A Voice for Men offers proof that it was a feminist who threatened Anita Sarkeesian. Minus the proof.

“Andy Bob” of A Voice for Men has decided that the recent threats against Anita Sarkeesian are fake because … they’re too melodramatic.

In a rather remarkable bit of logicking titled “Anonymous feminist provides Anita Sarkeesian with a potential new source of revenue,” Andy Bob quotes this line from the threat email:

“Feminists have ruined my life and I will have my revenge, for my sake and the sake of all the others they’ve wronged.”

And adds:

The only thing missing is the swish of “his” cape as he exits, stage left, with his “semi-automatic rifle, multiple pistols, and a collection of pipe bombs” cunningly concealed beneath “his” jauntily angled fedora.

Huh. You may recall that the most famous person to publicly declare that “feminists have ruined my life”– that is, Marc Lepine — followed that declaration with a shooting spree that left 14 women dead.

You may also remember a certain fellow named Elliot Rodger, who announced his shooting spree this spring with a video in which he, for all intents and purposes, did his best impersonation of a comic book supervillain, complete with evil laughs. Railing against the “girls” who committed the horrible injustice of not dating him, he declared in his final video that

I will punish all of you for it. (laughs)

On the day of retribution I am going to enter the hottest sorority house of UCSB… and I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there. …

I will take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.

You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one. The true alpha male. (laughs)

The fact is that mass killers often have grandiose visions of themselves as avenging angels/devils, and see the world in stark black and white terms.

I have no idea if the latest threats against Sarkeesian are “real,” or if they’re the work of some sadistic asshole trying to terrorize her into silence with words, or whether they were written by her cat, but the fact that these words are melodramatic is hardly proof that they weren’t meant sincerely.

The “if it’s melodramatic it’s fake” argument is also a highly, well, ironic one to make in an online publication that’s home to some of the most melodramatic writing this side of a #GamerGate manifesto.

Here, for example, is John Hembling, then the managing editor of AVFM, writing about the efforts of feminists to get Facebook to take down gender-based hate speech (whether directed at women or men):

They are not simply adherents of an ideology of hatred and violence, wrapping itself in the increasingly transparent veneer of false and pious humanism. … They are fascists, and if you support their cause, that of censorship, you may be a fascist as well.

And here is an actual sentence from an AVFM post by August Løvenskiolds:

Cunt-power is cunning but every now and then, it peeks through the veil to expose a fetid maw of endless hunger and hatred.

So, yeah, Men’s Rights activists in general, and AVFMers in particular, are not exactly strangers to melodrama.

But Andy Bob evidently never reads the publication he is writing for, as he goes on to, er, argue:

There is no doubt whatsoever that this email was written by a feminist posing as an MHRA. The entirely fictitious character, who is supposed to have written it, conforms so closely to the feminist mischaracterization of MHRAs as dangerously violent psychopaths who dream of brutally silencing women that it could only have been written by someone whose goal was to maintain and embellish this outrageously slanderous threat narrative.

Yeah, it’s not as if MRAs and #GamerGaters ever present themselves in a menacing manner.

The character created as the author of the email is an artful pastiche of those mythical MHRAs, Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine, neither of whom had any connection with known MHR organizations, despite fraudulent feminist claims to the contrary. …

The feminist author promises to “write my manifesto in her spilled blood” in order to raise the spectre of Rodger, who wrote a lengthy manifesto that primarily detailed his inability to get laid and revealed that he was the kind of sad and crazy pussy-beggar who would probably have been persona non grata in the MHRM had he ever attempted to gain entry—which he never did.

Given that Lepine lived and died long before there even was an Men’s Rights movement, it seems a bit weird to brag that he wasn’t a member of any “known MHR organizations.”

And while Elliot Rodger didn’t, as far as I know, identify as a Men’s Rights activist, he was a reader of and a commenter on PUAhate, a website connected to regular A Voice for Men contributor Jalon Cain (aka “Aaron Sleazy”), who volunteered as a moderator on the site and promoted it on his own site. Both Lepine and Rodger shared many of the beliefs of the current Men’s Rights movement.

Even more to the point, there’s no logic to Andy Bob’s argument. The fact that neither Lepine nor Rodger were card-carrying MRAs doesn’t prove that the author of the latest threats isn’t an MRA. Nor does it prove that the writer of the threats is a feminist. These are logic fails as big as Paul Elam’s ego.

The “MHRM produces crazed murderers who target women” threat narrative has been so closely observed throughout the text of the email that it could only have been written by someone who assisted in its construction. Two of the reasons why feminists posing as MHRAs are so easy to detect are the style of language they employ and the fact that their purported representation of MHRAs has the unmistakable tone of caricature that frequently devolves into the realm of pantomime.

Well, aside from the fact that the writer actually used a lot of specific phrases that are used often, and in one case almost exclusively, by MRAs.

“Anita Sarkeesian is everything wrong with the feminist woman, and she is going to die screaming like the craven little whore that she is if you let her come to USU.”

Really? And her little dog too?

This statement sounds more like it came from Snow White’s wicked stepmother as she raises a Sarkeesianesque eyebrow in envious rage than a real-life psycho.

Or from Elliot Rodger — who gleefully announced that “I will slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut” he saw, before attempting to do just that.

There isn’t the slightest hint of articulated performance in the glib and terrifying words of genuinely deranged psychopaths like Elliot Rodger and Marc Lépine.

Apparently Andy Bob never watched Elliot Rodger’s extravagantly melodramatic final video.

The only question that remains is: Who has a history of making death threats via emails to venues hosting talks on potentially contentious issues and has a vested interest in publicly demonizing the MHRM by maintaining a false threat narrative through attempted character assassination and misrepresenting everything we stand for?

Could it be …. Satan?

Well, no. He means AVFM’s version of Satan: Feminists — as the title of his post proclaims even more categorically.

Of course, A Voice for Men has never offered proof that any of the alleged threats made against its conference came from feminists. Or that these threats even existed. Indeed, even while AVFM was raising literally tens of thousands of dollars for “security,” the site’s lawyers were accusing the Doubletree Hilton hotel of faking the threats for money. Indeed, in the comments on AVFM, Andy Bob himself sneered at the Doubletree employee that Elam suggested might have faked the threats. But now Andy Bob has conveniently changed his mind and is presenting the alleged threats against AVFM as real. The irony meter level here is over 9000.

Several of the commenters to Andy Bob’s post go on to accuse … me of writing the threats.

Huh.

Yes, that’s right. He’s claiming that the fact that I analyzed the language of the threat means that I wrote it. And posts this as a comment to an article in which Andy Bob … analyzes the language of the threat.

Andy Bob, for his part, is happy to add to all the insinuations:

I have to admit that this thought crossed my mind. All of the lies about Elliot Rodger being a MHRA link back to David Futrelle as the original source.

Huh. Except that I never said he was an MRA, and in face went out of my way in my writings and media appearances to point out that he wasn’t an MRA — just someone who shared a great number of beliefs with MRAs.

If he is heavily invested enough in publicly demonizing the MHRM to fabricate this kind of obvious fraud (E.R. being a MHRA), it isn’t that much of a stretch for him to go one step further and actually fabricate a fake E.R. clone sending threatening emails to maximize his investment.

The only fraud being perpetuated here is by you, dude. Well, you and the Honey Badgers.

He stops just short of accusing me of literally writing  the threatening email.

Then, I wondered why he would take the risk of exposing his act of terrorism by writing what is, essentially, an account of how he went about doing it. Futrelle is too much of a coward, and not quite stupid enough, to be so obvious about committing such a serious crime.

But then, based on nothing more than his own “feels,” he goes on to accuse me of trying to encourage others to write similar threats:

My guess is that he knows the email is a fraud, thinks it is wonderful, and hopes to encourage others to commit similar frauds by offering instructions on how to accomplish them. After all, who knows better than he just how many loony feminists have access to keyboards? …

Futrelle’s post indicates that he is playing a very dangerous game in which he is dancing closer to the abyss of disrepute than ever before.

Yes, the guy who just wrote a post analyzing the language of the threat is accusing me of “playing a dangerous game” by … analyzing the language of the threat.

It’s only a matter of time before he missteps, and falls in, hopefully taking the perennially smirking, and equally appalling, Sarkeesian with him.

Dream on, dude. I’m not going away. She’s not going away. You’re utterly transparent in your insinuations. You have neither logic nor evidence on your side. All your accusations are nothing but ideologically driven fantasies.

But then again, that’s pretty much all the Men’s Rights movement is.