Jack Barnes, the notoriously hotheaded Men’s Rights Activist and longtime contributor to A Voice for Men, has escalated his attacks on me. In a post on AVFM, Barnes addressed me directly:
I’m a junkyard dog with no owner and no collar. …
Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you shouldn’t piss off a redheaded country boy from the backwoods of Tennessee? I promise you David that for the rest of your life there will be nights you cry yourself to sleep in anger and frustration over me.
In a followup post on TwitLonger, someone claiming to be Barnes — and it seems abundantly clear that it is in fact him — threatened to drive from Tennessee to Chicago to confront me in
a face to face in person discussion … No cops. No lawyers or prosecutors. No judges. No jury. No hiding behind a computer. Just me and you. …
I don’t know of any parent that would blame me for stomping a mud hole in your fucking ass and walking that motherfucker dry for what you have done!
What I have done is, in fact, nothing — nothing beyond letting the world know of some of the disturbing things Barnes has posted online.
But as Barnes sees it, I am responsible for putting his family in danger. How? Well, not long ago, someone apparently doxed Barnes, posting personal information about Barnes and his family on Twitter.
Of course, I had nothing to do with the doxing and only learned about it later from an AVFM video. I don’t know who did it, and I have publicly condemned it several times.
I will condemn it again, right here: the doxing of Jack Barnes and his family was wrong and a deeply shitty thing to do; whoever did it is a shithead and no friend of mine.
But Barnes is convinced one of my “cult followers” did the deed and bluntly warns me that ” I hold you personally responsible for this occurring.”
Even though I did not dox him, don’t know who doxed him, did not tell anyone to dox him, and have publicly denounced doxing in general and the doxing of Barnes and his family specifically.
The TwitLonger post declares:
You have crossed a line David. This is no longer about the MHRM vs feminism. This is no longer about AVFM, which I have no affiliation with, and your website. This is no longer about Paul Elam publisher of AVFM vs you as publisher of your website. You have made this personal. This is now about me vs you.
I don’t care that your little cult follower doxxed me. But when he/she doxxed my wife and little girl it became personal.
The author of the TwitLonger post, almost certainly Barnes himself, says that he will only come to Chicago for the promised “face to face in person discussion” if his family members come to harm.
But I do not have the luxury of seeing the threats as conditional ones. There are no conditions listed when he writes:
I don’t know of any parent that would blame me for stomping a mud hole in your fucking ass and walking that motherfucker dry for what you have done! Hell, I bet even Gondi would be like “he did what to you family? Fuck him up!
He is not saying that he would only be justified in “stomping a mud hole in [my] fucking ass” if something were to happen to his family; he is saying he is justified in doing so now.
Because some person who is not me, and who is unknown to me, did something I only found out about later and that I have publicly denounced.
And a possible “stomping” is not all I have to worry about: in his AVFM post, Barnes made sure I know that he
live[s] in a state with more guns than people, where a side arm is as common as a cell phone and where it is legal for 10yr olds to hunt with high powered rifles and without adult supervision.
So I can only assume that if he ever decides to pay me an unwanted visit he will be armed.
The author of the TwitLonger post — almost certainly Barnes — declares that his obvious threats against me are not in fact threats but “simply a statement of fact.” I think any reasonable person reading these posts would see them as clear threats, and I am treating them as such.
And it is plainly obvious to me that Barnes intends to terrorize me into silence with his threats — as his “promise” on AVFM that “for the rest of your life there will be nights you cry yourself to sleep” thinking about him makes abundantly clear. His threats are consistent with the threatening language he uses against feminists online, particularly on Twitter, which are clearly intended to shut his opponents up. As he put it in one notorious Tweet
https://twitter.com/Jackbarnesmra/status/559761561028669440
Adding to the surreality of this all, Barnes and his allies at A Voice for Men are so committed to their bizarre caricature of me as some kind of cartoon supervillain that they not only blame me for things I haven’t done but for not doing things that I have done. In this case, their eyes seem to have blurred over when they’ve come across the things I’ve written condemning the doxing.
In his AVFM post, Barnes wrote that while other feminists had denounced the doxing,
there was one person who has remain eerily silent about all this. That person is David Futrelle. Seems odd since all of this doxxing was done to avenge him. There is not a peep from Futrelle about this on his site or on social media anywhere that I could find. As a parent I know my kid is up to no good when she is quiet. Wonder if the same goes for adults (assuming the word applies)?
In fact, I had condemned the doxing two days earlier in a post that Barnes has publicly acknowledged reading.
On Twitter, AVFM’s “Chief Public Relations Officer” Suzy McCarley did Barnes one better, somehow managing to miss my denunciation of the doxing in a Tweet of mine that she was literally quoting at the time, leading to this rather surrealistic exchange:
It is almost as if they are so committed to seeing me as a monster that they cannot handle it when reality defies their expectations.
Another longtime AVFM supporter, so-called “Honey Badger” Hannah Wallen, has added a decidely Kafkaesque series of Tweets to the Twitter dogpile, including one that puzzled me greatly until she explained her “logic” in more detail:
Reading "If you X, I'll Y" as "I'm gonna Y!" = admitting to planning X. What have you planned to do, doxing Dave? https://t.co/93hT4Dlsaj
— Hannah Wallen | Professional Smartass (@Oneiorosgrip) November 9, 2015
Eventually, I was able to understand that she was taking my concern over Barnes’ threats … as proof that I was planning to harm his family.
She explained her “logic” in a blog post I discovered later. Utterly ignoring my denunciations of the doxing, and of doxing in general, she declared that if i didn’t immediately “admit”that my worries about Barnes’ threats were “a completely irrational overreaction to being held responsible for the effects of his dishonest shit stirring on his followers” I was essentially admitting that I was planning some sort of attack on Barnes’ family:
[H]is current response indicates .. that he intends for harm to come Jack’s family as a result of his shit stirring, that he DOES encourage his readers to engage in this type of behavior, and that he DOES intend for one or more of his readers to respond to his writing by engaging in violence against HIS political opponents.
After all, “If X, then Y” only infers Y on the condition of X… so responding to “If you X, then I’ll Y” as if the individual has only stated “I’m going to Y” is an admission that you’ve planned on X happening.
This, I have to admit, is pretty ingenious. Kafka would be proud.
But just in case anyone thinks there is anything to Wallen’s sophistry: I do not support doxing in general, and have made this clear on numerous occasions. I did not, do not, will not support the doxing of Jack Barnes or his family, nor do I have the slightest idea who did it. I do not “intend … for harm to come [to] Jack’s family” or to him. (Indeed, I don’t even know where they live; not only did I have nothing to do with the doxing of Barnes and his family, I didn’t even know about it until after the doxing tweets were deleted.) I do not support violence against my political opponents.
All of this is obvious to anyone who actually reads what I write on this blog without their perceptions distorted by MRA-induced prejudice or preconceptions.
That said, I will not apologize for taking Barnes’ threats seriously.
Nor will I apologize for exposing misogynistic Men’s Rights activists to the light of day — not by “shit stirring” or engaging in Wallen-esque sophistry, but by quoting their own words and reporting their real deeds.
And when people harass and threaten me — whether that’s Barnes, those at AVFM who have aided and abetted his threats, or anyone else — I will take every legal step I feel is necessary for my safety and the safety of others.
This post is one of those steps.
Jesus. I think that this really shows the core of the man-o-sphere. They talk an okay game about male suicide rates but at there core they are motivated by the same thing that causes those suicide rates: Toxic fucking masculinity.
I hope you remain safe David
I am grateful for and humbled by your support! It really means a lot.
Here’s Suzy McCarley’s latest: apparently to her, people offering me support is proof we’re planning to SWAT someone. (In case you’re reading this, Suzy, we’re not.)
https://twitter.com/SuzyMcCarley/status/664288992041373696
I think Suzy is my pick for most ridiculous AVFMer. I’ve never seen her write anything even remotely related to reality.
“‘harassing’ will continue and accelerate. We’re not going to stop until no one will openly admit to being feminist”
That’s terrorism. He is using violence or the threat of violence to get a political goal. That is 100% the definition of terrorism.
He’s a dangerous man and should be in jail.
@David
Hah! I ninja’d the boss.
Oh yes, of course, as a parent I would certainly react to someone doxxing my children by deciding who must have been behind it, threatening them at length, publicly, on multiple occasions, and then threatening to go armed in the vicinity of said person and to seek out a confrontation.
Because the best way for me to be a father to my children is to get myself locked up for years.
*S A R C A S M*
I love how in that outpouring of support from which Suzy McCarley is somehow divining a SWATting in the making, JoshIsAGod69 is telling David to grow up and stop crying because he’s a man and therefore cannot be silenced.
I think his premises are flawed….
Gotta go to bed and nurse this incipient cold.
I stand with David Futrelle.
ninjaed!
Barnes has already retweeted Suzy’s tweet. Will an AVFM post follow? These people are the most dishonest pieces of shit I’ve ver run across in my life.
“The dox failed. Are @DavidFutrelle ‘s peeps now going for SWATing?”
STUDENT: Oh! Oh! I know this one! the answer is no!
TEACHER:Very good Zeb! you get a gold star!
So McCarley invents something and Barnes retweets it and AVFM then writes about it. That site is built on bullshit.
On the bright side, the more Tweedle Jack and Tweedle Suzy do… Whatever the hell it is they’re doing (putting on a show for Jaye’s noncumentary? Liveblogging their bad drug trip? Wearing the diametric opposite of those glasses from They Live?)… The more slam-dunk the court case’ll be. Go get ’em, Boss.
http://i.imgur.com/JI4zAuy.jpg
A high five for David…
http://i.imgur.com/Zmsb8Uq.jpg
… And a mooning for Dumb and Dumber.
Suzy’s logic is incorrect. If X then Y does not mean that if Y, then X. For example, “If you’re a cat, you are adorable” does not imply “if you are adorable, you are a cat”. As we know, there are adorable things in the world that are not cats. Like puppies, for example. Or ferrets. Or tiny frogs.
Adorable, but not a cat.
I’m never going to stop calling myself a feminist. Stay safe, David, and thanks for everything you do.
I’ll never stop calling myself a feminist unless my female owner explicitly demands it.
Heartily seconded.
Oh, and Jack? If you’re reading this, here’s some free advice on how to REALLY deal with a doxer:
1. Gather and screenshot ALL THE FUCKING EVIDENCE.
2. Take it to police.
3. Also take it to a lawyer.
4. DON’T FLASH YOUR GODDAMN FUCKING ASS ALL OVER THE GODDAMN FUCKING INTERNET.
You’re welcome.
http://www.animal-space.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/fox-cubs-1491.jpg
Also adorable, still not cats.
Sorry about the spider-duclings. I did not notice the resemblance…
I wish you warm fuzzy feelings, not scary spider feelings, David. Hopefully cuddly foxes helps make up for it?
Once again MRAs have to be told that words mean things. Swatting is not what Suzy seems to think it is.
Dealing with pathological liars is stressful and no doubt damaging.
Be safe, David. Glad to see you still standing tall against this guy.
By the way, Jack, since you’re probably reading this, I’m a feminist as well.
I suppose it had to come to this eventually. I mean, David is no Martin Luther King but he does shed light on the doings of evil men. He was one of five influences that turned me to Feminism (sorry dave) and he uses the power of the screenshot to crippling effect.
bigots never take it well when someone shows the truth. The most good, saintly people have a hard time when the truth comes out about them. Jack Barnes . . . well we see what he’s done.
At this point, the only thing for Dave to do is to continue to accurately quote the underbelly of the internet and misogynists everywhere.
Another feminist unwilling to be intimidated by the likes of Jack Barnes. David, we all appreciate what you do here.
Blowhard Barnes should stop throwing a tanty for a moment and engage the outer part of his brain. I’ve never seen a post here where David has encouraged or endorsed doxxing.