Paul Elam: The SPLC is calling A Voice for Men a hate group — so you should send me money

By David Futrelle

Paul Elam, the founder of A Voice for Men, has responded to his site’s inclusion on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s official list of hate groups rather predictably, lashing out against the hate-tracking organization with what he thinks is righteous indignation. And then asking people to give him money.

In a post on AFVM Friday, Elam fulminated:

Twenty-five years of speaking out about men’s issues and reaching out to men living in blue pill hell, speaking the truth as I see it has earned me a place in what mainstream sensibilities assumes is the dark underbelly of modern hate. My name forever stained with an allegation that paints me as being at home in white sheets, saluting like a Nazi.

Yeah, it’s not like his actual behavior has had anything to do with this.

I mean, it’s not like this truth-speaking advocate for “male issues” regularly calls women “c*nts.” It’s not as if he once described feminists as “c*ntists” or their sphere of influence online “the c*nt-o-sphere.” It’s not as if he’s constantly trying to come up with excuses to call women “bitches.”

It’s not like he once furiously denounced Valentine’s Day — in a 1300-word post published in, erm, August — as “Whore’s Day,” declaring the majority of women to be candy-and-jewelry-grubbing “whores.” It’s not as if he once used the word “whore” more than two dozen times in an article about a woman he dislikes.

It’s not as if he once asserted that

the only tool [women] have at their disposal to have any sort of influence … is the power of pussy and pussy is powerful indeed.

It’s not as if he once celebrated Mother’s Day by declaring that all mothers — indeed, everyone with a vagina — should be considered responsible for every fetus that has been aborted and every child that has been killed or abused or “pimped out to pedophiles.” It’s not as if he insisted that

If you have a vagina, the blood of all those children, who are abused far more at the hands of women than men, has stained your skin and caked around the cuticles of your fingers.

It’s not as if he once suggested — in a supposedly “satirical” piece that wasn’t actually satirical in any way — that Domestic Violence Awareness Month (October) should be replaced with “Bash a Violent Bitch” Month.

It’s not as if he set up Register-Her, a fake online “registry” designed to equate individual women he dislikes — from feminist writers to actress Katherine Heigl — with murderers and rapists and child molesters. It’s not as if he once told a critic of this “registry” that

I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of f*cking your shit up gives me an erection.

It’s not as if he and his followers have launched harassment campaigns against so many women I’ve lost count.

It’s not as if he celebrated a Men’s Rights activist who killed himself in hopes of inspiring fellow MRAs to start firebombing courthouses and police stations. It’s not as if AVFM posted and publicized the manifesto in which this man explicitly advocated this anti-government terrorism, declaring “boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses.”

It’s not as if he once said that if some family court judge were to be “dragged out of his courtroom into the street, beaten mercilessly, doused with gasoline and set afire by a father who just won’t take another moment of injustice” it “would not … so much be a tragedy as the chickens coming home to roost.”

It’s not as if he once declared:

Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.

It’s not as if he once told me to kill myself, or as if one of his followers threatened to “[stomp] a mud hole” in my “f*cking ass and [walk] that motherfucker dry,” whatever that means.

Oh, wait, he did  do each and every one of those things, and many other things like them. As you will see if you start clicking on the links in the above paragraphs.

In his post Friday, though, Elam tried his hardest to portray his hateful self as the real victim here, insisting that

I take the SPLC manufactured crap about who I am what AVFM is about, and I treat it like what it is. Bullying.

The SPLC is trying to scare me into silence. Indeed, they are trying to scare all of us into silence. Mark Potak, absolute scumbag that he is, knows full well that left wing wackaloons out there have used his material to target people for violent action.

Yes, that’s right: The guy who once told one of his critics that “the idea of f*cking your shit up gives me an erection” is accusing someone else of bullying. The founder of Register-Her is outraged that an organization has put him on a list.

Elam is not only angry at the “hate” part of the SPLC’s declaration that AVFM is a “hate group.” He’s also annoyed that they’ve classified AVFM as a “group” at all.

“AVFM is a website,” he insists. Nothing more. … a personal website.”

That’s a little bit strange, given that Elam has insisted many times that his website is more than just a website. He has regularly praised “the team” that has helped him not only with AVFM’s website but also AVFM’s ongoing activist campaigns, such as they are. The site used to have 18 people on its “masthead,” including one now-ex member designated the group’s “Activity Director.” It had (and maybe still has) a “meme team” charged with producing branded, if often baffling, AVFM propaganda.

While AVFM doesn’t hold weekly meetings in a church basement with punch and pie, and while the group is basically a shadow of its former self, with many of its more famous names having departed, it’s hardly a one-man operation, and the group’s forays into “activism” online and off have been organized and coordinated.

But maybe it’s not altogether accurate to call AVFM a group. Would “cult” be better? Former AVFM #2 man Dean Esmay once suggested as much, albeit accidentally, when he Freudian-slipped up and told one critic of the group that AVFM was “a group of volunteers dedicated to a cause, and the cause is Paul Elam.”

Of course, that seems to be how Elam thinks of AVFM as well, at least financially. Indeed, Elam ends his rant against the SPLC by asking his readers to send him sweet, sweet cash and/or bitcoins.

I will … take this moment to remind you that what I do does not come easy, and it has a cost, even more than just dollars. …

Below … you will find a variety of options, including my Patreon page, links for one-time and recurring donations and a Bitcoin link. There are also donation and subscription buttons at the top right of this website.

These days, hate is a business, and business is booming.

H/T to Alan Robertshaw for alerting me to Elam’s post