We Hunted The Mammoth
Sleazy bigot Steve Bannon, the former Breitbart boss who Donald Trump wants as his chief White House strategist, isn’t terribly popular in Washington at the moment. But he’s getting a lot of support from the white supremacists he pandered to at Breitbart — from former Klan leader David Duke; from Richard Spencer, the guy who came up with the euphemism “alt right” in the first place; and (of course) from Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer.
Grotesque pickup artist and ironic rape legalization proponent Roosh V is thrilled to finally have someone like him on the way to the White House. That is, a fellow male human who also likes to rate women on a scale of one to ten.
One of the most perceptive analyses of Trump and his followers was written more than two decades ago. I’m talking, of course, of Umberto Eco’s oft-discussed essay on what he calls Ur Fascism or Eternal Fascism, his attempt to set forth the central features that define Fascism. I reread it today for the umpteenth time, and was struck again by its eerie prescience.
When I began this blog six years ago, the Men’s Rights Movement was little more than a curiosity. I’ve watched, with both amusement and alarm, as this small movement has inspired, and ultimately has been eclipsed by, a broader anti-feminist, anti-woman backlash, online and off, driven largely by the same white male rage.
One day before American voters quite possibly elect their first female president (fingers crossed), Trump supporter/Hitler fan Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer has come up with a new argument as to why women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or really be permitted to make any decisions at all.
Well, it’s a new argument to me, anyway, so I am hereby awarding Anglin with the prestigious Nazi of the Day award that I just made up.
We haven’t heard much from Breitbart “journalist” and self-proclaimed “supervillain of the Internet” Milo Yiannopoulos since he was booted off of Twitter. Sad!
But he’s kept himself busy with his Dangerous F****t “lecture” tour of American campuses, delivering deliberately offensive speeches in hopes of ginning up controversy and garnering publicity for himself.
So the Alt-Right and its fellow travelers have a brilliant new strategy to defeat Hillary Clinton — a hashtag (and assorted hashtag-related memes) intended to trick voters, especially women, into thinking that Hillary intends to draft women for an inevitable war with Russia.
Cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian may have moved on from videogames, but Gamergaters (yes, they still exist) haven’t gotten over their obsession with her.
Yet another woman has been driven off Twitter by misogynistic fanboy bullies angry that she had invaded their putatively male turf. This time, the arena is comics, and the woman in question is writer Chelsea Cain, a bestselling novelist who brought her feminist sensibility to the Marvel comic book series Mockingbird, which recently came to an end after eight issues.
Men Going Their Own Way love fantasizing about what they see as the impending sexual singularity — that is, when sexbots become so sophisticated that they can replace real human ladies in the sexing department, thus rendering real human ladies pretty much obsolete, ha ha sucks to be you, ladies!
