Today, in the Men’s Rights subreddit, we find Demonspawn, a long-time fixture in Reddit’s MRA circles, getting dozens of upvotes for a comment in which he advocates murdering family court judges and other government officials:
Demonspawn is responding to a post from Robert Franklin on Fathers and Families about Dan Brewington, “[a]n Indiana man fac[ing] five years in prison because he criticized the judge and the custody evaluator in his divorce and custody case.”
Or at least that’s how Franklin wants to frame the issue. While conceding that Brewington “often used intemperate language” on his blog, Franklin downplays what seems to have been a relentless four-year harassment campaign from the troubled father. According to a report on the case on the Eagle Country Online website:
[P]rosecutors argued that Brewington took his postings beyond being critical of the court system. They became personal against anybody who became involved with his case.
“This was sick revenge dragging my wife and kids into the matter,” Humphrey said during his testimony. “I don’t know of many cases where a subject has more clearly expressed his intent to do harm.” …
Brewington … called [custody evaluator Edward] Connor a child molester and prostitute in his “Internet rampage,” contacted the Children’s Home of Northern Kentucky where Conner is involved as a board member, and sending mass e-mails to Connor’s colleagues and legal professional around the area. …
Connor’s wife, Dr. Sara Jones-Connor, reaffirmed what her husband shared with the judge.
“For over four years we have dealt with his attacks on a daily basis,” Jones-Conner said.
And Franklin leaves out the most serious of the accusations against Brewington: that he threatened to murder the judge.
Brewington’s cellmate at the Dearborn County Law Enforcement Center for two-and-a-half months, Joseph McCaleb, had sent a letter to jail officials on September 25 after being concerned with what he heard from Brewington.
“He talked about following (Judge Humphrey) home, shooting him, and dumping him in the river,” McCaleb said of Brewington’s alleged “detailed and thought out” plan.
I should note that after testifying that Brewington’s threats seemed serious, McCaleb later concluded that they weren’t; and Judge Brian Hill did not take his testimony into consideration when sentencing Brewington.
Was Brewington’s sentence fair? I don’t know. But Franklin’s posting was misleading, to say the least, if not dishonest. And while a few people raised questions about it, no one on the Men’s Rights subreddit bothered to spend the two minutes on Google that would have turned up the story I’ve been quoting from, instead relying entirely on Franklin’s, er, incomplete account.
Whether or not Brewington’s threats were sincere, Franklin’s post had Demonspawn and many others on the Men’s Rights subreddit thinking violent thoughts themselves. Here are some more selections from the discussion there. Note that every single violent comment I quote below got upvotes from the regulars.
Here, Boss_Money invokes the memory of Tom Ball, who killed himself in hopes that his dramatic suicide would encourage other MRAs to start firebombing courthouses and police stations:
Later in that same thread, coldacid suggests that suicide is a much less effective strategy than murder:
Anxdiety, meanwhile, shares his fantasies of violent “retribution.”
Boss_Monkey returns with a miniature manifesto for armed revolution:
And whats_up_doc suggests that violence may be the only solution:
The Men’s Rights subreddit is by and large the most “moderate” of all the major Men’s Rights forums online. But this is the language, and the thinking, of a hate movement. Anyone who really cares about improving life for men needs to call this kind of thing out, and make clear that it is completely unacceptable in any rights movement worthy of the name.
The whole “do anything to get his kids back” deal reminds me of how some guys react when someone hurts their female friends.
They say “I’ll do anything to help you”–then offer to kick the guy’s ass.
But when the women say “No, I don’t need that, that wouldn’t help and it might get me in even more trouble, I just need you to be a supportive friend right now,” they don’t want to hear it.
Dudes need to stop saying “I’ll do anything” when they really mean “I’ll do anything so long as it makes me feel like a Big Man.”
I dunno, maybe we need more action movies where the hero’s sacrifice is an actual sacrifice, as opposed to something super glamorous and adrenaline-pumping. “I love you so much I’ll do things that actually help you” means a lot more than “I love you so much I’ll blow things up for you.”
@Stephen Blue: Wow, you denounced it here on manboobz where we denounce and mock it all the time.
I may be wrong, but I think David’s challenge is more or less denouncing in MRA spaces — do you plan to post the first part of your post at any of the places/spaces linked above
If you do, linkz plz!
Ithiliana: Well, Stephen denounced, then completely fucked up the dismount by saying there’s no sexism in the first place. Six in one…
Blitzgal: IIRC, Powell happened somewhere in the Seattle area, that may help your search.
Yeah, I found it. I didn’t remember his name, and like Unimaginative, when I used search terms to find him, a lot of stories of men burning their children just this year popped up, and made me feel extremely ill.
@Stephen Blue:
“Are there disurbed people in the MRA movement? Yes, but there are far more equally disturbed people in the feminist movement and the feminist movement is by nature disturbed, as it seeks to correct unjustices that were either never real, or long ago vanquished.”
Really. Please find me a feminist site where posters regularly praise women who murder their exes or who massacre groups of unsuspecting and unarmed men at random or constantly talk shit about how All Those Slutty Men are going to Get What’s Coming To Them Soon. The MRA movement is like any other supremacist movement in that it attracts almost nothing but the disturbed, the violent and the vicious. Your “FEMINISTS IS WORSE!!1!” argument doesn’t hold water and you know it, you minimizing apologist dolt, and neither does your attempt to negate every single violence-celebrating scumbag on your side of the fence with your measly screed. Take that shit to the people who are actually talking guns and firebombs and see how long it takes you to get called a mangina for it.
There is one positive side to all this. MRA’s are truly cementing their status as terrorists with all this talk of violence and celebration of actual acts of violence. And you know what? Western governments do not negotiate with terrorists. Nobody negotiates with terrorists.
What normal people see: someone threatening others, thus demonstrating that they are a danger and unfit to take custody of children.
What Owly sees: Liam Neeson’s role in Taken.
I initially thought “date robbery” sounded like some kind of “friendzone” type term, but it is apparently the practice of drugging and robbing people on a date, so it doesn’t have the deranged entitlement I initially thought it did.
He still sounds like a shitlord, though. Please somebody tell me he did not compare rape to rejection, please.
It’s like.. every time you find a “moderate MRA” and they say something reasonable, they then follow it up (usually in the same comment!) with something else completely (and often uniquely) awful.
I’m pretty sure that our Norwegian friend Eivind Berge has claimed that involuntary celibacy is worse than being raped. Very possibly on more than one ocasion.
I figured “date robbery” was where you paid for dinner and didn’t get laid.
Good to hear that it’s describing actual robbery, I guess, even if it’s kind of ridiculous to imply those robberies happen with any significant frequency.
“Date rejection,” though, Jesus Christ. I guess if I say yes to dating a guy but don’t want to date him literally forever, it’s a crime on a level with date rape? …Like I said, you think you’ve found a moderate one…
But that is not the practice to which Farrell is referring. In the excerpts from the book “Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men? A Debate”:
Robbery-by-Social-Custom: She Exists, He Pays
To shorten the period of potential rejection, men learn to pay for all of the 5 D’s– Drinks, Dinner, Driving, Dating, and then, if he is successful at repeatedly paying for the first 4 D’s, he gets to pay for the fifth: the Diamond. Or, more precisely, a diamond with the right 3 C’s (carrots, color and clarity). Together, the expectation for him to pay for these 5 D’s can feel like robbery-by-social-custom: she exists, he pays.
Hmmmmm….. perhaps I should change my avatar to “Buy diamonds, get carrots”
Not sure if he did that, but he did compare rape to unemployment. In his Excerpts From Myth of Male Power
Chapter 6
The Suicide Sex:
Unemployment to a man is the psychological equivalent of rape to a woman P. 172
For more of Farrell’s gems about rape, see Chapter 14. The Politics of Rape
Oh, nevermind, I guess “date robbery” is also something incredibly shitlordy.
“She exists, he pays?” Dude, if you’re dating a woman for no reason other than “she exists,” I give her my permission to milk every cent she can out of you, because there’s sure as hell nothing ELSE in it for her.
Huh, looks like I spoke too soon. Even giving him the benefit of the doubt was a mistake. What a total shitlord.
I’m pretty sure I’ve heard about that before, here or on SRS. As I recall, someone mentioned that they saw it in a bookstore, noticed that it had only male contributors, and put it back on the shelf. A decision eminently justified, by all appearances, although I must admit I want to know if the three Cs further lead into the twelve Ms, the two Js, and the Q.
From the link Pam provided:
wut
wut
wut
wut
Ugh. He needs a post on manboobz.
Okay, these ones from that link are just funny:
Yeah, I bet he would.
Okay, that one’s not funny, except, holy shit, dude, men get raped for real, why do you have to spend half the book coming up with things that are “like rape” except for not being rape?
So far we’ve got:
-Being unemployed
-Having to pay for dates
-Having a woman break up with you
-Having a woman not use birth control
Even if he wants to argue that these things are really bad (and some of them are!), saying they’re just like rape is incredibly stupid and narrow-minded, and makes men who’ve actually been raped into collateral damage for his feminist-baiting.
OK, first: it’s very possible I’m wrong here.
On with the show.
If a man consents to sex based on the condition that the woman is using birth control, which she has claimed is met, but she lied- is that technically rape?
There’s a parallel there with… is it the Julian Assange case I’m remembering? A woman consenting to sex using a condom, then being raped as the man wasn’t using a condom. The two situations seem broadly equivalent, apart from the fact that in one of them it’s a lie and in the other it’d need to be physical forcing.
I’m not aiming for any broader point here, really, just trying to reinforce my understanding of things.
@morkais
lying about using a condom has the potential to affect your partners body in a way that lying about using birth control doesnt
… So it does.
Need to think these things through better.
So, yeah, even in the more superficially equal case of lying about being on birth control versus lying about having had a vasectomy, the vasectomy’s got more consequences for the partner’s body than the other one, and there aren’t any it doesn’t have.
Thanks for pointing that one out.
Farrell is a hack who’s makin’ the big bucks and livin’ the dream off the backs of men who have been disenfranchised by a culture/society/civilization that, as MRAs are so wont to keep reminding us, were and are created BY MEN. And he does this, obviously quite effectively, by shifting the focus from the power relations BETWEEN MEN to the powerLESSness of men at the hands of the shadow conspiracy government of women.
MorkaisChosen — glossary troll brought that up about the Assange case, and near as I can tell, it’s a nearly irrelevant factor — he’s being charged with something about “unsafe sex” (which certainly implies STD risk, not pregnancy risk, but I can’t read Swedish). Except, well, the whole thing about only consenting with a condom? Was hour(s) before she woke up to him atop her, without a condom — it’s not exactly the important factor there.
Shall blame my memories there, I’ve probably picked up on the wrong bits. Thanks for setting me right. 🙂
Shouldn’t the comparison be between someone who bribes a college professor with money vs someone who bribes a college professor with sex?