Masculinities of the far right

[American Dream]

Men’s-Rights Activists Are Finding a New Home With the Alt-Right



Altogether, the men’s-rights movement represents a streak of misogyny that Trump’s candidacy helped bring to the forefront. But instead of falling in line behind Trump, men’s-rights activists have largely steered clear of the election. Indeed, their movement seems to be losing momentum, says David Futrelle, a writer who’s painstakingly tracked the movement and its key players for almost a decade. Instead, MRA ideology is leaking into the teachings of the group whose figurehead is one of the president-elect’s closest advisers: the alt-right.

The primary difference between the men’s-rights movement and the alt-right is that the former is largely anti-political. “They tend to dismiss Republicans and Democrats alike as ‘gynocentric’ parties, or parties that are at their root dominated by women’s needs,” Futrelle said. If, like me, you had to force down laughter at the idea of Republicans being dominated by women’s needs, Futrelle explains: “Their argument is that because women are the majority of the electorate, all politicians — male and female — have to pander to them in order to win.” No MRA would vote for Hillary Clinton, he said, and although some consider themselves Libertarians, there was little talk on online forums of Gary Johnson. If they voted, they voted for Trump.

But this same aversion to politics is why the men’s-rights movement is losing momentum while its racist cousin — the alt-right — gains it. Many of the movement’s actors largely sidelined themselves during Gamergate because Gamergate’s leaders didn’t align with their idea of what “men” should be — “They looked at guys playing video games as a bunch of pussies, so they didn’t really get pulled into that,” Futrelle said. Then, when Trump began to gain steam, most were slow to jump on the bandwagon.

The exception, it seems, is the PUA community. Long before the alt-right went mainstream, RooshV and another PUA who goes by “Heartiste”* were touting its ideologies. “At some point they started talking about actual pickup-artist stuff a lot less and started throwing in right-wing, racist politics,” Futrelle said. At this point, Futrelle said he would describe them as “alt-right fellow travelers.”

RooshV’s first foray into the alt-right appears to have been his review of Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critiques titled, “The Damaging Effects Of Jewish Intellectualism And Activism On Western Culture.” Thanks to the review, he was invited to attend a conference hosted by the National Policy Institute (a white-nationalist think tank whose president recently gave a speech at Texas A&M University). Certain extremely racist factions of the alt-right were displeased by his presence because, well, he’s not white. So RooshV concluded that the alt-right is “worse than feminism in attempting to control male sexual behavior” and “formally split” with the movement, despite the fact that he continued to espouse its ideologies.

When Trump won, RooshV saw it as a victory for the PUA movement. “I’m in a state of exuberance that we now have a President who rates women on a 1-10 scale in the same way that we do and evaluates women by their appearance and feminine attitude,” he wrote. “We may have to institute a new feature called ‘Would Trump bang?’ to signify the importance of feminine beauty ideals that cultivate effort and class above sloth and vulgarity.”

In the same way that RooshV began to adopt alt-right ideology, the alt-right began to publish stories grounded in the principles of pickup artists and the men’s-rights movement. Futrelle said he’s noticed sites like the Daily Stormer publishing explicitly anti-feminist articles — something they hadn’t explicitly focused on in the past. For example, a recent post defends Trump’s comments on Access Hollywood in 2005 using MRA logic to reposition him (and all wealthy men) as the victim: “Why do they keep leaving out the first part of his ‘grab em by the pussy’ quote? He clearly said: ‘When you’re a star, they let you do it.’ He is talking in the context of women throwing themselves at rich men.”

Futrelle rattles off other like-minded men who’ve risen to the surface in Trump’s wake: Mike Cernovich, who got his start during Gamergate; Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist; Milo Yiannopoulos, who’s written countless anti-feminist articles for Breitbart; Stefan Molyneux, a YouTube “philosopher.” Some have their roots in the men’s-rights movement, and others are hangers-on in their own right. “A lot of people who are anti-feminist saw the alt-right as being the thing that was growing and getting attention,” Futrelle said. “So they joined in.”

More at: http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/12/mens-ri ... right.html

[American Dream]

How the alt-right’s sexism lures men into white supremacy

Members of the alt-right tend to be young white men spouting blatantly racist, nationalist, and misogynistic views that align eerily well with historical fascism, and many of these men openly advocate harassment and discrimination (or worse) of women and minority groups. (Indeed, since the election, overt tension surrounding these various spheres has led to hundreds of reported hate crimes.)

Consequently, many people have pondered whether the “alt-right” label puts too fine a polish on what is at best an ugly mix of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. In response, many news organizations have grappled with whether it’s appropriate to use the term at all, and, if so, how to define it for their readers.

But no matter what you call it, the movement is plainly built around a political agenda that seeks to advance the rights of white male citizens at the expense of everybody else.


Though various branches of the movement are often at odds with one another, they share a number of core beliefs — and a common meme-flavored vernacular — that serve to unite them in what is sometimes called “the manosphere.” This realm includes the “men’s rights” movement, pickup artist culture (a community of men also labeled “PUAs” that essentially makes a game of the art of bedding women), “incels” (men who are “involuntarily celibate” because they feel women reject them), and geek gatekeepers like supporters of the Gamergate movement.

On the surface, PUA communities and incel communities have a lot of generic appeal: The PUA lifestyle emphasizes self-esteem and confidence building along with physical health, while the incel community allows men to bond over their struggle to achieve all of the above in spite of their sour luck with women. Meanwhile, gamers and geeks habitually tout the importance of gaming in providing social interaction for young men.

These spaces foster the kind of male friendship whose importance doesn’t get a lot of attention in the real world. But the benefits of their existence are often accompanied (and sometimes negated) by their tendency to instill in their members a newfound articulation of fundamental anxiety over their position as men in a society where women are actively seeking empowerment.

And in building its membership from so many different communities of white men who ultimately feel threatened and rejected by women, the movement promotes a sense of male entitlement that is easily radicalized into white nationalism and white supremacy.

How sexism serves as the alt-right’s gateway drug
In many alt-right communities, men are encouraged to view women as sexual and/or political targets that men must dominate. The men in these communities don’t see themselves as sexist; they see themselves as fighting against their own emasculation and sexual repression at the hands of strident feminists. (For instance, one alt-right blog described the activist group Code Pink as “a sort of liberal, feminist version of the Westboro Baptist Church.”)

All of these individual communities advocate a distrust of feminism and an insistence that female empowerment necessarily disempowers men. One of the most famous, Reddit’s r/TheRedPill, even paints this ideology as a religious conversion: an “awakening,” or “taking the red pill” (a reference borrowed from The Matrix) to understand what they regard as the life-altering “truth” that feminism has ruined modern society for everyone (but especially for men). Many people who’ve tried engaging with r/TheRedPill only to walk away have described it as a place where relationships are viewed primarily in terms of power struggles rather than mutual respect and equality. “In practice,” one Reddit user wrote, “their ideas become pretty toxic really fast.”

Over the past few years, Gamergate and male-centric Reddit communities have popularized the idea of “social justice warriors,” commonly abbreviated as SJWs. This disparaging label is an updated way to accuse progressives of extreme political correctness. The “SJW” label is a huge and successful weapon in the alt-right’s arsenal; it paints feminists as manipulative, oversensitive, shrill women who attack men with claims of sexism at the tiniest of provocations while rejecting their sexual advances.

Men who deploy the “SJW” attack seek to reestablish control and agency over the cultural conversation by ridiculing progressive attempts to seek greater diversity and representation in media, and to dismiss basically anything that could be deemed “multiculturalism” or representation (see: Gamergate and this year’s Ghostbusters backlash).

However, nested within the alt-right’s fight against SJWs is a flagrantly radical, white supremacist element.

Members of the alt-right frequently refer to progressive culture as “cultural Marxism” — a favored catchphrase of Breitbart founder Andrew Breitbart. The academic term “cultural Marxism” is a positive one that denotes the spread of Marxist values throughout culture, but its common use today is much more pejorative. Members of the alt-right view SJWs who are actively trying to make art and culture more inclusive as attempting to incite sociocultural and socioeconomic upheaval under the guise of “diversity.”

In fact, the term “cultural Marxism” is descended from actual Nazi propaganda — a distrust of modernism and the spread of non-Germanic culture that Hitler called “cultural Bolshevism.” In his book A History of Nazi Germany: 1919-1945, historian Joseph W. Bendersky notes that the phrase was code for the cultural purging that preceded the Holocaust. “Hitler referred to ‘cultural Bolshevism’ as a disease that would weaken the Germans and leave them prey to the Jews,” Bendersky writes. “A moral struggle was underway, and the outcome could determine the survival of the race.”

The updated alt-right version of this idea primarily targets feminists and progressives as the instigators of this cultural demise. Their belief in insidious cultural plots against white patriarchy leads them to overlap and interact with another branch of the alt-right — the innumerable online right-wing conspiracy groups that see Jewish, Islamic, and foreign plots in perceived attacks on white patriarchal culture. The all-or-nothing urgency and the blatant nationalism and white supremacy of Hitler’s version of the phrase is still intact.



In the wake of Trump’s victory, many have pointed to Gamergate’s sexist assault on feminism as a harbinger of things to come. Far more than the “fringe” components of the alt-right, the Gamergate movement drew mainstream attention from its beginnings in August 2014 and gained extensive coverage from popular geek media outlets as well as international news organizations as it grew. Though it peaked around the spring of 2015, the movement is still active; writing at the Guardian, Matt Lees points out that its supporters’ “techniques” of harassment and rhetorical victim blaming “have become the standard toolset of far-right voices online.”

Writers who’ve reported on and/or been targeted by Gamergate have also noted the convergence of the group’s membership with that of the alt-right. David Futrelle is a journalist who has spent the past five years maintaining a men’s rights watch blog, We Hunted the Mammoth. In an email to Vox, he said that it’s “close to impossible to overstate the role of Gamergate in the process of [alt-right] radicalization.”

From the start, Gamergate was based on the same sense of aggrieved entitlement that drives the alt-right — and many Trump voters. While Trump warned of the putative dangers of Muslims and Mexicans 'invading' America, Gamergaters talked about the dangers of so-called social justice warriors "invading" the world of gaming; many defined gaming as a "male space" or even a "male safe space," and so it was no coincidence that they focused so much of their anger at supposed female interlopers — [including gaming cultural critics like] Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu and others.

By presenting themselves as beleaguered defenders of gaming's "safe space," gamergaters managed to convince themselves that their harassment of people like Sarkeesian and Quinn was in fact a defense of an imperiled culture. They were saving the world!

One of the feminist targets of Gamergate was gaming journalist Leigh Alexander, who recently wrote about the movement’s expansion and convergence with the alt-right movement.

“When I was harassed in an attempt to get me to abandon [progressive critical stances on the relationship between pop culture and politics] during the embarrassment that was ‘GamerGate,’ everyone told me it was just a radar blip,” she wrote.

They said that the hit pieces on Breitbart about me, other women, and progressive voices in technology were just fringe issues. We should not give them any more attention, everyone said. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

Now the CEO of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, is an advisor to incoming President Trump. And in the last few weeks all those same old people, the dross of imageboard culture with their same assembly-line right-wing memes, are back in my Twitter timeline letting me know they “won.” ... These people’s fears, their power fantasies, are now steering the world.

Futrelle pointed out to Vox that Gamergate’s explicit sexism led many of its members to 4chan and to 4chan’s even more extreme sibling 8chan (which became a haven for Gamergate after the movement was officially booted off 4chan for misogyny). In those enclaves, Futrelle says, “there were hordes of neo-quasi-Nazis (some ‘ironic’ Nazis but many others utterly sincere) ready to tell them that it wasn't just gaming that needed saving, but Western Civilization itself.”

He continued: “They weren't fighting for the right to look at boobs in videogames any more, but fighting against ‘white genocide.’ Suddenly the weirdly inflated, often melodramatic rhetoric of Gamergate made more sense.”

Gamergate-inspired violence also presaged the wave of hate crimes that have been reported since the election. Examples from the past two years include the threat of a mass shooting at a major public university because the university hosted Gamergate enemy Anita Sarkeesian; the many pro-rape statements made on PUA hubs and social media accounts by prominent pickup artists like the notorious internet troll Roosh V, who bragged about committing rape; and finally, the 2014 mass stabbing and shooting of six UC Santa Barbara students by Elliot Rodger, a man who fortified his misogyny and sense of alienation via the incel communities he frequented online.

In light of the misogyny that seems permanently embedded within alt-right culture, it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that the movement’s favored presidential candidate also once bragged about sexually assaulting women. Trump may not fit the pattern of online activity that leads so many men to the alt-right fold, but he has planted himself within an online alt-right echo chamber. His ideas are informed by and emboldening to a growing collective of men who view the subordination of women as both part of a functional society and a stepping stone to a larger movement: one steeped in fascist ideology and willing to openly champion hate as a political cause.

More at: http://www.vox.com/culture/2016/12/14/1 ... ecruitment

[American Dream]

Shades of the fuk'n Wolves of Vinland: Fascists are the tools of the State?

Putin's Angels: Inside Russia's Most Infamous Motorcycle Club

The Night Wolves are backed by the Kremlin, fighting in Ukraine and hellbent on restoring the empire


The Night Wolves, Russia's largest motorcycle gang, are led by their president the Surgeon and backed by their country's president, Vladimir Putin.

The gang's rhetoric echoes both a growing wave of nationalism in Russia and a sharp rightward turn in the country's politics. Under Putin's tenure, the Kremlin has jailed journalists and opposition figures, banned "gay propaganda" and crafted ersatz political parties that provide a veneer of self-governance. It has deployed its vast propaganda apparatus — state-controlled radio and newspapers, but above all, television — to fan patriotic fervor. "Russia is like the Kingdom of the Crooked Mirrors," a liberal Muscovite tells me over dinner one night, referring to a Soviet-era fairy tale in which a king uses warped looking glasses to brainwash his people.

The Surgeon and his Night Wolves have flourished in this nationalist ecosystem. The club has reportedly received more than $1 million in grants from the Kremlin to support patriotic performances like the Sevastopol bike show. On several occasions, Putin himself has famously mounted a three-wheel Harley and ridden alongside the Surgeon. In 2013, Putin awarded the Night Wolves' leader an Order of Honor for his "patriotic education of youth." In June, the Russian press announced a cosmonaut would carry the club's flag into space. Putin, according to Mark Galeotti, a Russia expert and NYU professor, turned the club into "auxiliaries of the state" as part of a broader push to turn potential adversaries into compliant allies. However true, these assertions shed little light on how a once-countercultural motorcycle gang has come to wield a position of such power and prominence in modern Russia — and, now set loose, what it hopes to achieve.

"We are the army of Russia," the Surgeon tells me. But, he continues, "I don't want to meet any foreigners, as they won't write anything good." (He had agreed to be interviewed, begrudgingly, only after a fellow member in Moscow provided a recommendation.) "I will always be bad in their eyes. I'm bad, I'm Putin's gang — fuck it. But this gang is met with flowers. You will see how we will be welcomed in Sevastopol."


Vladimir Putin with the Surgeon in Moscow, 2009.

The Surgeon trundles a golf cart toward a derelict four-story concrete building — the local chapter's headquarters — then disappears. He is due on a flight, business class, back to Moscow in two hours. Soon, the Night Wolves' leader re-emerges in full biker regalia: black boots, black jeans, black vest bearing the club's flaming wolf's head emblem. Dmitry Simichein, the leader of the Sevastopol chapter, ushers the Surgeon into a tricked-out pickup truck, and we race toward the airport. As Simichein veers in and out of oncoming traffic, occasionally flicking on blue lights on the truck's grille to bully slower cars from our path, I ask about Global Satan.

"The easiest example is the sexual-abuse escalator," the Surgeon replies. "What was considered a sin before, pedophilia" – he means homosexuality — "now it's legalized. They even allow them to take marriage in the Catholic Church! The priests are not just traitors, but Satanists themselves. When these marriages are allowed, tomorrow pedophilia will be fine, then sex with dead people, then eating the shit, and if we don't stop, we will see the abyss of hell."

More at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/ne ... b-20151008

[American Dream]

Forms of Delirium

Peter Pomerantsev circles the Kremlin

‘We only have a few years to rescue the soul of holy Russia,’ Alexei Weitz said. ‘Just a few years.’ Weitz is a leading member of the Night Wolves. There are five thousand of them in Russia, five thousand Beowulf-like bearded men in leathers riding Harleys. It’s Weitz who has done most to turn them from outlaws into religious patriots. For the past few years, Vladimir Putin has posed for photo-ops with them, dressed in leathers and riding a tri-bike (he can’t quite handle a two-wheeler). They defended the ‘honour of the church’ after the Pussy Riot affair, roaring in a cavalcade through Moscow bearing golden icons of Mary the Mother of Christ on the front of their Harleys. The Kremlin gives them several hundred million rubles a year and they work to inspire loyalty across the country with concerts and bike shows that fuse flying Yamahas, Cirque du Soleil-style trapeze acts, Spielberg-scale battle re-enactments, religious icons, holy ecstasies, speeches from Stalin and dancing girls (there are booths for go-go girls next to the great crosses). At the last concert in Volgograd, 250,000 locals turned up, a world record for a ‘bike show’. Evander Holyfield was meant to come, to introduce a boxing match that went with the patriotic fireworks, but he had to pull out at the last minute – there was a problem with his visa. Everyone sang the anti-communist perestroika anthem ‘We Want Changes’.

...It’s hard to fathom how real the foreign threat to the Night Wolves is. There are thousands of Night Wolves and no more than a few dozen Bandidos in Russia. But to hear Weitz speak of it they are surrounded on all sides. ‘The Bandidos are the biker aspect of the American assault on Holy Rus. This is the last bastion of true religion. Stanislavsky used to say: “Either you are for art, or art is for you.” That is the difference between the West and Russia. You are imperialists, you think all art is for you and we think we are all for art. We give, you take. That is why we can have Stalin and God together. We can fit everything inside us, Ukrainians and Georgians and Germans, Estonians and Lithuanians. The West wipes out small peoples; inside Russia they flourish. You want everything to be like you. The West has been sending us its influencers of corruption. The kabbalah of the usurers. A Russian who is trained in a Western company starts to think differently: self-love is at the root of Western rationality. That is not our way. You have been sending us your consumer culture. I don’t think of Washington or London as being in charge. Satan commands them. That is why you want to bomb Syria, the homeland of holiness. The devil wants to take the road to Damascus, but Putin is defending it. You have to learn to see the holy war underneath the everyday. Democracy is a fallen state. To split “left” and “right” is to divide. In the kingdom of God there is only above and below. All is one. Which is why the Russian soul is holy. It can unite everything. Like in an icon. Stalin and God. Like everything you see here in the Night Wolves, we take bits of broken machinery and mould them together.’

Read at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n19/peter-pome ... f-delirium

[American Dream]

http://www.popmatters.com/column/72054- ... premacist/

Gay Nazi, Gay Aryan, Gay Supremacist




“Every revolution devours its own children.”
—Ernst Röhm

Once upon a time—a day in 1999, to be exact—a young gay American and young gay Canadian shared a dream of founding an organization which united gay and straight skinheads, creating a new era in tolerance and compassion between racist heterosexuals and homosexuals in their war against non-whites. From this dream emerged the American Resistance Corps (ARC), an organization with two purposes: to inform “straight skinheads that there were decent gay skinheads already among them in the movement who didn’t want validation but simply wanted acceptance for their common goals”, and to build “the framework for cultural recovery and a brighter future for the white race where all white people can live and work in harmony together without the interference and hinderance (sic) of the selfish interests of other races.”

For most, the existence of a group such as ARC is puzzling. Gay Nazi, Gay Aryan, Gay Supremacist … the terms seem like oxymorons. How can people join an organization that has sought to suppress or eradicate them? It’s illogical. Nonetheless, across the world, groups of gay and lesbian individuals embrace ideologies that are bigoted and seek to oppress others in much the same way that LGBT persons have traditionally been oppressed: exclusion, vilification, even murder.

In all fairness many skinheads, gay and straight, do not subscribe to the racist views with which this movement is frequently associated, but a significant portion do. Political scientists and psychologists have studied this phenomenon, with various theories proposed. Some argue that participation in a group that fails to have one’s own interest in mind is a form of self-loathing and punishment, while others maintain it stems from a desire to transfer their pain onto others. (Wyatt Powers, Executive Director of ARC, argues on the ARC website that gay membership in anti-Semitic and racist groups is a natural response to the Jewish and black communities’ efforts to subjugate gays.)

Understandably, the extremism of the views supported plays a role in motivation. Members of the Log Cabin Republicans, LGBT persons who support the Republican Party, are often criticized for supporting a party that opposes equal right protections for the community. Still, the views they support are largely mainstream and hardly militant, as is the case with Gay Nazis.

According to Rosa von Praunheim’s documentary Men, Heroes, and Gay Nazis (see excerpt on page 2 of this essay), 10 to 15 percent of Germany’s Nazi extremists are gay. The documentary, in part, chronicles the rise and fall of Michael Kuhnen, a neo-Nazi leader for much of the ‘80s. At the time, Paragraph 175, the German law criminalizing homosexuality, was still in effect—it wouldn’t be repealed until 1994.

Kuhnen’s announcement that he was gay, along with his publication of a pamphlet advocating for the inclusion of gays in the neo-Nazi movement, sparked a division in the ranks of the various Nazi groups gaining strength at the time. Associating with known homosexuals was just another reason for police interference. The schism remains today, as some Nazi groups openly embrace gay members while others repudiate them. History, however, reveals that homosexuals have long been a part of the Nazi party and were major players in its formation.

Typically though, when one hears the words ‘Nazi’ and ‘homosexual’ in conjunction, one thinks of the atrocities gays were forced to endure under Hitler’s regime. Even today, there is no clear number of how many gay people were killed; no count was taken, so historians can only estimate based on arrest numbers and concentration camp occupations. That historians and researchers ignored for decades the plight of homosexuals during the Nazi reign allowed important records to be lost and recollections to become cloudy.

Further, homosexuality was illegal in Germany before Hitler rose to power, so many who died in the camps could have long been in the closet, even to their death. What is clear is that Hitler and the SS launched a serious offensive in the mid-‘30s to eradicate “degeneracy”, and gays were considered degenerates. Arrests for homosexuality rose from around 2,000 between 1931 and 1933 to over 24,000 between 1937 and 1939, according to David Fernbach’s introduction to The Men with the Pink Triangle.

The book is the story of Heinz Heger, a gay man who survived internment. His story makes clear the vile treatment to which homosexuals were subjected, often worse than the treatment of other prisoners. Fernbach’s research shows that SS leader Heinrich Himmler issued orders that homosexuals were not to be killed outright, but worked to death. As such, they were not shipped to concentration camps, but sent to “death pits” with other undesirables. These camps were classified as Level 3 camps that operated under the rule that prisoners must be dead from overwork within a few months of arrival.

While still alive, the men had to live under rigid conditions. They were allowed no human contact, and rules governed how close they could get to other prisoners, guards, and fences between camps. Heger describes how the men were not allowed to put their hands or arms under their blankets at night, so there was no chance of masturbation, even when winter temperatures in the bunkhouse were below freezing. Those who failed to comply in winter were taken outside, doused with cold water, and made to stand in the freezing weather for an hour. Most, already weakened, died quickly.

Each moment of every day was governed by rigid rules with sadistic consequences for noncompliance. In summer, workdays started at 7AM and lasted until 8PM; winter hours were 8 to 5. Rules in the bunkhouse were enforced by “greens”, criminals who were also prisoners. In 1941, Heger’s camp got a new commander, nicknamed “Dustbag” by the prisoners, who broke up the “gay” bunkhouse and dispersed gay prisoners into the rest of the population, but his persecution of gay prisoners was worse than his predecessor’s. Even after the war ended and the camps were liberated, many gay men remained imprisoned under the old German law outlawing homosexuality.

Heger’s tale is horrifying, and shows the deep hatred that the Nazis had for gays. (Lesbians were similarly persecuted, but seldom arrested for lesbianism; instead, they were charged with prostitution or similar crimes.) The atrocities endured were brought to life again in Martin Sherman’s 1979 play Bent, made into a film by Sean Mathias in 1997. In the most memorable scene, Max and Horst, two gays imprisoned in Dachau, must stand in the sun side by side without touching or looking at one another. Still, they manage to bring one another to climax through the power of their words. Bent is not a romance, though—true to the Nazi reign, there are no happy endings.

It would be absurd, then, to suggest that the same Nazi party that tortured and killed so many gays could have been founded with the help of an army run by gay men or that Hitler himself was gay.

Continues at: http://www.popmatters.com/column/72054- ... macist/P1/

[American Dream]

The Night Wolves MC: Vladimir Putin's motorbiking militia of Luhansk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Gy7poRbUHY

[American Dream]

https://antifascistnews.net/2017/01/06/ ... -the-year/

WHY DID LGBTQ NATION CHOOSE MILO YIANNOPOULOS FOR “PERSON OF THE YEAR?”

JANUARY 6, 2017

One of the most popular queer interest web publications out of the U.S., LGBTQ Nation, has just announced their “Person of the Year” award and it is sending many of their readers into a rage. They conducted a reader poll to see what LGBTQ figure should be considered the “Person of the Year,” with people like Gavin Grimm, Ellen DeGeneres, Pat McCrory, and Eric Fanning being selections that a plurality that members voted for. Out of the selections, though, Milo Yiannopoulos, the Alt Lite troll and enigmatic Islamophobe and racist, came in with70%, dramatically more than anyone else.



The instinct they are following through with this is the idea that Milo has broken through stereotypes since he is conservative, opposed to feminism, insulting to trans people, and generally breaking the idea that queer people lean progressive. This is the agenda of more conservative queer organizations, to decouple queer oppression from solidarity with other marginalized people and to then celebrate queer celebrities no matter how disgusting they become. Milo has been the most effective promoter of the Alt Right over the last year, a growth that people like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor have used to take their white nationalist message to a larger, college-aged audience.

This news comes right after the announcement that Simon & Schuster has cut Milo a $250,000 advance for a book he is coming out with named Dangerous, named after his “Dangerous Faggot” tour on college campuses. When people are arguing about the “normalization” of the Alt Right, Milo’s advancement may be the best example of this.

While Milo has backed away from the term Alt Right, he certainly championed it for quite some time, referring to himself as Alt Right, hanging out with Alt Right celebrities like Jack Donovan, and did the first large media story on the Alt Right at Breitbart where he celebrated their iconoclastic ideas. The article at LGBTQ Nation had the Alt Right referenced in their first article then scrubbed it, instead putting a note at the bottom of the page defending Milo from his association. This is a chance for them to “have their cake and eat it too,” to promote a diet version of white nationalism while also insulating themselves from the criticism.

This needs to not happen without a near revolt from their readership, since they claim to be the most read LGBTQ news source on the planet. You can contact them to let them know your thoughts on this, but anti-fascists also need to keep up the pressure on Milo events and outlets that promote Milo, while also maintaining an intersectional analysis that Milo so desperately wants to destroy.

[Wombaticus Rex]

WHY DID LGBTQ NATION CHOOSE MILO YIANNOPOULOS FOR “PERSON OF THE YEAR?”

Who is LGBTQnation.com owned by? Who are the staff that make the final call on their content?

What is their politics? How did they donate in 2016? 2012? 2008? 2004?

What is Milo's relationship to LGBTQnation.com? Who was involved with the decision to name him?

Or, I guess we could link to a simple, short puff-piece that develops "Milo" as an easy reference, token villain for your demographic. That's contributing, right?

We're not here to actually answer questions....are we?

[Heaven Swan]

From Reddit
[–]zablyziblyCalifornia 10 points 1 day ago
They say the poll was brigaded:

The LGBTQ Nation Person of the Year contest is a reader driven poll to select the year’s top newsmaker. While the poll was intended for our regular audience, there were no stipulations on who could or couldn’t vote. Therefore, Milo Yiannopoulos won fair and square.

Yiannopoulos’ fans didn’t just flock to the site from his Facebook page though. Breitbart News did stories about the poll and his followers posted about it multiple times on sites like Reddit and 4chan. A similar effort was made on behalf of Pence, but it couldn’t compare to Yiannopoulos’ legions of followers.
permalinkembed
[–]Lakridspibe 0 points 1 day ago

Troll brigades at work!

[8bitagent]

Not sure why Milo is so hated. I think he's hilarious. To me its revenge for all the years of crochety old homophobic Republicans and political correctness.
The media and left call him an alt right nazi, even tho the alt right absolutely despise him and have issued official fatwa-esque death threats.
The guy is gay, only dates African American men and supports Israel...not exactly a poster child for the gay, black and jew hating alt right

[American Dream]

After a concerted effort to drum up votes via social media, conservative media gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos has won the title of LGBTQ Nation’s Person of the Year with almost 70% of the vote. Indiana governor and vice president-elect Mike Pence came in a distant second place.

...Yiannopoulos’ fans didn’t just flock to the site from his Facebook page though. Breitbart News did stories about the poll and his followers posted about it multiple times on sites like Reddit and 4chan. A similar effort was made on behalf of Pence, but it couldn’t compare to Yiannopoulos’ legions of followers.

...Yiannopoulos made the news throughout 2016 and always for truly awful reasons. He was a queer cheerleader for Donald Trump, whom he called “Daddy.” He has harassed and demeaned transgender people repeatedly.

He was banished from Twitter after gleefully encouraging his followers to harass African-American actress Leslie Jones because he didn’t like the remake of Ghostbusters. Jones left the social media site temporarily after a torrent of racist and sexist abuse.

http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2017/01/milo ... r-readers/

In an article announcing Yiannopoulos's win, LGBTQ Nation put the responsibility for the choice on its readers. However, the piece mentioned that alt-right influencers and media outlets like Breitbart campaigned for him.

"While the poll was intended for our regular audience, there were no stipulations on who could or couldn’t vote. Therefore, Milo Yiannopoulos won fair and square," noting that "Yiannopoulos’ legions of followers," who are presumably not the site's usual audience, rallied behind their candidate.

As a result, LGBTQ Nation argues it has no choice but to interview Yiannopoulos, a piece that will post next week. At Yiannopoulos's insistence, the outlet also amended the article to remove a mention of Yiannopoulos as a member of the alt-right, a term linked to white supremacy, racism, xenophobia, sexism, and homophobia. Yet in actuality, Yiannopoulos is a poster child for the movement.

When Out magazine, The Advocate's sister publication, published an interview with Yiannopoulos in September, it sparked a tidal wave of backlash from readers. Dozens of prominent LGBT journalists signed a petition reprimanding the LGBT publication. No such petition has so far materialized for LGBTQ Nation.

Regardless, many of LGBTQ Nation's actual readers are outraged by the choice of Yiannopoulos, with some galvanized to unfollow the self-described "world's most followed LGBTQ news source."

"If you posted a 'Reader's Choice' poll online in 2016 and DIDN'T think this would happen, you are pretty foolish. LGBTQ Nation, you need to do better," wrote reader Alison Hudson.

http://www.advocate.com/media/2017/1/06 ... erson-year

[American Dream]

http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trum ... rotesters/

Trump Praises Biker Group Planning Vigilante ‘Wall of Meat’ Against Inaugural Protesters



Donald Trump tweeted excitedly this morning that Bikers for Trump are on their way to Washington, D.C., for his inauguration along with “record numbers” of people. In reality, the “record numbers” may refer to the people coming to town to protest. Bikers for Trump plans to create a “wall of meat” to protect Trump and his supporters from protesters who might try to disrupt the proceedings, founder Chris Cox has told reporters.

Bikers for Trump became a sort of vigilante security force working in consultation with Trump’s head of security during primary rallies. Politico reported in April that at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania “Cox’s men were assuming functions typically reserved for paid security and police – patrolling the dirt floor of the arena, snatching and tearing protesters’ signs and following close behind law enforcement officials as they dragged protesters from the arena, ready to lend a hand.”

The group was also present in Cleveland during the Republican National Convention. Cox told Reuters before the convention that his group would “be doing a victory dance” over Trump’s nomination but said “if the Republican Party tries to pull off any backroom deals and ignores the will of the people, our role will change.” In Cleveland, the group participated in the “America First Unity Rally” sponsored by Citizens for Trump along with conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones and right-wing political strategist Roger Stone. That rally had originally been planned to mobilize opposition to any attempt by GOP insiders to wrestle the nomination away from Trump, but as that possibility faded it became a right-wing victory party featuring, among many others, Breitbart’s self-described “dangerous faggot” Milo Yiannopoulos and gun advocate Jan Morgan, a frequent speaker at right-wing events who banned Muslims from her shooting range.

Cox has described members of the group as “people who want to stand up to the leftist, racist murderers that are killing cops.” While Cox has said the role of Bikers for Trump at the inauguration will be to help police keep the peace in case protesters get out of hand, he was captured on video wrestling a banner away from a peaceful protester inside the Republican convention.

Bikers for Trump created a GoFundMe page in June with the goal of raising $250,000 “for the sole purpose of electing Donald J. Trump president of the United States of America.” The page is still taking contributions, topping $120,000 this morning.

[American Dream]

Swallowing the Red Pill: a journey to the heart of modern misogyny



The manosphere’s most hateful opinions tend to generate the most attention – like Roosh V’s notion that it should be legal to rape a woman on private property (a bit of hateful stupidity which he later claimed to be parody). In February, Roosh V attempted to organise a meet-up of like-minded men on the grounds of the provincial legislature in Toronto, but he had to cancel the event when a local band of female boxers threatened to disrupt the event with violence.

But judging The Red Pill by the most extreme statements of its members is, if not unfair, then at least inaccurate. There is plenty of vileness, to be sure – elaborate conspiracy theories formed out of pure misogyny and outright hatred of female independence. But the bulk of the comments are much more muted and, frankly, pathetic.

In the hours upon hours I spent wandering this online neighbourhood, I saw mostly feral boys wandering the digital ruins of exploded masculinity, howling their misery, concocting vast nonsense about women, and craving the tiniest crumb of self-confidence and fellow-feeling. The discussion threads are a mixed bag of rage and curiosity: screeds against feminists, advice on how to masturbate less, theories on why women fantasize about rape, descriptions of arguments with girlfriends, guides to going up to strangers on the street, and, most of all, workout schedules and diet regimes.

Reading The Red Pill, then, offers two possible answers to the question “how shitty are men really?”

The first situates The Red Pill as another toxic technoculture on a spectrum of digital misogyny: on Twitter, any woman who says anything even moderately controversial will receive torrents of direct physical threats as a matter of course. Sites such as 4chan exist mainly to post thousands of revenge porn images without consent. Gamers on Xbox Live will be sexually harassed, inevitably.

The answer to the question of how shitty men are, from this perspective, is “really pretty shitty”.

But an entirely different approach emerges with a slight shift in emphasis: how shitty are men really? That is, how does these men’s behaviour online translate into non-digital life ? The Red Pill poses one of the absolute conundrums of our time: are we our real selves on the internet, or are we not?

•••

The head moderator of The Red Pill goes by the handle Morpheus Manfred, and when he agreed to give me an interview it was only by online chat. Anonymity is sacred; facelessness is the sacrifice it demands. He moderates the community’s 141,966 (and counting) members, and like most of them, describes himself as white, early 30s, male and conservative (he would have preferred Rand Paul to Donald Trump, but he likes Trump’s “watch-it-burn” style).

I ask him what event led him to The Red Pill (his answers have been edited for length).

Morpheus Manfred: Having spent my 20s looking for female companionship, I noticed that the dating game wasn’t what I was taught – what my parents prepared me for, and what I learned from movies. It was stacked against guys, and it was a very unpleasant experience.

Me: Can you give me an example?

Morpheus Manfred: Over the past 10 years, the flakiness of women has gotten worse. You’d meet a girl, hit it off, get her number and agree to a date. And either she’d no-show, or cancel right before. I found myself putting in all this effort for nothing, it was very defeating. It’s not the way courting worked when my parents met.

What I saw in movies – where having a good heart and being yourself is all you need – that’s not what happens now. Good and nice aren’t attractive any more. The manosphere fundamentally became a surrogate father for the life lessons I never got.

We wanted a place where men could discuss masculine topics without facing the same public shaming outcry that happens on social media sites – feminists are quick on the trigger to try to take down anything they consider wrong … Milo Yiannopoulos lost his verified status on Twitter because of his views on masculinity. It’s a big topic that has become taboo in our culture.

Me: But surely there’s a line somewhere. I mean, the real feelings being expressed here are hostility to women.

Morpheus Manfred: We’re accused of misogyny almost daily. I won’t deny that the language is colorful and there’s a lot of emotion expressed by the men on the forum. But [before The Red Pill] there wasn’t really a way for guys to express these feelings.

Let’s say there’s a guy who just says “I hate women” – I think that’s textbook misogyny. We let them say that. Because there’s nowhere else for a man to blow off steam. But they stay, they learn, they vent, they get advice, they get back on the horse. The endgame of our advice isn’t to hate women. It’s to understand them so you can stop being so darn frustrated by them.

Morpheus claims that The Red Pill helped him find a longtime girlfriend, and that The Red Pill is ultimately little more than an online version of locker-room talk.


...The Red Pill is hatred of women in the context of men who want nothing more than to please women, and who are living in a world with a sexual marketplace they find deeply anxiety-provoking. Briffaut’s Law, another of the key concepts of The Red Pill, encapsulates male powerlessness as an eternal truth: “The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.”

But Redpillers are responding to a much more novel and contemporary reality that such biological imperatives: they are responding to women having financial and sexual power over their own lives and bodies. And they haven’t dealt with it yet. The term “manosphere” is really a misnomer. “Not-quite-a-manosphere” would be better.

More at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... sphere-men

[American Dream]

Why MRAs, radical feminists and Christian fundamentalists agree with each other about transgender rights

All three groups hate transgender people for the same reason – and that has important implications for trans activists .


Conservative Christians have become the go-to bogeyman for LGBTQ activists, and for good reason. There’s no doubt that in churches and “conversion clinics” across the country religious doctrine is used to justify transphobia. But let’s be clear: religion never made anyone do anything. From the Crusades to 9/11, zealots have done whatever they wanted – looted, killed, lashed out in fear – and used religion as an excuse, not an inspiration. God doesn’t tell Christians to hate transgender people any more than Allah told bin Laden to destroy the Twin Towers. There are transphobic atheists and trans-inclusive Christians.

What really drives conservative Christian opposition to transgender rights? The answer becomes clear once you realize what Christian fundamentalists, radical feminists and sexist men have in common.

By rejecting the gender that society assigns to them at birth, transgender people are also rejecting the social norms that oppress women.

So-called Men’s Rights Activists, abetted by the Internet and driven by the ever-burning engine of male insecurity, have become known for their hatred of feminism; but they also tend to be antipathical to transgender people. When Facebook started allowing users to identify themselves as transgender, genderqueer and other non-binary genders, MRAs pitched a fit, surmising that the “retards” at Facebook had caved to feminist and transgender pressure.

Writer Stephen Marche has done a fantastic job of showing that MRA antipathy towards women and feminists is rooted in fear and insecurity. Now with Facebook’s change they fretted about which of the new gender categories “are safe to approach” (note to MRAs: none of them bite). They lashed out with the frustration of boys who didn’t know the answers to a test they thought they were prepared for. “Have we been invaded by aliens trying to confused the fuck out of us?” [sic] one wondered.

In their confusion and anger MRAs, ironically, joined a longstanding and odd subgroup of radical feminists, known by their critics as TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists). TERFs have opposed trans rights ever since transgender women started trying to join the feminist movement, cloaking their hatred in the language of gender theory but essentially saying, “Ew gross, get away from me.” Soon after transgender women began trying to join events for “womyn-born-womyn only,” such as Michfest, founded in 1976, radical feminist Janice Raymond wrote 1979’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. Today notable TERFs include Cathy Brennan, founder of a group called Gender Identity Watch, who has outed transgender people online, including at least one adolescent.

TERFs assert that transgender women are “men in dresses” who suffer from “autogynephelia,” a discredited, made-up disorder in which men derive sexual pleasure from viewing themselves as women. They believe these “men in dresses” are attempting to insert themselves into everything feminine – including the feminist movement and feminists themselves – and to make women’s issues “all about men.” When TERFs see a transgender woman complaining about abuse they see an entitled man playing the victim card, pretending he’s endured something that only happens to cis women.

As with MRAs, a strong subcurrent of fear runs through TERF writings – TERFs believe cis men support the trans agenda because, by blurring the line between women and men, the existence of transgender people hides the facts that cis men oppress and abuse cis women. They don’t explain why the cis men who oppose transgender rights tend to be the same guys who deny sexism exists and seek to roll back women’s rights, whereas cis men who support trans rights are more likely to condemn sexism.

More at: https://socialworkedblog.wordpress.com/ ... er-rights/

[American Dream]

#Milosexual and the Aesthetics of Fascism

For the September 2016 stop at Louisiana State University of his Dangerous Faggot Tour, Milo Yiannopoulos is dressed as his drag persona Ivana Wall. Accompanied by a young squire, he teeters across the stage in a pair of sparkly high heels and a long white ball gown with gold brocade, carrying a gold-bound Bible. He removes his silver lamé cloak and white feather boa and adjusts the enormous blond wig perched atop his head, then waves his gloved hands to the ebullient crowd and proceeds to sing the national anthem and “America the Beautiful.” A slide on the screen behind Milo reads, “Admit it. Your dick is confused.”

Internet troll-master and technology editor for the far-right Breitbart News website, Yiannopoulos has built a cult of celebrity around himself as a breaker of liberal taboo and an advocate for what he calls free speech fundamentalism. In his articles, tweets, and lectures, he presents himself as a bold truth-teller, right-wing provocateur, and self-declared “faggot.” Like Cher or Beyoncé, his fame has grown so large that most people know him simply as “Milo.”

Milo is singular: an ultra right-wing pundit with a high-femme persona who is nonetheless embraced by a political bloc contemptuous of homosexuals and feminine men.

Though a fixture of the alt-right circuit since 2013, Milo was rocketed to mainstream visibility during the summer of 2016 when he was banned from Twitter for leading an online campaign of harassment against African American actress Leslie Jones. More recently, he became the center of controversy after it was announced he had signed a book deal with Threshold, the conservative imprint of Simon and Schuster, for which he received a $250,000 advance. Many bookstores are refusing to stock the book, accusing it of hate speech, and Chicago Review of Books has even taken the step of boycotting Simon and Schuster titles. Despite, or perhaps because of, this backlash, preorders from fans have thrust the title, Dangerous, to Amazon’s number one spot for political humor. These same fans recently flooded a survey on the website LGBTQ Nation to have Milo named its “Person of the Year.” Seemingly at odds with a movement founded on the hatred of racial, religious, and sexual difference, Milo has somehow been crowned the alt-right queen.

What makes Milo so vexing to the left and successful among young people on the right is the way he manages to utilize his “deviant” sexuality as a political asset rather than a liability. Milo’s rhetorical and aesthetic strategies are manifold: he adopts the argot of science and history in support of his claims about the supremacy of Western culture, but simultaneously asserts that we live in a “post-fact world.” He mocks the offended sensibilities of leftists who protest his campus appearances, yet uses the language of assault to characterize himself as an embattled champion. He effortlessly pivots from ridiculing his targets (fat people, Muslims, feminists) to asserting that his insults are in fact efforts to save these people from their brainwashing. If all else fails, he whips out a cock joke.

While there are parallels to be found between Milo and historical and contemporary fascist figures interested in homoeroticism, he remains singular: an ultra right-wing pundit with a high-femme persona who is nonetheless largely embraced by a political bloc synonymous with contempt for homosexuals and feminine men. Understanding the sources of his appeal is crucial to developing sophisticated insight into the way alt-right media—now the sanctioned news of the White House—uses spectacle and irony to persuade, bewitch, disrupt, and overwhelm the public.

**


Hitler with the bullet-scarred Röhm.

To understand exactly how Milo operates in a milieu shaped by fascist aesthetics—by which I mean both the visual tropes associated with Nazism, as well as the increasingly diverse visual strategies employed by contemporary fascists—it is necessary to examine the historical connections between fascism and homosexuality.

There is a long and grand tradition of masculinist gay fascism.

There is a long and grand tradition, in particular, of masculinist gay fascism. One need only look back to Ernst Röhm, a founder of the Nazi party and long-time head of its militia (the Sturmabteilung or SA), who was openly homosexual (as were many of his lieutenants) and advocated a militarized vision of masculinity based upon his experiences in World War I, in which “only the real, the true, the masculine held its value.” Influenced by the right-wing German sociologist and philosopher Hans Blüher, Röhm subscribed to a vision of fascism that embraced homosexuality as an acceptable and even necessary component of an all-male militaristic society called the Männerbund. Consistent with this line of thinking are Milo’s constant digs at “ugly” women, feminists, and lesbians, all of whom he considers baffling, useless, and pathetic. Like Röhm, Milo embraces a vociferous misogyny that suggests he would rather live in a world without women. However, the similarities between Röhm and Milo run out here.

With his large facial scars and barrel chest, Röhm’s hypermasculine appearance fell outside of Weimar stereotypes of how a homosexual should look and act (a stereotype that more closely resembles Milo). In Röhm’s view, conservative homophobia was a reactionary current in German political discourse that would be swept away when the Nazi’s rose to power. But the uneasy coalition of fascist homosexuals and homophobes would not hold, and ultimately Röhm’s homosexuality provided Hitler a ready rationale for his assassination in 1934 during the Night of Long Knives. After Röhm’s death, the Nazis increased the punishments for homosexual conduct under Paragraph 175 (a provision of the German criminal code), and initiated a public anti-vice campaign to rid the Reich of “homosexual contamination,” leading to the imprisonment and death of thousands of gay Germans. Yet Röhm’s long-term position of power and influence testifies to the complex and sometimes contradictory attitudes of fascists toward homosexuality within their own ranks.



Masculinist strains of fascism persist to this day, with the treatises of American gay white nationalist Jack Donovan perhaps best exemplifying this strange blend. In The Way of Men (2012), Donovan’s most popular book, he lays out his “gang theory of masculinity,” which relies upon “four tactical virtues”—strength, courage, mastery, and honor—that he claims distinguish men from women. Though Donovan skirts “the Jewish question,” he makes heavy allusion to Nazi symbolism, especially in his use of Germanic runes, and his writing is distributed by Counter-Currents Publishing, which exclusively sells Nazi- and white nationalist–themed books. Combining terms such as “tribe” and “barbarian” with imagery drawn from Crossfit, the Hell’s Angels, and Germanic mysticism, Donovan has concocted a vision of fascist masculinity based on a mythic past. Though Donovan’s fantasy may be backward-looking rather than future-oriented, like Röhm’s, it imagines a white and male-dominated society outside existing morality and sexual strictures.

More at: http://bostonreview.net/politics-gender ... cs-fascism