By David Futrelle
A big round of applause for two websites that have featured here on We Hunted the Mammoth from the beginning: A Voice for Men and Return of Kings have both been officially recognized by the Southern Poverty Law Center as hate groups.
The hate-monitoring group announced the news in its latest “Year in Hate” report yesterday. “[F]or the first time,” the report declared,
the SPLC added two male supremacy groups to the hate group list: A Voice for Men, based in Houston, and Return of Kings, based in Washington, D.C. The vilification of women by these groups makes them no different than other groups that demean entire populations, such as the LGBT community, Muslims or Jews, based on their inherent characteristics.
Both groups have more than earned this long-overdue designation. If you need to be reminded just how, take a stroll through the archives here for literally hundreds of examples of hateful rhetoric and actions by both AVFM and RoK, and/or their respective founders, Paul Elam and Roosh V.
You may also notice, in your stroll through the archives, that both AVFM and (especially) RoK have embraced some of the most noxious views of the racist alt-right directly. Indeed, one of the most notorious participants in the racist Charlottesville march last year — a man jailed for his assault on a counterprotester — was a former contributor to AVFM.
Elam’s response so far to his recognition as a hatemonger by the SPLC has actually been somewhat tame, at least by his standards.
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/966383611841859586
https://twitter.com/anearformen/status/966386487846686725
He also retweeted this lovely sentiment from someone whose Twitter handle is a not-very-subtle reference to the c-word.
https://twitter.com/KruntFrucker/status/966385645743755264
This dude was even more pissed:
https://twitter.com/has_baal/status/966405995999227904
Roosh’s response to his inclusion on the list was a bit, shall we say, ironic as well:
https://twitter.com/rooshv/status/966402313341595652?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Thanks for proving the SPLC’s point, guys!
The SPLC report also notes a number of other discomfiting facts, starting with this one:
The SPLC’s Year in Hate and Extremism report identifies 954 hate groups – an increase of 4 percent from 2016.
Some of this increase, the report says, was due to a resurgence of fringe black nationalist groups — which the SPLC is quick to distinguish from “activist groups such as Black Lives Matter and others that work for civil rights and to eliminate systemic racism.”
But the real danger comes from the racist right.
[B]lack nationalist groups lagged far behind the more than 600 hate groups that adhere to some form of white supremacist ideology – and they have virtually no supporters or influence in mainstream politics, much less in the White House.
Within the white supremacist movement, neo-Nazi groups saw the greatest growth – from 99 groups to 121. Anti-Muslim groups rose for a third straight year. They increased from 101 chapters to 114 in 2017 – growth that comes after the groups tripled in number a year earlier.
Ku Klux Klan groups, meanwhile, fell from 130 groups to 72. The decline is a clear indication that the new generation of white supremacists is rejecting the Klan’s hoods and robes for the hipper image of the more loosely organized alt-right movement.
The overall number of hate groups likely understates the real level of hate in America, because a growing number of extremists, particularly those who identify with the alt-right, operate mainly online and may not be formally affiliated with a hate group.
These groups not only spew hatred; they have helped to spur a frightening rise in racist violence — and murder.
A separate SPLC investigation, released earlier this month, found that 43 people were killed and 67 wounded by young men associated with the alt-right over the past four years. Seventeen of the deaths came in 2017.
So AVFM and RoK are in some pretty shitty company here.
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy
And I thought I was bad at drawing sexy peoples
or just people in general
@Bakunin
All the luck!
@mish:
http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/fb/fba0c4627b4633855f402108cab53c3198510c3d2c25c3e96a25269e25cc0de9.jpg
@Bakunin – Hope it all goes well for you!
David, I’m so glad you’re feeling up to posting again. It’s a shame that there’s so much to post about.
My kid’s school had a scare about a shooter this past week. The guy had responded to his ex on social media (snapchat?) with a threat about doing something the next day, and some kids in the school saw it and reported it. The would-be-shooter was arrested, and rumors were flying so wildly that I and a bunch of other parents pulled our kids out of school for the rest of the day. No one was hurt.
It was awful, though. I was so scared, but my kids are okay at least. None of this seems real, how is this even debatable? Do we all have to lose people to have it taken seriously?
@Mistyful –
Firstly: I am so sorry that happened to your family. That shouldn’t happen to anyone. Ever.
Secondly: The WHTM crowd isn’t as familiar with the gun rights crowd as you are with the MGTOW types, so I’ll fill in a bit because I grew up in the movement: The gun rights movement is a single-issue far-right movement. Like most far-right movements, they’re made up of a mix of True Believers (like my parents) and people who manipulate the true believers for money and/or power (NRA execs, gun company execs, Alex Jones types, etc). There’s a lot of overlap between gun rights extremists, sovereign citizens, the Patriot movement, various Christofascist groups, social regressivists, hate group members, bigots of any and usually several varieties, hard-right militia movements, and doomsday preppers. In fact, most of the extremist gun rights folks I’ve met cover at least two of those bases (my parents, for example, are gun rights extremists, Patriot movement supporters, bigots, and doomsday preppers). So it’s hard not to talk about the others while you talk about gun rights extremism, but I’ll try because that’s a whole can o’ worms there and I could go on for way too long.
There are five keys to remember when dealing with the gun rights crowd on this kind of issue:
1. They believe any social problem (including the problem of shootings) can be solved by more guns. See the mantra of “The only thing that stops a Bad Guy with a gun is a Good Guy with a gun.” They marinate themselves in propaganda about lone heros single-handedly saving the day with their trusty self-defense weapon. Often they’ve convinced themselves that they – Mr 70YO doctor with no formal combat training or Ms overweight and out of shape 35YO business person who plays paintball once in a while – would be this Great Hero if something ever happened, and they’ll even express some eagerness over the idea in unguarded moments. They genuinely believe the only thing stopping them from being a hero is lack of opportunity. So when you pooh-pooh the idea of some middle-aged teacher with no combat training single-handedly stopping a school shooter because that’s fucking ridiculous (and it is fucking ridiculous don’t get me wrong – trained experts in that kind of tactical response have at best an 18% hit rate in real situations, can you imagine what an untrained person does?), you’re threatening their own self-image and making them feel personally insulted. Cuz, after all, they’re Joe or Jane Ordinary, too.
2. They believe any attempt to regulate gun rights whatsoever is the first step on a slippery slope to overarching totalitarianism, because if they don’t have their guns, there is nothing to stop (insert boogeyman here – the government, the New World Order, whatever) from taking over. They believe the above because most of them are right-wing authoritarians and fantasize about being the ones in control with absolute authority to do whatever the hell they want – and they feel if that’s what they want, that’s what everyone wants, and only constant vigilance will keep them and theirs free.
3. They believe that any incident involving a gun can be explained by other factors, other than the mere presence of the firearm. Baby shoots mommy in the grocery store and kills her because he was playing with her gun in her purse? That’s the mom’s negligence for storing her weapon improperly, not the gun’s fault (never mind they advertise some weapons as purse weapons…). School shooter? Mental health, not enough armed people in the school to respond, terrorism if the shooter is brown, if the shooter didn’t have a gun he’d use a bomb or a knife, etc. Crime? Tougher policing is needed, not “punishing” the lawful gun owners for the actions of the criminals! I could go on.
4. Their primary tactics in these cases is to delay, deflect and distract. Step 1: Delay. This is not the time to talk about gun control. How dare you politicize this tragedy? Step 2: Deflect. The problem isn’t guns in school, it’s [other issue – violent video games, mental health, whatever]. Step 3: Distract. If you really want to protect children, why don’t you [arm teachers/set up SWAT teams and an armed perimeter on every school/etc]? or Those kids weren’t really victims – they were crisis actors! They know what they’re saying is ridiculous, but that’s not the point – the idea is to buy time for the public attention to move somewhere else, because they know that once public attention is no longer on an issue, the government isn’t going to act.
5. Under no circumstances will they ever argue honestly. They will say they support “reasonable” gun control, but they are lying. They want to seem reasonable so they pretend a compromise can be found and instead work to sabotage it by finding ridiculous sticking points until you give up in frustration, and then they’ll paint you as the bad guy.
So, what I’m saying is: No tragedy will ever be enough for the gun rights crowd. The True Believers are in a cult to the god of gun culture. Nothing will convince them head-on. They pretty much have to find their own doubt somehow and de-radicalize. And the others are too amoral to give a shit. Weirdly, the too-amoral ones are the ones it’s easier to reach – if you can convince them it’s better for them to side with you, they’ll change camps. Think the Republicans who all of a sudden found in their hearts a bit of support for gun control measures in the past week.
As hard as it is to do, what the US needs to do to make progress on this issue is to completely write-off the gun rights crowd and go after the moderate and mainstream conservatives, the swing voters, and the left wing. If you can make it obvious it’s political suicide to take NRA money and support NRA positions, that’s how you win. The kids from Parkland are doing a great job – by refusing to let the three Ds work. They insist they want to be talking about gun control, so they refuse to delay. They redirect the conversation back to guns by providing counter-evidence to the claim and returning back to the topic at hand. And they make fun of the outrageous ideas but – critically – refuse to be distracted. If you control the political conversation, as the kids are doing, you control where politics goes.
I think we might finally be headed in this direction now. Companies are starting to sever ties with the NRA because of the impact on their bottom line.
Oh – that’s without even going into their “the only person responsible for your safety is you” schtick. Basically, they genuinely believe that anyone who is the victim of a violent crime is partially at fault for contributing their own person to the situation.
Yes, this includes when the victim is a child. Most of gun rights crowd would partially blame toddler-to-preschooler me for getting myself molested by a pedophile, because I should’ve had more personal responsibility and kept myself out of the situation. I know this because a lot of them told me as much to my face in the days before I left the movement. Rarely quite so explicitly – but it’s not super hard to read between the lines especially when they refuse to deny that you’re responsible for being molested when you bring up that situation in a hypothetical. Because “even a child can do something.”
The gun rights crowd could (and probably do) partially blame the students at Parkland for not arming themselves with whatever’s at hand and charging like the fucking Light Brigade at the shooter.
I believe your brain is corrupted by a chemical from women that has made you into a beta male permanently or long-term. At this point its hopeless for people like you. But soon enough the incels who have sense will start the revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJjt_xTanSw
I hope you are. Up here in the North the left is making the mistake of assuming the gun control, voter suppression, and abortion arguments are over. And the Left everywhere in North America made the mistake of assuming far-right extremism was over after the 90s. No, moderates didn’t “win” – the far right learned from its mistakes. They went underground so people would forget what they were while they raised their kids to be the next generation of far-right extremists. Now that their kids are coming of age (I’m one of the oldest of this cohort at 30), we’re seeing a rise in right-wing terrorism. Based on my own childhood, I’m starting to think that isn’t just a coincidence.
The folks who were far-right extremist types and supporters in the 70s-early 90s didn’t all deradicalize when they had kids. A lot of them hold the same beliefs they used to, they just don’t want to engage in open action anymore because getting caught would be harmful to their kids. So instead they set out to de-fang and moderate the public image of the far right (turning the image from a neo-Nazi skinhead beating people to Preston Manning saying ReFOOOORM in a silly nasal voice on This Hour Has 22 Minutes or Stephen Harper droning about economics) while they just raised and groomed their kids to be the next generation. It’s what I was groomed for. The evangelical Quiverfull movement doesn’t have a monopoly on far right belief systems trying to self-propagate through the kids of the previous generations’ firebrands. The idea I was brought up with was that in the inevitable doomsday revolution, I (and my siblings) would be cell leaders who would get glory and become the heroes of the day by overthrowing the totalitarian regime of the Canadian government (yes I realize how ridiculous that sounds now). It was all to be decentralized, with each cell taking inspiration from actions of others and loosely coordinating over emerging platforms like the Internet (the far Right realized and took advantage of the potential of the internet much sooner than the rest of the political spectrum – Stormfront was the first political BBS, frex). The benefit of the decentralized structure was that the Enemy would be too busy playing whack-a-mole with crises to take effective and coordinated action, and without a single figurehead or leader, the movement would live on even if individuals were arrested. When I was a kid, it was reality to me. When I de-radicalized and left the movement, it all seemed so loony as to be laughable. And yet, what’s happening now seems familiar enough to be chilling.
MGTOW is a symptom of the underlying problem of far-right extremism – and that’s a threat we underestimate at our peril.
This is a recurring pattern on the right wing generally.
Religious extremists believe any social problem (including religious bigotry/Islamic terrorism/etc.) can be solved with more prayer, more applying the rules of their preferred holy book, and more forcing those rules on unwilling members of the wider society.
Economic right-wingers believe any social problem (including poverty) can be solved by shoveling more money toward the people who need it least.
White nationalists believe any social problem (including neo-Nazi terrorist acts) can be solved by deporting (or worse) brown people.
And so forth.
Same thing again. Religious extremists think any attempt to limit their ability to impose their religious mores on unwilling nonbelievers (in those mores, at least) is the first step on a slippery slope to overarching debauchery (sounds like fun!) or a takeover by (insert hated heterodox branch/other religion here, e.g. Catholics, Jews, or Muslims if you’re Protestant, or Protestants, Jews, or Muslims if you’re Catholic). Economic right-wingers think any attempt to raise their taxes a few percentage points or implement a social program or two is the first step on a slippery slope to Stalin’s gulags and miserably executed, decrepit and collapsing totally-centrally-planned Soviet economy. White nationalists think any attempt to limit white privilege, e.g. affirmative action or just plain giving everyone equal ability to vote, is the first step on a slippery slope to “white genocide”.
And again. Religious extremists explain away religiously motivated terrorism from members of their own faith as “mental illness” or some other something-else, even if there was a clear religiously inspired manifesto. (Remember the Planned Parenthood shooter, caught on tape yelling “No more baby parts!”, being blamed on anything-but-Christian-extremism?) Economic right-wingers explain away poverty as laziness, mediocrity, “why don’t you just get a job?”, lack of entrepreneurship, and so forth — anything but right-wing economic policies. White nationalists explain away white-on-nonwhite terrorism as “mental illness”, etc.
And religious extremists will do so when a member of their faith kills from religious conviction, and the economic right-wing will do so when things like the Grenfell Tower fire or Flint water crisis or Carillion collapse or 2008 mortgage meltdown happen that can be laid directly at the feet of right-wing fiscal policies, particularly privatization. (Privatization is guilty in all four of the above cases: the “public” housing became a public-private partnership and a profit motivated firm cut corners at Grenfell; they put the bankers in charge of deciding Detroit’s fiscal policies, instead of the elected mayor and council; Carillion is a private contractor resulting from outsourcing public works to profit-motivated businesses; and the mortgage meltdown was a culmination of numerous policies, not least of which was making central banks the world over “independent” — that is, controlled by private interests or else wholly unaccountable, instead of under the thumbs of we the people. White nationalists will say “both sides” were bad after something like Charlottesville, then change the subject.
Again, I see that from all right wing groups. Religious ones will use their holy book selectively to support their position, ignoring the parts that undermine it and ignoring everything not in their book; economic right-wingers will stick to an atomized view of isolated, perfectly rational market actors with perfect information where no nonlinearly-bad things happen when people’s bank balances go below zero and similar spherical-cow models come hell or high water. If they don’t cling to something even weirder, like goldbug-ism, all-taxation-is-theft extremism, a very strict (and selective, just like the Bible/Koran/etc.-thumpers) interpretation of the Constitution and/or Ayn Rand, or similarly instead to justify abolishing taxes and all social programs and turning the financial-policy clock back to the 1800s (which, it should be noted, saw recurring bouts of deflationary depression — some economic “golden age” that was). White nationalists simply refuse to view non-whites as fully human beings, rendering them immune to basically any argument from morality.
TL;DR: The five points you raise about gun fondlers seem to apply also to tax haters, religious extremists, privatization peddlers, “libertarians”, white nationalists, and so forth. They seem to be generic to those on the far right wing of every issue.
Oh yea, I’m not saying it’s unique at all. More I figured I’d give a primer on the gun rights arguments and tactics as applied to that particular subgroup.
In fact, I think the rest of the spectrum tends to make a mistake in assuming that far right groups are all in separate camps – that the gun rights types are distinct from MRAs are separate from racist groups are separate from alt-right are separate from militias are… etc. The reality looks a lot more like a spider web, or one of those thought cloud things. There’s a lot of overlap between the groups, and they all borrow and learn from each other. Usually a far-right extremist isn’t a single-issue extremist even if they say they are – MRAs are often racists or gun nuts as well as MRAs, preppers are usually also militia types and gun nuts, and so on. Gun nuts are typically also at least three of racist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic and sexist, and often are involved in militia or patriot movement stuff. And so on and so forth.
Humans like to shove things in boxes to simplify the problem, but in a lot of ways, the far-right defies that sort of simple characterization.
They did? I’m up here in the north too and every progressive space I’ve ever spent time has discussed these issues. The Democratic party as a whole (there are of course individual exceptions) has dropped the ball on some of these by being afraid to take a hard line. But people in my age group and younger at least have not from what I’ve seen believed the fight is over on any of this.
North = Canada in my post, sorry. In Canada they’ve treated those issues as over. That’s a big, big, big mistake.
… where’s David?
He said he’d be a bit of time in getting back into daily posting.
In my not so humble opinion, he and his docs have done miracles in getting him back on the horse so quick. You can be the most motivated and enthusiastic person in the world about something and depression will still stop you doing it. In some ways, that seems the worst aspect of depression to me. It takes the simple joy of getting something done away as well. 🙁
He was posting daily. Then he stopped again?
IDK, hope he’s ok. Depression’s a biochemical vampire that sucks the life out of a person, so here’s hoping he’s ok.
He’s still tweeting. Depression has ups and downs and some days it’s harder to motivate yourself than others. You don’t get better instantly. It’s no different than if he were recovering from surgery; some days you might feel up to doing a lot and some days your body forces you to rest. Let’s give him some time to heal.
@Surplus
All the above. Also, outside of when he did that Today in Tweets series last autumn, he has never kept up a consistent daily posting schedule. Historically speaking, a few days off is rather par for the course with this blog and nothing to be prematurely concerned about necessarily
All the good wishes to David anyway – I hope you’re OK, and that you take as much time as you need. Posting is great, as long as it’s not knackering you!
Petition to get Amazon to cut ties with the NRA.
https://www.change.org/p/jeff-bezos-remove-nratv-from-amazon-s-streaming-service-website?utm_medium=email&utm_source=petition_signer_receipt&utm_campaign=triggered&share_context=signature_receipt&recruiter=66501479&j=254048&sfmc_sub=387803491&l=32_HTML&u=46244913&mid=7233052&jb=496178
Saw that on twitter last night.
WTF is NRA TV?
Why is NRA TV!!!
Ooh, a troll! I wanna play!
@Incel Revolutionary:
There is no incel that has sense. If an incel had sense, he wouldn’t be an incel. Also, David covered the zombifying vagina goo thing years ago.
Many men these days suffer from beta male syndrome. But your condition doesn’t have to be permanent. Ask your doctor if Incelium is right for you.
Side effects include frothing rage, overarching entitlement, bitterness, loneliness, homicidal ideation, internet trolling and misogyny. Do not take Incelium if you wish to remain a decent person.
Sigh. We’re back to stupid YouTube videos, huh?