite the jokes, he seems to take himself very seriously indeed, and to believe a good deal of his own hype.

I may return with more thoughts on his case once I’ve read some more of it.

Proof of the superiority of the white race? Speakers at AmRen 2015

A writer from Roosh Valizadeh’s terrible Return of Kings site recently got himself into a bit of trouble at a white power convention in Tennessee.

The problem wasn’t that the writer, one Blair Naso, didn’t fit in with the motley assortment of Hitler-lovers and former National Review writers who attended the 2015 American Renaissance conference, put on by an organization that actually has won itself an official “hate group” designation from the Southern Poverty Law Center for its virulent racism and its obsessive advocacy for a white “homeland.”

No, he fit in fine, ideologically speaking. In a post for Return of Kings, Naso praised the AmRen crowd for “doing a wonderful work,” and “saying the things that others are terrified to say.”

The problem? Well, Mr. Naso got a wee bit drunk and started harassing women at a local bar. As Naso sheepishly admits in his ROK post,  

On the first night, I got very drunk. If I were wise, I would have gone to bed after the speakers, but instead I went to a nearby bar with the other guys. I went around asking girls to dance, because I wanted to use the swing lessons I had taken. All of them rejected me, because no girl likes an obnoxious wasted guy.

A few young girls were being especially snarky. I knew they wouldn’t dance with me, but I decided to ruin their night anyway. I go up to them and say, “You’re fat, and I’m balding. Let’s dance.” They kept saying no, and I kept asking them, just to piss them off. One pushed me, and I pushed her back, and then the bouncer literally threw me out of the bar.

Another conference attendee, Matt Parrott of something called the “Traditionalist Youth Network,” tells a similar story of Naso’s misadventures.

Here I was at the bar …  when I felt pushed by a nearby scuffle and saw the short, balding, swarthy guy [Naso] being physically thrown, black-and-white Western-style, out of the bar.

Parrott ran outside to try to cool Naso off, sitting beside him on the grass while Naso went on about “how the girl was fat and had no right to reject his advances.”

We kept him off of the property and got him back to the conference safely, then spent the next hour or so effusively apologizing for him, buying the girls drinks right and left, and promising the locals we would avenge their girl in short order.

As Parrott evidently sees it, Naso’s actions don’t necessarily reflect badly on the white race, “since the guy’s (arguably) not exactly white.”

Naso, for his part, insists that despite his “olive complexion” he has a “largely Scottish background.”

White Supremacy sure is complicated, huh?

Parrott was much more impressed with Naso’s traveling companion (and Return of Kings colleague) Matt Forney, who also attended the event. In Parrott’s estimation, Forney was the Gallant to Naso’s Goofus.

Forney thoughtfully argued his anti-feminist and male-empowering positions until he was too drunk to thoughtfully argue. Meanwhile, his fellow attendee boorishly irritated both male and female attendees alike until he was too drunk to contain his frustration about women and pushed one of the local girls at the nearby bar.

It certainly sounds like a glorious moment in the history of the white race.

In any case, Naso’s post on the conference is, he says, his swan song to the Manosphere. In a post on his own blog, he declares that

I’m quitting the Manosphere and will very likely not return, because it’s been exacerbating some personal demons in my life for the last several months, which I won’t go into detail here with a sob story.

It would seem like this is a product of the fiasco at AmRen, but that would be a wrong assumption. AmRen at the very most only moved it up by a few weeks, if even that. This has been coming for a while, and it takes more than a few dorks who live on the internet to make me quit.

Also leading to his decision: his horror at discovering evil feminists like … Lindy West.

I could have gone my whole life without being exposed to Jessica Valenti and Lindy West. We are writing against some truly vile and empty human beings on a very deep level of the soul, regardless of their actions. I think any man or woman who is exposed to mainstream feminism long enough will lose some part of himself, no matter what his reaction.

Poor fella! As Lindy’s Twitter bio asks:

WHY FAT LADY SO MEAN TO BABY MEN

Why, Lindy, why?

P.S. If any of you have any doubt that a large number of the readers of Return of Kings are completely awful Stormfront-style racist assholes, take a look at the comments on Naso’s ROK post. Yow.

That is a lot of tweeting.

So have you been following this whole #HowToSpotAFeminist thing on the Tweeter? The hashtag was started a couple of days ago by some right-wing radio dudes as an excuse to say mean things about feminism. By yesterday it had turned into a monster, with some feminists jumping in to try to combat the forces of darkness; as I write this at 7:28 AM Wednesday it’s still going strong.

Happily, the hashtag is proving to be very educational. So I would like to share with you The top 10 shocking “truths” about feminism I’ve learned from #HowToSpotAFeminist. You may want to take notes, as some of them are truly shocking indeed.

1) Feminists are fat and ugly with stinky, hairy armpits and no one likes them

Oh, wait, I think that last one is a ringer.

2) Feminists have smelly vaginas that may contain sand, cobwebs

3) These ugly, fat, hairy, feminists with stinky armpits and cobweb-filled vaginas sometimes resort to ad hominem instead of serious man logic

4) Feminists are Jews, or they’re controlled by Jews, or, I dunno, something to do with Jews

5) Feminists don’t know what “real feminism” is, and need to have some doofus on the internet who refers to women as “cumsluts” explain it to them

6) Feminists think they are equal to men, even though they sometimes need to have things repaired

7) Feminists for some weird reason think that rape is bad even though they’re so ugly no one would even want to rape them

8) Feminists aren’t real women, possibly because they don’t like Hitler enough

9) They have kept alive by men for all of human life and still are with male taxes.In 40years of feminism only assault men

10) Whatever the hell is going on here

Hey, Dean Esmay — are these really the guys you want on your side?

The not-so-good folks at A Voice for Men are still so steamed about the Southern Poverty Law Center calling them out on their misogyny that they can’t think straight. Consider the unhinged anti-SPLC rant AVFM’s “chief operations officer” Dean Esmay posted on the site after the SPLC’s Mark Potok appeared on David Pakman’s internet show last week.

In his interview with Pakman, posted below, Potok acknowledged once again that the SPLC had not named any Men’s Rights website a “hate group.” But he also made clear that the SPLC doesn’t list any website as a “hate group” — not even the viciously racist and anti-Semitic Stormfront — because to be a hate group you need to be, well, a group, and not a website.

In fact, as Potok told Pakman, he’s seen “an incredible amount of misogyny, an incredible amount of defamation of women” in the Manosphere. “The websites are filled with incredible vitriol,” he added.

Just to give an example to our listeners, Paul Elam, the guy who runs A Voice for Men, and who is considered in many ways the leader of this anti-woman movement, for a long time had a website called Register-Her.com … [which] was a vile site that put up pictures, sometimes personal information … of various enemies of the Men’s Rights movement.

Some of those people are feminists, some of those people are women [like] Lorena Bobbitt — ok, she wasn’t very friendly to men — but an enormous number are simply women who in some way identify as feminist, who some way have offended the men in the Men’s Rights movement, women who are guilty of no crime, and yet this website said these women should be prosecuted, they should be in jail.

And there’s a huge amount of harassment, internet harassment of women who … say something publicly about feminism or sexism or misogyny. 

He’s not quite right on one detail here; AVFM didn’t actually end up putting any personal information — at least in the form of addresses, phone numbers and the like — on Register-Her. Elam just threatened to, repeatedly, and offered thousand-dollar bounties to those who were able to deliver the personal info of some women the AVFMers were unable to track down. But the rest is of course correct.

Potok noted that in his view “there are absolutely legitimate beefs that men have,” including bias towards women in family courts. “That said,” he continued,

I would say that legitimate complaints are very much the minority of what you see on these websites. Most of it is just untrammeled hatred directed at women.

He also brought up the Philosophy of Rape subreddit, devoted to the “corrective rape” of “harlots” (I wrote about it here) and the rabidly antifeminist and anti-woman mass murderers Marc Lepine and Elliot Rodger.

Well, Potok’s appearance on the show seems to have sent Esmay over the edge. In his AVFM post, he declared Potok, a “sociopathic, reactionary bigot,” a “rich fatcat tool of the corporate establishment,” and (somewhat redundantly) “a fatcat corporate weasel who just happens to dress a little like an old hippie.” He also described Potok as a “snake … in Dockers,” which is odd, because neither snakes nor old hippies are known to favor khakis.

Esmay wants the world to know (he’s got to let it show):

I want the world to know I have said this, and I mean it: the Southern Poverty Law Center is a multimillion $$ fraud organization that makes its money by spreading fear and hate and ignorance – mostly in the form of slanted half-truths- about innocent people who can’t fight back.

This is a rather, well, interesting take on the noted civil rights organization. If you look on the SPLC website, to be sure, you will find quite a number of “innocent people who can’t fight back,” among them:

Migrant farmworker Victor Marquez [who] was traveling to his hometown in Querétero, Mexico, to pay for his new home, only to have his life savings seized by police who alleged it was drug money.

Guest workers from India, lured by false promises of permanent U.S. residency, paid tens of thousands of dollars each to obtain temporary jobs at Gulf Coast shipyards only to find themselves forced into involuntary servitude and living in overcrowded, guarded labor camps.

There’s just one problem with Esmay’s analysis: the SPLC didn’t spread “fear and hate and ignorance” and/or “slanted half-truths” about these men. It filed lawsuits on their behalf.

The SPLC got the State of Alabama to return the $19,000 that Victor Marquez has earned not from selling drugs but from picking beans. In the case of the Indian guest workers, SPLC’s federal lawsuit forced Signal International to cough up $14 million in damages to five men the company had duped and exploited.

Indeed, if you look through the lawsuits listed on the SPLC website, you will see example after example of the group working on behalf of, well, “innocent people who can’t fight back,” from trans men facing discrimination on the job to prisoners (adult and juvenile) enduring horrific conditions and abuse to guest workers getting ripped off by their employers to immigrants denied marriage licenses to lesbian, gay and transgender youth facing bullying at school.

The SPLC has been famously successful in a number of cases, not only providing justice to people who wouldn’t have otherwise had the resources to bring cases on their own but also helping to eradicate unjust and illegal practices. In Austin V. Jones and  Hope v. Pelzer, for example, the SPLC not only assisted abused prisoners seeking redress but brought the end of “hitching posts” and chain gangs in the Alabama prison system.

The SPLC has also, as an article on the site points out,

crippled some of the nation’s largest and most violent hate groups by helping victims of racial violence sue for monetary damages. Its victories include a $7 million verdict against the United Klans of America in 1987 for the lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Ala.; a $12.4 million verdict against the White Aryan Resistance in 1990 for the brutal murder of an Ethiopian student in Portland; and a $6.3 million verdict against the Aryan Nations in 2000 that forced the organization to give up its 20-acre compound in Idaho.

And in Macedonia v. Christian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan,

The Christian Knights of the KKK, its state leader, and four other Klansmen were ordered to pay $37.8 million, later reduced by a judge to $21.5 million, for their conspiracy to burn a black church.

The civil judgment forced the Klan to give up its land and headquarters. When the property was sold, the deed included a restriction that the land never be used for white supremacist activities.

The judgment in this case transformed the Christian Knights from one of the most active Klan groups in the nation to a defunct organization.

So who exactly are these “innocent people” who Esmay thinks the SPLC is tarring with “slanted half-truths?” Esmay gets a little more specific later on in his rant, accusing the SPLC of

instigating spin and slander indiscriminately against anyone who might deviate somewhat from mainstream opinion (or just opinions not liked by the elites who rule us).

Esmay doesn’t provide any actual examples of these allegedly “slandered” people he thinks have been unfairly targeted by the SPLC because their thoughts “deviate somewhat from mainstream opinion”  — perhaps because, if he were to actually start listing any of the extremists that the SPLC tracks, it would quickly become obvious that their opinions are, not to put to fine a point on it, hateful as shit.

Here’s a list of the various kinds of hate groups and individuals that the SPLC tracks:

• Anti-Immigrant
• Anti-LGBT
• Anti-Muslim
• Black Separatist
• Christian Identity
• Holocaust Denial
• Ku Klux Klan
• Neo-Confederate
• Neo-Nazi
• Patriot Movement
• Phineas Priesthood
• Racist Music
• Racist Skinhead
• Radical Traditional Catholicism
• Sovereign Citizens Movement
• White Nationalist

Most of these categories are pretty self-explanatory. But in case you haven’t been following the ins and the outs of the American far right over the past several decades: “Christian Identity” is a violently racist, anti-Semitic and only “nominally Christian” ideology that arose in the 1980s; “Neo-Confederates” are fans of the old south, slavery and all, and not big fans of democracy or gay people; the “Patriot Movement” is an antigovernment movement of mostly white dudes suffused with racism, nativism and a love of guns; “Radical Traditional Catholicism” is a rabidly anti-Semitic splinter sect “rejected by the Vatican and some 70 million mainstream American Catholics” but embraced by Mel Gibson and his dad. “Sovereign Citizens” are a sort of Time-Cubed band of tax protesters, some of whom are white and racist as fuck, and some whom are black and “unaware of their beliefs’ origins.”

Yeah, the Sovereign Citizen thing is weird.

I hadn’t heard of the Phineas Priesthood myself. Evidently it’s a term white supremacists use to describe those who’ve murdered interracial couples or otherwise violently attacked “Jews, non-whites, multiculturalists and others seen as enemies.”

Huh. It’s funny, but I’m not seeing a lot of good-but-misunderstood souls on this list.

Now remember: Esmay doesn’t just think that the SPLC has wrongly included a few non-hateful folks (like, presumably, him) alongside real extremists in its “extremist files.”

Esmay, as he so proudly “want[s] the world to know I have said,” is accusing the SPLC of being “a multimillion $$ fraud organization that makes its money by spreading fear and hate and ignorance.” And he thinks that most of this alleged “fear and hate and ignorance” comes “in the form of slanted half-truths- about innocent people who can’t fight back.”

So either Esmay honestly thinks that most of those on the SPLC’s big list of bigots aren’t actually bigots at all — thus aligning himself with some of the most hateful shits in the known universe — or he’s deliberately lying about an organization that has done more to help “innocent people who can’t fight back” than his foul website could do in a million billion years (and that’s only if we ignore all the bad that the website does that puts its moral balance sheet perpetually in the red).

Actually, that’s not really fair to Esmay. It’s possible that he’s neither a secret Nazi nor a compulsive liar but rather an over-excitable ideological hack who simply has no fucking idea what he’s talking about.

This is hardly the end of Esmay’s false accusations against the SPLC. He continues his absurdities by claiming that the SPLC is a “contemptible terrorist-inspiring organization” that “has helped incite murder.” Esmay’s “evidence” for this assertion?  A blog post by a right-wing ideologue that links to a story in the right-wing Weekly Standard that sort of half-suggests that the SPLC may have half-inspired the murder of three Muslim students in Chapel Hill, North Carolina … because the accused killer “liked” the SPLC on Facebook.

Esmay might have had a point here if the SPLC were, you know, an organization that devoted all of its energy to inciting hate and violence against Muslims.

Trouble is, as you may recall from earlier, the SPLC is quite explicitly opposed to anti-Muslim bigotry; indeed, the group has profiled a number of prominent Muslim-haters and includes some two dozen “Active Anti-Muslim Groups” in its database of hate groups. Wherever the accused killer in Chapel Hill learned his anti-Muslim hate — and there is certainly no shortage of places he could have — it wasn’t on the SPLC Facebook page.

Should I bother to point out that the misogynistic mass murderer Elliot Rodger was a regular commenter on PUAhate, a site soaked in misogyny — and whose most famous moderator at the time was a fellow who goes by the name of Aaron Sleazy? You know, the same Aaron Sleazy who, under his real name Jalon Cain, wrote 10 articles for A Voice for Men? (His final article there: a bizarre attempt to blame Rodger’s killings on “gynocentrism” that somehow neglects to mention his own role at PUAhate.)

Esmay is not only dead wrong about the big issues; he throws in some little white lies as well. Upset that Pakman didn’t hit him up for the alleged truth about the SPLC before bringing Potok on his show, Esmay complains that

Pakman has not so much as approached us to comment before allowing the odious hate group known as the SPLC bash the innocent men and women of the Men’s Human Rights Movement, who are incredibly easy to find and talk to (me and Paul can be reached right here).

Well, there are few lies there, but it’s the last one that gets me. You know, the one about Esmay and his boss Paul Elam being “incredibly easy to find and talk to.”

The other day, as some of you may know, I tried to contact Elam and Esmay to point out that they had published a number of posts by a literal Holocaust denier and Hitler fan on AVFM and ask them what they intended to do about this.

Elam blocked me on Twitter, making clear he wasn’t taking any questions from me. And the “incredibly easy to … talk to” Esmay sent me this nice note:

At the time I assumed that Esmay was playing a bit of the old “kill the messenger” game in an attempt to avoid dealing with the fact that the site he’s the “managing editor” of had, you know, published a number of posts by a literal Holocaust denier and Hitler fan.

But maybe I was too kind. Could it be that Esmay thinks that Holocaust-denial and Hitler-love are just examples of slight “deviat[ions] … from mainstream opinion (or just opinions not liked by the elites who rule us)” that are so unfairly judged by big meanies like the SPLC?

Mr. Esmay, on the off-chance you are still open to questions: Is Holocaust denial one of those “Men’ Human Rights” that AVFM likes to talk so much about?

And if I may be allowed a followup: What do you have against Dockers, anyway?

I guess we’ll never know, because the chance that Esmay will respond to these questions or this post, if he does at all, with anything even approaching honesty or logic or even correct grammar is pretty damn slim.

Here’s the Pakman interview with Potok:

Oh, wait, that was actually a Dockers commercial from 1988. Here’s the real interview.

Original poster for the 1979 Mad Max

So you may have heard vague rumors that there’s a new Mad Max film coming out. You also may have heard that it stars Charlize Theron as a shaven-headed postapocalyptical badass named Furiosa alongside Tom Hardy as Mr. Max.

Well, the manly men of the Manospshere are having none of it. On the always terrible Return of Kings, the most-trafficked blog in the Manosphere, Youtube bloviator Aaron Clarey issues a clarion call to his fellow right-thinking men, urging them to

Not only REFUSE to see the movie, but spread the word to as many men as possible. … Because if [men] sheepishly attend and Fury Road is a blockbuster, then you, me, and all the other men (and real women) in the world will never be able to see a real action movie ever again that doesn’t contain some damn political lecture or moray about feminism, SJW-ing, and socialism.

Er, “moray?”

As Clarey sees it, the central flaw in this film that he hasn’t seen is, well, it’s going to be starring Charlize Theron as a shaven-headed postapocalyptical badass named Furiosa. And that’s just not right, because everyone knows that women are just too damn womeny to be postapocalyptical badasses.

Even worse: in one of the trailers for the film “Charlize Theron’s character barked orders to Mad Max. Nobody barks orders to Mad Max.”

Clarey also reports, with a kind of growing horror, that none other than Eve Ensler, of Vagina Monologues fame, was brought in to consult on the film. (And trust me, Clarey’s discomfort with Ensler has nothing to do with her issues with intersectionality.)

Sure, Clarey acknowledges, Fury Road — at least on the surface — “looks like that action guy flick we’ve desperately been waiting for where it is one man with principles, standing against many with none.” But, he warns, despite not having actually seen even a minute of the actual film, nothing could be further from the truth!

[L]et us be clear. … This is the Trojan Horse feminists and Hollywood leftists will use to (vainly) insist on the trope women are equal to men in all things, including physique, strength, and logic. And this is the subterfuge they will use to blur the lines between masculinity and femininity, further ruining women for men, and men for women.

Lines between masculinity and femininity blurring! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes. The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!

Clarey worries that

men in America and around the world are going to be duped by explosions, fire tornadoes, and desert raiders into seeing what is guaranteed to be nothing more than feminist propaganda, while at the same time being insulted AND tricked into viewing a piece of American culture ruined and rewritten right in front of their very eyes.

You might think that someone this worried about the legacy of the original Mad Max might have noticed somewhere along the way that Mad Max is not actually a “piece of American culture” at all. It was an Australian film, filmed in Australia, directed by an Australian, and starring an American citizen who’d been living in Australia since the age of twelve.

I’m guessing that the director of Fury Road might have a somewhat more nuanced understanding of the original Mad Max than someone who doesn’t even know what country the movie was made in, especially given that the director of Fury Road, the director of the original Mad Max, the director of The Road Warrior and the director of Beyond Thunderdome are actually all the very same person.

But over on Return of Kings the fellas are as furious about Furiosa as Clarey is. In the top comment to Clarey’s piece, with several dozen upvotes, someone calling himself “truth” complains that the evil feminists who run Hollywood are ignoring the immutable truths of gender.

Hollywood is a garbage propoganda machine which spews out this feminist drivel filth into the minds of today’s young audience. Even though science has told us and proven, that men are physically stronger than women, it is nonetheless discarded by the forces driving this feminist nonsense.

There is a sick agenda at play here, and it only continues to get worse over time. First this, and now the upcoming “Terminator Genisys” which shows Sarah Connor in a more heroic and superior position to that of Kyle Reese, really makes me wonder how much further down the toilet society is going to go down, in it’s ridiculous attempts to try and reverse the traditional gender and biological roles.

Because “traditional” and “biological” roles always seem to be the exact same thing to these guys.

It is clear that the brainwashing of the masses will continue to go on with the promotion of these absurd movies in conjunction with the whole “girl power” themes that are present in these films. Furthermore, factor in the indoctrination of the liberal schooling and educational system, there is no doubt, that masculinity will be attacked from all sides in attempt to make the female gender more superior. …

I guess from the damage that I am seeing on a daily basis being inflicted by the feminist movement, there is really no turning back. Men will continue to opt out of society and by rejecting to watch these kind of movies, can help to further cement this narrative. And if ever, should the manginas and white knights reach that epiphany when they realise they are not perceived as a credible voice in this feminist driven gynocentric matriarchy that we live in, then even they will opt out of society.

Huh. And, let me guess, once the men all “opt out of society,” it’ll collapse in a giant heap and desperate women will turn to men for help? No wonder these guys are so angry about Fury Road; it challenges their favorite apocalyptic fantasy. Call it Mad Max: I Told You Bitches You’d Come Crawling Back to Me.

Women and feminists in general have without a doubt, proven that they are dysfunctional by nature and cannot be trusted with anything. And this movie helps to prove it.

FWIW, dude, the movie was directed by a man. It was written by men. And even though it’s got a lot more women in it than your typical action movie, most of the named actors in it are male. But apparently, to guys like Clarey and “truth,” it only takes a few drops of female blood to contaminate an entire action film.

Always maintain your masculinity.

And once again it’s the guys who think of themselves as the most macho who are the ones most anxious about their masculinity.

Truth is also horrified by one of the posters he’s seen for the film:

Even though the movie is called “Mad Max”, the poster clearly centres around Charlize Theron, while Tom Hardy looks like some ordinary guy in the background.

A woman’s face … in front of a man’s face! Can masculinity survive this terrible assault?

Slashfund complains that in the poster it “looks like he is wearing a muzzle like her bitch.”

Well, not really. Anyone who’s seen the original Max Max and its first two sequels may remember that a lot of the characters wore weird headgear and creepy masks; this was intended to make them look scary and, you know, postapocalyptic. Max’s new mask is no different.

Clark Kent whines

Where I can’t stand these female characters in kickass movies is when it is so damn obvious that they are forcing the female character in just to appeal to the blue-pill masses. The whole point of Mad Max is that he is the most hardened self-respecting man in the post-apocalyptic world. He lived through the decline, and thus carries all the grief of having been strong enough to see what the world has become.

To turn Mad Max upside down and make it into a feminist flick is horribly telling of our times. Rather than creating new films to depict the world from a women’s perspective, we take the great myths of men and boys and rewrite them to make women happy.

What? Mad Max is a “great myth of men and boys” now? It’s a movie made in 1979, not a tale told around the campfire by our ancient ancestors. And don’t any of you Return of Kingers remember Beyond Thunderdome, the second Mad Max sequel, released six years after the original? You know, the one co-starring Tina Turner, stomping around like a badass as the ruthless ruler of Bartertown?

Like it or not, fellas, but badass women are part of Mad Max canon.

MajorStyles, for his part, suggests that the film may be part of a sinister plot to con men into liking women with (gasp!) short hair — a major Manosphere bugaboo.

And what’s the end game of all this horse shit? That Alpha men will start finding bald, androgyonous women with anger issues attractive? Yeah, when pigs fly…

Again, another fail on the part of Team Feminism. As it has been noted many times, they do not get to order men what to be attracted to. Erections cannot be legislated. Only a man of supreme thirst would find this angynous thing attractive.

And the women who choose to impersonate Theron’s look in this movie will always be relagated to the same position – bridesmaid, cat lady, or beta male abuser.

TS77RP1, meanwhile, wants his fellow men to think of the children. And what he thinks about the children — specifically, those of the female persuasion — is genuinely horrifying.

Seriously: if you’re having a decent day so far, or, hell, a crappy one — basically, if you’re a having any sort of day so far, you may want to skip the rest of this post. No joke.

.

.

Ok, if you’re still with me, here we go:

The only way back is to begin punishing ambition in our daughters and in all female children. They need to be physically and psychologically disciplined to be servile and deferential and they unfortunately need to have it beaten into them that they should NEVER trust their own judgement and always seek guidance and permission of their male headships.

Please tell me this monster doesn’t have a daughter.

My daughter would be turned out with nothing but a shirt on her back if she so much as looked at a college website or played with her brother’s educational toys.

Aw, fuck.

She would be belted to the point of being unable to sit if she exhibited confidence in decision making.

Fucking hell. A proud abuser.

I don’t want my wife to step foot out of the house unless her every dime and minute spent can be accounted for and executed in conjuncture with my approval. My daughter will exude obedience and timidity for whoever her future husband is and it’s imperative that all Christian Men demand nothing less within their own homes. Playtime for feminazis and the left is over. This is our world and our heritage to protect. Let the cultural war begin!

No words.

In a followup comment, he assures one skeptic that his wife and daughter are indeed real.

I do in fact implement this in my own home and practice what I preach vehemently. I have a daughter and sons and they are being raised to know that they are unequivocally different and 100% not equal. My wife is from a highly devout family and she was cowed long ago into obedience by her powerful, alpha father. I kinda won the life lottery >:^)

I can only hope that he’s bullshitting in an attempt to impress the Return of Kings regulars.

But impress them he does, winning upvotes and an awestruck comment by englishbob:

Wow! Its like you have a mini Saudi Arabia right in your home!

Apparently hatred of women trumps hatred of Muslims on Return of Kings.

I have no idea if Mad Max: Fury Road is actually going to be a good film. But I hope it does well, very well, if for no other reason than to spite these assholes.

We get a lot of these around here.

Once again, a look at some of the comments that people try to leave here, but which for assorted reasons don’t get past the rigorous We Hunted the Mammoth screening process.

I kid; the process is not rigorous at all. You just need to pass a minimal standard of basic human decency. Here’s an assortment of comments from people who, well, fell short. In each instance, I’m pretty sure you’ll be able to guess why.

I’ll take “Protocols of the Elders of [BLANK]” for $400, Alex!

This fellow, like a lot of manospherians, seems really, really obsessed with cuckolding.

This fellow tried to post a number of comments on the same theme. This is is most succinct:

I’ll take “I don’t condone violence but you feminists totally deserve it for making jokes” for $200, Alex.

tl;dr: This guy, not really a big fan of women. (Spot the “we hunted the mammoth” for bonus points.)

You thought that last one was the worst it gets? Unfortunately not. Whoever sent this one — from a dubious IP address — is either a giant douchebag of a troll, or the next Elliot Rodger. (Please be the former.)

I’m going to just stop now. This post turned out a bit darker than I expected.

Breivik after his arrest

In July of 2011, Anders Breivik set off a bomb in front of government buildings in Oslo, killing 8 people, then gunned down dozens more at a summer camp for the youth league of the Norwegian labor party; in all, 77 people died by his hand. Breivik, a virulent Islamaphobe with a manifesto he wanted to publicize, thought he was striking a blow at the “Cultural Marxists,” multiculturalists, and feminists who, in his mind, were destroying European culture.

On Free Northerner, a far-right manosphere blog run by a self-described “Christian Reactionary,” the regulars are debating if Breivik did their cause more good or harm.

In a post that is equal parts pedantic and pernicious, the anonymous blogger behind the site tries to assess whether or not Breivik was engaged in a “just war” against his foes. Free Northerner argues that

Breivik did have a just cause for war; the rapes, violence, and slow genocide of his people by foreigners and hostile elites are just causes for war, but he was not carrying out a just war.

While Breivik’s cause, in the blogger’s mind, was a noble one, he failed the test for a “just war” by acting alone and targeting youth rather than “legitimate military targets.” Also, Free Northerner laments,

his actions had no real chance of success. Given that propaganda outlets are almost entirely in the hands of his enemies, the most realistic outcome was that his actions would actively hinder his cause.

In order for his attacks to qualify as a just war, Free Northerner suggests, Breivik would have had to rally a significant portion of Norwegians to his cause. And been a bit more picky about his targets:

Given the nature of the conflict in Norway, I think a legitimate case could be made that the ruling elite and politicians are legitimate military targets, but the spawn of the ruling elites were not. He should have targeted the politicians, media, and bureaucrats, not their children.

Good to know just which particular forms of murder are ok with you.

The readers of Free Northerner’s blog aren’t all this squeamish about the whole “indiscriminate killing” thing.

One anonymous commenter, giving himself the name of “A. Breivik,” writes

I don’t agree. Breivik lurks in the subconscious of reactionaries and SJWs alike.

I think a decentralized “lone-wolf” campaign of violence directed at SJWs could have a multiplier effect. Terrorizing weak minded sophists, while inspiring innumerable disaffected members of the majority to finally stand in self defense.

America could sorely use a Breivik or two.

A commenter calling himself Pode decides to do the whole “devil’s advocate” thing, although it’s clear he agrees pretty thorougly with this particular devil.

Argument could be made (not necessarily by me, just advocating for the devil) that the traitorous elites of Norway have in fact declared war, by allowing the invasion, violence, & rape. Thus any member of the Norweigan people would be justified in undertaking a solo mission in that existing civil war … since the war has already begun.

In a followup comment, he added:

Further, compulsory exposure to the content of the public school system could arguably be considered a kidnapping attack on the children of the Norwegians, making their opponents children equally legitimate targets

Commenter Mark Citadel is fine with political assassinations; he just thinks the far-right needs to get a bit more organized about it. Yes, “the Norwegian government is an enemy, like all Western governments,” he argues, but “lone wolf” attacks like Breivik’s can backfire.

Yes, there can be positive effects such as inspiring others, but these are often outweighed by big negatives and tricky moral questions. I think the issue is where do we draw the line? Modernity is the aggressor in this conflict and its adherents are not shy about using violence against us. Where can we respond in kind, and where can’t we. That’s a question that really needs hashing out on the radical right.

But hey, Citadel continues, while Breivik wasn’t really a proper Reactionary, he had some “good instincts,” and picked the right targets. “I do give him props for not blowing up a mosque or something similar,” Citadel writes. “He did actually ‘gore the matador, and not the red sheet’ as I think Jim put it.”

It’s not news that there are those in the right-wing of the manosphere who think Anders Breivik was at least partially on the right track. Shortly after Breivik’s mass murders in 2011, after all, the radical and repellent MRA Peter Nolan wrote that “in different times” Breivik “would be called a hero”; the equally repellant Matt Forney described Breivik’s manifesto as lucid and “sensible,” and a bunch of Men’s Rights Redditors praised excerpts of Breivik’s manifesto before realizing just what it was they were praising.

But it is a little startling to see reactionary manospherians talking so openly, and even enthusiastically, about the pros and cons of murdering their political opponents and/or their children.

Karen “GirlWritesWhat” Straughan: Everything she says is “true”

Karen Straughan, the soporific, pseudoscientific YouTube antifeminist, doesn’t seem on the surface much like a “Red Pill Woman.” She’s a single mother with short hair, well past “the wall,” who makes a point of not wearing makeup in her videos.

But she’s got one quality that apparently makes up for all of her other defects as a Red Pill gal: she tells the Red Pill guys exactly what they want to hear, defending their noxious views, feeding their sense of victimhood, and hand-waving away their blatant misogyny.

So it’s hardly a surprise that she got a warm welcome when she showed up yesterday in the Red Pill subreddit to do an “ask me anything.” Today, I girded my loins and popped a caffeine pill and read through her answers. Well, skimmed them, anyway; I’m no masochist.

I learned a lot. Unfortunately, most of what I learned was not true. 

So let me present the Top Ten Completely Untrue Things I Learned from GirlWritesWhat’s Red Pill AMA, and One Thing That Might Possibly Be True. 

All quotes are straight from Straughan’s AMA. I’ve bolded some of the most-untrue bits.

1) Roosh V isn’t a bad person for wanting to legalize rape

“One commenter expressed a wish that I’d learn to speak more wisely and circumspectly on topics like RooshV’s suggestion to make rape legal on private property (all I said was that however stupid or unfeasible or offensive his idea was, his stated intention was to prevent rape, so I wasn’t going to call him a bad person for it).”

2) Red Pill dudes only say terrible things about women because they love them so much

“It’s not misogynistic. Some of the rhetoric here is very angry, and very generalized. A lot of that is from a sense of betrayal–I was taught women are wonderful and believed it, and then the shit hit the fan. There’s a point, though, if the journey isn’t suppressed through punishment and shaming, where these men tend to realize it’s the false paradigm they’re angry with, not women. … If these men didn’t love women in the first place, they wouldn’t be able to be hurt by their failure to live up to the unrealistic expectations society has encouraged them to have.”

3) When men rape women, it’s probably some woman’s fault, if you think about it

“A rapist is a very damaged man (usually damaged by women) or a man who really really really wants sex but can’t convince a woman to willingly lie down with him.”

4) Women might look cute, but GWW can see the total-not-cuteness of their souls

“Neoteny. It’s important. The cuter someone is, the nicer we assume they are. For women, that cuteness is also associated with attractiveness to the opposite sex. So everyone thinks cute women are automatically nice, and men also find them sexually appealing.”

5) I’m a fatty who might possibly be wearing a fedora. No, really, for some reason my weight and possible hat choices came up

“Have you guys seen David Futrelle? Or “Angry Aussie”? Or any number of other hipster douchebag male feminists who are fat, have neckbeards, wear fedoras, have difficulty getting laid, etc?

A lot of the men I’ve met in my travels through the MRM are awkward or otherwise don’t remind women of Matthew McConaughey. But a lot of them are quite presentable. Confident, attractive, fit, and definitely not virgins.”

NOTE: I have doublechecked and I am definitely not wearing a fedora.

6) “Most feminists” probably have Borderline Personality Disorder or something similar

7) Red Pillers are the Malcolm X to the Men’s Rights Movement’s Martin Luther King

“If you rebelled without disseminating a message, you’d be a hindrance. But doing what you’re doing, you’re helping, even if you’re just presenting a Malcolm X for MRAs to juxtapose against MLK.“

8) Black activists only protested the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in order to get white people mad and make money for themselves, probably

“When you try to cast blame over all whites for perpetuating a racist culture in a Martin or Brown case, whites don’t like that. They get pissed. It gets the animosity stirred up on both sides of the racial divide much more effectively than if the shooting was 100% unjustifiable. And it stirs up white resentment of blacks.

It’s like these particular people (activist leaders) are invested in racism, and they (maybe subconsciously) go out of their way to perpetuate the conditions that keep them in paychecks and justify their existence.

If racism ended, they’d be out of a job. The last three generations are the least racist, sexist, homophobic in history. Where’s the money and status in that, for your average Sharpton?”

9) There’s no epidemic of rape in India because half of all rape cases there are total bullshit

“[T]here’s significant evidence that about half of rape reports in India derive from consensual sex between unmarried persons, but which fall under statutory definitions of rape that are being questioned within the system as to their moral basis in a changing social landscape.” 

10) Women are less stable than men because science?

“A woman has to be more emotionally stable than 85% of women to be as emotionally stable as the average man. A man has to be more sensitive than 85% of men to be as sensitive as the average woman.”

11) Chimp dudes don’t have wingmen. (Wing-chimps?)

“Human males are more cooperative with each other than males of almost any other species, really. The phenomenon of guys trying to get other guys laid just isn’t a thing in chimpanzee society.“

That last one might be true, I guess. What the hell do I know about chimps?

EDIT: I have been informed that chimp dudes sort of do have wingmen, but in a horrible way.

Dylann Storm Roof’s Facebook profile picture; the patches on his jacket depict the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa

Less than 24 hours after an apparent white supremacist murdered nine black churchgoers in cold blood during a prayer meeting in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, one prominent MRA is trying to put the blame on feminism, because of a remark the killer reportedly made about rape.

One of the survivors of the church killings reported that, before he began shooting, the killer told those in the prayer group that “you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” 

Dylann Storm Roof, the accused killer, wore his racism on his sleeve, almost literally: a former classmate tells the press that Roof “made a lot of racist jokes”; his license plate featured the Confederate flag; his Facebook profile picture shows him in a jacket with patches representing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa.

But Dean Esmay, the second-in-command at A Voice for Men, probably the most influential Men’s Rights site, thinks that Roof’s killing spree may be the result of too much feminism. Earlier today, he posted a link to an article on the shooting to the Men’s Rights subreddit with this headline:

To their credit, the Men’s Rights subreddit regulars voted his comment down; one told him “[n]ot everything is about us, man. This is distasteful.”

Two hours later, apparently undaunted by the criticism and oblivious to irony, Esmay returned to the Men’s Rights subreddit to make another accusation:

No one has declared the shooter to be an MRA. The little we know about Roof right now suggests that he was a garden-variety old-school racist. The paranoid notion of black men raping “our” white women is one of the oldest racist tropes out there; as Jessica Valenti noted on Twitter, Roof’s language is “the language of white supremacist patriarchy.”

The alleged threat to “our women” was used for generations as an excuse to lynch black men and terrorize the black community as a whole. In the case of Roof’s shootings, it’s an even more transparent ruse. As Rebecca Carroll notes in The Guardian, it’s hard to argue that these killings had anything to do with real fears or even paranoid fantasies about the rape of white women when most of the victims were not black men — the symbolic “rapists” in the equation — but black women:

There is something inconsistent with the Charleston shooter’s alleged evocation of the historical myth of black man as beast and rapist of white women, and the fact that he killed mostly black women. Did he only shoot black women because there were no more black men to kill? Because black women birth, care for and love black men? Or because he didn’t see black women as women at all … 

The idea that white women’s bodies represent that which is inviolable while black women’s are disposable hasn’t changed enough since it was first articulated by white men; but again, aimed at black men on Wednesday night, it was predominately black women who suffered by their invocation.

We will find out more about Root’s twisted beliefs in days to come. But it is clear already that they had nothing whatsoever to do with feminism.

H/T — r/againstmensrights

EDIT: I’m making this a NO TROLL, no-derailing-with-idiotic-MRA-or-incel-talking-points thread.

Dean Esmay wants you to know that you’re a cruel bitter bitchy hatemongering bigot harpy who needs to be spanked, metaphorically.

Dean Esmay, the Chief Operations Officer (whatever that is) of A Voice for Men, has scored a major public relations coup for the Men’s Rights movement with his aggressive promotion of an exciting new Twitter hashtag, #SpankAFeminist.

In what I can only assume is an attempt to convince the world that MRAs do indeed spend a good portion of their days fantasizing about doing physical harm to feminists, Esmay explains in a post on AVFM that the hashtag is necessary “because it’s finally time to put abusive liars over the knee.” 

In case you’re wondering, when he refers to “abusive liars” he means feminists and not, you know, people who think that publicly fantasizing about spanking feminists is 1) hilarious and 2) some kind of actual activism on the behalf of men.

Esmay is quick to assure his readers that he is only referring to metaphorical spankings over metaphorical knees.

As he sees it, feminists are pretty much all just begging to be spanked (metaphorically).

Why would you spank a feminist? Well in reality, we know a lot of them would complain but some might actually enjoy it. Who knows? Maybe they’re just shit-testing us all and waiting and feeling frustrated that we aren’t responding right.

Evidently, in Esmayland, when women challenge their male partners with so-called “shit tests” it’s because deep down they want to be physically assaulted.

Also, feminists are a bunch of meanies, anyway.

[A]ny time you meet a feminist, you should spank him or her until they cry. And do it every time they open their mouths to spew forth their hateful lies about standing for tolerance, inclusion, and equality, when there is no movement in the modern world that does more to fight against tolerance, inclusion, freedom, and equality than feminism. Not even real life fascists or communists can top them at this point.

Feminism is an intolerant, hateful, racist, anti-gay, misandrist, misogynist, gynocentric religion and hate movement.

Yep, that’s right: In Esmayland, feminists are actually worse than real Nazis.

So how is the spanking going so far? Here are a few of Esmay’s contributions to the hashtag. As always, he is a master of subtlety. CONTENT WARNING for terrible rape references. Also a WAIT, WHAT? WARNING for some of the nonsensiest nonsense I think I’ve ever seen.

You may have noticed that Esmay favors some rather colorful descriptions of feminists and feminism. Here are a few others he’s used in the hashtag over the last day or so.

• Bitter bitchy harpies
• Cruel violent abusive harpies
• Hatemongering cultist[s]
• Misandrist bigot[s]
• Bigots and bullies
• Hateful feminist bigot and bully
• Bigot feminists

It’s weird that someone who complains so much about alleged feminist “bigotry” is fine with publishing articles written by a literal Holocaust denier.

Also, given how evil we feminists are, it seems a bit strange that Esmay tried to friend me on LinkedIn the other day.

Dean Esmay, man of many surprises.

While Esmay’s tweets seem to make up roughly half of the #SpankAFeminist hashtag, a handful of other terrible people have enlisted in Esmay’s (metaphorical) spanking crusade. Here are some of the most charming of the bunch, and when I say “charming” I mean CONTENT WARNING for gratuitous rape references, violent gifs, and Dan Perrins being Dan Perrins. (I’ve omitted the assorted porn pictures the #SpankAFeminist folks have posted.)

All of this is truly good for bitcoin Men’s Rights.

Computers: Popular with racists

It’s yet another reminder that online hate has consequences. In a manifesto of sorts he posted before he shot and killed 9 black people in a Charleston church, Dylann Roof noted that he had learned his racism online. He even specified one of the hate sites that fuelled his hate: the Council of Conservative Citizens.

Now it appears he was also a regular commenter at The Daily Stormer, an especially vicious neo-Nazi “news” site.

In his manifesto, Roof wrote that he “was not raised in a racist home or environment.” As he explained, it was the Trayvon Martin case that

prompted me to type in the words “black on White crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day. The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. 

Emphasis mine.

After this terrible “discovery,” Roof wrote, “I researched deeper,” ultimately “[finding] out about the Jewish problem and other issues facing our race, and I can say today that I am completely racially aware.”

One of the places he conducted this “research” was, evidently, the Daily Stormer. A researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center has discovered that a number of passages in Roof’s manifesto are virtually identical to comments left on The Daily Stormer by someone calling himself AryanBlood1488. It seems likely that this was Roof himself.

Just as Elliot Rodger seems to have picked up some of his misogynistic beliefs from PUAhate, a site whose best-known moderator at the time was a regular contributor to A Voice for Men, Roof seems to have picked up some of his “racial awareness” at The Daily Stormer, a site appealing to many of the same people — literally the same people — who regularly read and comment on popular “manosphere” sites like the proudly racist Chateau Heartiste and Roosh Valizadeh’s Return of Kings, which recently ran a long Naziesque screed, by Roosh himself, on the evils of “degenerate” and “cosmopolitan” Jews.

No, The Daily Stormer doesn’t see eye-to-eye on everything with pickup-oriented manospherans like Heartiste and Roosh; Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin thinks pickup artistry is “pure snake oil” and doesn’t consider Roosh to be sufficiently white. But he’s also praised Roosh’s “anti-Jew article” as “excellent.” As Anglin sees it, Roosh

no doubt sees which way the winds are blowing, and is attempting … to keep his media base in tact in the face of rising Nazism.

And it goes without saying that Anglin is as violently misogynistic as any of those I write about on this site; recent headlines on his site include Jew Announces a Bitch to be Featured on $10 Bill and God Should be a Bitch Says Church of England’s Slut Priestesses.

In the end, the various fine distinctions one can make between, for example, racist, misogynistic far-right hate sites that promote pickup artistry (like Chateau Heartiste) and racist, misogynistic far-right hate sites that don’t promote pickup artistry (like The Daily Stormer) seem less important than their innumerable similarities. They are all part of the same big ball of hate. 

First Elliot Rodger, now Dylann Roof. In the past two years alone, two young men who read and commented on two specific hate sites I’ve written about on this blog have literally committed mass murders inspired by the hatreds they learned and developed online — and which they’ve spelled out clearly and unequivocally in manifestos they left behind.

Online hate has consequences in the real world. I can only hope that the authorities are paying attention.

H/T — r/GamerGhazi, which also points out that GamerGate icon Fredrick “Hotwheels” Brennan, founder of 8chan, recently published an article on The Daily Stormer advocating eugenics.

Some other Holocaust deniers

Last month, I reported that Indian Men’s Rights Activist and marital rape apologist Amartya Talukdar — a regular contributor to leading Men’s Rights site A Voice for Men — was a Holocaust denier.

The evidence? A series of Tweets in which, among other things, he declared that the “Holocaust is a lie of gigantic proportion,” expressed a certain admiration for Hitler and, bizarrely, declared that Hillary Clinton was a “Jewess.”

When I asked AVFM’s then-managing editor Dean Esmay about these troubling Tweets from someone he had published on his site only a few days earlier, he responded … by calling me a “stalker madman” and threatening to call the police if I ever emailed him again. (It was, as far as I recall, the only time I’ve ever emailed him.)

Well, ok, I thought, the folks at AVFM seem to be congenitally unable to ever admit to being wrong, even when the evidence is right before their eyes. But I didn’t think AVFM would be dumb enough to post anything by Talukdar ever again. 

I was wrong. Yesterday, AVFM put up a new post by him. No, it contains no Holocaust denial or defenses of Hitler. But the question remains: why is AVFM continuing to post the writings of a Holocaust denier even after being presented with irrefutable evidence of his noxious beliefs? 

The answer may be that the folks at AVFM live so completely in their own little bubble that they cannot see the evidence right in front of them.

In my email to Esmay, I not only provided a link to my post on Talukdar’s Holocaust denial but also provided direct links to archived copies of four of his most troubling Tweets. Esmay didn’t have to take my word for anything or even look at my post. All AVFM’s “managing editor” had to do was to click four links and read four tweets in order to see the sort of vile nonsense Talukdar had been tweeting. 

It’s not clear if Esmay was able to bring himself to do even this much due diligence of a writer he was responsible for publishing. 

Instead, as I discovered when looking back through Talukdar’s tweets today, Esmay’s “investigation” of the matter may have consisted of nothing more than this brief Twitter exchange, in which Talukdar, using a technique popular amongst small children and liars of all ages, simply told Esmay what he wanted to hear:

Talukdar took a similar tack with me, though he took a little more time in getting to the “telling me what I wanted to hear” part. Here’s just one of the rather surreal exchanges I had with him on Twitter (click here for more context).

I got no reply to this last question, but I guess I shouldn’t complain; Talukdar also offered no response, at least not on Twitter, to Esmay’s questions on whether or not his remarks had been “taken out of context” or whether he had been “making intemperate remarks you did not mean perhaps?”

I’m not sure in what circumstances saying that the “Holocaust is a lie of gigantic proportion,” or calling Hillary Clinton “a “Jewess” could be dismissed as nothing more than “intemperate remarks” made in the heat of passion; that would be akin to excusing Mel Gibson’s famous rant on how “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” as just one of those things people say when they’re pulled over for drunk driving.

But I can help Esmay out with the whole “context” thing. Here are some of Talukdar’s Tweets in their original context on Twitter. (Click on the screencaps below to see archived versions of the Tweets.)

Huh. Somehow that doesn’t seem any better in context.

That’s just as bad.

Not only anti-Semitic, but we’re in tinfoil hat territory now.

Dude, “hail Hitler” is not the preferred nomenclature. It’s “heil.”

As far as I can tell, Talukdar has never apologized for or even directly acknowledged his Holocaust-denying Tweets; he’s content to pretend they never happened, as is, evidently, Dean Esmay.

Weirdly, Talukdar’s attempts to cover up his Holocaust denial have been as cursory as Esmay’s quarter-assed “investigation.” Not long after I posted about him, Talukdar tried to clean up his Twitter timeline by deleting the offending Tweets. But he didn’t get them all.

Indeed, when I searched Twitter for his handle and the word “holocaust” today, I found three of his Holocaust-denial Tweets still up, lurking at the bottom of the search results. (I’ve archived the search results, as well as the individual tweets (1, 2, 3), in case he goes back and deletes them today.)

On his Twitter page, Talukdar describes himself as, among other things, a “Humanist.” A Voice for Men describes itself as the voice of the “Men’s Human Rights Movement.”

So I have to wonder: Do Talukdar and his editors think those killed in the Holocaust were somehow less than human?

H/T — Talukdar himself, who Tweeted me about his latest AVFM post

EDIT: Proofreading correction, minor tweak, added the H/T

Dean Esmay: Considers himself qualified to judge your blackness

Dean Esmay — Men’s Rights Activist, AIDS “skeptic,” big old white dude — has added another skill to his resume: Arbiter of Blackness.

If you haven’t been following the activities of Mr. Esmay of late, the A Voice for Men “chief operations officer” has been having a rather extended Twitter meltdown, posting endless puzzling yet impassioned Tweets to his own #SpankAFeminist hashtag, addressing an assortment of imaginary feminist enemies.

Some of the more puzzling have involved race, like his repeated charge that feminists are a bunch of white racists because, well, let’s let Esmay explain:

(Archived here.)

In Esmay’s mind, apparently, the fact that feminists recognize that rapists and abusers come in all colors is … a racist attack on black men.

(Esmay also seems to think that black men own “their women,” a belief that has a more than a little in common with the fears of white racists — like one Dylann Roof — who worry endlessly about black men raping “our” — that is, white — women.)

But, one might wonder, if feminism is fundamentally racist, why do many black women embrace the movement, even with reservations?

Esmay has now provided what he evidently sees as the definitive answer to that question:

(Archived here.)

You can tell how well-versed Esmay is in black history by the fact that he has misspelled the name of Aunt Jemima, the famous racist stereotype and pancake pitchwoman.

Esmay is even more contemptuous towards black feminist men.

(Archived here, here and here.)

It’s certainly true, as no sensible feminist would deny, that white feminists, even those with the best of intentions, have said and done a lot of racist shit over the years. Pretty much all white people have. (That’s not an excuse, just a sad fact.)

I’m just not sure that Esmay is really the best person to determine who is and who isn’t an “Uncle Tom.”

In addition to being a patronizing white dude, Esmay is the “chief operating officer” of a website that has repeatedly published the work of a Holocaust denier; has enthusiastically promoted the videos of white “nationalist” RamZPaul; and has been waging a long if somewhat ludicrous battle against the Southern Poverty Law Center, an influential and effective opponent of far-right racists; indeed, Esmay has himself declared the SPLC a “a multimillion $$ fraud organization” and “America’s #1 Hate Group.”

In 2013, Esmay’s boss at AVFM, Paul Elam, after glomming onto bogus information first spread by 4chan trolls and white supremacists at Stormfront, helped to lead an abortive hate campaign against a young woman falsely accused of discriminating against white male applicants to Georgetown university

Dean Esmay: apologist for racists, arbiter of blackness?

EDIT: I removed a paragraph in which I got the Sad Puppies and Vox Day’s Rabid Puppies mixed up. In my defense, it’s very early in the morning.

Hey, where’d that subreddit go?

So Reddit is in a tizzy again. This time, surprisingly, it’s not because Redditors are outraged that the site admins have hired a woman, or shut down one of dozens of subreddits devoted to, I dunno, stolen pictures of dead celebrity babies, or some other typically Reddity thing for Redditors to get outraged about.

No, this time Redditors are angry because Reddit seems have fired the one staffer who was genuinely liked by a wide swath of Redditors — that staffer being Victoria Taylor, Reddit’s Director of Talent, perhaps best known for keeping the site’s mega-popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) threads running smoothly, which extended to relaying questions to famous guests and transcribing their answers. 

After learning of her mysterious departure yesterday, the IAmA subreddit — home to Reddit’s AMAs — took itself private as it tried to figure out how to operate without her. Other subreddits, including some of the site’s most popular ones, took themselves private in solidarity. It’s a testament to how badly site admins have handled this that both the Men’s Rights subreddit AND GamerGhazi — the main anti-GamerGate subreddit — have gone dark.

With no explanation of the firing forthcoming from the Reddit overlords, there’s a lot of speculation going on.

Some Redditors are convinced that Taylor’s apparent firing was a response to her perceived mishandling of a Jesse Jackson AMA (archived here). Reddit being Reddit — that is, a site that has been welcoming to trolls and bigots and other terrible people from the start — Jackson was peppered with an assortment of hostile and sometimes openly racist questions, including one lovely tirade that started by declaring him “an immoral, hate-filled race baiter,” before asking him “how is your relationship with the illegitimate child you fathered in 1998 while cheating on your wife” and whether or not “Al Capone would be jealous of your business model if he were still alive?”

Jackson’s response to that question was so bizarre that it seems clear that Taylor must have censored the question before relaying it to him. If true, this was a well-intentioned mistake that had the unintended effect of making Jackson look like he was admitting to being an extortionist.

But of course the outpouring of hate in the AMA was hardly her fault; that’s what happens on a site that allows racism to flourish to such an extent that white supremacists have started using it as a primo hunting ground for new recruits.

Meanwhile, other Reddit observers are suggesting that the Jesse Jackson theory is bunk and that Taylor was in fact booted because she was resisting Reddit’s efforts to “overcommercialize” the site.

Whatever the reason, the Reddit overlords have a bit of a PR disaster on their hands.

For more details and updates, see this summary of events on Gawker and/or this highly useful thread on the Out of the Loop subreddit. And if you have any other useful links or info, feel free to post them below.

How the opponents of so-called Cultural Marxism see the world

Every once in a while, a hostile commenter wanders into the discussion here nattering about the evils of “Cultural Marxism.” One stopped by last night, prompting another commenter to ask what exactly this Cultural Marxism was, anyway.

I responded by saying the term essentially meant, at least to most of those using it, “the Evil Jews But We’ve Learned We Can’t Just Say That Publicly Outside of 4chan and Stormfront Without People Realizing We’re Basically Nazis.” 

Oh, sure, once upon a time “cultural Marxism” was indeed a school of Marxist thought dealing with, you guessed it, culture. But in recent years the term has become a popular buzzword amongst neo-Nazis and other proud bigots on the far right, who use it to suggest a vast Jewish conspiracy against Western Civilization and the white race … without having to use the J-word, which tends to give their anti-Semitic game away.

But it’s not as if the opponents of “Cultural Marxism” go to great lengths to hide their racism and anti-Semitism. Indeed, a quick look at some of the “memes” and other graphics used by the Cultural Marxism-haters makes pretty clear where they’re coming from.

So here are some of the most, well, revealing images that popped up when I did a quick image search for “Cultural Marxism.” I’ve done this a couple of times before, but I felt it was time for a refresher, just a little reminder how many of the opponents of “Cultural Marxism” actually see the world.

CONTENT WARNING: All the bigotries you can imagine, and then some.

The last one is especially charming: don’t believe YOUR conspiracy theory, believe MINE.

Oh, and if these people start bringing up The Frankfurt School, well, it’s not because they’re interested in discussing the theories of actual cultural Marxists like Theodor Adorno or Herbert Marcuse. No, it’s just another way for them to say “teh evil Jews,” as this little “infographic” makes abundantly clear.

I should note that not everyone who talks about the alleged evils of alleged “Cultural Marxism” is a neo-Nazi. Some of them are simply people who, perhaps unknowingly, are getting a good deal of their “information” about the world from neo-Nazis who aren’t necessarily very upfront about being neo-Nazis. (There are a lot of these types hanging about in the manosphere and in GamerGate circles.)

If you’re one of the non-neo-Nazis and you’re dropping the phrase “Cultural Marxism” into your conversations online and possibly off, take a good hard look at the images above. The people who made these images are the people you’re aligning yourself with.

These are people who actually believe a secret cabal of hook-nosed Jews runs the world. These are people who think interracial classrooms = white genocide, and that supporters of multiculturalism not-so-secretly yearn for a world without white children. These are people who think Adolph Hitler had a lot of really good ideas, and not just about landscape painting. These are people, in other words, that you should have nothing to do with.

It’s amazing just how quickly a visit to 4chan’s /pol/ board can strip you of any lingering faith in humanity.

Consider the following 4chan “infographic” posted recently on Twitter:

A quick Google search of the language in this graphic led me to an archived 4chan thread, where this particular “argument,” and the graphic itself, seem to have originated, making it exceedingly unlikely that (as per the small print on the graphic) “Prof. Owl” is actually a “married father of four daughters and three sons” and exceedingly likely that he is instead an overgrown adolescent nursing a giant grudge against women.

The good news is that not everyone in /pol/ agreed with Prof. Owl’s reprehensible views; the not-so-good news is that their views on rape were often just as reprehensible.

So let’s take a look at some of the, er, highlights of /pol/’s debate on the proposition that rape is “nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be.”

1) Prof. Owl’s contribution

2) “The true male equivalent of rape is not rape, but rather paternity fraud.”

3) “We live in a cunt overglorification culture thus it’s blown completely out of proportion.”

In case you’re wondering, here’s what this fella’s graphic says:

4) “It is actually more traumatic for men … Getting forced to accept a dick in the anus shows that that man is not able to protect anything. Which makes him unqualified for mating.”

5) “Rape is significantly less traumatic than being jumped by a gang of nigs.”

6) “The violence should be punished of course. But the heterosexual rape itself only minimally.”

7) “If people just stopped their victim privilege and lend a help to someone who is raping them and just went with the flow. There wouldn’t be any rape incidents.”

(I’m really hoping that this guy is being sarcastic, but sadly I think he probably isn’t.)

8) “My female friend told me it was a complete turn off for her if someone asked her directly if she wanted to have sex, which … feminazis completely ignore.”

9) “Maybe I’m just an old fashioned guy with a sense of historical perspective. Rape may not be so bad.”

10) “I was raped once, and it was really unpleasant when it started. But then after I let myself go and loosened up it actually felt quite good.”

11) “There is no such thing as rape. … There is only the fair and equal redistribution of pussy.”

12) “I’d be mad if I were raped, but as long as I wasn’t injured or infected I’d get over it pretty quick”

13) “When a woman is raped her entire identity (her vagina) is being stolen for free, when usually you’d have to buy her shit, date her, marry her or whatever.”

14) “It undercuts their princess status.”

15) “Who /rapist/ here? I’ve raped 7 girls”

Please, please, please let this asshole be trolling.

H/T — r/againstmensrights

An anti-Pao graphic, repurposing Chinese Communist propaganda

Congratulations, assholes of Reddit! You’ve driven another woman away from your internet clubhouse.

This time the woman in question was the site’s now ex-CEO Ellen Pao, who resigned today after a week of “Reddit Revolt” that included racist and misogynistic abuse aimed at “Chairman Pao” as well as the occasional death threat.

Indeed, the abuse was so bad that Pao felt the need to address it in her resignation note:

I just want to remind everyone that I am just another human; I have a family, and I have feelings. Everyone attacked on reddit is just another person like you and me. When people make something up to attack me or someone else, it spreads, and we eventually will see it. And we will feel bad, not just about what was said. Also because it undercuts the authenticity of reddit and shakes our faith in humanity.

Reddit board member Sam Altman, in his announcement of Pao’s replacement, described the attacks on Pao as “sickening,” and declared that “[i]f the reddit community cannot learn to balance authenticity and compassion, it may be a great website but it will never be a truly great community.”

This latest “Reddit Revolt” was triggered by the firing of a popular admin who worked with the site’s’ often beleaguered and ignored subreddit moderators.

But what really drove the revolt was the resentment many Redditors feel every time the site admins make any efforts at all to rein in the worst tendencies of Reddit’s regulars — the most recent “outrage” being Reddit’s banning of the FatPeopleHate subreddit and an assortment of others because they were encouraging real world harassment.

It certainly didn’t help, as far as Redditors were concerned, that she was a woman. The very thought of being bossed around by a woman is anathema to a shockingly large number of Redditors. Naturally, she’s being replaced by a dude, Reddit cofounder Steve Huffman, who promises to continue many of the same policies as Pao, but who will presumably be more palatable to the site’s fragile male userbase.

The abuse against Pao continued even after her resignation. In the thread announcing her replacement, this obnoxious comment at one point sported more than 1500 upvotes:

Only after someone pointed out that the commenter, who named himself after the racist Charleston church shooter, was in fact an unironically racist moderator of Reddit’s outrageously racist CoonTown subreddit did the comment end up with more downvotes than upvotes.

Stay classy, Reddit!

EDIT: Added links and a bit about her replacement.

No racism here! Screenshot from an anti-Pao video.

The misogyny of many of those who badgered Ellen Pao out of her CEO position at Reddit was about as subtle as an explosive fart at a dinner party. And it’s not exactly difficult to find evidence of widespread racism directed at her as well.

There was the whole “Chairman Pao” thing, for example, and the blatantly racist “humor” that it unleashed:

And, yes, it gets even worse than that (link very much NSFW).

But some of Pao’s more, well, imaginative detractors, it’s Pao’s defenders who are the real racists and misogynists.

A blogger by the name of Blixkrogg, a self-described “rational freak,” puts it this way:

Ellen Pao was ousted for incompetence. It didn’t matter whether she was Asian-American or had a vagina. Excusing incompetence and having a lower level of expectation just because someone’s Asian or a woman is condescending prejudice. Arguing that she should have stayed CEO despite her competence is the actual racism and misogyny.

Also, black is white and night is day and the car alarm going off outside my apartment is not annoying.

So the #RedditRevolt was about “incompetence?”

If you want to see the real incompetence at Reddit, look at the way in which the powers that be at Reddit allowed their site to be used to disseminate child porn and stolen celebrity nudes. Look at the toxic culture of hate and harassment that their tolerance of blatantly hateful subreddits has allowed to flourish — so much so that white supremacists have started using Reddit as a hunting ground for new members.

Pao’s detractors aren’t angry about the toxic wasteland that Reddit has become — and in some ways always has been. They’re angry at Pao because of the tiny steps she was taking to try to clean up the worst of that mess — by banning the FatPeopleHate subreddit and a few others that were actively harassing people.

The powers that be at Reddit have now made it abundantly clear that they can be bullied by the hate mob that their policies have essentially created. Setting that precedent seems like a pretty incompetent thing to do, if you ask me.

Much better policy; Send Reddit’s bigots to Snake Island

So the new Reddit CEO — returning co-founder Steve “Spez” Huffman — announced the site’s much-anticipated new content guidelines today, and to say that they are disappointing is a bit of an understatement.

Essentially, he told the site’s many varieties of bigots that they could continue to spout their various bigotries on Reddit without repercussions, so long as they didn’t actually threaten to, you know, go out and murder or otherwise physically harm people whose sexual preferences or skin color or religion (or whatever) didn’t meet their approval.

Only now the bigots will be posting on Reddit s dime.

No, really.

Reddit’s new policy on hate speech is to make hateful content “opt-in,” like the site’s NSFW subreddits are now. Oh, and to not embarrass the site’s advertisers by running ads next to blatantly hateful garbage.

As Huffman explained in a posting on Reddit, under the new policy

it’s ok to say “I don’t like this group of people.” It’s not ok to say, “I’m going to kill this group of people.”

Hateful content — or, as Reddit euphemistically puts it, “content that violates a common sense of decency” — will be “reclassified” but not banned. The “indecent” stuff

will require a login, must be opted into, will not appear in search results or public listings, and will generate no revenue for Reddit.

What this means in practical terms, Huffman explained in a followup comment, is that

r/rapingwomen will be banned. They are encouraging people to rape.

r/coontown will be reclassified. The content there is offensive to many, but does not violate our current rules for banning.

So, yeah, Reddit’s grand plan to deal with its bigots is to … subsidize them.

I can’t even.

Adding to the repugnance of this “hide the hate, but keep hosting it” policy is the fact that, in the wake of the #RedditRevolt against now ex-CEO Ellen Pao, and Dylan Roof’s racist murders in Charlestown, South Carolina, /coontown and other blatantly racist subreddits have seen a giant boost in traffic, with more than 18,000 subscribers and roughly 200,000 page views a day.

As MrTomFTW noted in a posting on r/GamerGhazi, r/coontown is

closing in to matching Stormfront’s traffic. This means that Reddit could soon be host to the largest active white supremacist forum on the Internet.

Actually, that’s understating things a little. If you add Reddit’s other racist subreddits into the mix, Reddit is already the number one destination for white supremacists looking for a place to talk online.

And Reddit will keep footing the bill.