Matthew Heimbach — the founder of the white nationalist Traditionalist Workers Party — recently sat down to interview John Friend for his podcast at Radio Aryan. Friend, who just last year lost his job when his employers discovered his connection to virulently anti-Semitic organizations, discussed the protests against Donald Trump which both he and Heimbach asserted were funded by the likes of George Soros (a longtime bogeyman of the right) and other Jewish financiers.
The men’s rights website A Voice for Men has a well-earned reputation for misogyny. It’s founder, Paul Elam, has published a variety of woman-hating screeds in the past, and made statements promoting the rape and physical abuse of women. (Usually when an article crosses the line he makes a ham-fisted attempt at passing his hate speech off as “satire.”) Other notable AVfM columnists, such as Dean Esmay and Warren Farrell, are equally toxic in their denunciations of women’s rights. Since Elam et al.are gearing up forrecently announced the cancellation of their second annual International Conference on Men’s Issues in late October, here’s a friendly reminder that AVfM has promoted numerous bigots and wingnuts who not only embrace sexism, but who have also made dehumanizing statements about Jews, people of color, and other religious and racial minorities. Here are five such examples:
1. Robert Stacy McCain
A conservative blogger and author who once held a job writing for the far-right Washington Times, Robert Stacy McCain has been a longtime opponent of women’s rights. In a recent guest column for AVfM McCain referred to feminism as a “totalitarian movement,” and accused women who’ve had abortions of participating in a form of “blood sacrifice” in order to “appease their need for sadistic vengeance against the society they blame for their personal unhappiness.” While AVfM describes McCain as “an award-winning journalist” it neglects to mention his ties to various extremist groups, such as the neo-Confederate hate group League of the South, whose members openly advocate Southern secession.
In 2002 McCain (under the pen name “Burke C. Dabney”) authored an article entitled “Race and Teenage Pregnancy” for the white nationalist publication American Renaissance, in which he denounced attempts to reduce unwanted pregnancies among white teenagers as “yet another form of racial suicide.” “If crusaders against teenage motherhood were serious,” he wrote, “they would concentrate on the black and Hispanic girls who account for more than half of teenage births.” Lest people think McCain’s ties to racist organizations are in some way accidental on his part, McCain wrote in a private email that “a number of perfectly rational people” react to images of interracial couples with “an altogether natural revulsion.”
2. Paul Ray Ramsey
Paul Ray Ramsey, a prominent Dark Enlightenment “thinker,” is another individual with ties to American Renaissance (he’s spoken at their past three conferences). Known by his online handle “RamZPaul” — and dubbed “the Smiling Nationalist” by his fans — Ramsey is a sort of David Duke for the digital age, a prolific video blogger who uses satire to spread his ideology of racial separatism and anti-feminism. In one video Ramsey claimed that black folks “don’t have the IQ, they don’t have the self-control” to refrain from assaulting whites, and compared them to rattlesnakes. In a video response to the controversial Supreme Court decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby , Ramsey, a staunch anti-suffragist, mocked outraged women and feminists, saying that the five justices responsible for the opinion “have real issues with women.” In fact, he said, “when they wrote their official court brief, they said they ruled that way because they hate women, and they want to rape them. That’s their official legal position.” Nonetheless, Paul Elam has promoted Ramsey’s work on AVfM and admitted to having “enjoyed many of [Ramsey’s] videos.”
3. Amartya Talukdar
According to AVfM Amartya Talukdar is a “dedicated humanist living in Kolkata in India” and a “relentless campaigner for Indian and family values.” Evidently those values include a husband’s absolute right to have sexual relations with his wife regardless of whether or not she consents, since Talukdar believes laws against marital rape amount little more than a “feminist tool to criminalize marriage in India.” In a guest post for AVfM Talukdar wrote that the “concept of marital rape is an oxymoron.” Marriage is a “licence for sex” in his eyes, and if a woman ever wishes to refuse sex for any reason then tough luck — she should have filed for divorce instead. “If a man should not subject his wife to physical pain,” he reasoned, “the wife should not subject him to the rigors of the criminal justice system.” (This article is, inexplicably, still featured prominently on AVfM, whose members and supporters still bill themselves as “human rights activists.”)
Arguably worse than Talukdar’s rape apologia is his noxious anti-Semitism. Talukdar, it seems, has a penchant for Holocaust denial and a strong adoration for Adolf Hitler. In a series of Tweets, he referred to the systematic extermination of some six million Jews and millions of other “undesirables” as a “byproduct of allied propaganda just like Saddam’s weapon of mass destruction” and “Stalinist propaganda devoid of any facts.” He then added in another Tweet, “Hitler is the tallest person in history. More you ridicule, more you invent stories of Holocaust [sic], he becomes even bigger. Hail.” When Dave Futrelle of the feminist blog We Hunted the Mammoth brought these statements to the attention of AVfM managing editor and COO Dean Esmay, Esmay bafflingly responded by calling Futrelle a “sociopathic sadist” and a “stalker madman.” Go figure.
4. Stefan Molyneux
Last April AVfM announced it would hold its First International Conference on Men’s Issues in late June. Its speaker roster included the usual MRAs — Warren Farrell, Mike Buchanan, and the like — as well as some surprises, such as Irish-born Canadian blogger and libertarian philosopher Stefan Molyneux. Molyneux uses his podcast, Freedomain Radio (“FDR”), as a platform from which to spread his anarcho-capitalist ideology and other unconventional ideas. An apparent science denier, Molyneux believes there is no such thing as mental illnesses (“There are no lab tests, brain scans, X-rays or chemical imbalance tests that can verify that any mental disorder is a physical condition.”), and his hatred of psychiatry rivals that of the Church of Scientology.
Quite fitting, then, that Molyneux and his wife have been accused of being little more than cult leaders for convincing listeners to sever ties with their “families of origin” or “FOOs.” Molyneux points out that familial relationships ought to be “voluntary” and that if people cannot improve those relationships, they should have the option to “disengage” — what he refers to as “deFOOing.”
Molyneux harbors an intense hatred for women as well. In an FDR broadcast from last year, he blamed the abundance of evil men on — what else? — women who “choose assholes.” “Women who choose assholes guarantee criminality. Sociopathy. Politicians. All the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married assholes,” he snarled. “Women worship at the feet of the devil and wonder why the world is evil.” Molyneux’s rhetoric is so deplorable, in fact, that when presented with this quote in last year’s debate with Matt Binder, Paul Elam couldn’t distinguish it from the words of misogynist rampage killer Elliot Rodger.
5. Daryush Valizadeh
Early this year AVfM‘s Mumia Ali (yes, he really calls himself that) published a softball interview with slimy pickup artist Daryush Valizadeh — better known as “Roosh V.” Valizadeh, a thirty-something professional troll, runs the websites Roosh V, Reaxxion, and Return of Kings, a blog “for heterosexual, masculine men” which features articles such as “5 Reasons to Date a Girl with an Eating Disorder” and “24 Signs She’s a Slut.”
Valizadeh made headlines this year for a particularly despicable article advocating the legalization of rape, supposedly in order to end it. “By teaching men not to rape, what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions,” he wrote. “I thought about this problem and am sure I have the solution: make rape legal if done on private property.” As abhorrent as this opinion is, it actually makes sense that Valizadeh would advocate legalized rape considering the fact that he admitted to raping an intoxicated woman in his book Bang Iceland.
Lately, as the Anti-Defamation League points out, Valizadeh has branched out into spreading anti-Semitic myths and promoting the work of Kevin MacDonald, a retired professor and white nationalist. Mumia Ali, who became an “instant fan” of Valizadeh when he was operating his now-defunct DC Bachelor blog, had little in the way of criticism for him. “Roosh set out to achieve a list of personal goals for himself, and by any measure, he not only has done so, he’s done so by a pretty wide freakin’ margin,” he wrote glowingly. “No matter what you think of him or what he’s about, you just have to respect that.” Actually, Mumia, no. No we don’t.
In an article for Return of Kings — pickup artist Daryush Valizadeh’s steaming pile of online misogyny — writer and “web developer” B. R. Crumb wrote that men should “shoulder the responsibility for ending rape culture” by refusing to date “raped chicks.” Echoing claims made last year by right-wing author George F. Will about rape victims enjoying a “coveted status,” Crumb wrote that women are “fond of falsely crying rape” because “being known as a rape victim is all upside, no downside.” (Other than the physical and psychological trauma, rumors being spread about your sexuality, sexists running through your personal life with a fine-toothed comb, getting doxxed by Internet harassers, and being branded a “liar” and a “slut” by disbelievers, that is.)
Crumb also waxed nostalgic for a bygone era in which rape victims “could be judged unfit for marriage,” and stated that society used to regard rape as evil “only secondarily because of the emotional turmoil a raped chick experiences as she orgasms underneath her alluring, bad-boy attacker.” However, while Crumb encourages RoK readers to “say you won’t date raped chicks” so as to discourage women from “crying rape,” he nevertheless maintains that it is at least acceptable to sleep with them. After all, he wrote, “in many cases a chick who claims to have gotten raped is the closest thing to a guaranteed freak you can find”:
The feminists are right. Men must shoulder the responsibility for ending rape culture, and the way we do it is this: Never date a raped chick.
Next time you hear (or hear of) a chick claiming she got raped, what you should do is nothing. Don’t confront or antagonize her. Don’t question her motives. Certainly don’t quibble over the particulars of the raped chick’s story; even if you prove she’s lying, the world will still insist she’s a victim (see: Jackie Coakley, formerly of UVA).
And don’t date her. Simple as that.
To be clear, I’m not suggesting you forego banging a raped chick (after getting her written consent, notarized and in triplicate). Outside of a girl who is currently in the process of going ass-to-mouth with you, in many cases a chick who claims to have gotten raped is the closest thing to a guaranteed freak you can find.
But, whatever else you may do to her, do not date her.
Girls are fond of falsely crying rape because in the sexually liberated West, being known as a rape victim is all upside, no downside. Raped chicks are praised for heroism and bravery. Other people lavish attention on them, and ask them to speak about themselves at length, which for chicks is like crack cocaine.
In extreme cases, raped chicks have leveraged their purported suffering into international acclaim and seven-figure book deals.
It bears mentioning that raped chicks have always been coddled and comforted (at least in the West), and in that regard, they are not so different today than before. But in times past, that coddling took place behind closed doors, among family. It was private and there was no way to leverage it into unusual status.
Rape was kept private is because it held terrible implications for the raped chick’s future. If she were single, she could be judged unfit for marriage. If she were married and gave birth soon after the rape, the child would be regarded with suspicion if not outright labeled a bastard.
Our society came to regard rape with such gravity primarily because of these things, and only secondarily because of the emotional turmoil a raped chick experiences as she orgasms underneath her alluring, bad-boy attacker.
. . .
Realize that we are fighting a war of disinformation, against an unprincipled enemy that is openly contemptuous of the truth. Nothing could be more tediously unproductive than arguing over facts with an opponent who has chosen to forego them. To win this fight, you have to hit the bitches where it hurts.
And for most chicks, that means attacking their romantic prospects—or, more fundamentally, their attractiveness. Even the most manjawed cunt secretly harbors fantasies of locking down a good man, marrying him, and thereby trebling her disposable income. Chicks will cry rape if it means endless, adoring attention with zero associated cost. But they won’t if they think getting raped renders them unattractive in the eyes of men.
. . .
First, don’t seek opportunities to voice your aversion to dating raped chicks. Wait for someone else to bring it up.
Second, explain your position with sympathy for raped chicks, even expressing regret that you couldn’t date one. Never dating raped chicks isn’t retributive. It’s simply something you, as a man, feel compelled to do.
Last, don’t take individual responsibility for never dating raped chicks. Explain that allmales feel this way; the testicular fortitude to own your feelings is all that distinguishes you from the mass of men.
. . .
This is a 10-megaton truth bomb, and your interlocutors will likely be angry and confused in its wake. Don’t expect them to agree with you, but don’t argue the point further. Once you’ve planted the seeds, step away and give them time to grow.
This is admittedly a long-term strategy. But if we band together in this effort, then someday, in the not-so-distant future, a 6.5 will find herself in her dorm room, regretfully recalling the night she got pounded out by the captain of her college’s club soccer team… and she’ll idly contemplate crying rape.
But then she’ll remember how much she likes the captain of the club swim team, and she’ll consider the impact crying rape would have on his opinion of her. And she’ll think better of her little lie.
And when she does, it will be because together, we took a stand against ever dating raped chicks.
A Voice for Men founder Paul Elam has an urgent message for us: innocent men and boys are under assault by ravenous “Gynocentric Zombies”! Yes, in an allegedly humorous article by Elam and fellow AVfMer Tom Golden — yes, it took not one but two adult men to write this — they liken feminism to a full-blown zombie apocalypse, and demonstrate that they have probably never taken a creative writing class:
The world, the real one filled with real people, is already filled with real zombies. Gynocentric Zombies, or, if you prefer, Gynozoms. They are automatons who feed on the flesh of men and boys in order to satisfy the needs, real or imagined, of women and girls. It’s pretty simple really. Just imagine decaying, tooth snapping extras in The Walking Dead and adjust it – slightly — with the zombies of both sexes only attacking men and boys, as they do the zombie shuffle right past women and girls in perfectly good culinary condition. That about sums up our present state.
. . .
So, are you a Gynozom? It is easy to find out. Just a few questions will suffice.
Do you think that it’s okay for boys to be circumcised/mutilated as infants without any anesthesia while any cutting of infant female genitalia is forbidden by law? If so, you’re a Gynozom.
Do you do a twitchy shrug and shuffle on when you hear that men are 80% of the victims of suicide? 93% of workplace deaths? Then we need to call Michonne to pay you visit with her trusty katana.
Do you think that women are inherently good and superior to men, while men are inherently bad and inferior to women? Then your rank smell should be filling the empty space where your nose used to be before it rotted off.
Do you think that female victims of domestic violence deserve help while male victims don’t exist? Gy-no-zom!
Are facts immediately lost on you because your brain is now as functional as a head of cauliflower that has been laying in the hallway of a gender studies department for two weeks? Move toward the light! For the love of everything holy move toward the light!!
First of all, since when does Paul Elam care about male suicide or workplace deaths? Not only has the man done fuck-all to help prevent these tragedies, he’s written that feminist blogger Dave Futrelle should kill himself. Yes, Paul Elam is very much concerned about male suicide rates and the like. Much more concerned about that than harassing random women. Yup. It also looks as though Elam is attempting to fight off these zombie hordes with an army of strawmen. Who, for example, says that women are “inherently good” and men “inherently bad”? Who is saying that male victims of domestic violence “don’t exist”? Any names? No?
This is the real Zombie apocalypse. And is happening right now directly in front of societies, dull, greying eyes.
It’s time we start calling people the zombies out. Our politicians are all Gynozoms. They only make laws to help women and forget the men and boys. And they make laws to attack men and boys. Remember, Gynozoms are everywhere and not only the acidic and lethal types. No, the Gynozom Invasion come in all sizes and flavors. The worst are probably the politicians but our academicians are staggering and limping just a few steps behind.
Then there is the media. Oh yes, the media. Nearly all are media (who were already zombies to begin with) are willing to attack and consume men and boys whenever they need a bit to eat. Bonus! They get fed and they also get to pat each other on their decomposing backs for “working hard” to protect women and girls. Yes, the media is overrun with Gynozoms. Swarming with them.
The most frightening aspect to Gynozoms is that you can’t identify them by the way they look. They look just like everyone else. In the Zombie movies it is easy to tell them from those who are fully alive. You can’t miss it. But in real life you can’t tell a Gynozom from a Gandhi just by looking. At any moment a Gynocentric Zombie who looks just like everyone else may come and take a bite out of you. If you are a man or a boy, no one will care. The other Gynozoms certainly won’t.
Politicians and academia and the media are all colluding against men and boys? Gosh, if only we lived in a world where men were equally represented in academia, business, and Congress. Maybe then the men and boys who are so persecuted and maligned in America will have a chance. Perhaps someday.
The right-wing blog American Thinker is no stranger to racist rhetoric. It routinely publishes articles by Colin Flaherty, the author of the book White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It, which makes the specious argument that there is ongoing racial violence against white people by angry black Americans. Flaherty attempts to “prove” this by taking every crime where the perpetrator is black and the victim is white — regardless of the motivation for the crime — and weaving this disparate evidence into the narrative of a bloody race war. (In a YouTube video promoting his book, Flaherty not-so-subtly plays rap music while showing clips of black people allegedly committing crimes.)
Thus it is only fitting that American Thinker, like other conservative news publications, savaged First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech to Tuskegee University, a historically black college.
In a newly published article titled “Michelle Obama riles up graduates with black power speech”, conservative columnist M. Catharine Evans employs racist and sexist tropes to attack the First Lady for her candid remarks on race and racism in America, referring to her as “a radical, black nationalist caught in the grip of a fanatical, anti-American, anti-white ideology” who engaged in “manipulation of clueless blacks”:
The Tuskegee University graduating class of 2015 applauded as Michelle Obama roused the spectre of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the civil rights era in a commencement speech on Saturday.
Michelle told the mostly black audience the angst they’re feeling over ongoing discrimination is “rooted in decades of structural challenges that have made too many folks feel frustrated and invisible, and those feelings are playing out in communities like Baltimore and Ferguson and so many others across this country.”
. . .
If Michelle sounds like a radical, black nationalist caught in the grip of a fanatical, anti-American, anti-white ideology, it’s because she is one. The First Lady’s transparent manipulation of clueless blacks this past weekend in Alabama would be comical if her black brothers and sisters weren’t killing each other at alarming rates (including aborted babies).
Mrs. Obama, a former corporate lawyer raised by middle-class parents, then a University of Chicago Medical Center administrator involved in patient dumping of poor, black patients, and finally, a woman who shares power in the White House with a millionaire Chicago slumlord, had the audacity to tell the graduates:
The road ahead is not going to be easy. It never is, especially for folks like you and me. Because while we’ve come so far, the truth is those age-old problems are stubborn, and they haven’t fully gone away.
Seven years after her husband’s grotesque “A More Perfect Union” race speech, Mrs. Obama is still whining and complaining about being an oppressed, victimized black woman trapped in a ‘down right mean’ country. Why? It’s all about getting out the vote.
. . .
In the same speech, Michelle calls out the media in faux outrage over the ‘name-calling’ she endured during the presidential campaigns. She says she was rattled when a depiction of her sporting an afro and holding a machine gun appeared on the cover of the very liberal New Yorker magazine. The cover cartoon showed a fist-bumping Michelle and Barack in Muslim garb with an American flag burning in a fireplace below a picture of Osama bin Laden.
. . .
Mrs. Obama wants people to see her as an Angela Davis black radical. The fact that she chose to share her feelings about the incendiary 2008 New Yorker cover with her audience is a dead giveaway. Most in the class had probably never seen it, or forgotten about it. Better to remind them.
Michelle Obama, for even discussing race and the very real issues plaguing the black community from Ferguson to Baltimore to Cincinnati to New York City makes her an angry black radical. (I’m surprised that Evans didn’t tell her to smile.) As Blair L.M. Kelley, an associate professor of history at North Carolina State University, notes, this stereotype’s long, sordid history can be traced at least as far back as the television show Amos ‘n’ Andy. The popular program featured as a character “finger-waving, neck-snapping Sapphire” who “complained incessantly” about the shortcomings of her husband, George “Kingfish” Stevens.
Even before that, in the 1830s, Kelley points out, “the first ‘black women’ American audiences saw on the American stage were minstrel ‘Negro wenches.'” Black women were “ridiculed on the minstrel stage,” a world filled with such caricatures as the Jezebel — black women who were depicted as “fair-skinned, disloyal, greedy and hypersexual” and who “yelled at their spouses and acted loud and inappropriately in otherwise genteel, public spaces to demonstrate all the ways that they were different from white women.”
It is also telling that Evans disregards an entire class of college graduates — men and women who worked hard and succeeded in higher education and who are unquestionably brighter than most Americans — as being nothing more than “clueless blacks.” Moreover, she takes time to condescendingly lecture the black community about morality, pointing out that the First Lady’s “black brothers and sisters” are “killing each other at alarming rates” which, she believes, includes “aborted babies.”
Here’s a tip for Evans and the rest of American Thinker: Whitesplain to someone else about racism in America. Your unlettered and bigoted opinions aren’t appreciated by anyone with a functioning cerebrum.
If you hadn’t caught it, Mark Potok of the SPLC — a well-known civil rights group — recently made an appearance on the David Pakman Show where he discussed misogyny and the Men’s Rights Movement. The interview was a fairly standard discussion of Men’s Rights Activists, the backlash against feminism, and sites which espouse anti-woman hatred. Websites like A Voice for Men, of course. Dean Esmay, AVfM’s managing editor, responded to the interview by, what else, calling SPLC members “hate-inciting fatcats” who have been “directly tied to inspiring intolerance and murder” — the latter claim being an outright fabrication:
I want the world to know I have said this, and I mean it: the Southern Poverty Law Center is a multimillion $$ fraud organization that makes its money by spreading fear and hate and ignorance – mostly in the form of slanted half-truths- about innocent people who can’t fight back.
The Southern Poverty Law Center steals, by deception, from well-meaning donors and from U.S. taxpayers to spread the kind of hatred that leads to intolerance and violence. This is in part because people like David Pakman are so fucking gullible, they think that if these snakes in Dockers say they’re progressive, they’re actually living the values they claim to stand for.
Yes, David, SPLC has been directly tied to inspiring intolerance and murder, by spreading hate, instigating spin and slander indiscriminately against anyone who might deviate somewhat from mainstream opinion (or just opinions not liked by the elites who rule us).
. . .
Basic human rights, David. Do you get that? Basic human rights. That’s what your group of wealthy cronies at the SPLC are all about attacking and stopping: the march of human progress, and treating all people as if they are flawed but valuable human beings, regardless of race or sex or orientation.
And you’re helping these hate-inciting fatcats smear those working for those values, you brave young man, without having the guts to talk to us or ask us any questions let alone invite us on your show to ask him any genuinely challenging questions. Not even questions about his contemptible terrorist-inspiring organization — I expect that would be too much for you — but whether this bullshit he’s feeding you about us really paints an accurate picture.
Pakman has not so much as approached us to comment before allowing the odious hate group known as the SPLC bash the innocent men and women of the Men’s Human Rights Movement, who are incredibly easy to find and talk to…
And for you fat, wealthy, elitist, reactionary, pompous, self-serving liars at the SPLC (and yes Mr. Potok, I’m talking to you, you sociopathic, reactionary bigot): you are directly implicated in getting right-wingers murdered in this country. Which means you now have a body count sir, and that is something that, despite all your hateful bigoted lies and distortions, is something the Men’s Human Rights movement to date does not have. We’ve never been implicated in anyone’s murder, or even anyone’s assault, not by any rational standard–unlike you.
You and everybody who has given money to or supported the SPLC in the last few years most certainly has helped incite terror and murder.
And you lie about human rights activists, even as they put their lives on the line.
Do you ever wake up and ask yourself if you’re on the wrong side, David? I suspect you do.
Here’s a hint: you are.
Just a reminder: The animosity toward the SPLC by Dean Esmay and his cohorts stems from AVfM’s inclusion on a list of misogynist websites published by the SPLC in 2012. No, the SPLC has not been “directly tied to inspiring…murder.” I suppose when you don’t have much of a case against someone you might as well make something up out of thin air.
Salon – Freddie Gray’s death has been ruled a homicide; Baltimore police officers to be charged. Jacobin – Why the city of Baltimore rebelled. AlterNet – Internet racists pose as looting black protesters on Twitter to smear the Baltimore uprising. The Daily Beast – See the abortion law too stupid for Texas. Feministing – Peer reviewer says female researchers should get a male co-author to “check” their study. The New Civil Rights Movement – Jeb Bush announces he’s a fan of the white nationalist author of The Bell Curve. The Guardian – May Day rallies for labor broaden to address police brutality. The Nation – The Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision all comes down to Justice Kennedy.