A Men’s Rights activist, an incel, and an antisemite walk into a restaurant. The restaurant owner says, “hey Larry, do you want your usual table for one?”
Because they’re all the same person!
I think I screwed that joke up, but the sad thing is that there is a lot of overlap between the manosphere and the so-called alt right — and a lot of people who easily fit into both groups.
This isn’t new. Indeed, a lot of the elder statesmen of the manosphere — most notably the now-departed blogger known as Roissy/Heartiste — were alt-right racists before the alt-right was even a thing. The infamous former “pickup artist” (and current Christian fanatic Roosh Valizadeh took a longer time to develop into a raging antisemite, but he got there all the same. The famous “crying Nazi” — Christopher Cantwell — cut his teeth writing for the Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men.
The misogynist MGTOW and incel “movements” have long been rife with conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and outright Nazism, in part because fascists have been recruiting in both groups for years, knowing that it’s a short step, in these circles, from woman-hating to antisemitism.
When Andrew Anglin posts extravagantly misogynstic rants about women on his Daily Stormer website, it’s not just because he’s a misogynistic asshole; he’s also trying to draw disaffected incels into the neo-Nazi movement.
Up until now, evidence of the slippery slope from the manosphere misogyny to full-blown neo-Nazism has been largely anecdotal — though, to be fair, there’s not exactly a shortage of anecdotes.
Now a new report from Hope Not Hate and the Antisemitism Policy Trust documents in detail the slippery slope from misogyny to antisemitism and outright Nazism — and the role that conspiracy theories play in greasing the skids.
The report, titled “Antisemitism and Misogyny: Overlap and Interplay” (pdf here), concludes that
Anti-feminism and misogyny can act as slip roads towards antisemitism and other forms of racism. In recent years, the far right in particular has become increasingly adept at steering the former prejudices towards the latter.
Conspiracy theories often serve as a bridge between misogyny and antifeminism and antisemitism. If you believe, as many manospherians do, in the nonsensical notion that there is a “war on men,” it’s apparently not hard to convince yourself (or to let yourself be convinced) that there is a war on white men specifically. And it ‘s only a small step from there to the notion that the Jews are somehow behind it.
Looking at Telegram, “a key online hub for the antisemitic far right,” the report notes,
we found that open misogyny is widespread and enabled within antisemitic spaces on the platform.
The researchers found,no surprise, that in these antisemitic online spaces the discussion is crude and violent, and one of the most popular discussion subjects is rape.
As the Guardian notes, the researchers
examined 73 English-language antisemitic far-right Telegram channels and chat groups, which provided 5,684,738 text messages, and found that misogynistic content was “prevalent”. Misogynistic keywords were detected in more than 85,000 posts, with the word “rape” among the most common, occurring in almost 46,200 posts, and “rapist” in a further 3,900.
Many posts referred to the sexual assault of white women and children by minority ethnic groups, a longstanding far-right trope that enables white men to play a patriarchal “protector” role. On the extreme fringes, meanwhile, analysts uncovered an “increasingly common promotion of weaponised rape and sexual sadism”.
If you thought incel discussion of rape were bad, on these “extreme fringes” of the far-right they are worse.
As the Guardian sums it up.
Pro-rape discourse has spread across the wider pro-terror Nazi subculture, with one of the clearest examples being the RapeWaffen Division (RWD), a small, now defunct AWD splinter that operated on Telegram.
This group obsessively promoted sexual violence, and in private chats, users solicited and shared videos of women subjected to sexual abuse, alongside other acts of violence and murder.
The group’s founder has given followers practical advice on locating and subduing victims in order to sexually assault them.
And they’re not kidding. Indeed, an American soldier who associated with “RapeWaffen” was indicted last year for a mass murder plot.
What’s more chilling is that all of this has a good chance of spreading further. The Guardian points out that roughly a third of young people (teens and early twenties) told Hope Not Hate pollsters that they thought “feminism holds men back.” Meanwhile, the same poll revealed that nearly 20 percent of young men think that “Jewish people have an unhealthy control over the world’s banking system.”
I’m sure the neo-Nazis on Telegram salivate over poll results like that; just think of how many of these young haters they can recruit!
You’re doing a heckuva job, Telegram, you really are.
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Related: https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/tiktok-transphobic-far-right-study/
Transphobia on tik tok is a gateway to alt-right content. There’s gonna be a whole paper about it.
Thank you for posting this, David. I have spent many hours trying to convince anti-hate groups to take misogyny seriously. Even the Anti-Defamation League, the Kupfferberg Holocaust Museum, and even Heather Heyer’s mother ignore it. I attended a virtual presentation – a manel, dontcha know – and my question was dismissed and ignored. I will forward this pdf to many groups in the (vain?) hope that they will FINALLY listen to women.
Hatred, true hatred (as distinct from casual, unthinking bigotry, which is not primarily motivated by hate and easier to fix), is addictive.
Like all addictions, some people are more vulnerable than others. Some can quit fairly easily, once they realize it’s bad for them; others find it near impossible to give up of their own volition. Also like all addictions, it partially satisfies a craving for something which is missing from their life, yet is never enough. Sooner or later, any attempt to satisfy the cravings will have diminishing returns. Instead of finding some other way to fulfill their needs, they seek out additional persons (if focused on specific individuals) or more groups of people to hate (if focused on broad bigotries), which is ultimately no less addictive and no more satisfying.
While I would not be surprised to find that some forms of hatred act as more effective gateways to certain other forms of hatred, I believe that all forms are ultimately gateways to all other forms. Further, I would suggest that certain people (such as most incels) start out with misery addiction and then branch out to hate addiction. (And then there are ones which start out with misery and/or hate and then branch out to drug addiction. That’s really not pretty.)
And what is missing from their lives? Most of the time, a feeling of security. Hyped-up, nonexistent threats; being treated as ignoramuses, reckless fools, and sometimes even evil monsters when they just know that they’re the only truly good and wise folk; uncertain and likely unstable financial futures; perceived or actual loss of long-held privileges; inability to control what their children see, hear, and believe… for the first three, gee, I wonder who is really responsible for those. (Hint: It is the ones who are paying certain media to point at scapegoats.) For the fourth, privilege is such a fragile and often invisible thing to hang security on, and of questionable morality besides. For the last, that was always to some extent an illusion, now being laid bare – and even the real portion of it could not realistically persist in societies deep in the information age.
We’re not responsible for their feelings of insecurity, obviously, but our own actual security (well, most of us here, anyway) is jeopardized by the pay-to-scapegoat system. Getting rid of that would kill two birds with one stone… but it would be a slow death for both birds, to torture a metaphor. And unfortunately it is a high priority on a far-too-long list which is almost all high priority.
TL;DR hate suuuuuucks.
I would also add that they also all start as Libertarians.
Thanks for posting this!
“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
Yoda knew what he was talking about.
@Matruz
Libertarianism is, after all, a deliberate attempt to paint selfishness as moral, and financial status as a result of virtue. So naturally it appeals to the kind of assholes who were, to use a sportsball metaphor, “born on third base but convinced that they hit a triple.”
It’s not surprising that misogyny is the gateway bigotry, considering sexual rejection happens early on (even before puberty). A girl saying “no” is likely to be their first experience with another person withholding the status they believe they’re entitled to.
Once the initial resentment and sense of victimhood is sparked, it’s not hard to funnel those grievances onto other groups.
@matruz
That’s because libertarianism is conservatism with extra steps. While conservatives want clearly established social hierachies based on gender, race, class, religion, etc; libertarians simply believe that the myth of meritocracy: the belief that cishet White males are more competent than everyone else. But when all their priviledges and advantages were obtained through the oppression of other groups, then their own inherent superiority is nothing than a rigged outcome.
That’s why, the minute we started moving towards equality and they couldn’t compete on merit, with people far less advantaged than them, they started denouncing the system as “rigged” and “unfair”.
It didn’t take them long before they turned to full-throated fascism in order to obtain, through force, what they felt naturally belonged to them.
In short: they are only libertarians because they believe themselves to be outstanding, by virtue of their skin and genitalia, when in fact they’re all mediocre or even below that.
In my own experience, guys on the left can also be misogynists who hate or fear women. Or they exploit women, sexually or economically or just to make themselves feel more powerful. Or all of the above. Words are great. Actions should be congruent with words.
Shorter: Intersectional or GTFO.
In the words of the late great Norm MacDonald: “Another groundbreaking story from the Journal of DUH.”
No, it needed to be studied formally, but that running Weekend Update gag (usually the Medical Journal of Duh) always made me laugh and we still use it here to this day.
@ginger: Of course a manel would reject it. I hope this report helps them see the truth.
I think we all knew this. Kind of ironic that the Guardian wrote about it though. Because they’re always platforming TERF shit and that’s another gateway to Nazism.
I came across this quote today; seems apposite.
“Today’s fascism no longer needs a Hitler, a Mein Kampf, or a regular corps of stormtroopers. Instead it has Facebook, the gaming channels Steam and Discord, the Telegram messaging service and the algorithms that push far-right video content onto the screens of people Google deems likely to enjoy it.”
(From someone called Paul Mason, whom I must confess I’d never heard of.)
Sunday, 18 May 2014
by MichaelRosen
The studies referenced here are interesting; although I’m not entirely convinced. It might be a factor though.
https://bigthink.com/the-past/authoritarian-meaning-life/
Seems that one should be very wary of anyone proclaiming an “end of history”.
Note that the Nazis and Communists weren’t the only regimes to proclaim a manifest destiny and then go on a conquering rampage sprinkled with acts of genocide, inspired by some set of writings. Consider all of these events from history:
Time period: aggressors, book, ideology, acts of aggression, victims
5th century: Arabs, Quran, Islam, expansionist conquests across the MENA region, Persian Empire and other preexisting polities
10th century: Europeans, Bible, Christianity, Crusades, Muslims
14th century: Spanish, Bible, Christianity, Inquisition and conquistadores, nonChristian Spaniards and Native Americans
19th century: Americans, Monroe Doctrine, Manifest Destiny, westward expansion and expansion of slavery, Native Americans and African-Americans
19th century: Canadians, very similar doctrines, westward expansion, Native Americans
20th century: Europeans, various conceptions of national supremacy, colonialism, World War I, each other and assorted native populations around the world
20th century: Germans, Mein Kampf, Nazism, World War II, religious minorities and nearby polities
20th century: Russians, Das Kapital, Communism, expansion of Soviet Union, WWII, and Cold War, religious minorities and nearby polities
20th century: Americans, Friedmann and Hayek and “Washington Consensus”, liberal capitalism, establishing dictatorships in places like Iran and Chile under local puppets like the Shah and Pinochet, the populations of the subverted countries
21st century: Americans, Fukuyama, neoliberal capitalism, wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, the populations of the invaded countries
No doubt plenty more such examples can be found. (What ideology drove Japan’s authoritarianism and aggression in the runup to World War II? No doubt there was one.) Probably every time an expansionist empire has appeared in history, a similar ideology proclaiming a manifest destiny helped drive the expansion. And most of these ideologies have produced recurring bouts of expansionist aggression: Christianity appears up there twice, and the various American iterations of manifest destiny have three occurrences (and, especially the first time, have invoked Christianity as well as capitalism).
Most of these incidents have combined expansionist aggression abroad with domestic authoritarian repression in the affected nation-states. This has often taken the form of concentration camps, gulags, or reeducation camps/”residential schools” intended to eliminate or “reprogram” people of rival cultures, so, genocide. Mass enslavement has featured in some incidents as well.
It should also be noted how often these events are terminated by a ruinous war. Europe near-bankrupted itself prosecuting the Crusades. The Monroe Doctrine period ended in America’s Civil War. Nazism was crushed by the world war that it started. The United States has near-bankrupted itself with the Fukuyamist warmongering in the Middle East; like the Crusades a millennium prior, this has led to a withdrawal of forces from the region and growing financial and economic instability at home. Pandemics may have played a role in ending the hostilities both times, plague then and COVID now. World War I also may have ended partly because of a flu pandemic.
One part of the Bible seems to have been a self-fulfilling prophecy: these events, sometimes driven by belief in the Bible’s own eschatology, tend to bring out the Four Horsemen when they occur, and this in turn tends to make them self-limiting and ultimately ruinous for the aggressors and their victims alike.
@snowberry
Excellent insight about hate addiction.
Even antifascists have to be careful…hate Nazis but don’t make the hate the goal… stopping them is the goal.
@Kat
Ah, the woke-bro! But he’s so sensitive! And knows all the right jargon! He’s with you ,sister…you go girl!!
But God help you if you contradict him or ask him to explain himself… don’t you know how SENSITIVE AND AWARE HE IS? as he explodes with anger that you would dare question him.
Or he sulks because you have questioned his wonderfulness.
And he never, never, EVER, apologies.. unless you back him into a corner with facts: ” okay I sorta might be wrong about snapping for no reason I’m sorry can I go now?”
They’re real charmers… especially when they whine to a third party they don’t know why there was a problem….
Yeah, kinda know a couple of those guys.
@ iforget
Ironically this is one of the best illustrations of that principle.
@iforget
Yeah, he’s pretty thrilled with his own wonderfulness.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants
It’s not surprising that misogyny is the gateway bigotry, considering sexual rejection happens early on (even before puberty).
And before, during and after that period, a boy can grow up in a household where his mother – and any unfortunate sisters in the family – are dismissed, shouted down, ignored or actively abused by his father. Freud was wrong about a lot of shit, but he was bang on with the problems that families can cause.
@oncewasmagnificent, yes! Considering that pretty much everyone experiences sexual/other kinds of rejection, and people can and do have this experience without thereby becoming bigots, I would hazard that being surrounded by bigoted and abusive behaviour – such that it is normalised – is probably a far more significant factor.