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Earlier today, a Muslim man was reportedly shot and stabbed by three masked men outside a mosque in Houston, Texas. Yesterday, another Muslim man was beaten outside a mosque in Orlando, Florida by a man who reportedly told him that “you Muslims need to get back to your country.”
So I suppose that we should be grateful that Men’s Rights Activist Jack Barnes hasn’t, as far as I know, shot or otherwise physically harmed any Muslim Americans. So far, at least, he has confined himself to threatening them with murder on Twitter.
Today, Barnes posted a picture of himself brandishing a gun, alongside a threatening message aimed at Muslims, first on Imgur (archived here), and then on Twitter (archived here; screenshots of both here).
Barnes, a regular contributor to A Voice for Men, didn’t just retweet or recaption some tacky meme; he photographed himself brandishing a real handgun, and did his best to spread the picture and its threatening caption as far as he could online, tweeting the picture directly to Milo Yiannopoulos’ Twitter account in hopes that Milo would share it with his alleged 320,000 followers.
Seven hours after posting the photo on Twitter, Barnes declared that despite all appearances to the contrary he didn’t mean all Muslims. “Lol. No,” he Tweeted. “Just the terrorists.”
“Allahu Akbar” is not, of course, a phrase used only by terrorists. As Wikipedia notes, the phrase,
usually translated as “God is great”, “God is [the] greatest”, or “God is greater” … is a common Islamic Arabic expression, used in various contexts by Muslims; in formal prayer, in the call for prayer … as an informal expression of faith, in times of distress, or to express resolute determination.
This is hardly the first time Barnes has threatened people online. Feminists “need to learn to fear retribution from us,” Barnes wrote in an AVFM post this January, telling his readers that
we have our hands on the throat of feminism. This isn’t the time to ease up. This is the time to squeeze harder.
Despite the violent language, Barnes insisted that he wasn’t threatening to physically harm feminists, merely threatening to deploy “online tools … to strike fear in [their] hearts.”
Last November, Barnes decided to blame me after someone who was very definitely not me, and whose identity neither Barnes nor I even know, posted Barnes’ address on Twitter. He threatened to show up at my door for “a face to face in person discussion,” adding that
I don’t know of any parent that would blame me for stomping a mud hole in your f*cking ass and walking that motherf*cker dry for what you have done!
Barnes has made clear that he intends his “activism,” if that’s what you want to call it, to intimidate those he disagrees with into silence.
Barnes doesn’t always remember to put “harass” in quotes, as in this now deleted Tweet (archived here).
After an angry misogynist opened fire at a Louisiana theater last summer, killing two women and injuring nearly a dozen other moviegoers, Barnes offered this chilling assessment of the event (archived here):
https://twitter.com/Jackbarnesmra/status/626838268173283328?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
I think it’s fair to say that these all count as “warning signs.” Of what, I shudder to think.
H/T — Thanks to @TakedownMRAs on Twitter, a diligent tracker of Barnes’ noxious activities on Twitter who drew my attention to Barnes’ Tweet today.
“Alleged” really is the operative word here, isn’t it. I’m pretty sure that it’s hard to even find that many people who know who he is, let alone find him worth following (or hate-following). I wonder how many of said followers are eggs, and store-bought eggs at that.
@msexception:
Right? That’s the part where I laughed the hardest. It would have been funnier if the dog had pantsed him for being such a fool, but oh well.
He’s childishly sensitive to literally anything. If I thought he had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the election, I would be very frightened. The first time a foreign leader said something unflattering about him, we’d be in another fucking war.
I … kind of envy that.
“Barnes insisted that he wasn’t threatening to physically harm feminists, merely threatening to deploy “online tools … to strike fear in [their] hearts.””
Guess he forgot that threats to incite fear is still a crime. He is flat out stating that he intends to commit assault (4) against all feminists and all Muslims to take their First Amendment rights away. That makes this also a Civil Rights violation. This asshat needs to be stuffed in a Federal hole somewhere. Since he admits he is intending to incite terror, that makes him a Terrorist, so he should go to GITMO.
I doubt Barnes in on zero watch lists. From witnessing anti-terrorist professionals work in Canada, they have people on lists for things that are not at all serious compared to this very explicit display of textbook terrorism.
But aside from encouraging a Big Brother prison state here, doesn’t this qualify for a 72-hour psych hold?
I mean if you are going to try to reduce harm, you also have to consider that mass killings are a very narcissistic way for assholes to commit suicide. So the onus is on the mental health profession to help in preventing mass shootings before they happen by providing
emergency care to people who threaten others online. Especially people who do it so consistently and frequently.
So if Barnes really is someone who works long hours alone all over the U.S., it heightens his position as danger to himself, or society or both.
This reminds me of a story…
23+ years ago there was no full fledged social media. All of us would read Usenet. There was this group called rec.arts.celebrity.gossip or something like that (I don’t feel like Googling shit from 1993 LOL) and on this funny group there was a guy called Kansan1234 or something like that. He was obviously a paranoid schizophrenic who had OCD about math. He would write long-winded numerology posts. People didn’t get off on insulting strangers online so he was pretty much left alone. But we watched him develop a super unhealthy fascination and obsession with then model Heidi Klum. OMG the way he had weaved a numerology story to explain how he was the father of Heidi Klum’s first baby… Totally creepy, but then also quite revealing. Eventually, people from the group found his family and did an intervention. He was hospitalized and his family was not aware of his online ramblings and reacted in a swift and decisive way.
Which is 100% my experience sitting and chatting with every single mom who has a shitlord for a kid… Pleasant, informative, super efficient.
An ugly (imo) white guy trying to overcompensate for a perceived lack of manliness by striking an action hero movie pose and talking shit online? Oh yes, I’m very impressed by the alpha maleness on display, alright.
My sarcasm aside, it’s a sad truth that disturbing men like Barnes are the most likely to actually lash out and physically harm others. Everyone who’s reported him, thank you.
These are the same men who tell us to fear black people because they’re “thugs”. Using a gun to intimidate others into silence–to protect free speech, no doubt–is clearly only bad when it’s not a white guy doing it.
QFT. This is the meaning I got from your original post, too.
@ Jamesworkshop
“I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen?”
It could be a non-Freudian compensation– I’m betting this is a guy who feels scared, helpless and overwhelmed by the world more often than not.
Also, at the risk of being accused of appearance-shaming: Jack, that camera angle does you no favors at all.
@Eva Vavoom
We don’t tend to appreciate armchair psychiatric diagnoses here. Please refer to the comments policy.
@Ledasmom
“willy nilly” is fun to type and fun to say. 😛 More entertaining than ‘hither thither and yon’ particularly in the context of the OP. 😉
Yes, it’s the lurkers who are persuadable. I’ve lurked on message boards and the like just to get a clue as to whose arguments are more persuasive.
@Eva Vavoom
Yeah, makes sense.
Whoa! Really good to know.
This seems apropos of the discussion about Jack Barnes, noted macho peacock:
Toxic masculinity doesn’t just target women: The viciousness and vacuity of modern American manhood is also harmful to the self.
http://www.salon.com/2016/07/04/toxic_masculinity_doesnt_just_target_women_the_viciousness_and_vacuity_of_modern_american_manhood_is_also_harmful_to_the_self/
The author says this of wrestler Costa Karageorge, who killed himself in 2014:
Given the number of concussions this guy took — at the insistence of his father and uncle — I’m actually going to question that statement. I’m not convinced that he was ever fully reasonable.
Oh dear – Mr Barnes is not happy.
https://twitter.com/TakedownMRAs/status/750185813351084032
He’s responded! I wonder what he’ll say?
Thanks for the update, Mish!
Mr. Barnes’s response is sure to be profound — as in profoundly hateful.
At school I knew someone who really did have a small penis and he was just a regular guy. If he had any issues with it, and knowing that everyone else who did PE with him knew about it, he kept it to himself. On the other hand I, er I mean my friend, was plagued by insecurity for years in spite of being “regular sized”. Inadequacy and compensation is about comparing yourself to others in an unhealthy way, projecting the negative feelings created onto others and then dealing with that in a toxic way. Pointing out that someone is doing this is not saying somone has a small penis. Compare and contrast referring to someone’s SUV or Ferrari as penis extension.
@SFHC
Just now saw this:
I know there were at least some pundits who said this, but they were answering the wrong question with it. With respect to torture, other countries are, in fact, not the arbiters of morality. The arbiter of morality in this case is basic morality itself. Torture is immoral according to moral systems, and whether other countries agree with that is irrelevant. It would be immoral if every country on Earth thought it was fine. It would be immoral if every country on Earth thought it was not fine. What other countries think doesn’t matter. The pundits who brought up other countries were engaging in red herrings in order to appeal to nationalism.
The context of this other thing was whether the US is accepting it’s “fair share” of Syrian refugees, on the grounds that Sweden has a higher per-capita acceptance of them, as though Sweden sets an absolute bar and other countries are morally obligated to meet that bar. I won’t apologize for rejecting that entire premise. If one wants to argue that the US is falling down here on basic moral grounds, that would be fair, but to say that Sweden is the benchmark? That’s arbitrary, the choice of per-capita rather than absolute numbers is also arbitrary, and I reject it all entire.
I’ll just say that PoM is completely and utterly lying about my argument. I never said that Swedish policy “sets an absolute bar” and “other countries are morally obligated to meet that bar”, or that “Sweden is the benchmark”. These are lies that only a lying liar would tell. A toxic lying liar.
PoM once again demonstrates their lack of understanding of what “per capita” means and how it works. Their argument was that if the USA were to split up into four different countries, each accepting 1/4 of the current number of refugees of the entire USA, the per capita rate of refugees would change. They also doubled down on this mistake when called out. This is such an obvious and stupid error I don’t even know where to start. Why have a discussion with someone who doesn’t even understand the basics?
I won’t get into a discussion with them again, since they’ve proven they’re arguing in bad faith. Anyone can go back and read the thread if they’re interested.
My argument was, in short, that doing less than average is not something to brag about or to be proud of. It’s also dishonest to claim that you’re doing more than all other countries combined, when in fact you’re doing less than average. For some reason PoM chose to respond to this with conservative talking points, which obviously makes me side-eye them significantly. In the end, PoM also stooped to attacking my understanding of English in order to save face. This I regard as a classic failure to stop digging when already in a hole.
@IP, I’m not trying to get involved in this and do not want to give offence to anyone, but I’d like to see the thread. Is it ok to ask which one it was?
@Mish
I don’t know. This was something that happened months and months ago, and I have no idea why PoM is still whining about this. I don’t have the thread saved or bookmarked, nor do I recall what the thread was originally about. Sometimes it helps me to google wehuntedthemammoth along with certain key words when I’m trying to find old threads. Maybe try “immigration”, “Sweden”, “Germany”, “TOEFL” (since I mentioned my flawless TOEFL scores after PoM had bravely fled the scene 😉 ).
Other than that, I can’t do much to help. May the google gods be with you.
@ IP
Totally O/T, but just read your Otter’s full thesis.
It’s brilliant. Really glad I had the chance to take part.
@Alan
Cool! I’m glad to hear it.
Agh, I never requested that she send me the full report! Somehow I thought I had. Ah, well.
@Viscaria
If you still have her email saved, you can send her a message and she’d be happy to send you the thesis. 🙂
I do and I will! Please pass on my thanks 🙂