We Hunted The Mammoth
It’s a day ending in “y” and “Men’s Human Rights Activist” Dean Esmay is spamming another hashtag on Twitter with belligerent and nonsensical Tweets directed at some imaginary feminist living in his head.
Wait, these were Tweeted yesterday, not today. Let me check something.
Yes, Thursday is also a day ending in “y,” so let’s continue.
Dean Esmay, the Chief Operations Officer (whatever that is) of A Voice for Men, has scored a major public relations coup for the Men’s Rights movement with his aggressive promotion of an exciting new Twitter hashtag, #SpankAFeminist.
In what I can only assume is an attempt to convince the world that MRAs do indeed spend a good portion of their days fantasizing about doing physical harm to feminists, Esmay explains in a post on AVFM that the hashtag is necessary “because it’s finally time to put abusive liars over the knee.”
Last night, as you probably have heard, a Dallas man named James Boulware launched a one-man quasi-military assault on the Dallas Police Department headquarters, firing an automatic rife with such abandon that early reports suggested that there were as many as four different shooters. After fleeing the scene in an armored “Zombie Apocalypse Van,” leaving behind an assortment of improvised explosives as a kind of going away gift, Boulware was cornered in a restaurant parking lot; after a long standoff, he was eventually killed by a police sniper’s bullet. It was something of a miracle that no one but Boulware ended up dead.
Boulware’s father told local news that his son had been “pushed past” his “breaking point” after losing custody of his son. Men’s Rights activists often describe men who “resort to violence” after losing a custody dispute as victims of a cruel family court system.
But in Boulware’s case, it appears, nothing could be further from the truth.
The not-so-good folks at A Voice for Men are still so steamed about the Southern Poverty Law Center calling them out on their misogyny that they can’t think straight. Consider the unhinged anti-SPLC rant AVFM’s “chief operations officer” Dean Esmay posted on the site after the SPLC’s Mark Potok appeared on David Pakman’s internet show last week.
Over on Vox Popoli, everyone’s favorite far-right fantasy author Vox Day (Theodore Beale) is pig-biting mad that pizza parlors in Indiana won’t be allowed to refuse service to gay people. And so he’s doing his best to rally the troops for a real-world Culture War Deathmatch, urging Christians — or at least the right kind of Christians — to “stop their cowardly cowering before the world” and start acting like “the apostles and martyrs and crusaders and inquisitors who preceded them.”
Oh, and like the dudes who’ve been having a giant public temper tantrum about video games and evil SJWs with dyed hair for the past 7 months:
I‘ll get to that thing in the headline in a second. But first: A Voice for Men’s Director of Lying Liars Janet Bloomfield has responded to my last post about her embattled tit pics — see here; the whole thing is too bizarre to explain briefly — by informing her readers that I was
failing to distinguish between pics sent to individual men privately as a means of manipulation and pics plastered over social media to make a broader point about feminist censorship and harassment.
AVFM’s flying monkey army has been making the same, er, argument in a series of highly original tweets:
As the news broke this morning that the Germanwings plane crash may have been a deliberate murder/suicide caused by the flight’s co-pilot, readers of the leading Men’s Rights website A Voice for Men were greeted by a post from site founder Paul Elam titled “A little blood in the mix never hurt a revolution.”
The headline on Elam’s post, a muddled mess that’s mostly a response to recent infighting amongst MRAs, recalls a disturbing post of his from several years ago titled “How to Build a Man Bomb.” (Archived here.)
Ostensibly a warning about the cost of ignoring male rage, it read a lot more like a threat.
Longtime readers of this blog will be familiar with a fellow who used to call himself Peter-Andrew: Nolan© — with the hyphen and the colon and the copyright symbol — and now calls himself Joschua-Brandon: Boehm© — also with a hyphen and a colon and a copyright symbol.
I think it’s fair to say he’s the world’s worst MRA.
Today, the first in what will be an occasional series of posts on the Twitter activity — sorry, “activism” — of Men’s Rights Activists and other misbegotten misogynistic miscreants.
Sorry about the cheap alliteration at the end of the sentence there, but I’ve spent the last few hours reading Tweets from Attila Vinczer (@Alvhun) and I guess his penchant for tacky rhetorical special effects has rubbed off on me a little.
Attila, the “Activism Director” for Men’s Rights hate site A Voice for Men, is an energetic Twitter “activist.” While not quite as hateful or vicious as his colleagues Dean Esmay or the now-banned Judgy Bitch (aka Janet Bloomfield), Attila has developed a Twitter style all his own, spewing forth minor masterpieces of overwrought incoherence that are the unintentional result of his attempts to pull off complicated literary maneuvers without a mastery of the basics. There is a kind of poetry to them.
The self-described “Men’s Human Rights” site A Voice for Men is a hate site trying — admittedly not very hard, or convincingly — to pose as a human rights organization. In reality, as I and various other writers have documented in considerable detail, it’s an organizer and amplifier of hatred, directed at feminists and women more generally.
Much of this hatred is directed at specific targets, mostly though not always feminist women who have offended A Voice for Men’s founder Paul Elam. The aim is generally to terrorize feminists into silence.
I’ve written at length about AVFM’s campaigns of vilification and intimidation in the past; for a recent example as well as numerous links to discussions of past examples, see here.
Today I will look at some of the specific tactics that AVFM uses against its targets – providing, in each case, a recent example.
This, in other words, is how AVFM’s Hate Machine functions. [TRIGGER WARNING for abusive language, discussion of abusive tactics]
