incel rodger
see red pill
see man male manosphere
===
duck 2 26
GQ
https://www.gq.com › story › inside-claviculars-thirsty-tour-of-new-york-city
Inside Clavicular's Thirsty Tour of New York City | GQ
2 days agoRolling with the lord of online "looksmaxxing" as he meets the press, hits the runway, and tangles with his haters during a chaotic weekend in Manhattan.
New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com › 2026 › 02 › 13 › style › clavicular-looksmaxxing-braden-peters.html
Looks Aren't Everything? Clavicular Begs to Differ. - The New York Times
Feb 13, 2026Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, has emerged as a beacon for a group of narcissistic, status-obsessed young men. He wants to take his fixation with "looksmaxxing" mainstream.
spectator
https://spectator.com › article › clavicular-looksmaxxing-took-over-new-york-fashion-week
How Clavicular's 'looksmaxxing' took over New York Fashion Week
4 days agoThe community obsesses over metrics like clavicle width (hence Clavicular's moniker), facial harmony and body fat percentages. The trend has exploded on TikTok, drawing in young men disillusioned by societal pressures and amplified by Clavicular himself, who's been profiled in the New York Times as the face of this hypermasculine vanity.
incels.wiki
https://incels.wiki › w › Clavicular
Clavicular - Incel Wiki
Jan 20, 2026Braden Eric Peters (known as Clavicular) is an American looksmaxer who exponentially grew in popularity on social media in early 2025, considered mainstream particularly...
looksmaxxingwiki.com
Clavicular: The Rise, Influence, and Controversy of the Looksmaxxing ...
Dec 8, 2025Who Is Clavicular? Clavicular —real name Braden Peters —is a 19-year-old American TikTok influencer known for his sculpted facial structure, aggressive self-improvement messaging, and controversial presence in the online looksmaxxing community. Born December 17, 2005, he rapidly grew a following by teaching young men how to "maximize their looks," "mog their peers," and project ...
The Cornell Daily Sun
Clavicular Frame Mogged! Looksmaxxing and the State of Modern Love
4 days agoClavicular (Braden Peters) is just one of many social media influencers who promote these ideas to niche audiences online. At only 20 years old, Clavicular represents just how young the ...
spiked
Clavicular's cult of 'looksmaxxing' speaks to the ... - spiked
Feb 11, 2026Clavicular's cult of 'looksmaxxing' speaks to the narcissism of our age This delusional and deeply insecure influencer can only offer a parody of masculinity.
musk bolso chainsaw
no lnx an
'You have been gaslit': CPAC oozes MAGA's 'male inequality' agenda
People react as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) annual meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, U.S., February 22, 2025.
Matt Laslo February 23, 2025
NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — This just might be the year American men finally overcome centuries of political, cultural and marital oppression that have ravaged the gender and kept guys locked out of key policies, like the Violence Against Women Act.
That’s what one conservative vendor peddled at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. And they’re not alone. The oft-repeated message being subtly driven into CPAC attendees – is that the era of male victimhood is over.
Culture wars are now king.
In years past, the conservative confab focused on fiscal responsibility and cutting federal spending. This year — even as Republicans in Congress and the White House debate trillions of dollars in budget cuts — leaders stoked gendered culture wars.
“Don't allow this broken culture to send you a message that you're a bad person because you're a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you're competitive," Vice President J.D. Vance told CPAC attendees Thursday.
Eradicating diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives may have merely been a stepping stone. Conservatives have rallied behind a new, if antiquated, gospel of manhood as they work to turn back time and eviscerate what they call "wokeness" in real time.
At CPAC, this is truly a man’s world, or will be soon if the resurgent right succeeds.
“Male Inequality”
Masculinity is everywhere here at CPAC. It’s tangible, making this year’s conference feel more like an all-male retreat than the policy-focused escape the annual event was before President Donald Trump remade American conservatism in his image.
In these conservative confines, there’s no gender pay gap (even as statistics show women earn roughly 75 cents for each dollar a man makes). Women’s suffrage, practically speaking, is a fairy tale of a bygone era. While Bibles abound, the Book of Ruth and its strong, central female cast, is an afterthought (if a thought at all).
The real problem is “Male Inequality,” according to the newly launched Men’s Equality Network, or MEN.
‘Areas of Male Inequality’ — a pamphlet MEN are handing out at this year’s CPAC.
At CPAC, MEN seeks to drum up support for the hashtag #genderequalityformen, while also giving away free caps emblazoned with “Watchdog: Stop the gender agenda.”
MEN's tagline succinctly sums up the mission that drives the group: “assuring due process, fairness and equal opportunities for men.” And while they may only be a few weeks old, MEN has already attracted 18 partners, ranging from United Families International to the Child Custody Coalition.
The group is so new, it hasn't held its first meeting. But MEN soon plans to start hosting monthly training sessions with partner organizations, then storm the marble halls of Washington, demanding equality for men.
And MEN has allies in powerful places in Trump’s Washington.
"Our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge, you should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place," Vance opined from the CPAC main stage. He, like MEN, provided no evidence to support his contention.
While the group is surely easy to single out, it's far from alone in its drive to restore manhood to its properly patriarchal perch at CPAC but also throughout society.
"Go fu#% yourself Planned Parenthood”
Entering this year’s hall of vendors at CPAC, it’s seemingly impossible to miss the loud magenta “Go fu#% yourself Planned Parenthood” banner next to a cardboard cutout of President Trump.
Defund Planned Parenthood photo (Photo credit: Matt Laslo)
A few rows away, at first blush, the booth for "Date on the Right" seems dedicated to online romance for Republicans. But the material seems more focused on connecting hardline conservatives with their policy dreams.
Instead of promising long-term love, the group’s selling point feels more politically inclined than lifemate: “Dating for conservatives: only two genders – male and female allowed. No pronouns but male or female allowed.”
Other booths are dotted with free swag seeking to uproot political correctness — “I support free speech, not political correctness,” reads one sticker — through slogans like, “God, Guns and Girly Things” or “Woman: an adult human female.”
“We have an entire generation of young men who are smoking weed, watching porn, not getting married — not even pursuing women,” American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told CPAC attendees. “We have this thing called incels — involuntary celibates. It's terrible. And we can't become a great nation again — we can't make America great again — until our men are great again.” //TUCKER MAINSTREAM GRT?
“You’ve been gaslit to high heaven”
For attendees, conservatives are undeniably victims. The thousands gathered at CPAC are set on righting those past perceived wrongs.
“You’ve been gaslit to high heaven every time you picked up a newspaper in the United States,” conservative anchor Megyn Kelly told the crowd. “Every time you’ve turned on CNN. You’ve been lied to. You’ve been bullied — or seen others with lesser power — bullied by the media and the leftist Democrats. You have been a victim of overbearing and controlling leftists who think they are the final arbiters of what’s best for you and your life.”
While this may be MEN's year, conservative women aren’t going quietly.
CPAC may be a man’s world these days, despite all the powerful women in today’s GOP, like White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who, at 27, is the youngest person to ever hold the prestigious role.
On the CPAC stage this week, former White House communications director Mercedes Schlapp — wife of CPAC chair Matt Schlapp who a sheriff wrote up earlier this month for allegedly groping a man — asked Leavitt about being a woman in Trump world.
"Look at the White House and look at the exceptional Cabinet President Trump has put together," Leavitt said. "While we don’t care about identity politics…the president has appointed Susie Wiles, our first female chief of staff in United States history; Brooke Rollins heading up as our secretary of agriculture — look across the entire Cabinet. There are incredible women — Linda McMahon, leading the Department of Education — the list goes on and on."
As for her advice to young women, Leavitt departed from her party’s new man-centric mantra.
"Stay strong, speak the truth and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t achieve your dream, or you can’t get to that next step. Just believe in yourself, because there will be a lot of people who don’t believe in you, who cast doubt on you, who talk bad about you," Leavitt said. "Screw ‘em. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter."
NOW READ: Whoever tries to tell you that Trump is Christian needs to look up this passage in the Bible
--==
an 2 25
“ RIP Black Incel King': Admirers float copycat plans as latest school shooter is celebrated
---
no lnx
an no lnx
'Nothing is beyond our reach': Extremist site accused of 'grooming' teen attackers exposed
An image taken by school shooter Solomon Henderson and shared in his diary features a character from the Soyjak website. It's thought to be based on Patrick Crusius, who carried out a mass shooting in El Paso.
(Taken from Solomon Henderson's diary.)
Jordan Greenand Raw StoryFebruary 01, 2025
Before taking a handgun out of his backpack and walking into the cafeteria at Antioch High School in Nashville, where he opened fire and killed another student before taking his own life on Jan. 22, 17-year-old Solomon Henderson posted a link to an online screed filled with violence and unfiltered racism.
His message gave “special thanks” to Soyjak.party, an imageboard website whose anonymous users and administrators post bigoted memes based on a stock set of caricatures that typically make fun of liberals, sensitive men and trans people.
Using the insider lingo of the community, Henderson closed his post with a sign-off, “Remember keep jakking ‘teens,” followed by the website’s emblem, an octopus-like creature wrapping its tentacles around the globe. The emblem was accompanied by the slogan, “Nothing is beyond our reach.”
Henderson is one of three teenage attackers who have carried out shootings — and in one case a knife attack — over the past six months that extremism researchers have linked to a subset of the Soyjak community known as the Soyjak Attackers Video Fandom, or SAVF.
In the hours after Henderson’s school attack, investigators at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism monitored discussions among the anonymous users on the Soyjak website.
“We watched as they started panicking about losing their website out of fear because they believed the Antioch shooter had been groomed to carry out the shooting by their imageboards,” Carla Hill, the center’s director of investigative research, told Raw Story.
Henderson was a Black teenager whose writings revealed a deep immersion in white supremacist ideology. His consumption of extremist content appears to have manifested as a loathing for himself and other Black people, as he grappled with personal difficulties.
Henderson also identified with the involuntary celibate, or incel, movement, whose members blame women and society for their lack of romantic success.
The title of Henderson’s screed combined the two ideas by marrying a racial slur against Black people with the suffix “cel,” adding a parenthetical to explain that he was an “involuntary” Black person.
“We felt like the Antioch shooter was driven to self-loathing by what he saw online,” Hill said. “That’s how he came to be a self-hating person.”
Other terrorist attacks — such as the car-ramming recently carried out by an ISIS sympathizer in New Orleans and the 2019 mass shooting by a white supremacist at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas — have proven to be significantly more lethal, but Henderson’s attack has unnerved extremism researchers as a harbinger of an emerging hybrid threat that is harder to pin down.
Hill took notice of three intertwined “driving forces” behind Henderson’s attack.
“There’s the incel space — various incel spaces — we found him in those. Soyjak crosses over with that,” Hill said. “Then, he was in spaces that glorify violence and gore and school shooters. Third, he was in these reactionary imageboard sites like Soyjak that serve as a hub for all kinds of extremist discourses, including antisemitism, accelerationism, white supremacy and misogyny.”
Through his participation in overlapping fringe internet subcultures where members use multiple social media platforms to celebrate white supremacist mass murder, dabble in the occult and engage in degrading interpersonal drama, Henderson connected online with 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, who fatally shot a fellow student and teacher before taking her own life in Madison, WI, in December.
And Henderson took inspiration from an 18-year-old Turk named Arda Küçükyetim, who carried out a knife attack at an open-air café near a mosque in August. Rupnow participated in an online group that held a pre-arranged viewing party to watch Kücükyetim carry out the attack on a livestream.
Küçükyetim and Rupnow were also “part of” the Soyjak Attacker Video Fandom,” according to a report written by two pseudonymous authors and published by Marc-André Argentino, a senior researcher at the Accelerationist Research Consortium.
A screed left behind by Ryan Palmeter, a 21-year-old white supremacist who fatally shot three Black people in a Dollar Store in Jacksonville, FL in August 2023, also bears the imprint of the Soyjak community. A graphic included in Palmeter’s document includes a Soyjak character known as Chudjak, who is said to have been inspired by Patrick Crusius, the El Paso shooter. The word “soy” is emblazoned across Chudjak’s T-shirt in the graphic. The reference caught the attention of Henderson, who referenced him in his writings as a “soyteen,” the term that insiders use to describe a member of the community.
Similar to Palmeter, Henderson and Küçukyetim published screeds in advance of their attacks that celebrated previous white supremacist shootings, reviewed their meticulous planning and gear, and provided encouragement to readers they hoped would emulate their actions. (Rupnow also engaged in this ritualistic practice, but it’s unclear what she wrote because she left her Google document on private before taking her own life.)
As part of an iterative effort to promote accelerationist violence calculated to bring about the collapse of society, Henderson and Küçükyetim’s posts shared one specific facet: They recommended documents produced by the Terrorgram Collective, which was recently named as a specially designated global terrorist entity by the U.S. State Department.
Terrorgram first emerged in 2019 and, within a couple years, coalesced into a tight-knit group that produced PDFs with highly stylized graphics that combine terrorist propaganda, white supremacist hate, and tactical guidance. Terrorgram’s propaganda venerates white supremacist mass murderers by calling them “saints.”
Terrorgram’s publications function like a virus that finds a receptive host in fringe online extremist communities such as Soyjak, and then infects individuals who attack society at large through mass shootings and other lone-actor violence.
Henderson shared instructions on how to perpetrate attacks on social media from a Terrorgram Collective publication, among others, according to Argentino, and links to three of the publications appear in his screed.
Küçükyetim, meanwhile, shared PDFs of three Terrorgram publications on Telegram, according to a federal indictment of two Terrorgram Collective leaders. Dallas Humber of Elk Grove, CA, and Matthew Allison of Boise, ID, the Terrorgram leaders, were arrested less than a month after Kücükyetim carried out his attack. Humber and Allison were indicted on 15 counts, including conspiring to provide material support for terrorists, and could face up to 220 years in prison if convicted.
On the morning of his attack in the northwestern Turkish city of Eskisehir, according to the Humber/Allison indictment, Küçükyetim posted in a Telegram group chat: “Come see how much humans I can cleanse.” The post included links to a livestream and PDF files of the Terrorgram publications.
Hill and her team at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism found the group chat. A Telegram account they identified as Natalie Rupnow's joined the chat through an invitation, which meant that she had been connected somehow to the other members of the chat prior to the livestreamed attack, Hill said.
Hill told Raw Story that Rupnow participated in a post-play discussion to evaluate the merits of the attack. Rupnow remarked that Küçükyetim had been “caught” and that the death toll was “0 probably,” but that he deserved “credit” for at least trying.
Humber and Allison also took note of the attack.
“He included the Terrorgram books and other Saint manifestos in his file dump, gives shoutouts to the other Saints in his manifesto and references several Hard Reset passages, he was 100% our guy,” Humber wrote in a chat with Allison, according to the indictment.
“But he’s not white, so I can’t give him an honorary title,” she added. “We still celebrating his attack tho, he did it for Terrorgram.”
When Rupnow posted her screed on X before opening fire at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, WI on Dec. 16, Henderson replied under the post: “Livestream it.”
Later that day, after the attack, he expressed excitement that “the newest skool shooter followed” him on two of his X accounts.
In his diary, Henderson appears to speculate that he may have influenced Rupnow.
“It’s weird how we had similar takes and views, but not really because she followed my account,” he wrote.
“Arda was right!” Henderson added. Then he quoted directly from Küçükyetim’s screed: “Remember, I and the other saints will not forget what you did…. In this way, you will motivate future saints.”
It’s not clear whether Henderson directly interacted with Küçükyetim. In his diary, Henderson described Küçükyetim as “an ultimate saint” and “someone I was inspired by,” while cryptically adding, “maybe I didn’t know him.”
The transfer of terrorist motivation and camaraderie in each of the attackers’ screeds is part of a negative feedback loop, along with group chats and other social media posts, that is ensnaring some teenagers who are globally linked to one another through the internet.
“It’s not like a conversation in real life where if I told you something crazy you would be like, ‘Wait a minute,’” Hill said. “It’s an echo chamber that allows anything to go. They’re not getting healthy feedback. It builds on things that trouble them, and causes real-world problems.”
The proliferation of accelerationist terrorism through online radicalization is a challenge that law enforcement is not equipped to handle alone, she said.
“It’s going to take everyone,” Hill said. “It’s going to take parents talking to kids about how what you see on the internet could be false and horrible. And the tech community somehow trying to stop the spread of this.”
NOW READ: Incompetence and chaos as Trump 2.0 crashes and burns
This story is the first in a three-part series exploring how violent online subcultures provide the opportunity for teenagers attracted to accelerationism and inceldom to network and encourage one another to carry out terrorist attacks.
---
---
no lnx
:{Alternet
Social media shows Antioch shooter was influenced by Holocaust deniers, white nationalists
Antioch High School.
Jordan Greenand Raw StoryJanuary 23, 2025
The 17-year-old who killed a female student at a high school in Nashville before taking his own life was an African-American Reserve Officers' Training Corp member who hated Black people and identified as involuntarily celibate, according to a manifesto apparently posted by him online.
A document outlining the views was posted to the X account of the shooter, Solomon Henderson, along with a photo of a handgun in a backpack that appears to have been taken in a bathroom before he walked into the cafeteria at Antioch High School and opened fire around 11 a.m. Central Time. Henderson’s X account was still active, with the link at the time of publication.
In a question-and-answer section in the document, Henderson indicated the attack was motivated by “hatred” of Black people referenced through a racial slur. Europeans, according to the shooter, “need to be protected because they are conquerors, inventors and revolutionary’s [sic] thinkers.” It goes on to accuse Jews of subverting Europeans and imperiling their existence, echoing the racist Great Replacement theory.
ALSO READ: Trump's MAGA America revives a Confederate nightmare
The final page of a diary that was also posted on the shooter’s X account shows a photograph of Henderson, accompanied by the inscription: “God I am ugly. 4 hours to go.”
An entry in the position document on Henderson's opinions of Black people includes a litany of shockingly dehumanizing and ultraviolent descriptors of murder and atrocities.
Henderson credited less than a dozen internet personalities, mostly far-right influencers with radicalizing him.
The list includes Candace Owens, a Black conservative who left the Daily Wire website founded by Ben Shapiro last March following a string of increasingly antisemitic comments. In 2019, Owens testified before a House subcommittee hearing on white supremacist terrorism as a witness for the Republican minority. Owens lashed out at another witness during the hearing, saying, “The audacity of you to bring up the Christchurch shooting manifesto and make it seem as though I laughed at people that were slaughtered by a homicidal maniac is in my opinion absolutely despicable.”
Henderson wrote: “To expand on this, Candace Owens has influenced me above all. Each time she spoke I was stunned by her insights and her own views helped push me further and further into the belief of violence over the Jewish questions.”
Henderson also said he was influenced by Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist and Holocaust denier who dined with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022, and Ethan Ralph, a far-right podcaster who helped stoke the Gamergate controversy, a culture war flashpoint in 2014 that proved to be a staging ground for a misogynist backlash against women’s participation in gaming and other male-dominated spaces.
Henderson describes himself as a "Groyper incel," using terms that respectively refer to Fuentes followers and the involuntary celibate, or incel, movement.
Fuentes responded to the shooting by acknowledging that Henderson called himself a 'groyper,' but distanced himself from the attack in a post on X.
The document also credits the rapper Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) with inspiring his violence and extremism.
Henderson's position document pays tribute to an array of white supremacist mass murderers, including Patrick Crusius, who carried out a massacre targeting Hispanics in El Paso, Texas, in 2019; Brenton Tarrant, who killed Muslims at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; and Anders Breivik, who murdered young people at a youth camp in Norway in 2011.
Henderson's document expresses support for neo-Nazi ideals, which he described as "a better, neater, cleaner world by eliminating all undesirables." He added, "We must aid the Aryans regardless of our race."
Henderson’s diary indicates that he had initially planned to attack on Thursday, but decided to move it up to Wednesday because he wanted “to speed things up.” He said he was “scared of failing to kill myself and then going to jail,” and that his “goal was to kill at least 10 people.”
He wrote on X that he had saved money for a GoPro camera "but it was hard to explain to my parents why I needed it so I couldn't buy it." Henderson's X account includes a link to the streaming platform Kick.com, where three videos documenting his attack were posted. The videos have since been taken down from that site, although Henderson's X account remains active.
Henderson’s X account re-shares posts from four other accounts that promote violence, self-hatred, white supremacy and the incel movement. Some of the accounts show pictures of the users making the A-OK hand signal and writing, “Goodbye everyone.”
The similarities suggest some degree of coordination, although it is unclear whether the other account owners carried out attacks of their own.
Henderson said he had "connections" to some of the other shooters, although "only loosely via online messaging platforms."
In a section of his position document, Henderson paid tribute to what he called "new gen cases," including Natalie Rupnow, the 15-year-old girl who fatally shot two students at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, last month.
an 12 24
A new trend taking over TikTok is targeting vulnerable young men. The “looksmaxxing” phenomenon – to maximise one’s looks – is aimed at young men and boys who want to change their appearance to become more attractive and gain social acceptance.
Unhappy with their appearance, teenage boys and young men scrolling the app are directed to chat rooms where they’re instructed to upload photos in exchange for advice.
It begins with “softmaxxing”. This includes basic hygiene such as teeth brushing and whitening, removal of face and body hair, and “mewing” (tongue exercises that supposedly help tone facial muscles).
This progresses to “hardmaxxing”, which is to improve one’s appearance by any means necessary. More extreme measures include:
- steroid use
- hair transplants and plastic surgery
- using pumps for penis stretching
- removing ribs for a sculpted waist
- “bone-smashing”, which involves using hammers to break bones in the face to look more masculine
- “starvemaxxing”, which encourages extreme dieting and eating disorders
- “whitemaxxing”, which involves using creams to present as more White
- and “edgemaxxing”, which is described as “withholding climaxing in order to boost testosterone to improve appearance”.
Looksmaxxing may appear harmless, encouraging self-care, exercise and healthy eating. But at its core it has ties to violence, suicide and incels (involuntary celibates) – men who blame women for their struggles with establishing romantic or sexual relationships.
A click away from the incel rabbit hole
Looksmaxxing videos on TikTok have amassed many millions of views.
They pull young boys and men into a dark subculture of incels. Incel and extremist content is suggested to users on multiple platforms including TikTok Instagram and Youtube.
Within minutes, TikTok users may be bombarded with videos that promote suicide and gendered hate speech. One 2021 research report found young YouTube users will sometimes be suggested incel-related videos by YouTube’s algorithm within just five hops when starting from a non incel-related video.
‘Hunter’ versus ‘prey’ eyes
Male model Jordan Barrett has become an envied idol for men and boys following the looksmaxxing trend.
Many looksmaxxers believe having his “hunter eyes” with a positive canthal tilt (the canthal is the angle between the inner and outer corner of the eye), along with pursed lips and hollow cheeks, translates to a dominating stare women can’t possibly resist.
On anonymous incel forums, young men are trained to calculate their “sexual market value”. If they’re deemed below average, they’re bullied, accused of being “bitches who are feminine, weak and submissive, too ugly to live” and told to take their own lives.
The Bateman effect
At the apex of the incel beauty tower is the character Patrick Bateman from the 2000 satire-thriller American Psycho. Bateman is known by incels as a superior “sigma” male: a lone wolf and capitalist hustler who attracts money-hungry women.
In fact, he is shallow, manipulative, misogynistic and extremely violent. This sociopathic ideal resonates with many incels. Other characters idolised by incels include Tyler Durden from Fight Club and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker.
Incels who feel they are misunderstood and demoralised by women also look to self-proclaimed powerful male influencers with perceived “social status”, such as Andrew Tate, for solace. Alongside messages about fitness, financial gain and self-improvement, Tate is openly misogynistic and suggests it’s socially acceptable to indulge in violent desires against women.
This false representation of masculinity creates a sense of entitlement in men who believe they are repressed. This can then be used as fuel for gender-based violence, femicide, copycat crimes and mass killings.
Bateman and incel ideology influenced self-proclaimed incel and mass shooter Elliot Rodger. In 2014, Rodger carried out a deadly mass shooting and stabbing spree in Isla Vista, California, killing six people. He blamed women for his celibacy and wanted to seek revenge by killing them.
Many misogynist incels now hail him as a hero. Some men use his initials claiming they want to “go ER” or “be a hERo”, implying they’re ready to commit mass murder.
A 2023 report from the Australia Strategic Policy Centre highlights concerning incel content online. One user says “women should be stripped of their rights because they still have primitive minds that need to be tamed”. Another says “I might start a political movement. ‘BRING BACK RAPE’ […] ‘WANNA STOP BEING INCEL, TIME TO START RAPING’.”
Young people are under pressure
Our preoccupation with having a perfect appearance is an obsessive social disease alienating us from ourselves and others.
Researchers point to a link between trends such as looksmaxxing and the broader cultural pressures young people face. They’re growing up in an increasingly precarious world with war, post-pandemic anxiety, environmental degradation, unaffordable living and unstable employment. This is juxtaposed with neoliberal hyper-individualism, hypersexuality and consumer capitalism.
Where young people feel like they can’t control their environment, they may turn to trends such as looksmaxxing as something they can control.
In recent years, former members of the manosphere have started producing their own counter-forums that challenge the beliefs they once held.
Studies highlight young men and boys are beginning to recognise misogynistic ideology and restrictive performances of masculinity. These studies also argue these forums can offer alternative perspectives, with information that emphasises the importance of healthy socialising, consent and respectful relationships.
In the age of TikTok algorithms, schools and communities must do more to educate on masculinity, what it means to be a “man” and the dangers of incel culture, extremism, gendered hate speech and sexual violence.
Celebrities and influencers also have a role to play. Actors such as Mark Ruffalo and Ryan Gosling have helped foster positive ideas about what it means to be a man. Real, positive change can come from instilling the belief that collectively we can create a more equal and empathetic world.
Jamilla Rosdahl, Senior Lecturer, Australian College of Applied Psychology
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
==
ref 2 vallerga
Abstract
Websites, blogs, and message boards of the “manosphere” are dedicated to a worldview that celebrates hegemonic masculinity and decries feminism. In a reflexive thematic analysis of 227 posts (389,189 words) from two manosphere message boards (The Red Pill and Incel), we analyzed how posters viewed women and men. We found that beliefs about women and men formed an ideology comprised of (a) evolution-based views of gender essentialism, (b) an informal psychology of women's motivations, and (c) a typology of men.
Women were seen as having three primary motives: to deceive and manipulate men, to promiscuously satisfy their own sexual needs, and to trade sex for power. Men were seen as falling into two (The Red Pill) or three (Incel) types: alpha men who are attractive, powerful, and sexually successful, beta men who give to women as their only route to sexual interactions, and incel (involuntarily celibate) men who are too unattractive to achieve sexual success. Posters acted on these beliefs either to improve themselves (The Red Pill) or give up on life and endorse suicide and/or violence (Incel). We discuss these beliefs and actions in relation to theories of sexual aggression, the psychology of radicalization, and the American Psychological Association's Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.
In 2014, Elliot Rodger committed a mass shooting in Santa Barbara, California, killing six people and wounding more than a dozen (Branson-Potts & Winton, 2018). Hours before, he uploaded a YouTube video explaining his intent to punish women for not sleeping with him, and sexually active men because he envied them. Rodger also discussed these beliefs on PUAhate.com which was frequented by people known as incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”). This message board is part of the “manosphere,” a collection of websites, blogs, and message boards dedicated to a worldview that celebrates traditional masculinity and decries feminism as a source of male weakness or subordination (Ging, 2019).
The Texas Department of Public Safety's (2020) Domestic Terrorism Threat Assessment states that incels are an “emerging domestic terrorism threat” (p. 3), noting the severity of the violent online rhetoric. Our goal for this study was to conduct a reflexive thematic analysis of posts on two websites that are part of the manosphere (The Red Pill and Incel.me), to better understand the men who are part of this community and to gain a better sense of the ways in which traditional and hegemonic masculinities are currently enacted among one group of younger, more technologically savvy men.
HEGEMONIC AND TRADITIONAL MASCULINITY
The ways that men in manosphere communities see women and other men have been compared with hegemonic masculinity (Ging, 2019; Van Valkenburgh, 2018). Hegemonic masculinity is the configuration of enacting gender in a way that grants legitimacy to patriarchy, and subsequently to the dominance of men and subordination of women (Connell, 2005). In addition to hegemonic masculinity, there are other constructions of masculinity that legitimize patriarchy (Connell, 2005). Subordinated masculinity involves practices that constitute the reception of dominance from other men. Complicit masculinity consists of practices by men who do not embody hegemonic masculinity but go along with patriarchy and thus benefit from men's domination of women.
Marginalized masculinity encompasses practices of men with other intersectional identities such as race, that results in their dominance from other men. Scholars who theorize hegemonic masculinity are typically less concerned with the degree to which men live up to these enactments (few men actually do), but more concerned with how the attempts to do so reinforce patriarchy (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Hegemonic masculinity may present differently across time and place. However, a constant is that implicit or explicit threats of violence are directed towards women in service of the hegemonic masculinity project of legitimizing patriarchy (Connell, 2005).
In their current forms, these hegemonic legitimizations of patriarchy become central to an identity that strongly emphasizes adherence to traditional masculinity in the face of perceived threats to it. Traditional masculinity ideology refers to a constellation of beliefs about what masculinity should be. Because cultural definitions of masculinity, even traditional masculinity, are fluid and multiple, a static definition is not practical (Pleck, 1995). However, consistent components of these beliefs (hostility toward femininity, dominance and aggression, nonrelational sexuality, and restrictive emotionality) are seen in the measurement of the endorsement of traditional masculinity ideology (Levant, 2011). These are difficult ideals to live up to and men face negative consequences attempting to do so.
O'Neil (2013) summarized 30 years of research on such consequences describing several forms of gender role strain. Self-imposed restrictions connected to traditional masculinity are related to anxiety, intimacy problems, loneliness, and emotional dysregulation. Violating traditional male gender roles is related to substance abuse, self-objectification, and suicide. Endorsement of traditional male gender roles is related to violation of others through hostile sexism, dating violence, rape myth acceptance, and violence. All of these are common experiences of men, which we expected to see represented in posts on The Red Pill and Incel.
How people enact gender is deeply important to their self-identity. For men who construct a masculine gender identity using sexist attitudes, enactment of those sexist attitudes has generally gone underground (Glick & Fiske, 2011). However, in community spaces friendly to displays of sexist constructions of masculinity and femininity men congregate and reinforce these beliefs (Matthews, 2014). Our research examines discursive constructions of masculinity and femininity, represented on The Red Pill and Incel message boards. The semi-anonymity of these boards and the community culture facilitate frank discussions of these gender constructions.
THE MANOSPHERE
The manosphere is a collection of digital spaces in which hegemonic and traditional masculinity are articulated bluntly and without artifice. These spaces are rich in useful data for researchers interested in documenting the ways in which these masculinities are enacted, because it is not necessary to “read between the lines” to discern the meaning of coded messages. In addition, many sites in the manosphere have a large membership and produce an outsized impact on the world. The Elliot Rodger mass shooting is one key example but, in addition, many spaces in the manosphere seek to encourage men to internalize core red pill tenets, one of which is to subjugate women and coerce them into sex (Dignam & Rohlinger, 2019). These sites often redefine sexual assault to exclude the kind of coercion promoted there (Gotell & Dutton, 2016). Furthermore, the manosphere is an echo chamber where sexism and misogyny are reinforced and escalated (Ging, 2019).
Research on the manosphere generally focuses on one or more distinctive subcultures, including Men's Rights Activists (MRAs), masculinist separatists called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), groups formed around misogynistic seduction techniques, called Pick-Up Artists (PUA) or red pill groups, and incels. In their discourse analysis of MRA websites, Gotell and Dutton (2016) found that the focus has moved away from fathers’ rights and toward recruiting young men by stirring up anxiety around changing consent standards and sexual assault. A recent content analysis of a MGTOW site revealed that many of the discussions about why posters identify as MGTOW concerned misogynistic constructions of women as a threat (Wright et al., 2020). In an ethnography of London-based PUA communities O'Neill (2018) elucidated how neoliberalism and post-feminism shape men's engagement with PUA instruction-based seduction communities.
Similar dynamics between masculinity and neoliberalism were present in The Red Pill message board's ‘sidebar’, a collection of essential readings prescribed by the moderators of the message board (Van Valkenburgh, 2018). Cosma and Gurevich (2020) conducted a discourse analysis with PUA media and found that women's bodies were constructed as commodities and used to bolster men's masculinity. In another study, members of the manosphere construed men as active and women as passive and discussed women through misogynistic lenses including objectification, gendered scrutiny, and the assumption that women are immoral and untrustworthy (Krendel, 2020).
In general, incels have not been included in data collection as part of larger explorations of the manosphere. Understandably, incels are typically discussed as a culture unto themselves, with a focus on their violent acts and violent discourse. Tomkinson et al. (2020) defined incels as a violent extremist threat and recommended government intervention in terms of mobilizing public security agencies and employing deradicalization processes.
The incel subculture has been found to malign women, validate male oppression of women, and encourage violence (Glace et al., 2021; O'Malley et al., 2020). In a recent study, incels presented themselves as the victims of new dating technologies, with women manipulating this new system to give themselves a higher status than (male) incels (Preston et al., 2021). Maxwell et al. (2020) theorized that incels, beset by severe loneliness and unable to live up to internalized masculine ideals, become radicalized through experiencing romantic rejection and commiserating with the incel community.
Despite the separate treatment of the incel community in the literature, the Incel message board is embedded within the manosphere, both in terms of shared membership (Ribeiro et al., 2020) and beliefs about gender (Hoffman et al., 2020). These beliefs about gender center around the idea that there is a surface level cultural story (that women are oppressed by patriarchy) which covers up the true nature of gender relations (that male dominance represents the natural order, which feminism is upsetting with negative consequences for everyone). This is codified through a metaphor taken from the film “The Matrix”, in which a blue pill would allow the protagonist to return to his existence in the false world and a red pill would allow him to break free and learn the truth about reality.
The term “red pill” is shared across the manosphere, tying different groups together with the underlying belief that the metaphor represents (i.e. a kind of libertarian heterosexuality in which men and women are rational actors seeking to maximize different kinds of gains; Gavey, 2005, Hoffman et al., 2020). This is where The Red Pill forum in the manosphere gets its name. The corresponding “blue pill” in the ideology of the manosphere represents everyone else who remains ignorant of red pill “truths” (Labbaf, 2019). Both Incel and The Red Pill position themselves in opposition to the blue pill ideology, the only difference being the presence of “black pill” terminology among incels, which represents the additional “truth” of permanent hopelessness (of having a romantic or sexual relationship) that they accept for themselves (Hoffman et al., 2020).
The relatively small body of social scientific research on the manosphere has been somewhat diffuse in both purpose and focus. The studies conducted to date differ from our proposed study most centrally in terms of scope, in that no research thus far has collected data from both The Red Pill and Incel. Our study seeks to do so in recognition of the fact that Incel formed in reaction to The Red Pill and other communities like it (Labbaf, 2019) and the two communities continue to be in dialogue with each other. Our study also differs from past research in that the only previous study that conducted a content analysis on data from The Red Pill examined core ideological texts rather than direct member discourse (Van Valkenburgh, 2018).
Research focused on Incel has relied on exploratory thematic analyses of member discourse, similar to ours (Maxwell et al., 2020; O'Malley et al., 2020). However, our analysis of the Incel community connects it back into the larger manosphere, weaving common threads together to speak to the diverse responses that participants in the manosphere can have to similar underlying misogynistic ideologies. This goal is in line with quantitative findings that, over time, different spaces within the manosphere tend to share the same user base (Ribeiro et al., 2020).
THE PRESENT STUDY
To better understand hegemonic and traditional masculinity in the current sociohistorical moment, and to explore the ways in which masculine ideology is articulated in online message boards that are part of the manosphere, we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis of posts on The Red Pill and Incel message boards. Our goal was to better understand these men's beliefs about men and women. To facilitate this exploratory study, we used a thematic analysis of conversations in the message boards to develop themes that highlight and explain members’ ideologies.
METHOD...
===...
https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/manosphere-influencers-are-teaming-anime-obsessed-content-creator-who
no lnx etc
violent misogynist and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate is now promoting dangerous incel culture to his audience of millions.
Tate and his associates have teamed up with and are promoting an anime-obsessed content creator and misanthrope who glorifies school shooters, pushes Holocaust denial, and promotes the hyper-sexualization of underage girls.
Tate and his acolytes Justin Waller and “Sneako” have aligned themselves with “Waifu Watchers,” a viral content creator who appears to be obsessed with sexualizing underage cartoon anime girls. Waifu Watchers’ content promotes an incel-aligned and misogynistic ideology;the same kind of extremist rhetoric that has led to real-world violence, harassment, and is correlated with mass shootings.
This is an example of Tate and his adherents leaning into and helping to popularize violent incel culture while using Tate’s massively viral nature to push a new set of dangerous misogynistic ideas to his followers. This could be dangerous for Tate’s large fanbase, which includes susceptible kids and teens who idolize him.
In May 2022, Tate bestowed Waifu Watchers with the title of “G of the week” after he made a TikTok gloating about being legally allowed to be sexually attracted to underage anime girls because they aren’t real.
“I want you to follow this guy, Waifu Watchers. This is an official shoutout.” Tate’s co-host and brother Tristian said. “Can you follow this guy, everybody. He’s a fucking hero.”
“Hero. He ain’t taking shit,” Tate added.
Recently, Tate posted a photo of himself wearing a “Waifu Watchers” jacket standing alongside two female anime characters. Tate and the influencer have been pictured together numerous times. Waifu Watchers claimed that he stayed with Tate for a week, and that Tate gifted him cryptocurrency.
WW Tate
CitationScreenshot from Waifu Watchers' Instagram page
Tate and his adherents' decision to platform and promote an anime-obsessed misogynistic edgelord continues the pattern of far-right figures using anime and Japanese entertainment to push dubious narratives.
What is a waifu?
According to Dictionary.com, a “waifu” is “a term for a fictional character, usually in anime or related media, that someone has great, and sometimes romantic, affection for.” The term is taken from the English word for “wife.”
Some anime consumers have a “pseudo-intimate relationship” with waifus. This becomes insidious when anime watchers fixate on underage female characters as waifus, as some of these characters are drawn to be hyper-sexualized and fit coming of age stories.
Waifu Watchers promotes extremist and predatory views to his audience
Online, Waifu Watchers has promoted the sexualization of underage cartoon girls, Holocaust denial, and the glorification of school shooters.The influencer goes by “chaiinmail chase” in some of his videos.
Here’s a breakdown of the content creator’s history of pushing extremist views:
In a YouTube Shorts video, the influencer douses himself with what he pretends is the urine of an underage-looking anime girl.
In another YouTube Shorts video, the content creator celebrated the sound of a female anime character getting her finger broken and screaming.
On various occasions, Waifu Watchers has posted misogynistic content about women.
The content creator made a fake Joe Rogan interview with an anime character where she defends Hitler and promotes Holocaust denial.
During a vlog, the influencer said “I would never shoot up a school” unless it was a place that was “indoctrinating” kids into believing that three million Jews died during the Holocaust. He bleeped out the word Holocaust during the entirety of the vlog.
During the same vlog, he told his audience, “I hope you’re keeping those streets clean and those schools empty.”
The influencer sells t-shirts that glorify school shooters, rapper Ye’s (formerly Kanye West) “White Lives Matter” stunt, and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
The content creator posted a photo of himself holding what appear to be firearms with the words “don’t log into twitter tomorrow,” appearing to refer to the phrase “don’t come to school tomorrow,” which was popularized as a meme following the Umpqua Community College shooting.
He admitted to making a fake, racist article that went viral on social media.
Some of the influencer’s YouTube content may violate the platform's terms of service against hate speech. Earlier this year, YouTube began monetizing YouTube Shorts for creators. Some of the short videos feature outright bigotry and misogyny. Tate’s own content is reportedly all over YouTube Shorts, despite being banned from the platform.
Online misogyny leads to real-world violence
Online misogyny has led to real-world violence and harassment. Incel culture and domestic violence have inspired mass shootings across the country.
Early manosphere influencers were a critical driver of Gamergate, a harassment campaign against women who worked in the video game industry that pushed violent misogyny and anti-feminism. Several women received death and rape threats for years from online harassers.
Viral influencers like Tate and Sneako promoting hateful or misogynistic content online have reminded some audiences online of the rhetoric that was used to attack women during Gamergate.
April 20, 2023
- America First activists Dalton Clodfelter, “Smiley,” and Jon Miller are celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday in despicable ways.
- Matt Evans (aka Beardson Beardly) is convinced that he could “have any woman” he wants, but he doesn’t want any because he’s an incel. Of course, since “incel” is short of “involuntarily celibate,” that makes no sense.
- Andrew Anglin is “begging China to nuke every city in America.”
- Today, we discovered that Isabella Riley Moody was a
in Project Veritas’ cringey “Oligarchy” music video. - Finally, Anna Perez has a simple test for determining if someone is a “fake conservative”: She simply uses the word “f*ggot” a bunch, and if they don’t think it’s hilarious, she knows they’re a RINO.
Tags: Aidan Duncan Andrew Anglin Anna Perez Dalton Clodfelter Isabella Riley Moody Jon Miller Matt Evans Leftovers
https://www.alternet.org/how-incel-culture-combines-dangerous-far-right-ideologies-with-mental-health-problems-report/
https://www.alternet.org/why-americas-misogynist-incels-adore-vladimir-putin-and-modern-day-russian-fascism-journalist/
why America’s 'misogynist incels' adore Vladimir Putin and 'modern-day Russian fascism': journalist
January 05, 2023
During the Cold War, nothing angered right-wing Republicans more than seeing a red Soviet flag. But these days, Russian President Vladimir Putin is admired by many Republicans in the United States’ far-right...
==
Man Charged With Violent Threats Against TPUSA Is Connected to White Nationalist, Incel Communities
ByKristen Doerer | August 22, 2022 10:39 am
The FBI charged Alejandro Richard Velasquez Gomez Thursday for making a credible threat against Turning Point USA, a right-wing youth organizing group founded by Charlie Kirk.
Velasquez is connected to the misogynist “incel” community, according to federal agents, as well as the white nationalist America First youth movement headed by Nick Fuentes, highlighting the very real threat of the ideologies these communities espouse.
The San Antonio Express-News first reported that Velasquez threatened participants of TPUSA’s Student Action Summit, which was held in July 22-24 in Tampa, Florida, and featured speakers like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz.
“July 22 is the day of retribution the day I will have revenge against all of humanity which all of you will pay for my suffering,” Velasquez wrote on his Instagram page. The then 18-year-old also bought a flight from Austin, Texas, to Tampa on July 22, only canceling it the night before.
Tampa police deemed Velasquez’s threat against TPUSA attendees credible, and on July 22, police in San Antonio arrested him. After obtaining a search warrant and searching Velasquez’s phone, the FBI found more damning material. Velasquez’s phone included three images of children being sexually exploited by adults, which were detailed in the affidavit.
On Thursday, the FBI charged Velasquez with making threatening interstate communications and possession of child pornography.
Velasquez’s threats of violence and possession of child pornography follow a long line of extremist rhetoric. Political Research Associate’s Ben Lorber reportedin 2021 that Velasquez regularly posted neo-Nazi content on Instagram and TikTok under monikers like “Sp*cWaffen.” Velasquez also showed familiarity with the misogynist “incel” community.
Incels—short for involuntarily celibate—are today best characterized by their virulent misogyny and belief that women owe them sex. Incels’ hatred for women is displayed on online message boards, where users insist that women are commodities, argue that women should not have the right to vote, and celebrate violence against women.
The language of Velasquez’s threat echoes that of Elliot Rodger, a self-identified incel who murdered six people in a stabbing and shooting rampage in 2014. Rodger has become an idolized figure among those in the misogynist incel subculture, including apparently Velasquez.
An FBI agent who interviewed Velasquez said in an affidavit that Velasquez “explained to me that he intended the post to evoke Elliot Rodger and was familiar with Elliot Rodger due to extensive online research.”
Velasquez also has connections to white nationalists like Nick Fuentes, who has alternatively praised and mocked Velasquez, according to PRA’s Lorber. Lorber also reported that Velasquez at one point established a micro-community of brown ultranationalists who dwelt alongside America First.
Fuentes discussed Velasquez, who uses the moniker LatinoZoomer, on his “America First” show around 2021. “I’ve met him, he’s a nice guy,” Fuentes said of Velasquez in a video unearthed by KiwiFarms, a controversial forum known for doxing. Later, Fuentes read a message from Velasquez and wished him a happy birthday. “We love you, big guy,” he said.
Velasquez was also pictured with the white nationalist in 2021 after Fuentes’ speech in Dallas, Texas, which was held outside of the Conservative Political Action Conference. While Fuentes is banned from CPAC, Velasquez appeared to have attended the Trumpian conservative conference that year.
[Velasquez was also pictured with the white nationalist in 2021 after Fuentes’ speech in Dallas, Texas, which was held outside of the venue for the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Fuentes has also been banned from TPUSA events for harassing TPUSA speakers. In 2019, Fuentes and America First’s army of “groypers”—young, mostly white men who make up America First—heckled speakers at TPUSA events held on college campuses and targeted TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk for not being adequately “pro-white” and far-right.The effort was two-fold: force TPUSA to be more extreme and recruit new followers.
On Friday, Fuentes denied claims that Velasquez was a part of America First. “For the record, Alejandro Velasquez had nothing to do with me or America First,” he posted on Telegram.
Though best known for his white nationalism, Fuentes is also a virulent misogynist and self-declared incel. And in spite of his well-known white nationalism, antisemitism, and Christian nationalism, some far-right Republican elected officials like Rep. Paul Gosar, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, and Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers attend his events, lending him credibility among the GOP.
:{
[vid/twt incel b/c no time for girls vs --> historical figure]
among Fuentes’ misogynist beliefs are that women should not have the right to vote or work, and that women in the United States should be treated like they are under the Taliban. In June, Fuentes declared, “We need to go back to burning women alive more.” That language has been echoed by other America First white nationalists like Dalton Clodfelter, who recently said he would like to see a woman burned alive at the stake for wearing a “blasphemous” bikini.
Such virulent misogyny and violent rhetoric has been chocked up by some as a desire to shock audiences and increase notoriety. But if Velasquez’s credible threat of violence against TPUSA proves anything, it’s that such talk doesn’t remain just talk—and that it won’t spare conservatives either.
}:
12 21 raw an relationship coach kind // life coach?
...Both men overtly invoke the apocalypse, and self-consciously make QAnon references in their respective podcasts.
“What is going on here in America?” Cusick said in the Oct. 19 episode of his podcast. “They have us — we’re enslaved…. When the pilgrims came to America in 1620 — four hundred years from then goes to 2020 — when did this awakening start in the United States? Everyone started realizing what was going on with our elections, with Hollywood, with all these elites. It started in 2020, thanks to our president, Donald Trump.”
Cusick offered an allegory, comparing Americans from the settling of the colonies in the 1600s to the Israelites who, according to the Old Testament, were enslaved in Egypt under the pharaoh. By way of explaining how the United States, which after all, was supposedly “founded on Judeo-Christian principles,” had been “enslaved” since before its founding, Cusick claimed that “it was infiltrated and it became Satanic.”
For Cusick, Trump is to be credited for awakening a sense of nationalism in Americans and helping them define an enemy, which happens to be their fellow citizens.
“Trump’s the one who made people all of a sudden realize we have a country, and we have an opposition, whether you were on the left side or the right side,” Cusick said.
While concerned with something entirely different — helping men have more sex, as opposed to saving souls for Jesus — Stedman offered a similar chronology in his Dec. 9 blog post entitled “Why Your Woman Stops Wanting Sex.”
“We have been experiencing a gradual dark night of soul these past 100 years; as I write this in December 2021 we are near the culmination of it,” he wrote. Then, he went straight to the apocalypse: “In this collapse all that has been hidden is becoming seen. We are living through the apocalypse— the great revealing. The great awakening.”
After invoking apocalypse as a force for a transformation in gender relations, Stedman advised young men that they should strive for “consensual polarity” while making it clear that he was not advocating for equality: In his view, the men are protagonists; women are material to be “forged.”
“Such a relationship is well within your grasp,” Stedman advised. “In spite of all the programming, suitable women are all around; though many do need guidance — you will need to help forge them. But the limiting factor is you. Because you can only take a woman as far as you yourself have gone.”...
https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/involuntary-celibates-are-an-emerging-domestic-terrorism-threat-as-texas-warns-of-an-incel-rebellion
no lnx
Involuntary Celibates are an ‘emerging domestic terrorism threat’ as Texas warns of an ‘Incel Rebellion’
Written by Bob Brigham / Raw Story January 12, 2020
Misogynistic men who identify as part of the “Involuntary Celibate” movement are domestic terrorism threats, according to a new report.
The Texas Department of Public Safety included the warning in their 2020, “Texas Domestic Terrorism Threat Assessment” (PDF).
“Although not a new movement, Involuntary Celibates (Incels) are an emerging domestic terrorism threat as current adherents demonstrate marked acts or threats of violence in furtherance of their social grievance,” the report noted. “Once viewed as a criminal threat by many law enforcement authorities, Incels are now seen as a growing domestic terrorism concern due to the ideological nature of recent Incel attacks internationally, nationwide, and in Texas.”
“What begins as a personal grievance due to perceived rejection by women may morph into allegiance to, and attempts to further, an Incel Rebellion. The result has thrust the Incel movement into the realm of domestic terrorism,” the report explained.
“The violence demonstrated by Incels in the past decade, coupled with extremely violent online rhetoric, suggests this particular threat could soon match, or potentially eclipse, the level of lethalness demonstrated by other domestic terrorism types,” the report warned.
“Texas Domestic Terrorism Threat Assessment” by the Texas Department of Public Safety (screengrab)[doc pix]
==
https://www.cnn.com**/2018/04**/24/americas/toronto-van-investigation/index.html
no lnx pix vid
toronto (CNN)Toronto police have their suspect -- but they're still looking for a motive.
Alek Minassian, the man accused of plowing into pedestrians with a rented van on Monday, was charged Tuesday with 10 counts of first-degree murder.
The 25-year-old is also charged with 13 counts of attempted murder. Authorities said another count of attempted murder likely will be added.
Investigators are still trying to determine the motive behind the attack, which left 10 people dead and 14 hurt. One aspect they will look at is his social media posts and what a man who killed six people with a vehicle in 2014 meant to Minassian.
Minassian, who was wearing a white jumpsuit with his hands cuffed behind him, appeared attentive during the brief hearing. His next court appearance will be a bail hearing on May 10.
Alek Minassian is charged with a total of 23 counts for Monday's van plowing attack.
"Obviously all Canadians continue and will continue to have questions about why this happened, what could possibly be the motive behind it," Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday.
So far, officials aren't calling the attack an act of terrorism. "There would appear to be no national security connection," Canadian Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said.
Van strikes pedestrians in Toronto
Photos: Van strikes pedestrians in Toronto
But Toronto Police Chief Mark Saunders said, "It's very clear just from a general perspective to say that the actions definitely look deliberate."
The van sped down a busy street Monday with reckless abandon, swerving into the wrong lanes of traffic and careening onto a sidewalk.
Clue emerges from Facebook
Minassian on Monday posted a cryptic message to Facebook minutes before setting off in his rented vehicle, Sgt. Graham Gibson, a homicide detective with the Toronto police, said Tuesday.
Investigators found a Facebook account they believe belongs to Minassian, CNN law enforcement analyst Josh Campbell said.
What we know about the Toronto van suspect
A message posted on the account earlier Monday read: "All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!"
Campbell said investigators believe the post refers to the man who killed six and injured 14 in a drive-by shooting and vehicle ramming attack near the University of California Santa Barbara campus in 2014. Rodger later died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Investigators said Rodger was motivated to carry out his attack by a personal grievance related to his immersion in the extremist ideological subculture of men's rights activists, who believe women don't actually want gender equality and have been brainwashed by feminist propaganda....
==
redistribution of sex/women
contain black ppl (jail) and women (lock her up hillary)
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/11/5/he_set_out_to_kill_women
punish rule-breakers (// lakoff? kill the invaders in self defense) women are manipulatir social climbers
yoga tallahassee
https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/misogyny-and-white-supremacy-its-time-to-fight-these-closely-linked-sources-of-violence/
no lnx
Misogyny and white supremacy: It’s time to fight these closely-linked sources of violence
Written by Heather Digby Parton / Salon August 12, 2019
It’s been a little over a week since the deadly shootings in El Paso and Dayton and, as usual, the nation’s attention is already turning to other things. In the Trump era, there’s always something horrible happening. The Democratic presidential candidates have put gun safety policies at the top of their agenda and perhaps it will stay there. But Mitch McConnell is still in Kentucky vaguely waving his hands about some kind of legislation, clearly assuming the country will have moved on by the time Congress reconvenes next month. This ritual response to mass murder is sadly predictable.
But before we leave this latest episode of horrific violence behind, it’s important to note that a new understanding has come out of these events about the nature of the threat we face. It’s not only from easy access to guns but about the ideology that’s driving some of these recent incidents. The mainstreaming of white supremacist language by conservative media — and by President Trump’s rhetoric — have been recognized as a contributing factor in the growing white power movement in the United States. That’s an important step to gaining an understanding of this phenomenon.
The threat of white supremacist violence has been with us for a long time, of course. But it has picked up in recent years and the government has been lax in confronting it, mainly because Republican politicians have a fit any time the topic is raised. (This should have sounded some alarm bells about the mainstreaming of this ideology long ago.) Law enforcement has long been aware that the advent of the internet has created fertile ground for recruitment and conversion and that the movement was spreading, but wasn’t given the resources to deal with it. Perhaps that will change, although it’s hard to see that happening any time soon when the president himself insists the threat does not exist:
Asked if he thinks white nationalism is a rising threat, Trump says, “I don’t really. I think it’s a small group of people that have very, very serious problems.”
Trump goes on to say he thinks it’s too early to draw conclusions about what motivated New Zealand mosque shooter. pic.twitter.com/maTx55ruCb
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 15, 2019
But the El Paso massacre by a white supremacist wasn’t the only deadly violence on that awful weekend in America. In Dayton, Ohio, a 24-year-old man killed nine people in another mass shooting, and his motivation is murkier. Apparently, the accused shooter’s social media accounts showed that he identified with progressive politics, expressing admiration for Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. But that may be less important than the apparent fact that he also had a fetish for guns and held crude and violent misogynistic beliefs. Although law enforcement officials have drawn no public conclusions about the shooter’s motive, ABC News reported on Sunday that they believed the shooter had “demonstrated a misogyny that was far more extreme than any of his political leanings.”
“Extreme” doesn’t really cover it. This man had been expelled from school for writing a “rape list” and was reportedly a singer in a “pornogrind” band — a tiny heavy metal subculture that celebrates extreme violence against women. (Although this musical genre is intentionally disgusting, it’s been around for years and has not previously been implicated in any acts of violence.) It appears the authorities believe the shooter’s motives weren’t explicitly political but rather tied somehow to his hatred of women.
Obviously a leftist can also be a violent misogynist, but left-wing politics doesn’t feature misogyny as part and parcel of its ideology. Generally speaking, the left rejects sexism and is open to a feminist critique of gender-based violence. In that regard, the Dayton shooter seems to have had more in common with the white supremacists than anyone on the left.
The Anti-Defamation League issued a report last year titled “When Women are the Enemy: The Intersection of Misogyny and White Supremacy,” finding that hatred of women is often “a gateway into the white supremacist world.” That report found that cultural changes and the focus on gender equality in progressive politics inspire some men to turn to far-right, white supremacist movements that see women in highly traditional gender roles. Among “white power” and neo-Nazi groups, whose explicit aim is to repopulate the white race (so that black and brown people do no “replace” them), women are encouraged to bear as many children as possible. (In that they are echoed by mainstream white nationalists such as Tucker Carlson of Fox News.)
Jessica Reeve, the author of the ADL report, told the Independent:
There’s a profoundly anti-woman undercurrent to many white supremacist/alt right online exchanges, and that can easily veer from disrespect into the full-on promotion of violence, including rape. This is even more evident if you visit incel and MRA boards, where anger towards and hatred of women is the primary focus — and participants celebrate and encourage misogynist violence.
In other words, there seems to be a strong correlation between the people who believe they are being robbed of their rightful status by people of color and those who believe they are being robbed of their status by women. These overlapping forms of resentment and anger can all too easily lead to violence. Sometimes this is limited to “ordinary” domestic abuse, which remains widespread in America. Sometimes it results in lethal horror such as Dayton.
A recent New York Times article explored the issue of misogyny in these mass shootings. Much as the white supremacists of 8chan and similar forums have celebrated the mass killings of Jews, Mexicans and Muslims, online groups of “incels” have also celebrated the killing of women, especially the infamous case of Elliot Rodger, the young man who killed six people in 2014 in Isla Vista, California, a day after posting an online video vowing revenge on women who had declined his advances. The Times cited a more recent example: “Alek Minassian, who drove a van onto a sidewalk in Toronto in 2018, killing 10 people, had posted a message on Facebook minutes before the attack praising Mr. Rodger.”
It appears that the demographic and personality profile that can lead to white supremacist violence is not much different the demographic and personality profile that leads to misogynist violence. In fact, these killers often seem irrationally angry with everyone who isn’t a white male.
I hardly think it’s necessary to point out that our president is right in the middle of this phenomenon as well. The ADL paper reports that after Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape was released during the 2016 campaign, notorious neo-Nazi Richard Spencer defended the then-candidate, saying that “at some part of every woman’s soul, they want to be taken by a strong man.” Trump’s overt racism isn’t the only reason these extremists love the guy.
Much has been made of the fact that authorities have been starved of resources to combat this white supremacist threat. There is now some hope that will change. As important as that is, it’s time to put some resources — and some serious thought — into combatting misogynist violence as well.
==
==
President Ronald Reagan famously asserted that someone who agreed with him 80% of the time was an “80% friend” rather than a “20% enemy,” which is how he was able to oversee a fragile right-wing coalition of libertarians, Goldwater Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, neocons, and theocratic Christian Right fundamentalists — despite their differences. Similarly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in 2019, finds herself overseeing a big bent of Democrats who range from unapologetically liberal/progressive to more centrist. Pelosi is a pragmatist.
But extremist movements are not known for being pragmatic, having a big tent approach or putting together diverse coalitions. They demand ideological purity. They will not agree to disagree.
And that all-or-nothing mentality is alive and well in the bizarre, twisted and disturbing world that is the fractured misogynist movement.
Not unlike Trotskyites and Maoists who absolutely detest one another or the Sunni Islamists of al-Qaeda and the Taliban who consider Shiite Islamists no better than atheists, misogynist groups often have a profound hatred of other misogynist groups. On the surface, it seems like the PUA (pickup artist) and MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way) schools of extreme anti-feminism would find common ground and bond over their hatred of women. But misogynists are hardly one big happy family.
Here are some of the misogynist factions that often express an intense disdain for rival groups of misogynists.
1. PUAs
:{:(style="outline-color:initial;outline-width:initial;transition-property:color"):}:
In an August 1, 2016 article for Return of Kings, PUA proponent Corey Savage described MGTOWs as “cringeworthy” and “stuck and lost” for being controlled by their “bitterness and frustration.” And in a June 6, 2016 piece, Savage attacked MGTOWs for showing a “self-pitying victim mentality”—which, according to Savage, does nothing to advance the patriarchal society anti-feminists should be fighting for.
2. MGTOW
When liberals and progressives put together peaceful, nonviolent political demonstrations back in the 1980s, the organizers would always hate it when fringe communist groups would show up uninvited and get into confrontations with other fringe communist groups. For example, the Trotskyist Spartacus Forum and the Maoist/Stalinist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) were notorious for their hatred of one another—and they had no interest in finding common ground. Similarly, the PUA and MGTOW schools of misogyny have no desire to bond over their mutual disdain for feminism.
Return of Kings and other PUA/“neomasculinist” sites are bitterly anti-feminist; MGTOW blogs are also bitterly anti-feminist. But as MGTOWs see it, the problem with the PUA crowd is that they seek to ultimately dominate and control women when they should be avoiding them altogether. PUAs believe in romantic relationships if women are completely submissive and reject feminism completely; MGTOWs embrace a separatist philosophy. And the PUA/MGTOW debates of 2014, 2015 and 2016 would become especially dark and troubling when Return of Kings would publish an article claiming that the way to attract women is to mistreat them—and MGTOWs would indignantly respond that mistreating women is still giving them what they want.
3. Incels
PUA misogynists often speak of taking the “red pill,” which means rejecting feminism altogether and fighting for a patriarchal society; incels, however, speak of “the black pill,” which means accepting that they will never be attractive to women. PUAs argue that ultimately, “neomasculinists” can defeat feminism by being manly, seducing women and encouraging women to embrace patriarchy; Return of Kings published a bizarre combination of “how to get laid” articles and articles sympathetic to the Christian Right. Incels, however, have given up on the idea of seduction and consider themselves “involuntarily celibate.”
The frightening incel subculture resulted in an act of domestic terrorism on May 23, 2014, when California resident Elliot Rodger (an incel) killed six people as a way of expressing his hatred of women. And Return of Kings published many articles describing Rodger as a prime example of why PUAs consider incels to be weak and pathetic. In a May 28, 2014 listicle, Valizadeh argued that if Rodger had taken the “red pill” and embraced a PUA view of “self-improvement,” he could have overcome his “dark traits of narcissism, entitlement, loserdom and hopelessness.”
The misogynist articles written in response to Rodger’s act of domestic terrorism underscored the deep divisions within the misogynist movement. While some incel blogs—horrifyingly—exalted Rodger as a hero, Valizadeh saw him as a weak-minded “social justice warrior” who had been poisoned by liberalism.
Liberals and progressives, of course, were horrified by Rodger’s terrorist act, but just as some people on the right will make the ludicrous argument that Hitler and Mussolini were liberals, PUAs view incels as having the traits of liberalism.
Truth is stranger than fiction, and there is no limit to how bizarre and outrageous misogynists can be when they’re fighting with other misogynists.
https://www.alternet.org/traumatic-vision-masculinity-lies-root-resentful-incel-movement
AN
When I read that Scott Paul Beierle, the 40-year-old man who murdered two women and injured five other people at a yoga studio in Florida, identified with the self-proclaimed "incel" (shorthand for "involuntary celibate") Elliot Rodger, I was, sadly, unsurprised.
This isn't the first time that a mass shooter was revealed to have been motivated by hatred of women. Rodger infamously shot up a California sorority in 2014 because he believed women were unjustly uninterested in him romantically; earlier this year, Alek Minassian drove a van into a pedestrian area of Toronto to target women because of his own sexual frustration; back in 2009, George Sodini went on a killing spree at a fitness center in Pennsylvania because of his struggles finding a girlfriend and having sex. And even when these frustrated men don't engage in literal violence, there are countless women who can report being harassed online or in person by individuals who feel bitter about a sexual world that seems to reject them.
In all these cases, the men in question were victim to the American conception of masculinity that made them feel deeply inadequate. Conservatives mock the phrase “toxic masculinity,” and yet it is a useful turn of phrase to describe the set of feelings, normalized in our culture, that define our conception of what it means to be a man. When men cannot achieve the masculine ideal, they often self-shame, feel they are losers or mocked by society and doomed to die alone. Many more men feel this way who do not turn to violence; in all cases, shaming men for not adhering to this horrid masculine ideal only makes inadequate feelings worse.
A study published recently in the journal Evolutionary Psychological Science offered some insight into the ways in which men deeply internalize said feelings. Though it relied on qualitative data, specifically culled from Reddit comments, the paper — titled “Why Men Stay Single? Evidence from Reddit”— offered some startling insights into the problems that seem to afflict men who complain on the popular online forum and aggregator site about being single, many of whom identified with the term "incel." It helped me learn more about the type of man who goes to an online forum to find solace for the problems in his personal life and to see, at least based on anecdotal evidence, how their plight can seem unshakeable....
==
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/united-states-witnessing-shocking-rise-alt-right-violence
Last August's "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which started with a torchlit mob chanting racist slogans and ended with a far-right activist murdering an anti-racist protester, galvanized national attention toward the growing problem of white nationalists organizing under a new branding term, the "alt-right." The death of Heather Heyer after a young white nationalist named James Alex Fields slammed his car into a crowd drove home that the alt-right wasn't just a bunch of douchebags playing Nazi on the internet, but a serious phenomenon that could include deadly violence.
Unfortunately, as a recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) entitled "The Alt-Right Is Killing People" makes clear, Heyer's death was not an isolated phenomenon. By their estimates, she was the 37th person murdered by someone apparently fueled by alt-right ideology in the past four years. Since Heyer's death, six more people have been killed by alt-right extremists, bringing the total to 43. That same increase in violence has included 67 injuries, including the 19 other people Fields hit with his car in Charlottesville.
“There is this subset of young white men that is radicalizing, and I think a lot of that has to do with perceived status and their own life outcomes," SPLC researcher Keegan Hankes told Salon. Such "disaffected" young men, he said, "are who we are seeing go on to commit these acts." [d frum: gop has sols to certain problems, and will turn any problem into one of those, or ignore it; genuine wackos can be ignored/arrested, but more broadscale issues cannot be ignored that have been capitalized on]
What makes a murderer a part of the alt-right? As Hankes explained, that's often tough to pin down. White supremacists and other alt-right activists "purposefully leave their ideology with fuzzy boundaries," leaving the question of "who’s included and who’s not" deliberately vague. In part this is to create "plausible deniability" if and when alt-right adherents do commit acts of violence. The alt-right movement is "purposefully sprawling," Hankes said, spread out over various sites and social media platforms, channeled through a variety of figureheads, and rejecting more centralized or coherent organizing strategies.
To cut through this uncertainty, SPLC researchers focused on a specific profile: Young white men who have radicalized themselves, usually through the internet. In most cases this means engaging with online propaganda that tells young men or teenage boys that their romantic, social and employment problems are the fault of "social justice warriors" and "political correctness," rather than bad luck or their personal failings. These young men are encouraged to lash out at women and people of color, primarily through online trolling. A few of them, perhaps inevitably, start hungering to do more serious damage in the real world.
The researchers traced this violent trend back to Elliot Rodger, a young man who killed seven people and wounded 14 in a 2014 rampage through Isla Vista, California, before killing himself. Rodger's explicit motivation was to seek revenge against women who had supposedly rejected him sexually, though his first three victims were his male roommates. He had spent a great deal of time on misogynist forums that routinely peddle the idea that feminism has ruined dating and sex for men.
The alt-right is associated more closely with white supremacy than misogyny, but as Hankes explained it, misogyny is "a through-line through the whole ideology" and the alt-right community holds "a general distaste for gender egalitarianism." In fact, alt-right leaders target online forums where young men gather to demonize women and exchange "pick-up artist" tips, using misogyny as the bait to lure young men into a white nationalist ideology. Baiting angry young white men with the idea that men of color are "stealing" all the white women — and that's why they can't get a date — is a common tactic.
It's also an idea that showed up in Rodger's 17,000-word manifesto, in which he wrote, “How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me?" His alt-right fans have seized onto this passage and used it to build up their claim that interracial dating and marriage is tantamount to "white genocide."
Some of the murders on the SPLC's list, such as Dylann Roof's June 2015 mass killing of nine people in an African-American church in South Carolina, have become the focus of massive media attention. Others, such as 21-year-old William Edward Atchison's murder of two students at a New Mexico high school in December 2017, have received relatively little. But they largely fit the pattern: Angry young men who took their grievances to online forums to self-radicalize and then lashed out violently in the real world.
Asked if this pattern resembles the way that Islamic terrorist groups like ISIS work, Hankes agreed, but emphasized differences in how social media networks and web server hosts have reacted to the alt-right. He noted that "several of the big social media companies" manage to get most ISIS propaganda taken down "before it’s even posted to the public." Generally speaking, the alt-right "have been given more leash and have more free range on these platforms."
Last summer's fiasco in Charlottesville, Hankes added, is an example of what alt-right organizers were able to accomplish online: For "so many of those individuals, this was their first rally that they had ever attended. Many of them came from all the way across the country."
To be clear, these young men should not be seen as mindless ciphers who simply absorb a bunch of right-wing memes and rants on Reddit and come out the other side delivering heil-Hitler salutes and committing violent crimes. The alt-right is a true grassroots movement, formed from thousands of disparate young white men telling each other, over the years, that people of color and women are to blame for their problems. It's a movement many years in the making -- that got a huge shot in the arm from the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.
Trump "puts so much wind in the sails of these guys," Hankes explained. "The disregard for so-called political correctness, this willingness to talk about taboo ideas, this willingness to dog-whistle or make outright racist or xenophobic remarks" all allowed young converts to alt-right ideology to believe they could "actually go make real things in the world happen." It's likely no coincidence, then, that the pattern of killings escalated after Trump's election. Of the 13 separate violent incidents cataloged by the SPLC, 10 of them came in 2017. While the negative publicity resulting from the Charlottesville rally has unquestionably disrupted the alt-right's rise, the bad press is also making its adherents angrier and more aggrieved. That is unlikely to lead to less violence in the futur
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/why-media-reluctant-cover-neo-nazi-violence
s been just a little over two months since a white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd of anti-fascist protesters and killed a woman in Charlottesville, Virginia. It seems as if the mainstream media has already gotten bored with the story of neo-Nazi violence and domestic terrorism. Leading white nationalist Richard Spencer snagged a huge amount of coverage for scheduling a speech at the University of Florida,which provoked stories about how much the school was spending on security, the potential for protests and the fact that the state's Republican governor felt compelled to declare a state of emergency. But when three of Spencer's biggest fans and core followers — their names are Tyler Tenbrink, William Fears and Colton Fears (the latter two are brothers) — were arrested for attempting to murder protesters, coverage of the event was relatively sparse.
Media Matters analyzed the news coverage of the incident, in which one neo-Nazi allegedly fired a gun while the other two egged him on to shoot protesters. The watchdog group found that cable news networks almost completely ignored it. CNN and Fox News didn't mention the alleged attack at all, and MSNBC devoted a two-minute segment to it on one show.
Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, told Salon he didn't believe the incident necessarily deserved "hours of coverage over a few days." But the paltry coverage the alleged attack got, he worries, may contribute to the public's failure to understand how serious the threat of neo-Nazi violence really is.
Vicious attacks on anti-fascist protesters have happened on at least two occasions since the events in Charlottesville. In an early September rally in Vancouver, Washington, there were reports of threatening behavior from motorists, with one man driving into a crowd (fortunately injuring no one), and a group of men in another car throwing things and driving menacingly around the protesters. Then there was this latest shooting associated with the Spencer event in Florida.
Just because no one has gotten hurt doesn't mean this isn't news. It's sheer luck that separates a bullet that hits someone in the head from one that doesn't. More importantly, Americans need to see the pattern of violent behavior coming from the white supremacist subculture, to understand the threat it actually poses.
Incidents like these “really underscore the risk a lot of people talked about when it comes to these rallies, and about what these groups actually bring when they hold these events," Keegan Hankes, a researcher for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Salon.
Hankes emphasized that white supremacy is an inherently violent ideology, noting that "you don't have the 'ethno-state,' you don't have this kind of world that they're dreaming up without extreme violence.”
As far-right fringe groups, emboldened by the election of Donald Trump, plan more rallies and public speeches, there's a real risk that the centrality of violence to white supremacist ideology gets lost in the public discourse. Part of the problem is that right-wing pundits have been working to frame the challenge posed by these groups strictly in terms of "free speech" while minimizing the problem of actual or potential violence.
“The security concerns are justified, as we see, because violence follows" where neo-Nazis and white supremacists go, Hankes said. "It's more than just that people don't want to hear their ideas or don't agree with them, and don't think they should be on campus."
Carusone characterized himself as a "free-speech purist," but felt that the public's understanding of the debate over speech on campus is incomplete if they don't understand the enhanced possibility of violence that white supremacists bring.
"Alt-right" groups, he explained, "do these sort of trolling events at campuses, not trying to make a point, but just to elicit a backlash, so that they can have these kinds of skirmishes. The net effect of the skirmishes is to create conditions such that they can not just engage in violence but also bully, intimidate and suppress their opponents.”
That too, he noted, is a free speech issue: The free speech rights of anti-fascists and leftists are endangered if they are being intimidated with violence.
White supremacists and other "alt-right" types have deliberately downplayed their own acts of violence in an effort to confuse the issue, Hankes said. Instead, they focus on a narrative claiming that they "just want a fair hearing for [their] ideas" and that it's "the anti-fascists who are committing violence," permitting them to play the victim and drum up sympathy for their extremist views.
He then began to make excuses, calling Fields a "scapegoat" and saying that Heyer's death was an "ambiguous situation." He also claimed that Fields' "vehicle was attacked," and suggested that ramming a car into a crowd of protesters was Fields "attempting to escape."Spencer himself did this during his speech at the University of Florida. When an audience member asked Spencer about the killing of leftist protester Heather Heyer, for which a white supremacist named James Fields has been charged with second-degree murder, Spencer deflected and downplayed the situation. He claimed he is opposed to all forms of violence and has "explicitly called for peace."
Shortly after Spencer tried to spin his movement as nonviolent, three of his most prominent followers — men who have repeatedly attended Spencer's appearances and events, including the Charlottesville rally — reportedly fired a gun at protesters while shouting "Heil Hitler" and urging each other on.
The media has an important role to play here. It's not just about reporting on events like this, but also putting them into context. The shooting was part of a growing white supremacist movement that is growing ever more ambitious and more violent, and feels emboldened by a sympathetic leader in the White House. This shooting happened during a constant churn of stories about Trump's racially provocative attacks on NFL players, Rep. Frederica Wilson, Myeshia Johnson (the widow of slain soldier La David Johnson) and ESPN sports analyst Jemele Hill. It's no mystery why white supremacists might feel it's a good time to ramp up their activities. This shooting cannot be viewed as a random crime, but as the inescapable result of electing President Donald Trump.
==
https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/toxic-masculinity-killing-us-many-ways
After every mass shooting—and sadly, there are so many that we have become numb to them—there’s an inevitable combing through the shooter’s past to see what could have motivated him.
We learned a lot about Omar Mateen, who shot up an Orlando, Florida, gay nightclub called Pulse in 2016. His ex-wife describes a man who was controlling and abusive. A colleague says he was always using racial and sexual slurs and "talked about killing people all the time." Both his ex-wife and his father describe him as homophobic. He was clearly fond of guns, having not one, but two concealed carry licenses. He was investigated by the FBI in 2013 for making threats to a coworker.
Stephen Paddock, who killed nearly 60 people at a country-western concert in 2017, also loved guns, amassing several dozen. He was a massive gambler who loved freebies but was rudely unwilling to tip waitresses. He dressed down his girlfriend in public for no reason, and was described by people who knew him as rigid, uncompromising, arrogant and entitled.
Elliot Rodger, who killed six and injured 14 in Isla Vista, California, was also entitled, and released a video and a manifesto explaining why he deserved female attention—and committed murder as revenge because he did not get it. And so on and so forth, with one killer after another.
There is a common theme here: Toxic masculinity.
Every time feminists talk about toxic masculinity, there is a chorus of whiny dudes who will immediately assume—or pretend to assume—that feminists are condemning all masculinity, even though the modifier "toxic" inherently suggests that there are forms of masculinity that are not toxic.
So, to be excruciatingly clear, toxic masculinity is a specific model of manhood, geared toward dominance and control. It's a manhood that views women and LGBT people as inferior, sees sex as an act not of affection but domination, and which valorizes violence as the way to prove one's self to the world.
For obvious political reasons, conservatives try to reduce conversations about public mass murder to “radical Islam,” the suggestion being that these impulses are inherent to Islam and that Christianity does not cause such violence. This, of course, is hoary nonsense, as there is a long and ignoble history of Christian-identified men, caught up in the cult of toxic masculinity, sowing discord and causing violence in our country: The gun-toting militiamen that caused a showdown in Oregon, the self-appointed border patrol called the Minutemen that again made news when their founder was convicted of child molestation, men who attack abortion clinics and providers.
Toxic masculinity aspires to toughness but is, in fact, an ideology of living in fear: The fear of ever seeming soft, tender, weak, or somehow less than manly. This insecurity is perhaps the most stalwart defining feature of toxic masculinity, and examples are endless. Donald Trump flipping out when someone teases him about his small fingers. (Or about anything, really.) The ludicrously long and shaggy beards on "Duck Dynasty," meant to stave off any connection to the dreaded feminine with a thicket of hair. The emergence of the term "cuckservative," flung around by hardline right-wingers to suggest that insufficient racism is somehow emasculating. Conservatives absolutely melting down about an Obamacare ad that suggested, gasp, sometimes men wear pajamas. (This ad traumatized them so much that many conservative pundits are still freaking out, years after the fact, that the Obama administration dared suggest the emasculating fabric of flannel pajamas ever touched the skin of the American male.)
If toxic masculinity was just about men posturing around each other in a comical fashion, that would be one thing, but this persistent pressure to constantly be proving manhood and warding off anything considered feminine or emasculating is the main reason why we have so many damn shootings in the United States. Whether it's Islamic terrorism or Columbine-style shootings or, as is the case with some of the most common but least covered mass shootings, an act of domestic violence by a man who would rather kill his family than lose control, the common theme is this toxic masculinity, a desire on the part of the shooter to show off how much power and control he has, to take male dominance to the level of exerting control over life and death itself.
Toxic masculinity is also the reason it's so easy for men with major issues to get a hold of the high-powered weaponry necessary to commit these crimes. Sure, the pro-gun movement likes to roll out a bunch of half-baked pseudo-arguments pretending at rationality to justify the lack of gun control in this country, but really, the emotional selling point of guns is that they feed the cult of toxic masculinity. Being able to stockpile weapons and have ever bigger and scarier-looking guns is straightforward and undeniable overcompensation for insecure men, who are trying to prove what manly men they are.
This issue also goes back to social and cultural forces, especially the way that the gun industry and the NRA have cultivated a culture of gun-powered macho power fantasies. The number of people who own guns has steadily declined in recent years, so the gun industry has shifted its marketing tactics.
“It's clear that the gun industry is marketing to people who are already their customer base and finding new and novel and unfortunately more dangerous weapons to sell them," Lindsay Nichols, federal policy director for the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, explained to me.
[ironic gun ad auto spam]
"The gun industry and the NRA are profiting off a sense of fear," Kris Brown, the co-president of the Brady Campaign, told me.The gun industry uses a carrot-and-stick approach to get this done. The carrot is the power fantasy—the idea that having a whole bunch of guns will make you feel manly and tough. Gun advertising also emphasizes the diverse range of technical attributes available, appealing to the "collect-'em-all" mentality. On the stick front, the NRA and other gun-industry propaganda arms have heavily promoted visions of social collapse and discord to make gun owners feel they have to buy enough weapons to start their own personal army in self-defense.
Most gun owners don't commit violent crimes, of course. But it's difficult to deny that this culture of heightened emotions and power fantasies is a huge factor in producing so many mass shootings. The gun industry's message that an arsenal of weapons makes you manly and powerful falls on the ears of unstable people every single day. Whether their motivations are rooted in domestic violence, political terrorism or just a desire to cause chaos, one thing mass shooters have in common is that they're plugged into gun industry marketing that appeals to that desire to dominate.
That's why any attempt to discuss putting even the smallest, most commonsensical restrictions on guns turns into a bunch of right-wing dudes squeeing about how the liberals are coming to taking their guns. This isn't a discussion being held on the plane of rationality, but is a psychological drama about these men's fears of emasculation, represented in an unsubtle way over their attachment to guns and their fear that liberals, stereotyped as effeminate in their imagination, are coming to steal the guns away.
What is particularly frustrating about all this is that, even though toxic masculinity is clearly the problem here, you have a bunch of conservatives running around and pushing toxic masculinity as the solution, as if all we need to end violence and terrorism is a bunch of silly posturing about who is the biggest man of all the menfolk out there.
Trump leads the pack on this, posturing about how we need "toughness," which he appears to define as a willingness to tweet ignorant, belligerent nonsense. And, of course, you have the chorus of conservatives who imbue their tokens of toxic masculinity—guns—with near-magical powers to somehow stop the violence.
"Under Florida law, guns can’t be carried into bars," John Hinderaker of Powerline tried to argue, in response to the Orlando shooting. "So Pulse was a gun-free zone. That is one legal change that should be made."
The idea that a bunch of drunk people dancing around a nightclub are safer with loaded weapons on their bodies is clearly not coming from a rational place, but from a place of deep insecurity and gender weirdness that treats phallic symbols like they are magical totems. In reality, there was armed security at the club, an off-duty police officer who did engage Mateen, but failed to take him down. And there were lots of people who had guns in their cars at the Las Vegas shooting, but were helpless as Paddock rained bullets from above on concert-goers.
Our country is saturated in guns, and yet the mythical "good guy with a gun" who is supposed to stop these mass shootings has yet to actually be produced. That is because the good guy with a gun is a myth, propped up to justify toxic masculinity's obsession with guns, and nothing more.
The relentless drumbeat of mass shootings lays bare what damage that this kind of dominance-oriented masculinity does to our society, especially now that an overcompensating bully who is completely immersed in the discourse of toxic masculinity is the president. It's a stark reminder of why we, as a country, need to get past the politics of tough guy posturing and move towards a more thoughtful, inclusive society. One with more dancing and less waving guns around while talking about what a manly man you imagine yourself to be.