We Hunted The Mammoth
The Fourth Quarter 2016 “We’ve Got a Bigger Problem Now” pledge drive is entering the home stretch, and I just wanted to update you all on the progress.
First of all, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU to everyone who has donated! Some of you really came through in a big way; I’m humbled and deeply appreciative!
To say that the Daily Stormer’s Nazi-in-chief Andrew Anglin is excited about Trump’s electoral victory is a bit of an understatement. Anglin, one of the most influential figures in the so-called alt-right, is so overjoyed by Trump’s success that he’s … encouraging his readers to harass depressed Hillary supporters until they kill themselves.
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.
So yesterday comedian Jen Kirkman posted a little joke on Twitter, as comedians are wont to do.
Before we look at what happened after she posted this Tweet (which has now been deleted), let me just say a couple of things about the Tweet itself.
Jen Kirkman does not actually “LIKE that Hillary has murdered a lot of people,” in part because she (Kirkman) does not LIKE murder and in part because she does not believe that Hillary has, in fact, murdered a lot of people.
The joke is a clear reference to the right-wing Clinton-haters who have been trying their best, for the last quarter century, to convince the world that Bill and Hillary have been secretly knocking off their political enemies, mob style, racking up a CLINTON BODY COUNT that is now said to number 48.
In other words, the joke is not actually a joke about murder. It s a joke about the right-wing idiots who think that Hillary goes around offing people like some pastel-pantsuited Tony Soprano.
[UPDATE 8/5 Kirkman herself made clear that’s what she meant in a Tweet today.]
Unfortunately, many of those who encountered Kirkman’s Tweet on Twitter — a large number of whom seem to be former Bernie Sanders supporters who’ve gone over the Green Party’s Jill Stein — have kind of missed the point just a little, misreading it as some sort of creepy celebration of drones murdering children in Afghanistan, or something.
And instead of stopping for a second to ask themselves, “wait, is this comedian lady who does those hilarious yet disarmingly earnest segments on Drunk History really mocking or even advocating the murder of children, why would she do that, that can’t be right” many of these people decided to advocate the murder of her.
Here are a small fraction of the Tweets sent to her.
After Kirkman noted that she would be handing the operation of her Twitter account to someone else because she was tired of reading all the death threats, some of her Twitter, er, critics, did little victory dances of sorts.
And yes, that last dude is using a photo of a young Josef Stalin as his avatar. You know, the Russian dictator whose actual non-fictional not-a-joke STALIN BODY COUNT added up to something close to 20 million.
Someone even took the anti-Kirkman struggle to Wikipedia.
https://twitter.com/lastlivingrose/status/761283232260362240
The people bombarding Kirkman with threats and abuse aren’t Trump fans. They aren’t Trump fans pretending to be BernieBros. If you don’t believe me, go look at the accounts of the people whose Tweets I quoted above, or go directly to @JenKirkman’s mentions now, where you can find hundreds if not thousands more Tweets like this.
These are people who, in many instances, consider themselves progressives, radicals, anarchists, “revolutionaries.” These are, in more than a few cases, proud supporters of Jill Stein, a woman whose presence in the race makes it all that much harder to defeat the unhinged Muslim-hating racist Donald Trump. That strikes me as something of an irony.
In Milan Kundera’s The Joke, set in Communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, a young Czech intellectual and Communist Party member is tossed from the party and sent to work in the mines after he jokingly writes “long live Trotsky” on a postcard.
These days, we’ve got Twitter for that.
NOTE 8/5: Just a reminder for new commenters: defending or excusing harassment is against the comment policy here. I’ve been lax on bans in this thread so far but that’s over now.
The war on female speech can claim another victory of sorts.
Feminist writer Jessica Valenti — the longtime target of an organized campaign of harassment and slander by Men’s Rights activists and others — has been driven off of social media by death and rape threats posted on Instagram, aimed not at her but at her five-year-old daughter.
So Twitter has finally given Milo Yiannopoulos the boot — apparently for good — after the Breitbart “journalist” gleefully participated in, and egged on, a vicious campaign of racist abuse directed at Ghostbusters star Leslie Jones on Twitter earlier this week.
[UPDATE: Milo has been banned for good from Twitter. My thoughts here.]
More than a year and a half of manbaby whining wasn’t enough to derail the opening weekend of the Ghostbusters reboot: the film took in a greater-than-expected $46 million in the US, and Sony is already talking about a sequel.
And so the Lady-Ghostbuster-haters have returned to their roots. And by that I mean harassing women. The woman they’ve chosen to target this time? Leslie Jones, who, in the tiny minds of her harassers, has two strikes against her: 1) she’s one of the stars of the Ghostbusters reboot and 2) she’s black.
If you’ve been wondering what you could do to support Chanty Binx, the feminist activist who has endured three years of harassment for the “crime” of yelling at a couple of Men’s Rights activists at a protest in Toronto, consider donating to her legal fund via this GoFundMe.
Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos is less a journalist than a professional attention-seeker, building up his notoriety (and his Twitter followers) though an endless series of calculated outrages designed to delight his fanbase of garbage people while offending pretty much everyone else in the world. But even he seems to have gotten bored with this increasingly stale schtick.
The quarterly WHTM Pledge Drive continues! If you appreciate this blog, and can afford it, please click the “donate” button below. Thanks!
A little over three years ago, a Canadian feminist with bright red hair confronted some Men’s Rights Activists outside of an event at the University of Toronto.
