men rights red pill

11/17

mirror? whataboutism?

redumbdent? see alt right, gamergate, troll ~ PC

gateway drug to alt rt?

see mass shooter

see violence

see bully

see domestic violence as precursor to mass shootings

see incel

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.”

“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

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This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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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...

OMG

no lnx many

https://www.vox.com/scotus/23841718/edgelord-federal-judiciary-james-ho-fifth-circuit-abortion-guns

The edgelord of the federal judiciary

Imagine a Breitbart comments forum come to life and given immense power over innocent people. That’s Judge James Ho.

By Ian Millhiser Aug 26, 2023,

James Ho sits on a panel speaking as video of him is projected on a screen behind him at the Federalist Society’s 2022 National Lawyers Convention in Washington, DC.

Trump Judge James Ho speaks at a 2022 event hosted by the Federalist Society. Shuran Huang/Washington Post via Getty Images]

Ian Millhiser is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he focuses on the Supreme Court, the Constitution, and the decline of liberal democracy in the United States. He received a JD from Duke University and is the author of two books on the Supreme Court.

If you could breathe life into 4chan, the dark corner of the Internet where shitposters, edgelords, Groypers, and trolls of all kinds thrive, and then appoint this new lifeform to the federal bench, you would have created Judge James Ho.

Ho, appointed by former president Donald Trump in 2018 to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, recently argued that anti-abortion doctors may seek a court order banning a commonly prescribed abortion medication, because “doctors delight in working with their unborn patients — and experience an aesthetic injury when they are aborted.”

He’s written that a federal law prohibiting gun possession by people that a court has determined to be a “credible threat to the physical safety of [their] intimate partner” is unconstitutional. Among other things, Ho claimed that this law “should give us pause” because women getting a divorce sometimes seek such court orders as “a tactical leverage device” in their divorce proceedings.

Ho’s very first opinion as a judge, a dissenting opinion in a case he did not even hear, claimed that all laws limiting the amount that wealthy donors may give to political campaigns are unconstitutional.Under Ho’s understanding of the Constitution, nothing prevents Harlan Crow, the billionaire Republican donor famous for lavishing gifts on Justice Clarence Thomas, from funding an entire presidential campaign.

Also, speaking of Harlan Crow, Ho held his official ceremony swearing him in as a federal judge in Crow’s personal library.

Ho’s work, in other words, is often indistinguishable from that of a professional troll. He revels in taking deliberately provocative positions. He often joins a fairly extreme opinion written by a colleague, and then writes separately to take an even more extreme position. His judicial opinions mingle Fox News talking points, men’s rights activism, Federalist Society fantasies, and discredited legal doctrines that are now taught to law students to warn them of the Supreme Court’s worst mistakes.

Ho seems to never miss an opportunity to weigh in on a political controversy. When he’s not writing concurring opinions arguing that the Supreme Court should bring back the Lochner era, an age when conservative justices imposed their own laissez-faire ideology on the rest of the nation, he can often be found lecturing law schools on the evils of “cancel culture.”

(That said, Ho did not respond to a request to be interviewed for this piece.)

When I speak to other judges, I often hear them use a derisive word to describe this kind of behavior: “auditioning.” It’s an increasingly common practice among Republican judges itching for a promotion.

In his final years as a lower court judge, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote several opinions laying out his plans to shift power from federal agencies to the judiciary — a high-priority issue for the Federalist Society, which played a key role in picking Trump’s judges and justices. These opinions reportedly “proved decisive” in the Trump White House’s decision to give Gorsuch a big promotion.

Similarly, in his final year as a lower court judge, Justice Brett Kavanaugh — who previously had a thin record on abortion — went out of his way to convey both in a published opinion and in a speech to a conservative think tank that he opposed Roe v. Wade. Trump picked Kavanaugh for the next seat to open up on the Supreme Court.

The most alarming thing about Judge Ho, in other words, isn’t his penchant for trolling. It is the very real possibility that he will be rewarded for it. No judge in America has auditioned harder for a Supreme Court appointment in a Republican administration. And, if the next president is Donald Trump, Trump has already shown that he prefers judges who go out of their way to show their loyalty to Republican causes.

What does Jim Ho’s version of the Constitution look like?

Lochner v. New York (1905) is one of a handful of decisions that legal scholars refer to as the “anti-canon” — a list of cases taught to law students as examples of how judges must never, ever behave. The list also includes the pro-slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and the segregationist decision in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896).

Ho wants to bring back Lochner.

Lochner stuck down a New York state law that limited, to 60 hours a week, the amount of time worked by bakery workers. At the time, these workers were typically paid by the day or by the week, so the law had prevented these workers from being forced to work extraordinarily long shifts for no extra pay.

Other cases applying Lochner’s reasoning struck down minimum wage laws and stripped workers of their right to unionize.

Lochner was grounded in what it described as the “right of the individual to ... enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate or necessary for the support of himself and his family.” The idea was that, if a worker entered into a contract to work long hours for little pay, then the law could not alter this contract — even if the contract was itself the product of exploitation or desperation.

Lochner, in other words, not only stripped the government of much of its power to protect workers, it did so on the dubious ground that, by insisting that workers adhere to whatever exploitative employment contracts their bosses imposed upon them, the Court was actually defending the rights of those workers. The Court ultimately abandoned Lochner in West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937).

Ho picked an inauspicious case, Golden Glow Tanning Salon v. City of Columbus, to offer his love letter to Lochner. In it, a Mississippi tanning salon claimed that Covid era lockdowns violated the salon owner’s “right to work,” a common argument made by modern day libertarians who seek to revive Lochner. (A “right to work” is synonymous with Lochner’s so-called right to “enter into those contracts in relation to labor which may seem to him appropriate.”)

Though all three judges who heard Golden Glow agreed that the Supreme Court’s decisions repudiating Lochnerism prevented them from ruling in the tanning salon’s favor, Ho wrote a brief concurring opinion that relied heavily on scholarship by right-wing lawyers arguing that Lochner should be revived. He suggested that the anti-worker right recognized in Lochner has a “better historical grounding than more recent claims of right that have found judicial favor.” And he urged the Supreme Court to take up a pending case seeking to revive Lochner (the justices declined to do so).

Ho’s passion for the sorts of economic “rights” favored by Gilded Age robber barons is matched by his disdain for abortion. He wrote about the “moral tragedy of abortion” in one of his judicial opinions. And he’s urged his Fifth Circuit — which is already the most right-wing federal appeals court in the country, and is typically hostile towards reproductive freedom — to be even more aggressive in quashing abortion rights.

Just last week, for example, a three-judge panel that includes Ho attempted to ban the drug mifepristone, which is used in more than half of all US abortions. That decision will have no effect, because the Supreme Court preemptively blocked it last April — a pretty clear sign that even this very conservative Supreme Court thinks that the legal arguments against mifepristone are weak.

But Ho didn’t just join this attempt to ban the drug, in a case called Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA,he wrote a separate opinion arguing that his colleagues were insufficiently hostile to abortion rights.

Technically, the Fifth Circuit’s majority opinion in Alliance did not purport to ban mifepristone outright, it merely ordered the FDA to reinstate restrictions on the drug that the agency abandoned in 2016. As a practical matter, this order would prevent the drug from being marketed in the United States for at least a few months, because it would take a long time for government regulators and the drug maker to comply with the pre-2016 rules. But Ho would have gone even further, ordering the FDA to rescind its decision to approve the medication way back in 2000.

There are so many errors in Ho’s legal reasoning that it would be tedious to list them all here. One of them is that the statute of limitations to challenge an FDA approval of a drug is six years. While there are legitimate reasons that time period can sometimes be extended, Ho can’t rescue a lawsuit that was filed more than two decades after mifepristone’s approval.

On guns, Ho joined the Fifth Circuit’s decision in United States v. Rahimi (2023), a decision the Supreme Court is likely to reverse in its upcoming term, holding that people who violently abuse their romantic partners or their partner’s child have a Second Amendment right to own a gun — even after a court proceeding determines that the abuser is “a credible threat to the physical safety of such intimate partner or child.”

Rahimi is another case where Ho joined an alarming decision written by one of his colleagues, and then wrote separately to argue for an even more extreme position.

Ho argues that one reason his court should be skeptical of a law seeking to disarm people subject to domestic violence restraining orders is that women who are not victims of abuse allegedly obtain these orders to “secure [favorable] rulings on critical issues such as [marital and child] support, exclusion from marital residence and property disposition.”

As evidence that this is a real problem that actually exists, Ho cites a handful of court decisions — including a 1993 decision by a court in New Jersey that invalidated a restraining order because of a lack of evidence that the man subjected to it was violent, and a 2005 incident where comedian David Letterman was briefly subject to a restraining order before a court tossed that order out.

The fact that Ho had to rely on decades-old cases in faraway jurisdictions to show that judges sometimes issue domestic violence restraining orders for invalid reasons is a sign that, maybe, this isn’t as big of a problem as Ho makes it out to be. Nevertheless, Ho would potentially arm hundreds of men who have murderous intentions in order to save someone like Letterman from having to go without a firearm for a couple of weeks.

Ho could be the future of the federal judiciary

Ho’s penchant for tacking to the right of his already quite reactionary colleagues marks him as an outlier, even within a conservative federal judiciary. But he’s hardly an extreme outlier, especially on the far-right Fifth Circuit.

In Collins v. Mnuchin (2019), for example, Ho signed onto an opinion by Judge Don Willett that threatened to invalidate every single action taken by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which was created in 2008 to stabilize the US housing market during a historic recession. Had Willett’s approach prevailed in the Supreme Court, it could have potentially collapsed the US housing market and triggered a global economic depression (the Supreme Court voted 8-1 against Willett’s approach).

Notably, however, Ho was one of a total of seven judges who signed onto Willett’s attempt to burn down more than a dozen years of work by a federal agency. There is no shortage of judicial arsonists on the Fifth Circuit.

Similarly, the Supreme Court will hear several cases in its upcoming term in which it is likely to reverse similarly aggressive decisions by the Fifth Circuit. Those most likely include the Alliance case about mifepristone, as well as the Rahimi guns case, and two decisions declaring the entire the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional and gutting the federal government’s power to enforce securities law.

The leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination are already signaling that they want to pick justices who are well to the right of the three already very conservative justices Trump placed on the Supreme Court. In his infamous speech before the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Trump said that he is “not happy with the Supreme Court” because they supposedly “love to rule against me.” (When Trump was president, the Court often manipulated its own procedures to rule in Trump’s favor, but the Court rejected his bid to overturn the 2020 election.)

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis attacked Trump’s justices in June, claiming that “none of those three are at the same level of Justices Thomas and Justice Alito,” two justices who fairly consistently vote like Fifth Circuit judges.

Ho, meanwhile, is auditioning harder than anyone in the judiciary to catch Trump or DeSantis’s eye. And, even if the next Republican president decides to pick someone less flamboyant for the high court, they will have no shortage of candidates who are eager to light decades' worth of settled law — along with entire federal agencies — on fire.

an 1 23

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 MAGA movement — including incels. Washington, D.C.-based journalist Natalia Antonova, in an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on January 5, lays out some reasons why Putin is so appealing to anti-feminist American incels.

The anti-feminist movement, which calls itself “the manosphere” online, contains a variety of rival factions. And those factions really hate one another. The PUAs (pick-up artists) favor an in-your-face form of patriarchy and believe that men should totally dominate women sexually, and they have a very low opinion of MGTOWs in the “manosphere.” MGTOW stands for Men Going Their Own Way, and MGTOWs are male separatists who have given up on women. As MGTOWs see it, feminism has made relationships a bad deal for men.

The PUA ideology was exemplified by an alt-right website called Return of Kings, which was operated by former PUA proponent Roosh Valizadeh. Since undergoing a religious conversion, Valizadeh has discontinued Return of Kings and disavowed the PUA beliefs he once championed. When Return of Kings was still operating, Valizadeh often expressed his contempt for MGTOWs. Valizadeh viewed MGTOWs as quitters and defeatists and argued that their problem was that they had no “game.”

But as much animosity as there is between PUAs and MGTOWs, they have a mutual disdain for incels — who are extreme even by the standards of other “manosphere” factions. PUAs and MGTOWs are fond of saying that they have “taken the red pill”; when incels say that they have “taken the black pill,” that’s their way of setting themselves apart from PUAs and MGTOWs and taking their misogyny to a whole other level of bitterness.

Incel stands for “involuntarily celibate.” As incels see it, celibacy has been forced upon them by feminism. And they are extremely bitter about it.

Putin is far from an incel, and he is admired by many PUAs. But as the Ukraine-born Antonova emphasizes, the Russian president really resonates with incels.

“Although he is losing his genocidal war against Ukraine and experiencing increasing economic turmoil at home, Russian President Vladimir Putin has one thing going for him: The genocidal dictator has children, palaces, and many rumored mistresses — the power-hungry alpha male’s dream,” Antonova explains. “Why, then, is he so admired by prominent ‘incels’ — i.e., men who refer to themselves as ‘involuntarily celibate,’ mostly because they are transparent misogynists who are rightfully spurned by women?”

Antonova adds, “The Book of Matthew warns of false prophets: ‘You will know them by their fruits.’ Today, you will also know them by their fans. And in western society, where nobody is really forced to like Putin, some of his most ardent fans are deeply troubled people.”

One “deeply troubled” individual Antonova discusses in her article is white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, who is both a self-described “incel” and a Putin admirer. Fuentes is openly fascist in his views, declaring that democracy needs to be abolished in the U.S. And he has called for the U.S. to have a government similar to the Taliban’s regime in Afghanistan, but with a severe form of Catholicism rather than radical Islam and Shariah law.

Antonova describes Fuentes as “one of the most prominent and most troubled of Putin’s western boosters,” noting that he “doesn’t hold back on his admiration for Putin’s war in Ukraine, and considers (Putin) to be a beacon of hope for the white race.”

“Earlier this year, before he was fanning the flames of Kanye ‘I like Hitler’ West’s anti-Semitic meltdown, Fuentes made comments about sex with women that eerily echo the ideology of the Kremlin,” Antonova observes. “Fuentes also refers to himself as an incel, although he also states that he deliberately stays away from women, because he is heterosexual. One might think this makes him voluntarily celibate, but Fuentes explains: ‘The only really straight heterosexual position is actually ‘incel’…. What’s gayer than being, ‘I like cuddles, I need kisses?’”

Antonova continues, “It’s not that Fuentes is opposed to sex with women per se. He is opposed to asking for affection. Incels frequently complain that, as women have been given more choice over their personal lives, men must now woo them rather than dragging them off to a cave. Viewing all sexual contact as inherently transactional, incels decry the fact that they don’t have the upper hand in the transaction. Genuine affection doesn’t figure into their calculus, so it makes sense that people like Fuentes refer to sex with women as ‘gay.’ In their language, ‘gay’ = ‘weak.’ And the officially homophobic Russian regime would readily agree.”

According to Antonova, “modern-day Russian fascism” shares the “misogynist” outlook of incels even though Putin is hardly an “incel.”

“Affection can make you vulnerable,” Antonova argues, “and vulnerability is anathema to Putinism, which first rose out of an aggrieved, anti-western revanchism and a feeling of failure that over time turned into seething resentment…. Just like Putin, members of the American far-right, sensing that they are losing the culture wars, have painted themselves as outsiders, misunderstood and downright reviled…. Putin is fragile. The best way to disband his cult among the American right is to prove it for all to see by supporting his unequivocal defeat in Ukraine.”

aha/hhmn: essence of conspir is that there is ONE evil cause of all our problems, a secret group with a plan/agenda to enslave the world, and mark is invited in/to the expose;

since the Jews hollywood CA coastal elite control media Tech titans except elon] , the truth has been hidden from us, so they admit there's an Earth2, they just claim THEIRS is real.

soc med allows wackos to find each other, bolster and remix hybridize [and monetized click and Old Scool direct mail grift] algo delivers endless carefully incremental higher doses --> radicalized.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/06/soverign-citizen/

yikes militia have guns, xians want Armageddon

remix?

no lnx

Sovereign-citizen members bolster their audiences by adding QAnon beliefs to their mix

Image via Screengrab.

David Neiwert and Daily Kos June 26, 2022

The “sovereign citizen” movement—comprising scam artists and their gullible followers who claim that, by filling reams of documents full of pseudo-legal babble, ordinary citizens can declare themselves free of government rule at any level, thus becoming the law unto themselves—seems to have figured out how, after a couple of decades of mostly lurking on the fringes of the extreme right, to expand its reach and revive (if not entirely rebrand) itself: Go full QAnon.

Last weekend, onetime Pennsylvania Republican candidate Bobby Lawrence boasted that he and his “American State Nationals” operation filled a room in Keene, Texas, with 650 people who paid $120 each to take their special “training”—which teaches that birth certificates are satanic documents that enslave people by subsuming them under a corporation, but they can free themselves by filing their prescribed “redemption” documents. They also ardently promote Qanon conspiracy theories, including the claim that John F. Kennedy Jr. was secretly Trump’s real vice president.

The Anti-Defamation League has been warning about this coalescence since January, with Lawrence and his cohort David Straight, who have been holding these seminars around the country and, thanks to the fresh appeal of absorbing QAnon beliefs into the similarly conspiracy-fueled worldview of sovereign citizens, have increasingly been packing them in.

As their backgrounder explained:

Lawrence teaches sovereignty with a QAnon bent, urging his followers to become “American State Nationals” before Trump is reinstated as president. “American State National” is one of many terms that sovereign citizens use to distinguish themselves from citizens under the jurisdiction of the illegitimate, de facto government. “Trump is working on the ‘Fall of the Cabal’ which will allow our Constitutional Republic to Rise again, however the newly partially restored Constitutional Republic will need We The People of restored status via ‘The Great Awakening’ to fill and function in the newly partially restored Constitutional Republic,” Lawrence posted toTelegram in October 2021. “This will only be accomplished via We The People reclaiming our Birthrightby becoming American State Nationals... As the number of American State Nationals and one of the People increases, so will the Function of the [sic] our Constitutional Republic. It will start at theabsolute local level(you and your neighbors) and then grow and grow and grow.”

Sovereign-citizen and QAnon beliefs meld together almost seamlessly, as the ADL explains, because their fundamental worldviews involving a massive global cabal nefariously conspiring to enslave mankind are so similar. The sovereign movement’s belief that the current U.S. government is illegitimate serves to support their view of the Biden presidency as fraudulent, as well as the means for “freeing” themselves from such “tyranny.”

Lawrence primarily promotes a version of sovereign-citizen beliefs called “Redemption Theory,” which deals with the core concept that everyone who is an American citizen is designated a “strawman” corporate entity at birth, making them subsidiary properties of America Inc. “Redemption” is the process by which they split the strawman from the flesh-and-blood human, and its purpose is two-fold. As the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explains:

Once separated from the corporate shell, the newly freed man is now outside of the jurisdiction of all admiralty laws. [Arrrrh me hearties] More importantly, by filing a series of complex, legal-sounding documents, the sovereign can tap into that secret Treasury account for his own purposes. Over the last 30 years, there have been hundreds of sovereign promoters packaging different combinations of forms and paperwork, attempting to perfect the process.While no one has ever succeeded, of course, they know with the religious certainty of a true cult believer that they’re close. All it will take is the right combination of words, say the promoters of the redemption scam.

Lawrence regularly regales his audiences with his version of the “redemption” scam, but with a powerful QAnon flavor. At an April 21 “Patriots Arise” event in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania—where he shared the stage with Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano—Lawrence launched to into a rant that manifested that commingling two conspiracist universes produces twice the crackpottery.

He explained how modern births and the birth-certificate process are actually satanic rituals:

Fred read a quote from [Woodrow Wilson adviser] Edward Mandell House where they talk about this construct, where they’regonna make slaves of us all, through a system of pledging, where we pledge our children as surety through something called a birth certificate, and a satanic ritual that takes place. …

So I’m gonna walk you through a satanic ritual that takes place, and it started with the birth certificate, which was actually chartered under the Department of Transportation. And everything is Admiralty. We all live under the water, and what is law, and where does law come from? Where does the word “law” come from? Land, air, and water. And where the founders of this nation thought about what law was, was the Bible, the Geneva Bible, the King James Version 1611 edition, where we got the word law from.And land, air, and water was in Genesis Chapter 1, verse 24 through 28, “and God created the heaven and the earth.” And God giveth man dominion over the earth, and God giveth man dominion over the land, and all the creatures that walk and creepeth. And God giveth man dominion over the air, and all the birds that fly, and God giveth man dominion over the water, and all the fish that swimmeth. And this is law.

Lawrence then repeated stock sovereign-citizen beliefs (all every bit as risibly false as his etymology for the word “law”) that there are three tiers of law: Canon law, common law, and Admiralty law, each reflecting rule over air, land, and water respectively. Then he went on:

So how do they get you to pledge your child, and how did our parents and our grandparents pledge us as property[slavery?] , as surety, in our personification, all capital names? It was through an evil, satanic ritual called the birth of a child.

You see, a mother goes into a foundling center, and she goes to see the doc—tor; a tor is a bill of lading when a ship arrives at the dock—and the mother puts her feet up on the stirrups and the mother’s waterbreaks, and the child comes out of the water through the birth canal, like you berth a ship, into the air, into the hands of the dock—tor. And then, historically speaking, a satanic ritual would take place—a child was smacked on the butt, turned upside down, cried out in fear and pain. And then before the child could put their feet on the land and take the breath of God as a free creation of God, a legal bond document came out. It’s on bond paper because it’s a banking instrument, it’s a surety bond.

And the child’s soul was taken on the back of that document. It was called the soul print. And then the umbilical cord and the afterbirth was thereby dead and abandoned by the mother, because that was part of your birth, part of your being born. The construct, the evil says that now that is dead, a part of you died and now you are a dead vessel, you are an all-capital legal fiction. They called you a person. If you look at your driver’s license, if you look at every document that government or any business sends you, it’s in your all-capital name. Your personification. Now the Bible tells us not to take on the persona, not to take on the person.

Lawrence also harkened to the stock radicalization belief in “red-pilling”: “We are living in Babylon right now,” he said. “It’s a corporate construct. It’s a Matrix. Keanu Reeves has said publicly that The Matrix is a documentary of how we are living our lives. Your money’s not real, you don’t own anything.”

And near the end, he wrapped it all up with a classic QAnon-style claim that Donald Trump is secretly One Of Them:

Yes, President Trump has done many things for us. And I won’t go into a lot of them, because quite frankly a lot of folks aren’t ready for it. And it’s hard to verify. But Donald Trump has told you all, if you go back to his speeches, he’s told you that when he comes back, he’s gonna be little letters, lower case. Look to his speech in 2021 at CPAC in Texas. He said when we go back to the White House this time it’s going to be in little letters. He told you at another rally that people are sovereign. He told you at another rally that you’re all millionaires. He told you in another rally that you’re the elite. And they’re the scoundrels. He told you at another rally that the Bar Association is corrupt. He tells you on and on—he might talk for two hours, but only four sentences are for those who are awake. And there’s a huge difference between being woke and awake, is it not?

Lawrence has formed close associations with leading QAnon influencers such as Ann Vandersteel, Allen and Francine Fosdick, the Pennsylvania-based hosts of the QAnon show Up Front in the Prophetic, and David Straight.

Vandersteel posted proudly announced onGab that she was “officially an American State National,” meaning she no longer was beholden to the U.S. government. She touted the supposed benefits of becoming an “American state national,” such as freedom from paying federal taxes to getting to “vote as a delegate, which has the power of four votes,” in an appearance on “The Conservative Daily Podcast,” hosted by Joe Oltmann and Max McGuire.

She said she had been introduced to these ideas by Lawrence, who ran for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania in 2018.Vandersteel indicated that Lawrence was radicalized afterward through his contacts with David Straight, a sovereign citizen activist who also promoted QAnon theories. Vandersteel claimed that Straight was a “commissioner on President Trump’s child sex-trafficking commission.”

ADL analyst Mark Pitcavage explained Lawrence’s rant on Twitter, noting that “redemption theory” originated with a sovereign-citizen guru named Roger Elvick back in 1999, and it became widespread within the movement.

“Basic redemption theory is something like this: In 1933, the US went off the gold standard and could therefore no longer pay its debts to the international bankers. To get around this, the government turned humans into collateral by converting birth certificates into stock,” he wrote. “They did this in part by creating fictional duplicates of every person (dubbed ‘strawmen’). You can tell when a document refers to the straw man instead of the flesh and blood person because the name will be in all caps, not upper and lower case.”

He also noted that much of the talk is devoted to explaining the sovereign-citizen belief that the conspiracy which infiltrated and subverted and replaced the original, legitimate government with a de facto tyrannical government had done so by replacing constitutional law with inferior “maritime” or “admiralty” law.

“Finally,” he noted, “the Satanic references thrown in there are derived from QAnon and presumably designed to make these theories more palatable to QAnoners.”

Given the size of Lawrence’s audiences now, and the regularity and breadth of “American State Nationalist” training sessions, the ADL’s January warning—“Given the flexibility of the sovereign citizen movement and its pseudo-legal tactics,it is quite possible that increasing numbers of QAnon adherents will find sovereign citizen ideas attractive in the future”—seems more than prescient. It may, in fact, prove to be understated.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/mens-rights-activists-roy-den-hollander-and-marc-angelucci-are-dead-and-the-movement-is-freaking-out

Members of the so-called “men’s rights” movement want to get one thing straight:while a prominent member allegedly killed a judge’s son, seriously wounded her husband, and was implicated in the killing of another activist, it should not reflect badly on their community.

In fact, the most deranged strand of the insular crowd’s alternately panicked and dismissive reaction to a bizarre internal beef spilling out into spectacular murders was the idea that all the shootings were a conspiracy to make men’s rights activists look bad.

Roy Den Hollander, 72, is accused of targeting the family of a judge who was presiding over one of his many “anti-feminist” legal crusades. Den Hollander, who raged against U.S. District Judge Esther Salas in online screeds, allegedly visited Salas’ house Sunday evening, fatally shooting her son and leaving her husband in critical condition.

Den Hollander, who was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, is also being eyed in the recent killing of Marc Angelucci, a rival men’s rights crusader and vice-president of the group National Coalition for Men in California. As The Daily Beast first reported, Den Hollander was placed in the state at the time of Angelucci’s death, with the FBI later confirming he had been linked to the slaying.

The slew of shootings are the latest in a pattern of violence to emerge from the “manosphere,” a sprawling misogynist movement,and it would be a stretch to expect much actual soul-searching from Den Hollander’s fellow travelers. Still, conversations with observers of the misogynist community—and a trawl of its forums, videos, and publications—painted a picture of a subculture in turmoil....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/matrix-co-creator-calls-out-elon-musk-and-ivanka-trump-for-urging-people-to-swallow-the-red-pill/

no lnx twt

'Matrix’ co-creator calls out Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump for urging people to swallow the ‘red pill

Written by Alex Henderson May 18, 2020

Although the term “the red pill” has come to be identified with far-right anti-feminist websites such as Return of Kings, that’s not where it originated: the expression made its debut in sisters Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s first of three “Matrix” films. Tesla CEOElon Musk recently used the expression in a tweet that White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump forwarded — and Lilly Wachowski is calling them out for it.

In the first “Matrix” film, taking “the red pill” means accepting a dystopian world as it really is. But when the alt-right adopted the term, they give it a far-right, socially conservative anti-feminist connotation — one in which someone who “takes the red pill” has had an alt-right awakening and rejects liberal or progressive ideology.

On Sunday, May 17, Musk tweeted, “Take the red pill.” And Ivanka Trump, upon seeing Musk’s tweet, responded, “taken!” Lilly Wachowski, in response to their tweets, posted, “Fuck both of you.” In a separate tweet, Musk (who has 34 million followers on Twitter), described “the red pill” as “one of my fav Matrix memes.”

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

Take the red pill ??

460K

10:44 AM - May 17, 2020

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Ivanka Trump

Taken! https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1262076474565242880 …

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

Take the red pill ??

Lilly Wachowski

@lilly_wachowski

Fuck both of you

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12:36 PM - May 17, 2020

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One area of the far-right anti-feminist movement, incels, have come up with their own twisted expression: “the black pill,” which refers to avoiding women altogether and sets itself apart from the “red pill” ideology that Return of Kings promoted before it went on hiatus in 2018. While Return of Kings founder Roosh Valizadeh promoted “PUA” or “pick-up artist” ideology and encouraged domination of women, incels (which is short for “involuntarily celibate”) embrace a different form of misogyny and see “taking the black pill” as avoiding women altogether.

Lilly Wachowski, who has been outspoken on transgender rights, followed up her anti-Musk, anti-Trump tweet with a request for donations to the Brave Space Alliance (an organization that supports transgender rights).

The “Matrix” co-creator wasn’t the only Twitter user who had a negative reaction to Musk’s tweet. Democratic activist Jon Cooper, @joncoopertweets, posted, “Take the red pill and shove it, Elon.”

Lilly Wachowski

@lilly_wachowski

Replying to @IvankaTrump

Fuck both of you

Lilly Wachowski

@lilly_wachowski

Support @BSAllianceChi if you can. https://www.bravespacealliance.org/donate

Donate — Brave Space Alliance

bravespacealliance.org

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Elon Musk

@elonmusk

Take the red pill

Jon Cooper ????

@joncoopertweets

Take the red pill and shove it, Elon.

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https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Black%20Pill

see 4 chan, pepe, clown

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/involuntary-celibates-are-an-emerging-domestic-terrorism-threat-as-texas-warns-of-an-incel-rebellion

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.

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.

aha based on brazil fail tip pt: // ecosystem health and indig cult heath/ languages;indig and native Am ppl is EJ intensified; colonialism; they are the poorest, least educated but/and thus pay largest price in terms of toxic load; hit 1st and worst by AGW, but had the least to do with causing and the MOST to do with PROTECTING (defenders killed at high rates eg berta C]. killed at high rates b/c the CAN be: racism plus greed: those ppl do not know the true value of assets; they are block progress and prosperity. who will miss a murdered defender? if police on take and courts corrupt, no justice for them, and no incentive to stop killing them.[NB missing native women around man camps, a throwback to wild west gold rush? toxic masculinity, low density of women].

Black Pill

A catastrophic prophecy or spiritless prophesying for the future that is not necessarily grounded in reality. A red pill gone hopelessly bleak.

John had swallowed too many red pills over the last few sleepless nights and tried to black pill me that the race war would be happening any day now.

Because of a bad breakup, Steven black pilled himself into believing that all women would cheat on him no matter what. A month later, he unexpectedly swallowed a white pill when he came and his new girlfriend kept sucking, proving the existence of a divine spirit and a glorious future for mankind.

#black pill #black-pilled #black pilled

thom h

an 619

People are asking why the shooter in Virginia Beach used a gun to settle his workplace score. The answer is probably pretty simple.

When a man has a gun, he literally holds the power of life and death in his hand. That kind of power is extraordinarily seductive.

With a gun in his hand, a man can look around a room, a building, or a public area and specifically identify who will instantaneously die and whom he will allow to live. It’s a power that traditionally has only been held by doctors, priests, police and soldiers.

The power over life and death is greater and more intoxicating than any other power; it’s one of the reasons why some men are specifically drawn to these professions and historically have tried to regulate them to be male-only.

If you are not male and have never carried a gun in public, it’s only an imaginary experiment, but science shows that simply handling a gun alters men’s levels of testosterone and measurably increases their aggressive behavior.

This is largely a male problem because men commit 85.3 percent of all homicides and 97 percent of all homicides where the shooter and victim don’t know each other. In the case of school and workplace shootings, the shooters are also more than 97 percent male.

As a result of this male aggression provoked in part by handling guns, in America guns are the second leading cause of death (just behind car crashes) among children between 1 and 19 years old.

We honor our soldiers who are willing to face gunfire; they can even board airplanes before anybody else, and TV commentators reflexively say, “Thank you for your service.” We honor our cops for their willingness to face gunfire; when one dies, the funeral typically is a major, citywide event.

Yet more children die from firearms in the United States every year than all the police and American military deaths worldwide combined. No gate attendant, though, is saying to airplane passengers, “Children under 19 may board first because we thank you for your sacrifice of dying in your homes and schools to give men thrills and keep the gun industry profits high.”

This goes way beyond the joke of the Small Penis Gun Club or its Facebook site. Men, it turns out, are actually hardwired by evolution and biology to react to having power over others with a boost in testosterone and an increase in aggression.

A 2006 study published in Psychological Science by Klinesmith, Kasser and McAndrew found that men who simply handled a gun were significantly more likely to give other men a higher dose of hot sauce (a commonly used research measure of aggression) right after handling the gun than were men who handled a child’s toy.

For men who feel that they’ve lost control of their lives, or who feel dismissed or disrespected by others, this is pure catnip.

Firing a gun, in addition to raising testosterone levels like simply handling one does, actually produces a feeling similar to intoxication. As UCLA Law professor Adam Winkler points out, shooting guns triggers higher levels of adrenaline and endorphins, producing a high like riding a roller coaster.

In this regard, guns can be thought of as a drug—an intoxicating, mind-altering, power-conferring drug that leads to aggression and, in the United States, to around 40,000 deaths a year.

Driving a car at high speed can produce a “high” similar to shooting a gun, and large, powerful cars can cause testosterone levels to increase. We already figured out how to deal with this.

In 1920 you could buy and drive a car without a driver’s license in most states. We figured out the downsides of such a libertarian policy, and regulated cars; the result was a rapid reduction in deaths and morbidity.

If, to define a chain of ownership and thus responsibility, a car must be registered with the state annually from the time it’s manufactured to the time it’s destroyed, why not the same for a gun?

If, to make sure the people controlling 2,000 pounds of steel and glass flying down the freeway at 65 mph know what they’re doing, we require a driver’s license—acquired by proving both knowledge and competence—why not the same for a gun owner/user?

If a driver must carry liability insurance because his car could kill somebody, why not a gun owner? Why is it that if the Newtown or Parkland kids had been killed by a drunk or even malicious driver, their survivors would have gotten a million bucks each from Geico, but the families of kids killed with guns don’t?

Required liability insurance, by the way, is the most Republican/conservative of all gun control measures; it’s a “free market solution.”

Just as no insurance company will cheaply write insurance for a driver with a few DWIs, so, too, would they restrict people with domestic violence charges, etc. No government involvement necessary for this one, other than the simple requirement to have the policy so long as one owns a gun.

There are many reasonable ways to reduce gun violence in the United States without outlawing guns. It’s time we started a real conversation about how to enact them.

gateway drug to alt rt?

https://www.splcenter.org/20180419/mcinnes-molyneux-and-4chan-investigating-pathways-alt-right

no lnx grafs see alt rt troll

In this article

What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?

"Stepping stones" and "in-betweeners"

Race realism

Chan culture

"Lolbertarians" and Neoreactionaries

YouTube personalities

"The JQ"

What brings someone into the alt-right ecosystem?

The question was posed in two threads posted during the last week of March on the white nationalist forum The Right Stuff (TRS), leading 74 individual users to describe their radicalization narratives.

Respondents recount a transformation that takes place almost entirely online. Led either by their own curiosity or an algorithm, the content they consumed became increasingly extreme, fostering their radicalization and guiding them eventually to TRS. Their responses reveal a pipeline between the alt-lite and racist “alt-right,” with many users explaining that alt-lite figures like Gavin McInnes were the first to introduce them to hardcore, veteran white nationalists.

The two threads, titled “WHAT BROUGHT YOU INTO THE MOVEMENT?” and “Path here beginning from Gavin,” asked posters to reflect on their own “red pill” narratives and provide tips for converting others. “Here’s the challenge,” a user identified as The Somalisher wrote. “Create a list of succession from the Alt-Light to us. I have friends who like Gavin…But I can’t exactly throw [Andrew] Anglin at them.”

The user continued, “It sometimes requires softer steps to ‘radical’ perspectives.”

The two threads refer specifically to bringing people into the fold of TRS and the Daily Stormer, which together serve as the core of neo-Nazism online. TRS, the brainchild ofMike “Enoch” Peinovich, started as a political blog in 2012 and has since transformed into one of the largest alt-right media platforms. It hosts a lively message board called the 504um and dozens of podcasts, the most popular of which are “The Daily Shoah” and news-oriented “Fash the Nation.” The Daily Stormer operates in the same orbit, consciously using humor to indoctrinate its readers.

Together, the two sites have become the preeminent propaganda machines for the alt-right. They’re also some of the most effective spaces for organizing real-world, local groups, called “book clubs” by the Stormer and “pool parties” on TRS.

The alt-right is a motley movement, drawing in people from a number of venues and subcultures. The 107 individuals and platforms mentioned by posters in the TRS threads have been labeled according to their ideology, which include alt-right, legacy white nationalist, alt-lite, mainstream, libertarian, skeptic, men’s rights activist, and conspiracy, in addition to a random category for those not easily classified. This heterogeneity is a boon to the movement, creating a number of avenues for individuals of different taste and predilections to fall within its clutches.

Though both the alt-lite and alt-right reject “establishment” conservatism, the former claims to adhere to civic nationalism — a poorly defined catch-all term for those who embrace nativism but shy away from more radical racist rhetoric — while the latter is explicitly white nationalist. Legacy white nationalists include those like Jared Taylor,Patrick Buchanan and Paul Kersey who, although they might be popular within the alt-right, were part of the white nationalist movement before that label emerged.

The number of times each individual or platform was mentioned as an influence was tallied, and those mentioned by three or more posters are listed in the chart below. Disconnected as they might seem, the most cited influences — the “politically incorrect” 4chan board /pol/ and the American Renaissance editor Jared Taylor — hint at two common paths to the alt-right: either through participation in the rampantly racist and misogynistic online trolling culture of 4chan and its offshoots, or through exposure to Taylor’s variety of pseudo-academic “race realism” that couches timeworn racist tropes in the language of science.

Within alt-right spaces like TRS, these two fibers of the movement are woven together — resulting in an ironic, meme-ified version of old-school race science — and embellished with antisemitism.

TRS and the Daily Stormer both argue that, with the right optics and messaging, they can attract a critical mass of followers to the cause and eventually shift what lies within the respectable terms of political debate. The respondents in these threads show how the current media landscape — replete with podcasts, YouTube channels and blogs that contain tempered bits of white nationalist propaganda under the guise of patriotism, “Western chauvinism,” science or hard truths — can aid that agenda, coaxing the “normies” down the path to white nationalism.

Stepping stones" and "in-betweeners"

TRS 504um posters describe their radicalization as a gradual process, with charismatic alt-lite personalities like Gavin McInnes introducing them to ideas they would eventually take to their extreme. McInnes, especially, hides under a guise of irony, freely using racial slurs and making incendiary comments about women, Muslims and African Americans in the name of mocking political correctness.

McInnes, who formed the Proud Boys in 2016, has repeatedly insisted the SPLC-designated hate group is simply a right-wing men’s drinking club in the vein of the Elks Lodge, and has taken pains to distance himself from the alt-right. But even he agrees that there’s overlap between his “Western chauvinist” Proud Boys and self-proclaimed white nationalists: “both sides have in common Western chauvinism, they’re not embarrassed by whiteness or whatever, [and] they don’t believe diversity is the end-all and be-all.”

Responses within the TRS threads show how easy it is to slip from the notion that “the West is the best” into believing that western culture is superior because it’s white. Of the respondents in the sample, roughly 15 percent mentioned McInnes as a step in their path to white nationalism or recommended using his videos and writing to convert others. There are more than a few real-life examples of Proud Boys moving into more extreme groups.

McInnes is loathed by many at TRS for being unwilling to take racial politics head-on and “counter-signaling” them, but he’s still credited with helping to cultivate their own belief in white nationalism. In a thread called “Do We Still Hate Gavin McInnes?” a user calling themselves KarlVonBraun came to his defense, writing “I remember first hearing Gavin trash niggers who do that pole/street dance thing on the subway…Basically he says everything short of calling them worthless niggers. I'd literally never heard anyone be brutally honest about what is uniquely nigger behavior while maintaining decorum, without crossing lines you can't cross. It was totally exhilarating.” Another user wrote, “I guarantee that he is still (without meaning to) funneling people into the Alt-Right.”

McInnes is also responsible for introducing a number of TRS users to Jim Goad and, indeed, for much of the writer and podcaster’s recent resurgence in popularity. Goad got his start as a writer in the 1990s producing his own controversial and acerbic independent magazine and, in 1997, published a book in the same vein. The Redneck Manifesto, which begins with a chapter called “White Niggers Have Feelings, Too,” bemoans liberals’ tendency to look down on poor whites and argues, “Multiculturalism is a country club that excludes white trash.” Goad (much like McInnes) began his career as a sort of small-time countercultural celebrity, but his focus on white persecution now earns him widespread praise within the alt-right.

McInnes has hosted Goad on his shows numerous times and, on a list he created of “required reading” on Western culture, included Redneck Manifesto together with Patrick Buchanan’s The Death of the West and Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America — both writers who are also mentioned as influences by TRS posters. One respondent called Goad’s book “an early redpill on the malicious anti-white agenda of the left.”

Goad takes advantage of the fact that he’s often treated as a serious literary figure, presenting his extremist views on race as simply thoughtful meditations on politically taboo topics or as an attempt to resist political correctness. He’s used his numerous platforms to perpetuate the myth of white slavery and criticized the “corporate globalist left” for making it difficult for the Daily Stormer to maintain a domain. He even hosted Andrew Anglin, the site’s founder, on his podcast, as well as former Ku Klux Klanlawyer Sam Dickson and the Holocaust-denying author Michael Hoffman.

Goad, who is cited six times by TRS members, disparages “Those who blame Jews for everything.” But in the same breath, he repeats their rhetoric, making him into what one poster calls the “missing link” from people like Gavin to the white nationalist TRS. If you’re trying to red pill a friend and “they like Gavin,” NotDonSilvo wrote, “send them his old podcast with Jim and some of his Taki articles or guest appearances in Gavin’s Compound Media [show].”

Besides his podcast, Goad’s main platform is Taki’s Magazine, an extreme right-wing publication with an irreverent tone that promises its “only ideology is to be against the junk culture foisted upon us by Hollywood and the mainstream media.” Along with Goad and McInnes, it publishes authors like John Derbyshire, who was fired from the conservative National Review after he wrote an article for Taki’s about advising his teenage children to “stay out of heavily black neighborhoods.” It described black people as “ferociously hostile to whites” and is now listed in the “greatest hits” section on Taki’s website.

Taki’s contributors overlap with those at the hate site VDARE, including Steve Sailer — cited four times by TRS users — whose writing is largely dedicated to opposing immigration and drawing a false link between race and intelligence.

Both Taki’s Magazine and VDARE are cited by posters of the TRS threads as “good in-betweeners,” and, together, are cited in more than 16 percent of responses. Both websites, the user Cniva wrote, are “good at presenting racism in a ‘we’re just being reasonable/this is what the science says, why are you acting so upset?’ type of way.”

Race realism

Many members of the forum note that McInnes’s online videos were particularly impactful because they introduce viewers to more extreme figures. “[D]ude i got here from Gavin because there was a time about 2-3 years ago when Gavin would take [sic] to people like Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer,” one user posted. In one of his genial interviews with Taylor (who he’s called a “super smart guy”), McInnes allowed the American Renaissance editor to peddle his racist tract “The Color of Crime,” which uses faulty statistical analysis to argue that non-whites are more prone to criminal behavior.

Respondents noted this kind of “race realism” — which relies on pseudoscientific evidence to argue that white people are a superior race — gave them a large push into the white nationalist camp. “If your prospect is an ‘objective’ type,” one forum member offered in a discussion of how to recruit others to their cause, “nothing beats race realism, and I’d say Jared Taylor and Alternative Hypothesis” — a “ human biodiversity” blog that argues race is genetically based — “are the most presentable, accessible, and pertinent in that field.” Another simply wrote, “Once I came across race realism it was over.” Indeed, Taylor is the second-most cited force for bringing people into the TRS/Daily Stormer network, with 20.3 percent of posters mentioning him.

Stefan Molyneux, a YouTube commentator, is also best known for amplifying scientific racism. Among his videos with titles like “Human Biodiversity and Criminality” and “Race, Genetics, and Intelligence,” he argues “skills and abilities have not been distributed evenly by mother nature between various ethnicities,” and multiethnic societies are a “problem” because “the blacks and the Hispanics, they don’t end up acting the same as the white population.” He’s also done a show with Taylor, titled “An Honest Conversation About Race,” that one respondent said they were “able to use” to help their friends and family “open their eyes.”

“These programs I think are the first steps,” they wrote.

The prolific Molyneux has attracted more than 770,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, adding up to more than 230 million views of his videos. He relies largely on charisma, delivering ill-researched and scientifically unsound lectures with a degree of confidence that eases viewers into accepting his arguments.

Molyneux, one TRS poster explained, “remains a great stepping stone between the alt-light and the alt-right.”

“Gavin > Moly > AR [Alt-Right] is common,” another wrote.

The “skeptics” movement — whose adherents claim to challenge beliefs both scientific and spiritual by questioning the evidence and reasoning that underpin them — has also helped channel people into the alt-right by way of “human biodiversity.” Sam Harris has been one of the movement’s most public faces, and four posters on the TRS thread note his influence.

Under the guise of scientific objectivity, Harris has presented deeply flawed data to perpetuate fear of Muslims and to argue that black people are genetically inferior to whites. In a 2017 podcast, for instance, he argued that opposition to Muslim immigrants in European nations was “perfectly rational” because “you are importing, by definition, some percentage, however small, of radicalized people.” He assured viewers, “This is not an expression of xenophobia; this is the implication of statistics.” More recently, he invited Charles Murray on his podcast. Their conversation centered on an idea that lies far outside of scientific consensus: that racial differences in IQ scores are genetically based. Though mainstream behavioral scientists have demonstrated that intelligence is less significantly affected by genetics than environment (demonstrated by research that shows the IQ gap between black and white Americans is closing, and that the average American IQ has risen dramatically since the mid-twentieth century), Harris still dismissed any criticism of Murray’s work as “politically correct moral panic.”

For posters on TRS, Harris’ work blended easily into that of more overtly racist writers like Paul Kersey, whose popular blog, “Stuff Black People Don’t Like,” is reposted on American Renaissance. The site “really gets the noggin joggin and encourages you to search for answers,” one user wrote. Their “biggest stepping stone” was from Harris’ work to Kersey’s blog: “It was there I learned about race realism, IQ, genetics, bell curves, and the economic/political drivers behind the pushing of ‘diversity.’'

Chan culture

While many on the TRS threads describe becoming fans of specific personalities like McInnes and Molyneux, who most often led them to legacy white nationalists like Taylor and Kersey, nearly as many came up through the more amorphous and anarchic spaces of right-wing digital culture that originated with 4chan. The anonymous “meme factory” traffics in humor and transgression, centering on the “politically incorrect” board /pol/ that nurtured the early alt-right and, especially, its misogyny. Nearly 23 percent of respondents said that chan culture helped them land at TRS.

Many of those who were eventually radicalized by 4chan came there relatively innocently. One user said memes led them to 4chan in the mid-2000s, but they eventually found their way to overtly racist /pol/ after Obama was elected for a second term. Others noted they “ironically” looked at /pol/, or they were led there by the more absurdist “random” board, /b/. One wrote that their friend, who they specified was not right-wing, told them to “surf /pol/ for fun.” “Humor is a powerful drug,” explained a poster who came for the political discussions but “stayed for the racist memes.”

Chan culture was male-dominated and heavily misogynistic. The sexism of these spaceseventually led many into the alt-right. According to one poster, “I always hated feminism and female empowerment, despite liking many elements of the left. When I got older and realized the left was only open to feminists or allies i stopped claiming it.”

This extreme anti-feminism gave fuel to various factions of male supremacy, like Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) and MGTOWs (“Men Going Their Own Way”), who profess to forswear women completely, then complain about them constantly on the internet. Then came Gamergate, a harassment campaign against women in gaming that began in 2014. Anonymous harassers targeted women who worked in or commented on the industry for daring to enter a male-dominated space. Abusers used 4chan and other platforms to organize. After choosing their targets, the mob would dox them, send them rape and death threats, distribute fake pornographic images of them and generally stalk and torment them relentlessly.

It was an extremely important moment in the development of the alt-right, when young men from right-wing online spaces came together in a shared campaign against the “politically correct” culture of the left. One poster described the years 2012 to 2014 as a political “void,” but explained that he was brought back into politics — and entered far more extreme spaces — thanks to Gamergate. After 4chan’s founder Christopher Poole banned discussions ofGamergatefrom the site, the campaign’s supporters migrated to the more extreme 8chan.

The episode also helped bring figures like Milo Yiannopoulos to prominence. At the time, he worked for a small tech website and was one of the first journalists to cover the story, eventually leading to his job as an editor at the right-wing outlet Breitbart. More than 12 percent of users note that Yiannopoulos was part of their alt-right transformation, and often list him in tandem with Gamergate (cited by 8.1 percent of posters).

Alongside /pol/, Reddit was another crucial space in the growth of the alt-right — especially the infamous subreddit r/The_Donald, that arose in support of Donald Trump’s presidency. For some who came to the movement around 2015, it was the first place they went. “I’ve been an openly racist nigger hater since 2010, but I just didn’t know where to find content that was explicitly racist until I stumbled onto T_D and was able to find other stuff from there,” a TRS user wrote.

"Lolbertarians" and Neoreactionaries

Libertarianism is a common path to the alt-right.In fact, it was frustration with libertarianism that led Peinovich to create The Right Stuff. He became a libertarian after reading the works of Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand, but — after finding sources on human biodiversity — said he realized that libertarianism wasn’t “going to work for everyone” because different racial groups couldn’t be expected to behavior properly without a state to regulate them. TRS’s Ricky Vaughn — unmasked as Douglass Mackeyon April 3 — described a similar trajectory. The one-time Ron Paul supporter eventually rejected libertarianism because it failed to account for many things that “drive current events” like “race, culture, all those kind of things.” He first grew frustrated with feminism, and then, after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, openly embraced racism.

Six posters mentioned Ron Paul as one of their political starting points, and 16 others mentioned libertarianism more generally. One TRS user said that he was a libertarian until he realized that his fellow believers “were fags for being ‘so principled’ with their open borders bullshit, that they ensured their desired society would never come about,” while another wrote they were a “lolbertarian until I realized only white people actually believe that garbage.” One simply wrote that they followed the “standard libertarian to nazi pipeline.”

AnCaps — or anarcho-capitalists — operate in much the same universe as libertarians, advocating for the eventual elimination of the state. According to one poster, “A couple dudes in my online AnCap circle went full bore with ‘you can't have libertarianism with mud genetics’ arguments. I was like ‘nah, that ain't true, and I'll show it ain't true.’ Then within a couple months I was like ‘yeah, that seems to be true. I think I'll go listen to that [William] Pierce guy” — Pierce authored the race war novel The Turner Diaries and is one of the most influential white supremacists in modern American history — “again but with an open mind, maybe if I actually check his claims I'll find out they're true too.’” He decided that Pierce was right.

The Dark Enlightenment is a political theory detailed by an obscure former academic named Nick Land in an online manifesto posted in 2012. It is an influential force within the alt-right that, like libertarianism, advocates for the recession of state power, though with different aims. Also known as “Neoreaction” and often shortened to “NRx,” adherents believe that capitalism should be accelerated to the point that corporate powers rule society, allowing natural hierarchies to emerge. They firmly believe in human biodiversity and reject democracy and egalitarianism (“it is easier to believe in Leprechauns than to believe in egalitarianism,” a sidebar on their subreddit suggests). In this essentially feudal society, the superior white race will supposedly rule. In other words, it is a rejection of Enlightenment principles. Many of its central ideas are popular within Silicon Valley, and former White House chief strategist Steve Bannonhas reportedly expressed interest in the philosophy.

Four TRS posters cited the philosophy as an influence, with some embracing the manifesto as they moved away from libertarianism. “Many of the ideological seeds that would make me open to Hitlerism started with Dark Enlightenment,” one person wrote.

While the tenets of the Dark Enlightenment and the manifesto were cited in numerous popular blogs and passed between users in anonymous forums like Reddit, the political philosophy received arguably its biggest boost from Millennial Woes, a popular YouTuber who began his broadcasts from his father’s basement in Linlithgow, Scotland, in 2013.

Millennial Woes, whose real name is Colin Robertson, developed his political views as he was struggling to overcome clinical depression (a subject he meditates on in many videos), and his nihilism became intimately wound up in his politics. In a 2013 video titled “Depression in Individuals, and in Society,” Robertson described the negative-feedback loop that affects people with depression as something that can also plague the larger political culture. Depressed people engage in forms of self-sabotage because they are so used to the idea of failure, he explained, but justify this to themselves and others as a sort of journey in self-discovery — a reflection of the idea “that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Modern liberal society, Robertson claimed, was doing the same thing: slowly destroying itself with experiments in feminism and egalitarianism in the name of achieving some kind of enlightenment.

This landed Robertson firmly in the camp of Neoreactionaries and, eventually, the alt-right. “Equality is bullshit. Hierarchy is essential. The races are different. The sexes are different,” the description of a 2016 Millennial Woes video titled “We Are the Alt-right” read. The video itself presented the viewer with questions like “Are you disturbed by the condition of our societies?” and “Don’t want your daughter to end up in a burka or with a non-white guy?” “What you need,” the text continued, “is a visit to the Alternative Right,” before a long list of alt-right outlets — including TheRightStuff.biz, American Renaissance, Red Ice, Alternative Hypothesis, Stefan Molyneaux, and of course, Millennial Woes — flashed on the screen.

Robertson brought a huge number of followers with him on his journey to the alt-right. His channel currently has more than 47,000 subscribers, while his videos have been viewed upwards of 7 million times. And it seems that Robertson’s trials with depression weren’t only a fundamental part of his political development, but helped attract others looking for support online — apparently an entry point to the alt-right for many. One TRS poster explained that they “Watched a Millennial Woes video on depression (I was miserable). He mentioned various things I had never heard of (neoreaction, Alt Right). I found Richard Spencer. I found TRS. Life completely changed…”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/misogynists-who-hate-misogynists-the-bizarre-ways-rival-women-hating-groups-detest-each-other/

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

Roosh Valizadeh is one of the ideological leaders of the PUA (pickup artist) or “neomasculinist” school of anti-feminism, and his website Return of Kings (which received considerable traffic before it went on hiatus) was classified as a hate site by the Southern Poverty Law Center thanks to offensive headlines like “Don’t Work for a Female Boss.” But Return of Kings has been highly critical of MGTOW, a separatist movement of misogynists who want to avoid women altogether. In numerous articles, Return of Kings argued that instead of being male separatists, MGTOWs needed to fight for a patriarchal society in which men are dominant and control all aspects of society. Return of Kings viewed the election of President Donald Trump in 2016 as a major victory for PUAs.

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.

Mill rightly thought that the typical case wasn’t one of views that are false, but views that have a mixture of true and false. It would be far more effective to try to engage with the truth in views we despise than to try to ban them for their alleged falsity. The Canadian psychologist and YouTube sensation Jordan Peterson, for example, says things that are false, misogynistic and illiberal, but one possible reason for his following is that he recognises and speaks to a deficit of meaning and values in many young men’s lives. Here, the right approach is to pry apart the true and compelling from the false and toxic, through reasoned consideration. This way, following Mill’s path, presents a better chance of winning over those who are lost to views we despise. It also helps us improve our own understanding, as Mill wisely suggests.

https://www.alternet.org/traumatic-vision-masculinity-lies-root-resentful-incel-movement

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.

"Cause I am ugly as fuck and have been cursed with awful genetics," one Reddit user profiled by the study complained.

"I’m completely fine talking to people I have [zero] interest in, but if I remotely have a crush on you I’m probably gonna be really fucking awkward. Any semblance of social skills I have go out the window if I have a crush on you," wrote another.

"I cant tell the difference if a girl is just nice to me or she is in to me. So I kinda let everything slip away," observed a third.

And this one seemed to sum up a lot of the comments that I've personally found when scrolling through Reddit: "Many rounds of rejection. Just gave up after a while. I’ll be fine on my own."

Such a culture of masculinity hurts men psychologically, and often hurts women physically. So what is the solution to this social problem?

"The first thing I would suggest is to listen to women," Harris O'Malley, better known as Dr. Nerdlove, told Salon by email. "One of the problems that comes up a lot is that men tend to make assumptions about women — what they want in men and in relationships especially — that simply aren’t true. In fact, many of these assumptions tend to come from other men, instead of women."

O’Malley added, "The next I would suggest is to focus on building the best version of themselves instead of a more nebulous ideal. Trying to mold yourself into the 'right' or 'perfect' person in order to find a relationship is a mistake. Trying to force yourself to be somebody else’s idea of successful is a mistake. It’s the lifestyle equivalent of trying to wear shoes that are too small; you may get your feet into them, but they’ll make you miserable. An introvert isn’t going to be happy as the wild club party guy and the buttoned up corporate type isn’t going to be comfortable trying to fit in to the goth or punk scene, no matter how attracted he is to the women there. Finding ways to be your best self will serve you much better and help you meet the people who are right for you."

"The hard thing about changing Incels’ minds is that they’ve frequently made being an Incel a core part of their identity," O'Malley explained. "If they admit that maybe they’re wrong — that it’s their attitude, not a few millimeters of bone that’s keeping them single — then they have to accept responsibility for their choices and abandon a community they’ve chosen to be part of. And the Incel community does it’s best to insist that change isn’t just futile but wrong."

He added, "The best way to get an Incel to break the cycle is simply to get them away from the forums and communities and out into the world. The more they see the world as it actually is, the harder it is to keep insisting that the world is divided into Incels, Chads, Stacys and Beckys. Getting away from the constant reinforcement of 'this is how the world is, now lie down and rot' does wonders for changing people’s minds."

When I showed the Evolutionary Psychological Science study to my colleague Amanda Marcotte, she astutely noted that not all of the misogyny we see from incels and other manosphere acolytes is driven by pure desperation. Referring to the book "Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny" by Kate Manne, Marcotte elaborated on how many of these men refuse to embrace concepts like gender equality because their goal isn't really to become happy, but rather tocontrol, monitor and punish "bad" womenwho either challenge male dominance or don't adhere to patriarchal concepts of femininity.

"A lot of people think of misogyny as sort of this blind hatred of women, and her argument is it's not," Marcotte told Salon. "What it is is entitlement. It is rooted in this belief that women are put on earth to serve men, that's what they exist for, right? And if they fail to do that to any single man's specifications, then he gets angry with her. Like a belligerent customer who thinks that the waiter isn't giving them good service."

She went on to compare the attitudes of many misogynistic men to consumers in a free market economic system.

"I think the consumerist model of dating really helps here. The analogy I'd use is if I go into a store, I feel as a customer entitled to a certain amount of selectivity amongst the products," Amanda explained. "I want to go buy a flower pot. If all the flower pots there are not the shape I like or the color I like, I'm disappointed. And I'll leave and I'll just be like, well they didn't have the flower pot I wanted. And everybody accepts that that's fine, right? But if I went into a store and I found a flower pot I wanted and I brought one up to the clerk and was like, 'Here's my money.' And they were like, 'We will not accept your money, you are not good enough to shop here,' everyone would be like, 'That's ridiculous. That's discriminatory.' And that's because a flower pot is just an object, right?"

She added, "And a store is a business. And we have a certain model. I think they think of dating in that way. They think of women as objects for sale, so they as a consumer get to be selective, but the objects for sale and the salesmen — which are kind of the same person in the body of the woman — are not allowed to be selective about who's buying. It should be the same price for all comers."

This is the sort of mentality that cannot be reasoned with or compromised on. For incels who look in the world through this filter, the only option is for them to be told — in emphatic, unequivocal terms — that they are wrong.

And if they're willing to accept that? Then they need to refer to the advice offered by O'Malley earlier in this piece, so that the part of them which deserves sympathy — the part that doesn't want to be lonely — can be listened to.

https://www.eenews.net/stories/1060094801

One scientist was called Climate Barbie.

Another was described as an "ugly fake scientist." A third had an erect penis drawn on her car window while she was in the field researching sea-level rise.

Such is the life of many female climate scientists in 2018.

All researchers face the risk of being criticized when speaking publicly about their findings. But women in the field describe being attacked based on their gender. They've endured insults, sexual taunts and degrading comments about their professional acumen. Most of their harassers use social media, email and the phone for their attacks. But there's a fear that it could become physical.

Threats of death, rape and other forms of violence have left a number of researchers feeling concerned for their safety. They worry about opening envelopes with handwritten addresses and answering phone calls from unfamiliar numbers. Anonymous emails that try to entice a response cause agitation.

"We get this additional layer of hate mail, and people, I think, find it easier to put us down because we are women, or feel like they have more right in telling us what is right or wrong despite our expertise, which is always frustrating," said Andrea Dutton, a geologist at the University of Florida and an expert on sea-level rise.

Dutton said she often hesitates to answer the phone after she's quoted in the media. The feeling can last for days, prompted by harassing attacks in the past from unfamiliar numbers.

One prominent researcher who has spoken about being harassed asked not to be quoted in this article. She worries it would trigger a new wave of trolling. Her concern goes beyond online attacks and hateful phone calls. She's worried for her safety.

The attacks aren't new. But some scientists say the harassment they're enduring is becoming more personal, increasingly sexist and less focused on their scientific conclusions. Some suggested that it coincides with rising societal tensions over gender and race, laid bare by President Trump's political rise.

"There is a huge underlying fear of change, and that's spawned the whole 'Make America Great Again,'" said Katharine Hayhoe,director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University.

"When was America great?" she added. "Back when women were in the kitchen and others knew their place, and so because of that, the whole climate change thing, the whole idea that humans could actually interfere with the planet's climate and that fossil fuels were the way that we got great way back in the day, that's what underlies all this, and that's why there is such a mix between gender and climate denial, because it's all coming from the same perceived threat to identity, and position and power and rights."

Online harassers have called her a "sad, little mediocrity," an "ugly fake scientist" and an "old thin-looking hag." They've gone after Hayhoe for sharing her climate research and for her outreach to the evangelical Christian community.

The verbal and written attacks derive mostly from men. That's probably not a coincidence. Studies show that climate skepticism is a male-dominated perspective. Men are less likely than women to accept scientific conclusions about people being responsible for rising temperatures. And they're more likely to overestimate their knowledge of the issue.

Threats aside, some of the most frustrating attacks experienced by Hayhoe are those that denigrate her professionally. Some men talk to her like she's a "certified, Grade-A idiot," she said.

"These same men who are sending me all this stuff and telling me I know nothing, that I'm not qualified and that I'm ignorant, if I were one of the top cancer surgeons in the country, at the same level that I'm a climate scientist and they had cancer, I am sure that most but not all of them would be happy to have me operate on them. They wouldn't be challenging my credentials; they wouldn't be saying, 'I know more about natural cycles than you do.'"

Someone on Twitter called her "Climate Barbie 2.0." There were repeated hang-ups on her voicemail, something she finds particularly disturbing because she's worried the caller might be unstable. Are they angrily dialing over and over again? Other "pseudo-engagers," as Cobb calls them, have written to ask seemingly sincere questions about climate change. One of them called her "stupider than a cow" after receiving her thoughtful response.Public appearances on national television outlets, in particular, bring waves of hatred for scientists. Kim Cobb, a professor of earth and atmospheric science at Georgia Tech, recently appeared on national news programs to talk about the dangers of climate change. Now she's being called a liar over email.

Cobb said this is the reality for female scientists. She has learned to take the nastiness as an indication that her message is reaching people.

"This is a sign of your effectiveness," she said. "You have to take it that way, and when you take it that way, it can push you forward and give you the armor that you need."

Still, she has noticed a shift in the tone of her critics. After she tweeted recently about a bedtime conversation about climate change with her 11-year-old daughter, she was accused of making it up. Some questioned the existence of her daughter and told her she was guilty of child abuse.

The attacks on her motherhood are representative of the vitriol in recent years, she said. In the past, climate deniers would at least try to convince her of their findings.

Now there's mostly rage.

"I do see a shift toward a lack of substance sharing," Cobb said. "So much of the flak from the climate-denial community, I think, was in the form of trying to share graphs to show their point, trying to question you on the validity of the science. And a lot of that was very misguided, of course, but it was still pretending to be substantive, on the data, on the issues themselves. But it seems much of it today has turned completely to ad hominem attacks, these stream of emotionally laden insults with no substance whatsoever behind them, just trying to land one below the belt."

Women who research climate change aren't only facing the threat of harassment from strangers on the internet. A recent report shows that female scientists in academia are among the most at risk to face sexual harassment from their colleagues and superiors.

An analysis this year by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine highlighted high rates of workplace harassment for female researchers in sciences, engineering and medicine at universities. The report's authors noted that 58 percent of female academic faculty and staff experienced sexual harassment, making academia second only to the military (with 69 percent) in rates of workplace sexual harassment. They pointed to a number of factors that create an environment ripe for harassment, including a reliance on advisers for career advancement and a "macho" work culture.

Climate scientists do have some legal recourse against the most serious threats.

The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund is designed to protect researchers who are victims of harassment. The defense fund also directs scientists to other resources for workplace sexual harassment and offers counseling to help scientists respond to incidents that may be troubling but not illegal. The fund's executive director, Lauren Kurtz, said laws addressing online harassment are "behind the times." They tend to focus on bullying of children, not adult victims.

Reports from women since the fund was created in 2011 fall into two main categories.

Some complaints are similar to the types of harassment faced by men, but "there is a sense of a lack of cooperation on the part of the institution or difficulty raising the issue with their supervisor," Kurtz said.

There's also sexual harassment. The group received a complaint a few months ago from a climate scientist who reported "really odious rape threats" on Twitter.

Sarah Myhre, a paleoceanographer at the University of Washington, blames polarization on climate change for disproportionate threats against scientists compared with other disciplines.

"When you ask people, 'Do you believe in climate change?' what you're asking isn't 'What is your topical knowledge?' it's 'What is your tribalism?'" Myhre said. "Because it has been so hijacked in this partisan dystopic narrative, it leads to misogyny being used to discredit climate science."

One of the most visible climate scientists in the country, Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, said he sees a difference in how female colleagues are treated. Mann said he has been targeted by people who reject climate change for two decades. He has received death threats, has been mailed white powder, and was targeted by fossil fuel and conservative interest groups to be fired or imprisoned. Still, he sees an extra element of vitriol in the way women in the field are treated.

"I can tell you that there is a very large overlap between those who harbor conspiracy theories about climate science and those who express unenlightened views when it comes to matters of ethnicity and gender," Mann said. "In short, yeah — a surprisingly large number of climate deniers are misogynists. And so our female colleagues are at the receiving end of a particularly toxic brew of denialism, conspiratorial ideation and misogyny. It is most unfortunate and most disturbing."

Still, there seems to be an increasing public awareness of the harassment directed at female scientists, observers say. Those who have been harassed say they want more of their colleagues, especially men, to speak out about the problem. That's happening more and more, said Dutton, the geologist at the University of Florida.

"That's what we really need; it can't all come from us," she said. "It shouldn't have to be the victims; that's how we're really going to have change, when it's the other people calling out the bad behaviors, and I have started to see some of that.

"That's heartening."

https://www.alternet.org/animal-house-40-why-national-lampoon-white-male-tribalism-still-relevant-trump-era

...movie’s final laugh, however, is on us, the audience inheriting the world that is left in the wake of the Deltas’ assault on the motorcade of postwar progress. "Animal House" ends with a series of captions revealing what became of the movie’s characters in the years between 1962 and 1978, and the characters’ fates are intertwined with the social upheavals of the age: Niedermeyer is killed in Vietnam, Marmalard is arrested for his involvement with the Nixon White House, Katie and Boone get divorced and, as a crowning piece of satire, Bluto becomes Senator Blutarsky. The Deltas’ terrorist campaign against progress, authority and reason itself has succeeded and we are left among the ruins. Despite its many imitators, "Animal House" remains unparalleled in the infinite cynicism with which is pronounces the failure of the post-war American project. What is there left to do but laugh?

The videos these people produce are a lot of things – "amateurish" and "mind-numblingly tedious" are among the main descriptors I'd use. But somehow, they're incredibly effective. Let's face it: anyone who can get hundreds of thousands of views for a one-hour rant about Owen Jones is worthy of at least our anthropological interest, if not quite our respect.

**The most famous instance of far-right views being disseminated on YouTube is PewDiePie – the site's biggest star, commanding an audience of literally millions of impressionable teenage boys, who for some reason want to watch him play computer games**. He was dropped by Disney after it emerged that his videos included antisemitic jokes and Nazi imagery. PewDiePie wrote a blog post declaring: "I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes... Though this was not my intention, I understand that these jokes were ultimately offensive."

**What PewDiePie does is very different from the likes of PJW, but this ironic racism can offer us a good example of what happens when these views, prominent in YouTube's ecosystem as they are, become normalised. Such videos are – at least anecdotally – having a measurable effect on how these kids talk about Jews, or the Nazis**.

Here's my hypothesis: Twitter is the natural home of the left because Twitter – participatory; open; capable of presenting multiple viewpoints to the reader simultaneously – is well-suited to the expression of left-wing views, which are (to draw however loose a family resemblance between often disparate warring factions) typically somehow egalitarian.

Contemporary right-wing politics, by contrast, is driven largely by the unexamined prejudices and anxieties of (primarily) white men. Any white man who wants to hold on to their prejudices and anxieties is going to have a tough time of it on Twitter – but they're going to have a grand old time standing in front of their wall, alone, ranting.

frum trumpocracy:

2016 Pew more ppl under 30 live w/ parent than parner 1st time since 1800's 195

2014 71% men 18-34 vs 84% 1960; videogame 2x vs prerecession; 2x weed (2x women); prnhub start 2007 1 mill -> 50 mil 2015 191 page view per capita, cda 2 165)

hillary = power (fem, racist??? sez milo 196

dale brenan quartz: djt is alpha winner but also beta loser, with accomp qualities of latter, which red pill ID with 199.

santa fe texas primary target girl rebuff (inital rept, beware)

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hugh-hewitt-seriously-proposes-trench-coat-ban-stop-gun-violence-after-texas

https://www.alternet.org/if-misogyny-was-factor-toronto-rampage-terrorist-act-against-women

https://www.vox.com/world/2018/4/25/17277496/incel-toronto-attack-alek-minassian

Alek Minassian, the man who killed 10 people by driving a van down a busy street in Toronto on Monday, is a terrorist.

We know this because he told us so. On Tuesday afternoon, Facebook confirmed the authenticity of a post in his name, in which he pledged allegiance to something called the “Incel Rebellion.” This is not an organized militant group but rather an ideal developed by the so-called “incel” movement — an online community of men united by their inability to convince women to have sex with them. (“Incel” stands for “involuntarily celibate.”)

Some self-identified incels, as they call themselves, have developed an elaborate sociopolitical explanation for their sexual failures, one that centers on the idea that women are shallow, vicious, and only attracted to hyper-muscular men. They see this as a profound injustice against men like them, who suffer an inherent genetic disadvantage through no fault of their own. A small radical fringe believes that violence, especially against women, is an appropriate response — that an “Incel Rebellion” or “Beta [Male] Uprising” will eventually overturn the sexual status quo.

Minassian is not the first to turn these violent fantasies into reality. In 2014, a sexually frustrated man named Elliot Rodger killed six and wounded 14 in a shooting spree in Santa Barbara, California. He justified his actions in a lengthy and creepy manifesto sent to acquaintances and then widely shared online as retaliation against women as a group for refusing to provide him with the sex he is owed. This man has become a hero to many incels; the Toronto perpetrator praised him as the “Supreme Gentleman” (a term the California shooter coined for himself) in his Facebook post.

Only a tiny percentage of incels seem willing to turn to violence or terrorism, and the movement isn’t a threat on the level of an al-Qaeda or ISIS. But it’s a new kind of danger, a testament to the power of online communities to radicalize frustrated young men based on their most personal and painful grievances.

...

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/toxic-white-masculinity-killer-haunts-american-life

Over and over again in America, it is revealed that whiteness is the complexion for the protection. Toxic white masculinity has proven itself to be lethal once again.

On Feb. 10, a man named Joseph Nickell went on a lethal rampage in rural Kentucky, killing his parents, his girlfriend and her mother, before turning the gun on himself. Many reports have suggested that Nickell had a substance abuse problem and had previously been arrested for domestic violence, public drunkenness and fleeing the police. By his own description, Nickell was a "conservative Christian," who posted standard right-wing memes on his Facebook page, including a post that read, "I stand for the flag and kneel for the cross." Unconfirmed reports have also suggested that he was a strong supporter of Donald Trump and a gun fetishist who held anti-Islamic views, none of which would be remotely surprising.

As I have highlighted here at Salon and elsewhere, when white men who hold "conservative" views engage in mass shootings and other acts of spectacular violence, a basic and obvious public script is followed.

Nickell is "mentally ill" and a "lone wolf." The violence has nothing to do with politics. It especially has nothing to do with America's lack of any serious restrictions on handguns or assault weapons.

Moreover, to discuss Nickell's race, gender and reputed political views is imagined by too many as being untoward, impolite or otherwise outside the limits of approved public discourse.

There will be no moral panics about whether white conservatives have become possessed by radical, right-wing Christian zealotryand driven to kill their spouses, children, neighbors, co-workers, acquaintances or random strangers. President Trump will not issue menacing threats and edicts about violent acts committed by men who look like him, voted for him and share his political values and beliefs. The right-wing media will not whip their viewers into a frenzy about the newest outrage and threat of the day.

There will be no questions echoing throughout America's public discourse about where a white conservative like Joseph Nickell became "radicalized." What was being taught in his church? How did he get such easy access to a gun? Why did his community not sound the alarm about him? What news programs, websites and other media did he consume? No one will ask those things.

Most certainly, few will dare to ask in public: What is wrong with conservative white men like Joseph Nickell? Should they be barred from entering the United States or placed on a special watch list?

These are the interrogations of cause and motive and context which, in America, are only applied to nonwhites. In a country that has been ethically and morally scarred by a state of perpetual vengeance, paranoia and war ever since the 9/11 attacks more than 16 years ago, such interrogations are almost uniquely directed at Muslims.

In America, the horrible acts of mass gun violence committed by Joseph Nickell and other white men are treated as something inevitable and outside of human control, like gravity or the weather. They are rarely viewed as the inevitable result of a pathological gun culture, a mental health crisis, radical religion, political sociopathy and toxic white masculinity.

These values are distilled in the form of Trumpism. Donald Trump's rise to power has only intensified them as he piles more firewood under a cauldron of violence, bigotry and cruelty.

In many ways, toxic white masculinity has created a state of amnesia, along with the intentional denial and collective forgetting that characterizes much of white America. Unfortunately, as in the case of Joseph Nickell -- and too many other examples to count --

https://www.salon.com/2018/02/13/terror-victims-donald-trump-wont-talk-about-people-killed-by-the-alt-right/

this willful amnesia does not make toxic white masculinity any less lethal.

Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon

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.