Category Archives: terrorism
A Voice for Men publishes a post by racist blogger Pamela Geller, whose Islamophobic writings helped to inspire Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik [UPDATE]
Some of Pamela Geller’s other work.
NOTE: Man Boobz Pledge Week Continues! Big thanks to everyone who has donated!
If you haven’t yet, and want to, here’s the button you’re looking for:
UPDATE: AVFM has taken the post down.
Men’s Rights Activists have had a serious hate-on for the Southern Poverty Law Center ever since the hate-group-monitoring watchdog wrote about the misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement last spring.
Since the SPLC devotes its time to ferreting out bigots and exposing them to the world, this has put SPLC-hating MRAs in some interesting company. While not everyone who’s criticized the SPLC is a bigot – both Harper’s magazine and the Nation have been critical of the group and its fundraising methods – many of the most virulent critics of the SPLC are far-right racists. On Reddit, for example, the anti-SPLC subreddit, called simply SPLC, is dominated by white nationalists; indeed, at the moment, one of the top links on its front page is titled “Interest for White Student Union grows.”
Appeals court upholds conviction of a man who threatened to kill a family court judge — in a song on YouTube
Jeffries in his YouTube video.
Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati upheld the conviction of a divorced Tennessee dad with the unlikely name of Franklin Delano Jeffries II who, in the midst of a custody battle, decided to post a YouTube video of himself singing a song with the sweet title “Daughter’s Love.”
The problem was that only a small portion of the song was actually about daughters and love; the rest was about Mr. Jeffries’ apparent desire to kill the judge overseeing the custody hearings, and possibly others.
As the appeals court judge put it:
The song contains sweet passages about relationships between fathers and daughters and the importance of spending time together. The rest boils into an assortment of the banal (complaints about his ex-wife), the ranting (gripes about lawyers and the legal system) and the menacing (threats to kill the judge if he doesn’t “do the right thing” at an upcoming custody hearing). Jeffries set the words to music and created a video of himself performing the song on a guitar painted with an American flag on it. The style is part country, part rap, sometimes on key, and surely therapeutic.
Men’s Rights Redditor: “I advocate the removal of judges, politicians, and other government agents who violate the Constitution by any means necessary.” [UPDATED]
Men’s Rights subreddit regular Demonspawn (remember him?) is back again with some deliberately vague but definitely threatening talk about judges and politicians:
Not a lot of “plausible deniability” here, though I am sure various MRAs will try to excuse this as not being what it obviously is: a threat of violence against judges, politicians and others who work for the government.
He’s done this before; I wrote about it here.
And while we’re on the topic of Demonspawn, here’s a little followup comment of his from the thread we discussed the other day. It’s a giant wall of text, I know, but it contains gems like: “When women mouth off to men and get their faces bashed in, they’ll know equality.” At least this comment of his got as many downvotes as upvotes.
I’m banned from the Men’s Rights subreddit, of course, but Demonspawn, despite repeatedly violating the subreddit’s rules about posting comments advocating violence, continues to post away. See his comment history for more lovely thoughts on, among other things, why women are parasites who don’t deserve the vote.
Update: Norwegian Men’s Rights blogger Eivind Berge will be held for four more weeks due to the “risk of recurrence of new criminal offenses.”
Just a quick update on Eivind Berge: According to this news account, the Norwegian Men’s Rights blogger is considered enough of a threat to police officers that his two-week detention has been extended by four more weeks. According to the prosecutor, the “risk of recurrence of new criminal offenses” makes releasing him dangerous.
Spinning the Eivind Berge arrest: Reddit vs. The Spearhead
Berge: Too provocative for his own good?
The spinning of Norwegian Men’s Rights blogger Eivind Berge’s arrest for threatening police officers has begun.
Over on Reddit, the leading hangout for the Men’s Rights movement’s “moderates,” most MRAs seem to want to have nothing to do with Berge’s extremism (which is good), to the extent that many of them are declaring him not an MRA at all (which is ridiculous).
Sorry, guys. Berge may literally be the world’s worst MRA, and one that most MRAs have been content to ignore, but he’s still an MRA. He’s described himself as such many times (e.g., here); he has many of the same views and obsessions as “mainstream” MRAs; and he’s even got a few outspoken MRA fans. And while some Reddit Men’s Rightsers were distancing themselves from Berge in the wake of his arrest, others were respectfully discussing a blog post from Berge’s girlfriend Emma the Emo (who shares many of his views) taking aim at what she called “American pedophile hysteria.”
Over on the Spearhead, the more reactionary W.F. Price has a rather different spin on Berge, as encapsulated by the title of his blog post on the subject: “Eivind Berge Arrested for Provocative Rhetoric.”
Evidently, threatening to stab a police officer (and announcing the day on which you plan to do so) is merely a sort of rhetorical flourish.
It’s a strange and often incoherent post, in which Price seems to argue that Berge’s threats don’t count as real threats because … he made them publicly? Here, you make sense of it:
Eivind Berge has been posting some pretty provocative stuff for quite a while now, including his desire to kill police for enforcing misandric laws. I agree with his girlfriend that it was a bunch of hot air, but he got arrested for it anyway. Despite his support for Anders Breivik, who decimated the youth wing of the Marxist/Islamist Norwegian left in a solo Knights Templar crusade last year, I seriously doubt Eivind would have carried out any violent acts. Breivik, who really meant business, kept his plans to himself.
The truth is that people who manage to pull off spectacular terrorist attacks are almost always those who don’t say anything about them beforehand. Think Mohammed Atta vs. James Ujaama.
Yeah, it’s not like Osama bin Laden ever made threats about attacking the US. Or that abusers who threaten their exes ever actually harm them. Or any of a million other examples in which someone who issues a threat carries out said threat.
The lesson here is that if you want to be political, there’s a sort of tortoise/hare dynamic at work. The impetuous, fast hare tends to run out of steam (or run into trouble with the law) fairly quickly. The slow-and-steady tortoise, on the other hand, keeps trudging on and wins the race. …
[T]hreatening to kill people openly and loudly is essentially worthless.
Is Price really equating terrorists who plot their attacks secretly with the slow-and-steady tortoise who wins the race?
Who the hell knows. But he is clearly offering an apologia for making violent threats on the dubious grounds that those who threaten their enemies openly are somehow therefore not dangerous.
Later Price offers this completely clear cut and definitive repudiation of violence.*
We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that violent action will do us any good. Of course violence does work, but the power of the state is so overwhelming today that individual acts are almost certain to fail. Furthermore, those who are willing to unleash violence on others must be prepared to die themselves, and must lead by example. Somehow, I don’t think many of us have reached that point. It’s a long road to get there, and I hold out the hope that it will never go that far.
[T]he point is that anyone who condones violent action loudly and publicly, but doesn’t back it up, can’t be taken seriously.
In the comments, Eric complains that men who commit violence for putatively political reasons may suffer the indignity of being called bad names:
As we have all seen repeatedly, violence against men is socially and politically sanctioned violence. A man committing violence in defense of his rights is labelled a ‘terrorist’ or an ‘extremist’. The case of Thomas Ball is a perfect example. …
The feminist elites are bullies who are aware of their power and our inability to ‘push back’ in any way that will cause them deserved pain (at least for now). But like all bullies, they are also rabid egomaniacs and fear anyone who doesn’t bow slavishly to their power. The more men who are informed as to their true nature and who are taught to despise them, the weaker these bullies become because their fear of exposure and losing their power is a mania.
I guess Eric’s main beef is with the English language. I’m pretty sure that using violence to cause “deserved pain” in an attempt to intimidate your political enemies is basically the dictionary definition of “terrorism.”
Further down in the comments, Eric sets forth a curious little conspiracy theory involving, well, me. In one comment, he suggests that the attention I’ve given to the Berge arrest
illustrates that the anti-MRM forces are primed and ready for a ‘false flag’ or provocateur-instigated ‘incident’. … The feminist elites have noticably shifted from typical ridicule to painting the MRM as a dangerous extremist movement.”
In a followup comment, he elaborates on this peculiar logic:
Futrelle … does seem unusally worked up. …
I have the feeling that something ominous is in the wind.
This kind of language out of the Mangina League; the SPLC’s attention; the spate of troll and provocateur attacks and hacking on mens’ blogs; this crap going on in Scandanavia—there’s definately a pole-shift among our enemies and it stinks of orchestration.
I’m pretty sure I didn’t make up many years worth of threatening comments from Eivind “killing at least one cop is on my bucket list” Berge. So does this mean that Berge is some sort of deep-cover feminist operative? What does that make Paul “fucking your shit up gives me an erection” Elam?
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*
Norwegian Men’s Rights Activist blogger Eivind Berge arrested for death threats against police [UPDATE 3]
Eivind Berge and police
Norwegian Men’s Rights Activist blogger Eivind Berge, known for his violent rhetoric and rape apologia, has been arrested for death threats against police.
Not too surprising, given that he once announced on his blog that “[k]illing at least one cop is on my bucket list.”
Here are some Google-translated details from a news account here:
The right-wing extremist and anti-feminist blogger Eivind Berge has been arrested for having encouraged and glorified the killing of policemen. The police have found both ammunition and textbooks in use of explosives at Berge.
The police regard the threats as an invitation to others to kill police officers, but also feared that he would commit the acts themselves shortly.
He was evidently arrested on Wednesday. According to this story — at least as far as I can tell from the obviously crude Google translation — he made a specific threat to kill a police officer this Saturday:
Berge also writes about how he was planning to attack a policeman with a knife on a Saturday evening:
“Then I used the trial to come forward as a good example for men, and I considered it to be worth 21 years in prison for premeditated murder.”
According to this account, Berge is being held for two weeks. He claims innocence.
Berge, as readers of this blog may well already know, is a fan of right-wing terrorist and mass murderer Anders Brevik. On his blog, he’s also argued (among other things) that “Rape is Equality.”
He’s glorified the murder of police on his blog numerous times.
Some examples, taken from the second news account:
“… attack on the police is something 100% in harmony with everything I stand for.”
“I maintain that police murder is both ethically and tactically correct.”
Some other examples, direct from his blog (each paragraph is from a separate post; click on the quote for the source):
I viscerally despise cops and wish them the worst. Killing at least one cop is on my bucket list.
If ever a victim of psychiatry, here is what I would do. I would first attempt to kill the cops or whoever tried to apprehend me. Failing that, I would feign docility in order to get out as soon as possible and then kill a representative of the industry as revenge. … killing cops is also very much a men’s issue. Every pig killed is also a blow against feminism, so men should be doubly elated whenever an officer goes down in the line of encroaching on our cognitive liberty.
This was his reaction to a news story about a police officer being killed:
Good news for men is rare in this hateful feminist utopia that is Norway, but today is a joyous day! Today I feel schadenfreude in my heart along with all the hate that feminism and resultant mate deprivation have instilled in me. One blue thug less on the streets.
From another post on the same subject:
The swine Olav Kildal died while trying to enforce our lack of cognitive liberty. This was a defensive, much deserved killing that cheered me up.
Here he threatens a female prosecutor:
To feminist prosecutor Anne Cathrine Aga I have the following message: The Men’s Movement is watching you, bitch, and we are seething with hatred against you personally and the police state you represent. Actions have consequences. Trials are still (mostly) public and they sink into our collective minds, where they form the basis of future activism. Hate breeds hate — that is a fact of life too smugly ignored by feminists. …
2011 is the year Norwegian men as a group emerged out of the blogosphere and into the battlefield. This in turn has led to a breakthrough for MRAs such as my good self in the public discourse, probably for the simple reason that the powers that be now realize ignoring us has deadly consequences. Men are angry now, and we have proven that we are deathly serious about resisting feminism. So the feminist prosecutors referred to above ought to wipe that smug look off their faces before it is too late. Clearly seventy-seven body bags wasn’t enough, but I am fairly confident that you will be sorry one day.
Aside from the explicit threats of violence, the violent and threatening rhetoric here is not unlike much of the rhetoric we see regularly on A Voice for Men and other MRA sites. AVFM founder Paul Elam, for example, told one feminist that:
I find you so pernicious and repugnant that the idea of fucking your shit up gives me an erection. … We are coming for you.
The blogger Emma the Emo, Berge’s girlfriend, has posted comments here in the past defending him. The news account quotes someone identified as Nataliya Kochergova, described as his girlfriend; I assume this is “Emma,” because what she told the media is similar to what she posted here. She of course denies that he planned any real violence. According to the article, she said:
There are not really threats. He has never had plans to kill someone, he has said several times in his blog. When for example, he says that “the police killings are an effective way to prevent stupid laws,” it’s a factual description and not a threat. Even those who love the police agree with it.
Berge, for his part, has stated publicly that if he had not met Emma, he probably would have killed by now:
At the time I wrote my last blog post, I believed I would probably become Norway’s first modern violent activist in peacetime. Celibacy enforced by a feminist regime had driven me to the point where I saw no other option. I would target the pigs who enforce feminist law, knowing I could realistically at least kill one of them before I would be captured or killed myself. Thus revenge would be assured and if I lived, my reputation as a violent criminal would make me attractive to some women. But then in the nick of time this blog attracted a lovely girl commenting as “Emma.”
This is why I take violent rhetoric from MRAs very seriously.
Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, MRAs glorify MRA “martyr” Thomas Ball, who killed himself on the steps of a New Hampshire courthouse last year in hopes that his death would inspire MRAs to literally burn down courthouses and police stations.
Ball’s manifesto is still up on A Voice for Men in its “activism” section, including these passages:
So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. … This is too important to be using that touchy- feeling coaching that is so popular with business these days. You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT!
Most of the police stations built in New England over the last 20 years are stone or brick. Fortunately, the roofs are still wood. The advantage of fire on the roof is that it is above the sprinklers
AVFM tastefully omitted Ball’s specific instructions on how to make Molotov cocktails, but left this in:
There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.
For many more examples of violent threatening rhetoric from MRAs, I urge you to go through some of my posts here and here.
Return of the Sexy Robot Ladies, Part Two: Electric Boogaloo
Our glorious future
The sexy robot ladies are back! Not so much in real life, where they are still more scary than sexy, but in the fervid imagination of dudes who hate real ladies. Like Eric here, on The Spearhead:
When I first came to the MRM, there was a story in the news about a Japanese robotics engineer who had made a female android. It really wasn’t much more than a fairly realistic-looking doll; although there was quite a bit of discussion at the time for the potential to improve on the design. The main thing was that it’s invention caused a fury from the feminists. Even at that early stage in my MRA days, I could see the reason: for the first time women were looking the very real possibility that they could become expendable.
Well, “expendable” only if you view women as little more than support systems for their vaginas.
Personally, I’m more into foreign girls than virtual sex. But the same principle applies: as long as there are alternatives to feminists, the feminists are expendable. They don’t have the power to convert every woman on the planet; and even if they could they can’t stop men from building robots.
Please, build those robots, and lock yourselves away with them forever, and leave the rest of us alone.
Elsewhere in the same thread on The Spearhead we get some examples of why it’s a problem when Men Who Really Should Be Going Their Own way … don’t. A fellow calling himself Rmaxd apparently suggested that men who feel themselves to have been mistreated by the courts should: “Lynch a judge as you would any traitor or dictator.”
His comment was deleted, and heavily criticized — apparently for not being circumspect enough in his threatening language. After all, our dear friend JeremiahMRA got mostly upvotes on The Spearhead for a similarly threatening remark just the other day. And elsewhere in the very same thread as Rmaxd’s now-deleted comment we find a fellow called freebird suggesting that men who have allegedly suffered because of women should
share this pain with those inflicting it.
cue up “blood on the plow”
Meanwhile, again in the same thread, a commenter called walking in hell brings up the example of Thomas Ball, the MRA who self-immolated on the steps of a Keene, New Hampshire courthouse a year ago in hopes that his dramatic death would inspire other men to (quite literally) burn down police stations and courthouses using Molotov cocktails. (You can read Ball’s manifesto, complete with its call for MRA terrorism though without the specific instructions on how to make effective Molotov cocktails, on A Voice for Men, in its “activism” section; search the page for “burn” to go directly to his advocacy of terrorism.) Walking in hell also thinks family court judges should be “punished” for their alleged “crimes,” by which he means denying some fathers visitation.
[R]esponsibility for such heinous crimes against children can behold an individual to a special kind of punishment.
We see the nervous squirming by judges in the Australia case marked by the judge issuing an apology. We also see nervous squirming in the UK with the evildoers trying to issue fake political gestures to angry people.
The evildoers must smell something besides fire and brimstone. The sooner they get to the fire and brimstone, the better off children and fathers will be.
Apparently this vaguely threatening language was vague enough to pass muster on The Spearhead; this comment got more than a dozen upvotes.
The sooner you fuckers build those sexbots you like to talk about so much, the better for all of us.
Spearheader “warns” women to stop being so feministy, or else!
More mustache-twirling from the MRA crowd.
Another day, another threat – sorry, prediction – of impending violence towards women from someone on The Spearhead. This time from a fellow called James, in his twenties:
The OLDER MEN simply do not understand what it is like to be a young man today.
I will say one thing though- a very big percent of young men of my generation do not believe in this feminism or white knight bullshit, and they have very little tolerance towards it.
Older men will allow themselves to get ass raped in divorce courts, but the younger men of my generation have no such tolerance.
So if the younger women think they are going to treat the younger men with the same level of hatred that the older women do to the older men, they have a big surprise waiting for them.
1. Either the men will just entirely boycott the younger women
or
2. They will actively fight for their rights, even with force, if it requires it
What I mean by that is, the younger generation of men are much more violent than the older generation. So in plain English, if women think they are going to treat the younger generation of men like shit, then we are going to see a huge increase in violence against women.
In short, the men of my generation are not as willing to tolerate the abuse from man hating women as the older men are. Young women would be very wise to take note of this.
Unfair quote-mining on my part? Not exactly. James got 72 upvotes for this bit of wisdom on The Spearhead, and only 8 downvotes.
Meanwhile, our old friend at the Pro-Male/Anti-Feminist Technology blog highlighted James’ comment in a post of his own, quoting the whole thing, and adding his own spin:
The younger you go on average you will find less tolerance for anything pro-female. This is not surprising. Even looking at my own life, I have been dealing with feminism since I was in elementary school especially if we define feminism correctly as feminine-ism. I remember (female) teachers being pro-female and anti-male going back to first grade. As bad as I had it, it is worse for men younger than me. They’re not going to listen to lies about how women are oppressed because all they have seen with their own eyes are the opposite. …
By 2020 the balance between men who are currently old vs. men who are currently young will have shifted. There will be less old men who remember life pre-feminism. There will be more young men who have spent their entire lives under the feminist jack boot. There will be more men who are completely fed up with women. Around 2020 there will be a lot more men willing to take radical direct action against feminism.
“Radical direct action against feminism?” What does this mean? Generalized violence against women, as James seems to suggest? Firebombing police stations and courthouses, as MRA “martyr” Tom Ball urged in his manifesto? Like most of those in the Men’s Rights movement who like to talk ominously about what they hope will be a massive anti-feminist backlash, the PMAFT blogger is vague about what exactly this might entail. But it’s not hard to connect the dots here.
Protip: MRAs, if you don’t want people to see the Men’s Rights movement as a hate movement — you need to stop posting, stop upvoting, stop even tolerating this kind of hateful shit.
Oh, Men’s Rights subreddit, will you ever learn? (Probably not.)
Sometimes I ask myself: what is it that I really hope to accomplish with this website, aside from entertaining myself and my readers, and exposing misogynist assholes for who they are. There’s a part of me that still hopes that someday, something I write will cause some misogynist and/or Men’s Rightser out there to develop a modicum of self-awareness, look at what they’ve been saying or doing, and say to themselves, “I’m really kind of a tool, aren’t I? Maybe I should stop.”
When the Southern Poverty Law Center report on the Men’s Rights movement came out, I hoped it might have a similar sort of effect. Or that, even if it didn’t persuade any MRAs out there that they were wrong, it might at least convince a few that they were going about things the wrong way. Nope. On the Men’s Rights subreddit, at least, it seems to have sent many of the regulars into an indignant tizzy, and they have doubled down on their peculiar brand of politics-by-whining-online.
Consider this post:
Yes, that’s right. Some Men’s Rights Redditors seem to think that the best way to convince the world that they’re not part of a hate group is to continue to celebrate a self-admitted child abuser who urged men to firebomb courthouses and police stations and kill people.
Then there’s this post, currently the top post on the subreddit:
Wow, if the Men’s Rights subreddit had anything to do with that, that would indeed be a victory. As one regular put it:
Thing is, I read r/mensrights pretty regularly, and I don’t remember any campaign there to protect the rights of fishermen in New Zealand.
Turns out that’s because the campaign, such as it was, consisted of one post some months back, which got all of 11 upvotes at the time. The current post in which r/mensrights congratulates itself for its “victory” has gotten, last I checked, 120 upvotes, more than ten times that. Simplecosine’s self-congratulatory comment in the new thread has gotten 36 upvotes. The comment in the original thread asking r/mensrightsers to send an email to the US Secretary of State’s office got … one upvote. In other words, only a handful of Men’s Rights Redditors even noticed the original post, much less sent along an email.
Reading one of the linked news articles makes clear the real reason the State Department opened an investigation: a six-month long, three-continent wide investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek revealing abuses in the industry.
The Men’s Rights subreddit: Taking Credit for Shit They Didn’t Do Since 2008.
And then there’s this post:
I’ve got nothing to say about this one — it’s basically self-refuting — except that I’m sort of bemused by the notion that the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “semi-women group.” Uh, what is that exactly? A group with some women in it? A group that doesn’t think women are all a bunch of evil bitches? The horror!
Oh, Men’s Rights movement. You’ll never change, will you?
EDITED TO ADD: And speaking of never changing, here’s how one Men’s Rights redditor responded to my comments there suggesting that maybe, just maybe, MRAs should actually denounce and distance themselves from someone calling for terrorism:
Let me just highlight that bit at the end again:
[T]he cost to the establishment to maintain the status quo in regards to divorce, custody, etc. must be made so high that it’s just no longer feasible. If that means instilling abject fear into the hearts of judges, cops and legislators by making them think their careers and/or lives could be forfeit unless they change their attitudes towards men, then so be it.
Trying to instill fear for one’s life in your opponents: that is the very definition of terrorism.
The Southern Poverty Law Center takes on the violent misogyny so pervasive in the Men’s Rights Movement
[TW for the comments to this post; discussions of rape and abuse.]
The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization devoted to tracking and exposing hate groups, has just published a detailed report on the misogyny and violent rhetoric so pervasive in the Men’s Rights Movement — as well as the actual violence inspired by this sort of hatred of women. It’s a piece you all should read, even though few of the details will be new to long-time readers of this blog.
Arthur Goldwag, an expert on conspiracy-mongers and the far right, argues (I think correctly) that the Men’s Rights movement is largely a backlash against the many successes of feminism over the last several decades:
It’s not much of a surprise that significant numbers of men in Western societies feel threatened by dramatic changes in their roles and that of the family in recent decades. Similar backlashes, after all, came in response to the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, and other major societal revolutions. What is something of a shock is the verbal and physical violence of that reaction.
[Thomas] Ball’s suicide brought attention to an underworld of misogynists, woman-haters whose fury goes well beyond criticism of the family court system, domestic violence laws, and false rape accusations.
The Men’s Rights Movement, as it exists today, is not a civil rights movement; it is a regressive, hateful reaction against a civil rights movement — that is, feminism.
Those who truly care about the rights of men, and who are not motivated by a hatred of women or feminism, need to repudiate the hate and the violent rhetoric of the Men’s Rights Movement as it exists today. Only then can there be a Men’s Rights Movement worthy of the name.
EDITED TO ADD: The SPLC has also put up a guide to some of the more hateful sites in the manosphere. Longtime readers will be familiar with most of them.
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN: And a piece debunking some Men’s Rights Myths.
EDITED TO ADD AGAIN, AGAIN: The discussion of the SPLC report on the Men’s Rights Subreddit is surprisingly reasonable, so far. (I mean, compared to what I expected. Meanwhile, over in this thread, the Men’s Rightsers are behaving as they usually do.)
