By David Futrelle

Like the Christchurch shooter, like Elliot Rodger, like countless other mass killers, the shooter who took three young lives at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California yesterday seems to have left behind a manifesto.

But it’s not his manifesto; it’s borrowed from a pseudonymous 19th century paean to “survival of the fittest.” Before launching his assault at the food festival, alleged shooter Santino William Legan posted a message on his Instagram account urging everyone to “Read ‘Might Is Right’ by Ragnar Redbeard.”

The book in question, first published in 1890, is an over-the-top, sometimes comically so, explication of the simple, and simplistic, idea encapsulated in its title; it’s been in and out of print for more than a century and is now readily available on the internet for free. The prose is ponderous and purple — “Redbeard” specializes in the sort of bombastic rhetoric that has an irresistible allure for many on the far right — but the ideas are easy enough to understand. It’s basically Nietzsche for Dummies.

The victor gets the gold and the land every time. He, also, gets the fairest maidens, the glory tributes. And — why should it be otherwise? Why should the delights of life go to failures and cowards? Why should the spoils of battle belong to the unwarlike?That would be insanity, utterly unnatural and immoral.

Imagine that stretched out over, say, 180 pages, with heaping helpings of racism and antisemitism on the side, and you’ve got Might is Right. Alongside its glorification of the powerful, the book is filled with snide asides about the “simian disposition” of “the Negro” and regular rants about the “usurious Jew.” (Redbeard is also pretty virulently anti-Christian, but mainly because Jesus was a Jew who liked to talk about the meek inheriting the earth.)

Naturally, the book has become a favorite of many in the manosphere and (of course) on the alt-right. It’s gotten shoutouts everywhere from the MGTOW subreddit (where one commenter hailed it as “the most important book out there”) to Incels.co (where it was described as “the most blackpilled and inflamatory book ever”); you can find it being recommended both by the old-school racists of the Vanguard News Network and by the relatively newfangled reactionaries of the Red Pill and DarkEnlightenment subreddits, not to mention 4chan’s /pol/. Before his recent (alleged) conversion to Orthodox Christianity, our old friend fiend Roosh V wrote a largely appreciative “review” of it.

It’s not clear where Legan ran across the book; it could have been almost anywhere. A better question might be: what exactly is it about this 129-year-old book that would appeal to a 19-year-old like Legan? And the answer to that, I think, is relatively straightforward: if you strip away the purple prose and the sometimes archaic references, what Redbeard preaches isn’t that terribly different from the contemporary ideologies of the manosphere and the alt-right.

Nowhere is that clearer — to me at least — than in the final chapter, in which Redbeard takes on the so-called “woman question” and delivers answers that would not seem out of place in Reddit’s the Red Pill.

As he sees it, women are naturally attracted to the most macho of men, those who can both take and deliver a punch, quite literally, as

fighting is the method whereby the most fitted to propagate conclusively prove the fact. …

Women instinctively admire soldiers, athletes, kings, nobles, and fighting-men generally, above all other kinds of suitors — and rightly so.

Nothing so lowers a lover in a virile maiden’s estimation, than for him to be ‘whipped’ in a personal encounter with a rival. …

Young women have an instinctive detestation for the ‘good young man that died’ kind of adorer, and they positively abhor the pale coward … Strength, energy-of-character, ferocity, and courage, she admires in her possible husband, above all other qualities combined. Even to be carried-off by force, is not repugnant to her feelings, if the ‘bold bad man’ is in other respects acceptable.

She pines to be ‘wooed and won,’ … she likes to feel that she has been mastered, conquered, taken possession of—that the man who has stormed her heart is in all respects, a man among men.

Nature, in other words, is an unending battle of Alpha Chads vs obsequious Beta soyboys — and Chad always wins, even if (perhaps especially if) he skips past romance and resorts to brute force to win his fair lady.

Change a few words in Redbeard’s text and you basically have a post on the Red Pill subreddit. Everything new in Red Pill ideology is actually quite old. Indeed, Redbeard even refers to sexual “market value,” an idea that many modern pickup artists think they came up with.

It’s impossible to know — at least given the scant information we now have — what in particular about Rebeard’s book most appealed to Legan, or how exactly the book may have played a role in inspiring his killings.

If he was trying to become the Redbeardian “man among men” that women instinctively hunger for (allegedly), I’m not sure than gunning down a six-year-old is going to earn him the posthumous adoration he may have wanted. It seems more likely he was hoping to garner the admiration of incels and others who are impressed by mass murderers. He may have been less interested in Redbeard’s specific ideas than in the amoral almost-nihilism that permeates the book.

We don’t know. We may never know. An alienated young man read read a really shitty book he (almost certainly) found on the internet and liked it so much he decided to make it the “message” behind his mass shooting. Now three innocents are dead, and so is the shooter himself, gunned down by police shortly after starting his rampage, and the biggest clue we have right now as to his motives is a terrible book from more than a century ago. Ideas have consequences; very bad ideas have very bad consequences.

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You may have reacted to the news of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting with anger, or sadness, or frustration, or some mixture thereof. Dilbert creator and freelance persuasion guru Scott Adams responded by asking himself “what’s in it for me?”

This was his answer, a Tweet encouraging eyewitnesses to the mass shooting to sell their stories through his app WhenHub.

If any eyewitnesses actually were to arrange interviews through the app, Adams would take a cut of 20% for hosting the calls. Classy, huh?

When the Daily Beast tried to contact Adams himself for an (unpaid) interview, he accused them on Twitter or stirring up “fake outrage trolls.” And in a Periscope stream today he played the victim, claiming he was being targeted for his support of Trump.

As the Daily Beast reports,

Adams claimed many of his critics on social media were just taking part in an organized campaign against him, saying that critics frequently calling him a “grifter” and a “ghoul” amounted to proof that his detractors were acting in concert.

Er, the fact that a lot of people are calling you a “grifter” could also stem, not from collusion, but from the fact that you are a grifter?

Adams, who describes himself as a WhenHub’s chief strategy officer, did concede that he was using the shooting to promote his app. 

“For those of you who are saying, ‘Scott, you grifter, you’re using this to get attention for your app,’” Adams said. “Well, obviously, yes.” 

Would he do it again? Maybe.

“I do plan to do the same thing again in the future,” he said on his Periscope livestream, “Now if it’s a mass shooting, I might think twice.” 

And then he laughed.

What a dilhole.

H/T — Daily Beast. And all the people who sent me the Daily Beast article!

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By David Futrelle

Hardcore semen retaiuners — yes, I’m back to talking about them again — believe that by refraining from masturbation they can bless themselves with certain magical superpowers, most notably the power of attraction.

When they’re full up with semen, after a long NoFap/no ejaculation streak, they believe that basically everything in the universe is drawn to them — women, men, animals, money, good luck. (Oh, and speaking of good luck, well, good luck trying to tell these guys that the real magical power they’re developing is confirmation bias, which turns every smile from a woman in their vicinity into a sign that she’s DTF.)

Not long ago, a Semen-Retaining Redditor called jakeducati offered his explanation for this mysterious new power of attraction.

“Many people wonder…why does semen retention (supposedly) increase attraction?” he began.

Think of it this way: all organisms that exist have a compelling desire for more life. Every organism wants to live life more abundantly. Plants stretch towards the warmth of the sun, people bask outside in the sunshine on a sunny day, animals of all kinds enjoy eating nourishment.

So what makes guys full of their own semen such tasty snacks, metaphorically speaking?

Evidently, it’s all in the balls. Literally.

As a man, you hold the seed of creation within your ballsack. The spark that starts the flame. It wants to express itself through the mechanism of ejaculation, of pollination. When you hold this seed, when you retain it, you are ascending to a higher vibration.

Are you sure you’re not just vibrating from sheer unslaked horniness?

The purity of life within your semen vibrates at a high frequency. It is pure creation itself. As a result of holding this seed, you start to vibrate at a high frequency.

Definitely sounds like you’re horny, dude.

You start to become the sun. You start to radiate. People seek the warmth of the sun, so they will congregate around someone who holds this energy.

Why do you think the founders of the world religions had so many adherents? Because they carried the seed. They respected the seed. They cultivated the seed.

“Blessed are the blue of balls, for they shall get lots of flirty glances from the ladies.”

A woman wants to bask in the warmth of the sun and express herself. Look how eager they are to shed their clothes when at the beach. Why wouldn’t they feel the same way around a man who holds life, who has the sun within him?

So if you retain for a long enough time, women are going to start stripping down to their underwear on the bus after you get on?

Women don’t want to take their clothes off in front of men who disrespect themselves and the seed within them. These are cold men. They do not feel warmth around these men. That’s why many women are not openly sexual with many men. They do not feel safe. A woman is a receptor of energy and the energy that constant fappers give off is dead energy.

Maybe. But I’m pretty sure that most women also don’t want to take their clothes off i the vicinity of men who devote any portion of their days to bragging about their full balls on the internet.

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By David Futrelle

Incels have a lot of opinions about slavery, mostly unburdened by even the tiniest understanding of history.

When they’re not comparing themselves to slaves, or getting mad at how easy they think female slaves had it, incels are stewing in resentment at dudes who are descendants of slaves for (allegedly) hoarding all the Stacies for themselves.

Indeed, some incels have squeezed their heads so far up their own asses on the whole slavery thing that they’ve somehow managed to convince themselves that slavery was a wonderful thing to happen to black people. Maybe not so great at the time, but great for black men today. Or at the very least for that subset of black men who qualify as “Tyrones,” the racist term incels use to signify black “Chads,” or alpha males.

I would type out a long response to this but I think this brief video sums it all up more succinctly than I ever could.

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Accused serial sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein isn’t just a fan of underage girls; he’s also, apparently, a big fan of eugenics — and like most of those into the crackpot science, he believes that he’s packing some superior DNA that needs to be spread far and wide.

In the New York Times today, James B. Stewart reports that Epstein “hoped to seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.”

Stewart describes how Epstein used his charm and his money — well, maybe mostly his money — to “insinuate his way into an elite scientific community, thus allowing him to pursue his interests in eugenics and other fringe fields like cryogenics.”

As Stewart notes,

He dangled financing for their pet projects. Some of the scientists said that the prospect of financing blinded them to the seriousness of his sexual transgressions, and even led them to give credence to some of Mr. Epstein’s half-baked scientific musings.

Epstein loved to regale his new friends — including Nobel prize winners and such well-known names as Stephen Hawking and Oliver Sacks — with his crackpot ramblings on such subjects as “atoms [that] behaved like investors in a marketplace” and “a mysterious particle that might trigger the feeling that someone is watching you.”

Gosh, I wonder why he might have been worried about people watching him?

One of Epstein’s favorite topics, apparently, was his idea for a vast baby ranch designed to pump out countless baby Epsteins.

On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein [reportedly] told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies … .

According to an attendee at one of his dinners,

Mr. Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe.

Virtual-reality guru Jaron Lanier told Stewart that Epstein seemed to be

using the dinner parties — where some guests were attractive women with impressive academic credentials — to screen candidates to bear [his] children.

So many layers of creepiness here. The last thing this world needs is more Jeffrey Epsteins.

–David Futrelle

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By David Futrelle

On Wednesday, a Malaysian member of parliament proposed a new kind of “Sexual Harassment Act” to help protect men from being “seduced” into raping or otherwise molesting women and girls wearing too-sexy clothes.

“I propose to the minister that we create a ‘sexual harassment act’ to protect men against the demeanor, words and clothing of women,”
Mohamad Imran Abd Hamid told the Malaysian parliament.

which can cause them to be seduced to a point where they commit acts such as incest, rape, molestation, pornography (sic) and others,

Such a law, he said, would ensure that “the men in this country are safe, and the country is peaceful.”

The proposal didn’t go over well, with Mohd Imran’s own party, the ruling Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), rejecting it outright. And so, on Thursday, Mohd Imran apologized for hurting “the feelings of many women and also men, who feel insulted” and retracted his proposal.

Unfortunately the central assumption behind his proposal — that women are “asking for it” if they behave in certain ways or wear certain clothes — is shared by innumerable men (and quite a few women) around the world.

It’s especially widespread among men of the manosphere, who regularly rail against the alleged seductive power of women wearing yoga pants or short shorts as well as outfits that show a bit of shoulder. (Or even just arm.) Men’s Rights granddaddy Warren Farrell has been warning men for decades about the alleged “miniskirt power” and “cleavage power” of young women.

Meanwhile, our old pal enemy Roosh V, the rapey-pickup-guru-turned-raging-fundamentalist-Christian took to Twitter yesterday to warn against another deadly seductive threat to men: women wearing pants.

Stay safe, men! Emulate the folks in Bird Box and wear a blindfold at all times every time you leave the house.

H/T — to Alan Robertshaw for the story and @Zemyla for the Roosh tweet

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By David Futrelle

Pop quiz! Which of the following statements did “Crying Nazi” Chris Cantwell post online several days ago?

This one:

Another mass shooting? This is tragic. When will we finally do the right thing, and get rid of the Jews who cause all of this suffering?

Or this one?

I am only a struggling artist, and a despised political minority. I have, in the course of my intellectual journey, and artistic expression, made countless regrettable statements which I never planned on having read back to me in a courtroom. Once upon a time, I expected obedience to the law would avoid such outcomes. Vilifying me is an easy thing to do, even when I have the opportunity to respond, and deprived of this capacity, I am but a sitting duck. So my cries for justice, however loud they may be to my own ears, are drowned out by more powerful forces.

Scroll down for the answer!

.

.

.

Trick question! He posted both, because that’s the sort of person Cantwell is.

The voluble antisemite — a former A Voice for Men contributor who gained infamy as the “crying Nazi” for a video he made after Charlottesville — can’t seem to stop making awful comments … and then wallowing in self-pity when these comments cause him problems.

The first comment I quoted was one of many awful and vaguely threatening comments he regularly makes on Telegram, the favorite social media app of terrible people who’ve been banned pretty much everywhere else, even Gab.

The second comment was from a long post on his website offering his legal response to a motion accusing him of threatening one of the lawyers handling a lawsuit against him and others for Charlottesville. (The comment in question, which Cantwell insists was not threatening at all: “After this stupid k*ke whore loses this fraudulent lawsuit, we’re going to have a lot of fucking fun with her.”)

Elsewhere in his rambling response, Cantwell moans about how unfair it is that his lawyers have dropped him because a) he keeps saying terrible things and b) he hasn’t been paying them.

My attorneys wish to withdraw from this case, and I don’t blame them. I’d like to do the same. Since the financial industry has destroyed my business by depriving me, without explanation, of the ability to process payments, and even squashed a second business of mine which I launched hoping to overcome that unlawful discrimination, I am unable to compensate them. …

I would take issue with their description of me having made no effort to pay, however. I’m not living it up behind the scenes, refusing to pay for their services while enjoying other luxuries. I have struggled to pay my rent, my electric, my car payment, and the insurance for that car. I have no health insurance. I have stopped paying my credit cards. I have cut every expense I could, while scrambling to find new avenues of earning. …

After two years of relentless struggle, I am exhausted, broke, and frankly, lacking faith in justice. And so, I present myself as a beaten man, who is not guilty of the crimes alleged in the complaint before this court. I beg for justice, deeply skeptical of its supply, and await in despair whatever impositions may come of the injustice I have for so long struggled against, seemingly, to no avail.

Poor fella!

Here, by the way, is a photo of that poor fella taken during the Charlotteswille protests — a photo he used to promote his online radio show. (In case you’re wondering, he’s the one doing the spraying.

H/T — @EmilyGorcenski on Twitter, who highlighted Cantwell’s self-pitying comments (and posted the picture above) in a recent thread.

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By David Futrelle

Add “marital rape” to the long list of things that incels don’t — or won’t — understand.

Yesterday, a prolific Incels.co commenter called Vermilioncore offered his take on this issue that directly affects roughly zero percent of all incels.

Lots of women claim that they are raped by their husbands but that’s just not possible.

Not a promising start.

How are you going to be raped by the man you are supposed to be fucking 24/7?

I often wonder if particular incels have ever even spoken to a woman they’re not related to; in this case I wonder if Vermilioncore has ever met a married person.

It’s impossible for a wife to be raped by her husband. He has permission to have sex with her because they are married. Even if she’s sleeping, she shouldn’t get mad if her husband starts fucking her in the middle of the night. 

Somehow I can’t imagine Vermilioncore being too happy if someone penetrated him while he was sleeping, even if he were married to them.

A woman getting angry because her husband “””raped””” her is like a dog getting mad that its owner pet him.

I’m pretty sure even dogs wouldn’t agree with him on this one.

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By David Futrelle

It’s Friday, which means it’s time for some BAD SCENCE from the manosphere.

Actually, I have never before specified Friday as a day for bad science, but humor me this once, because I found some pretty, pretty bad science in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, and I’m going to share it with you.

It seems the fellas were discussing the alleged tendency of women to “scream and yell at the top of their lungs anytime something [bad] happens.” And one of the regulars — a wise fellow in the 12th grade — offered a detailed explanation, which basically boiled down to “women get headaches when they have to logic.”

Take it away, PrinceRaj53!

As much “demeaning” or “misommistic” it sounds, but the truth is: logical evaluation in a situation is exhausting for women.

And apparently correctly spelling “misogynistic” is exhausting for men, or at least for the Men Going Their Own Way variety.

Men rely primarily on logical reasoning, whereas women rely primarily on emotional reasoning. …

For Men- “if it works, do it” (doesn’t care how it will feel)

For Women- “if it feels good do it” (or avoids bad feelings)

Yes, I’m sure that explains why so many men keep throwing such EXTREMELY LOGICAL fits every time a movie comes out featuring a woman as an action hero.

Now, women aren’t children, if we see it from a general perspective, right? However, in reality, women are grown up children who pretend to be adults while their actual actions and words remain the same as a child’s (I think the same about weak blue pilled males as well).

Dude, I don’t even pretend to be an adult.

A woman can handle more information and logic than a 4 year old, sure. But in general, a woman doesn’t really want to and most of the times can’t go beyond a certain point. My sincere belief is it gives them a physical head ache, just like when I study a new subject in my school with intensity(I’m in 12th, so for me the literature subjects are like this).

TOO MUCH THINK HURT BRAIN

All the new information, focus, and logic caused mental fatigue and the occasional head ache in the female mind. Sure, these things are helpful in that they create new neural pathways and learning, but it does mentally hurt. Women aren’t equipped to handle this well.

Uh, there are no pain receptors in the brain. You don’t feel anything when your brain creates new neural pathways. Headaches are centered in blood vessels, nerves and muscles outside the brain. Stress can cause headaches, but thinking logically doesn’t.

Your best approach is to use an analogy or story if you really want to get your point across,just like you would do with a child. Bonus points if it’s a real life story about something that happened to her.

For example, you might say “hey, remember when that idiot on the internet tried to tell you that women get headaches from thinking logically?”

He then offers an example of how to use a story rather than logic to outwit a female in this TOTALLY REALISTIC EXAMPLE of a conversation with a women about circumcision.

Her : “Hey! I got my kid circumcised!”

You : “You got your kid circumcised but thought that neutering your dog was mutilation. Both are cutting of the penis. Both against their individual will. Both cause the body parts to work differently and influence the sexual experience of the individual. Do you see how illogical your reasoning is?”

DO NOT do this. Just no. This will not go well, and will end up with more screaming and yelling, nothing else.

To be fair, I’m pretty sure any parent might scream and yell if they told you something about their baby and you responded by trying to outwit them logically.

Instead of that, do the following in such a situation (I am using this as an example) :

Her : “Hey! I got my kid circumcised!”

You : “Oh yeah? Huh. Cool.”

Wait a few minutes.

You : “Remember when you told me you thought neutering your dog was mutilation?”

Her :“Yes. What?”

You : “Just checking.”

Do this.

Yeah, women LOVE THAT SHIT. As ZZ Top once sang, or might have, if they had seen this post, “every girl crazy ’bout a passive-aggressive man.”

She’ll be confused for a bit. But she’ll recognize the interaction as having some sort of clear subtext. She may brush it off in the moment. But she’ll definitely think about it later. Just pass small packets of thoughts to her brain instead of going “direct to the point”.

She’ll have to make her own connections to the similarities in order to figure out the riddle. This will get the point across, and since it was done in a calm manner she can’t come at you yelling her head off. Women actually respect men who do this instead of going “direct cold hard”.

Thanks for you hard-won, mature wisdom on women, Mr. 12th Grader.

Now, lets recall a time in which you were exhausted by a woman’s emotional manipulation. Since we aren’t as emotionally oriented as them, we become exhausted by feeling lots of different emotions …

This is how women feel when a situation like you mentioned happens, they yell and scream because it gives them a mental headache.

What exactly is a “mental headache?”

She doesn’t necessarily want to fix things, not at all. She just wants to feel like creating drama to have the inherent feeling that she is right and special.

Or maybe she’s just annoyed that you’re a smug mansplaining asshole?

Use your logic to come to a conclusion, but once you are there, don’t state it as cold, hard fact, just pass it as a packet of thought to her mind indirectly. Let her figure out how to connect the dots. State the road, she’ll just follow because her hamster will stop spinning.

I’m a little baffled by the quick succession of metaphors here. Can someone draw me a diagram?

No, seriously, someone draw me a diagram, because right now I’m feeling like this little guy:

Have a good weekend, and don’t think too much!

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By David Futrelle

The last time we checked in on YouTube philosopher racist crackpot Stefan Molyneux, he was trying his hand at slam poetry, sort of. Now he’s become a beauty blogger. Or beauty tweeter, anyway, unleashing a veritable tweetstorm on the subject of makeup over the last several days.

I’ve been going through his tweets and have extracted these Six Fun New Makeup Tips for Devious Females.

Simulate the look of sexual arousal by painting your lips a deep red because everyone who’s had actual sex with real human females knows that their lips turn the shade of a cherry whenever they’re feeling really horny. It’s just science!

Use lipstick to arouse the male’s monkey brain, because obviously our primate ancestors wore tons of makeup. (Just don’t go too far and arouse the lizard brain because then the guy you’re trying to win might ignore you and start trying to catch nearby flies with his tongue.)

Use makeup to hide the fact that you’re a wrinkled old crone of, oh, 45 or so.

Use makeup to manipulate gullible men and extract their man-resources!

Feeling hungry? Apply lipstick at once and get some beta male dupe to pay for your $100 dinner.

Use makeup to con wealthy investors into pouring millions of dollars into your fraudulent blood testing startup!

Now, I suppose I should add that the last woman who pulled this particular long con got caught and is probably going to jail. But honestly, gals, her makeup skills were pretty basic, at best; surely you can do a better job and succeed where she failed!

COMING SOON (probably): Stefan takes aim at the dastardly tool of dude manipulation known as the Wonderbra.

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How do you falsely accuse a black man of calling for white genocide, when you know full well he didn’t actually call for any kind of genocide?

Well, if you’re David Marcus of The Federalist, you might do it by pretending that you’re making some sort of meta argument about how the left gets away with rhetorical excesses that would never be allowed on the right.

But before you get to that, you start with this categorical accusation:

In a feisty segment on Sunday’s “A.M. Joy,” Elie Mystal of Above the Law made an inflammatory comment in which he said white people who voted for Donald Trump should be destroyed. 

When The Federalist tweeted out a link to Marcus’ piece, using similar phrasing, fans of the publication reacted with predictable outrage, accusing Mystal of “hate speech” and “racism” and “inciting mass murder.”

“Well, if that isn’t a call, for an all out, guns a blazing in the streets, Civil War…… nothing is!” declared one especially outraged Tweeter.

Yet another suggested that comments like Mystal’s deserved some sort of divine intervention, possibly imagining it might come in the form of a thunderbolt.

On Twitter, Marcus made his insinuation even blunter. “I feel like there’s a word for suggesting that the majority of a racial group should be destroyed,” he wrote in a Tweet that was retweeted more than a hundred times.

There was just one problem: Mystal didn’t actually call for anyone to be literally “destroyed.” He was calling for those who oppose Trump to beat — to destroy — Trump fans at the ballot box. Here’s the full quote:

You don’t communicate to them, you beat them. You beat them. They are not a majority of this country — the majority of white people in this country are not a majority of the country. All the people who are not fooled by this need to come together, go to the polls, go to the protests, do whatever you have to do. You do not negotiate with these people, you destroy them.

It’s abundantly clear from context that he’s not talking about physical violence; he’s talking about winning at the polls.

But, knowing the propensity of right-wingers to take quotes out of context, the host of the show that Mystal was on, Joy Reid, jumped in to try to prevent someone like /Marcus from ginning up an invented controversy through deliberate misinterpretation.

“And by the way,” she declared, “the black man said ‘beat them,’ meaning in … an election.” Mystal himself added that he was using a “figure of speech.”

Marcus, of course, left these clarifying remarks out of his piece, in which he did exactly what Reid feared someone would.

Instead of acknowledging his rhetorical sleight-of-hand, Marcus went on to sniff indignantly about a supposed “double standard” in political hyperbole, in which Trump and his fans are criticized for talking about an immigrant “invasion” while liberals and leftists can get away with … suggesting that one should beat one’s political rivals at the polls?

When [Trump’s] supporters use fiery language and hyperbole, it is incitement to violence, but when progressives do the same thing, it is justified outrage.

Even the most generous interpretation of his comments — that “beat them” and “destroy them” mean at the polls — leaves some very troubling question. [sic] Are all of these tens of millions of people to be shunned and kicked out of polite society? If they are so horribly irredeemable that others cannot communicate or negotiate with them, what would Mystal have us do with them?

Mystal didn’t say anything about shunning anyone. And even if he had ,so what? Not getting invited to a barbecue is not the same as genocide.

More to the point, saying that it’s not worth trying to convince Trump supporters to come over to the Democratic side is not the same as declaring refugees to be some sort of invading force.

But why am I even bothering to respond to any of the details in Marcus’s piece? I’m sure most of those who reacted to his headline, or the first couple of lines of the piece, never bothered to actually read the whole thing. I don’t think they were supposed to.

It looks an awful lot like the real point of Marcus’ piece wan’t his meta argument; his piece looks, rather, like little more than a cheap rhetorical ploy — a crude, bad faith attempt to smear Mystal, and give the false impression he really did call for white genocide — as both the title and the start of the piece suggest. The rest of the piece, I think, is there largely to cover Marcus’ ass — though he knows, and I suspect hopes, that most people won’t read much past the headline.

Ironically, this whole invented controversy makes clear that Mystal was right: there’s no point in communicating with disingenuous asshats like Marcus who argue in such extravagantly bad faith. We need to vote Trump and the GOP out of power, and we need to send people like Marcus back to the political fringe where they belong.

And no, I’m not inviting any of them to any barbeques either.

— David Futrelle

Brand New Ugly highlights stories that are emblematic of the political and social ugliness of Trump’s America. Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.

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By David Futrelle

Today’s insight into lesbianism comes from the Braincels subreddit, where the regulars believe that lesbianism is just a “meme,” and that there are literally no women in the world who would prefer the touch of a woman, however lovely, to the sexual attentions of a beefy Chad.

Some incels have clearly thought this whole theory through in a bit more detail than most of their peers. Like, for example, this dude:

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that none of that is correct.

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, an “alpha widow” is a lady who has previously gotten it on with some alpha Chad and who therefore can never against be satisfied with betas of any gender. I’m going to go out on a limb again and say that this isn’t really a thing either.

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By David Futrelle

Western incels often fantasize about solving their no-one-wants-to-have-sex-with-them problem by moving to Southeast Asia where, they assume, they’ll have their pick of attractive, extremely impoverished young women ripe for sexual exploitation.

Incels tend to put it a little less delicately. “It seems that, if you’re white,” one prolific Incels.co commenter called RegisterUserName wrote recently, “the only way you can ascend is through going to Asia and fucking some noodlewhore who’s desperate for a green card … .”

But carrying out this plan would involve moving to, or at the very least visiting, a country far from home, and competing with other Westerners who might be more handsome or at least less objectionable as a person than you, and so for most incels this fantasy remains just that.

But RegisterUserName has some up with some ideas as to how he and his incel colleagues can find similarly poor and/or vulnerable women out there without even leaving their hometowns.

“[W]hen you can’t get what you want with mainstream methods,” he wrote in a recent post, “you have to think outside the box to solutions that have a greater chance of working.”

His suggestions?

Join a 12-step group like “Alcoholics Anonymous or one of those circle meetings to find someone in a rough patch in life.”

Get yourself admitted to a mental hospital so you could “find some crazy bird.”

Start a cult. This might be a bit tricky, as RegisterUserName notes, because you’d “have to be able to be very charismatic and preferably not a turbomanlet.” But if you can pull it off, he continues, you could fill the cult with “girls [who] could be anywhere from 16 (depending on age of consent; obviously don’t break the law) to around 25 or so)” and find yourself your very own Squeaky Fromme.

Join a cult. If actually starting a cult would be too much work, you can always try

Cultmaxxing by leeching on someone else’s cult and finding [a] wife, but be careful that a fellow incel hasn’t made it into a sex cult where he fucks your wife

Exploit homeless girls. RegisterUserName has a somewhat elaborate fantasy of “saving” some homeless teenager, who can’t help but feel so grateful that she “repays” you, her savior, with sex

and then they fall in love with you or something … you gotta have your own house and stuff, preferably be able to fulfill a father like role because she probably had circumstances which led to her never having anyone to be a father … . I think I like this one the most because … you’re actually helping someone so it’s the most morally acceptable … .

Sexual exploitation isn’t “helping,” dude.

Only one of RegisterUserName’s suggestions doesn’t involve exploiting a desperately poor or otherwise vulnerable women. But it does require you commit a violent assault. Yes, we’re talking about the time-honored mating strategy of beating up some cute girl’s boyfriend.

Fight girls’ boyfriends and try to hit on them after. You see all those stories man you never know. (Works best if you’re young, tall, good fighting success. You can snag teenage girls depending on laws in your area so from around 16-25 where they might just get turned on by it and are drunk and are angry at their boyfriends, but it probably won’t be a long term thing ever because, I mean, come on, it’s the type of girl to leave her boyfriend for an ugly subhuman because he got beat up)

As it turns out, RegisterUderName isn’t the only one with fantasies of explaoiting vulnderable girls and women. One of the other commenters, apparently writing from Saudi Arabia, explained that he had

considered … hiring a live in maid and hope she will fuck me to keep her job but that’s nearly impossible to do in Saudi Arabia or dealing drugs and hope one of the tweakers will suck my dick for some drugs but I don’t know anyone to buy drugs from and selling drugs has death penalty here and I’m not ready to die yet.

You know, fellas, maybe if you weren’t the sort of guys who spend your days fantasizing about ruthlessly exploiting desperate women for sex you might be able to get a date with an actual willing woman.

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By David Futrelle

I recently appeared on the Australian radio show Stop Everything to talk about the poisonous legacy of Gamergate. (You can listen to the archived episode here.) So I thought I would expand a little on some of the notes I made for myself before doing the show, and get into a little more detail on some issues I wasn’t able to talk about during the show itself.

It’s been five years since the supposed movement for “ethics in gaming journalism” began in the form of a harassment campaign against game developer Zoe Quinn. The movement, such as it was, faded out some time ago. But its unfortunate legacies live on.

So how did Gamergate poison online discourse? Let me count (some of) the ways.

One: It turned political and cultural warfare into a game.

You may remember the infamous — and much mocked — copypasta that made its way around the internet in the days of Gamergate.

They targeted gamers.

Gamers.

We’re a group of people who will sit for hours, days, even weeks on end performing some of the hardest, most mentally demanding tasks. …

These people … think calling us racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists is going to change us? We’ve been called worse things by prepubescent 10 year olds with a shitty head set. …

Gamers are competative, hard core, by nature … this is just another boss fight.

Like most people who read this overblown rant at the time– and this is a drastically shortened version — I laughed. But it turns out that people who treat cultural warfare as a game to grind away at turn out to be remarkably … persistent adversaries. Something to (sadly) keep in mind the next time you’re swarmed by sockpuppets on Twitter.

Two: Gamergate weaponized lying and bad-faith arguments, helping prepare the way for our current, and seemingly endless, “post-truth information warfare,” to borrow a phrase from New Yotk Times writer Charlie Warzel.

As Warzel points out in his recent overview of Gamergate and its legacy, the movement began with a lie — with easily disproven allegations that Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist to get a good review for one of her games. (The guy in question never reviewed her game.) And it thrived by portraying itself, dishonestly, as some sort of campaign for “ethics in gaming journalism,” when in fact it was little more than a harassment campaign writ large, an online lynch mob with memes.

Three: it helped to further blur the line between politics and harassment.

While Gamergate, in theory, was a crusade to improve game journalism ethics and, more broadly, to rid the game world of the allegedly sinister influence of so-called Social Justice Warriors, in practice it was a harassment campaign aimed mostly at a small number of women who had offended self-described Gamers in various ways.

Obviously, Gamergate didn’t invent the online pileon, or smear campaigns in general, but it did make these strategies central to a certain kind of reactionary cultural politics. It’s a small step from attacking Zoe Quinn for her alleged Crimes Against Gaming to attacking Brie Larson for her cultural crime of portraying a comic book superhero while female.

And you can see the legacies of Gamergate clearly in the online, er, actvism of reactionary disinformation warriors like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec who have launched sometimes remarkably successful smear campaigns against political foes ranging from Hillary Clinton to John Podesta. It’s hard to imagine Pizzagate and QAnon taking off as they have without Gamergate.

Four: It weaponized white male nostalgia for a past that never was.

Gamergaters regularly hearkened back to what they saw as a lost utopia – the days when gaming was allegedly a “safe space” for (mostly white) male geeks ostracized by the larger society. Never mind that girls and women (and people of color) have always been a large part of the gaming world. Never mind that putting playable female characters in some video games is hardly a threat to any male gamer (and one of the most pathetic things for grown men to become exercised over).

Five: It created a new and potentially lucrative career path for right-wing ideologues and grifters.

Who could have predicted that a weird, fringe movement as Gamergate could make so many media careers? Well, Milo Yiannopoulos, for one, and a whole host of rising YouTube stars like Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin. These new “harassment influencers” — to borrow the language of Syracuse researcher Whitney Phillips — lived lavishly on the Gamergate dole, and helped to inspire a new generation of right-wing grifters. Gamergate also helped to revitalize the flagging career of old-school ideological hacks like think-tanker Christina Hoff Sommers, who reinvented herself as the not-quite-hip-but-trying “Based Mom.”

Six: It opened the door for fascism.

In 1995, writer Umberto Eco sketched out what he saw as the essential characteristics of “Eternal Fascism.” Gamergate ticked off almost every box on Eco’s 14-point list. It was at the very least a fascist movement in embryo.

Like the original fascists, Gamergaters were driven by personal and social frustrations. They were obsessed with what Eco called “the cult of tradition” (in this case, white male nostalgia); with the “fear of difference” (in this case especially the feat of the female other); “with “the rejection of modernism (or in this case postmodernism); with the notion of “life as permanent warfare” (“they targeted gamers”).

Gamergaters worshiped “action for action’s sake.” They were forever in motion, constantly on the lookout for things to be ostentatiously offended by. They were obsessed with conspiracies, and in retrospect it seems all too obvious that they were primed to go from imagining games journalist plots to embracing outright antisemitism and the mythical notion of a Jewish scheme to lead the west into “degeneracy” through so-called “Cultural Marxism.”

I could keep going, but you get the point: Gamergate was, in its very essence, a deeply fascistic movement. It helped to bring about the revival of fascism in American and world politics today, and gave the new fascists many helpful techniques to use in promoting their brand of hate.

Gamergate takes Karl Marx’s famous pronouncement on history repeating itself and turns it on its head: It began as a farce, at least for those who were not its direct victims — but its legacy has been one of outright tragedy.

NOTE: I did a somewhat more extensive catalog of the ways Donald Trump matches up with Eco’s 14 points here. It’s a little outdated in terms of examples (I wrote it just after the 2016 election) but its general points still stand.

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By David Futrelle

Incels are breaking new ground in the arena of being oppressed.

Elsewhere on the front page of Incels.co today:

Uh, fellas ….?

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By David Futrelle

So Disney just announced the imminent arrival of a new She-Hulk series on Disney+. Most fans seem pretty psyched about the news. “YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!” wrote one She-Hulk lover on Twitter. “I’M NOT KIDDING I STARTED CRYING,” wrote another. “SHE-HULK … WAS THE FIRST MARVEL FEMALE HERO THAT I LOVED.”

And then there are these guys, littering Instagram and Twitter with these bad takes.

This post was perhaps the most inadvertently ironic:

Yes, I’m sure that Stan Lee would be SHOCKED to learn that a character he created nearly 40 years ago has gotten a show of her own.

It’s almost as if these guys are fake comic book fans or something.

This guy, meanwhile, had his own very specific agenda:

TWITTER MAN ONLY WANT PRETTY SHE-HULK. TWITTER MAN SMASH IF SHE-HULK LOOK TOO BUTCH!

H/T — Thanks to Twitterers @goslngs, @eriktonys and @BrieLarsonHQ, from whom I nicked the Instagram screenshots above.

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By David Futrelle

Andrew Anglin of the The Daily Stormer used to give his mostly-male readers Nazi dating tips. (Rule Number 1: Don’t talk too much about Hitler on the first date.)

But Anglin seems to have soured on the fairer sex, and lately he’s been starting to sound like the Nazi version of a MGTOW — a Nazi Going His Own Way. Instead of offering dating tips, he’s offering warnings, urging his followers to always be wary around women lest they STEAL YOUR SOUL.

In an — *ahem* — “humorous” post on the Stormer today, (archived here) Anglin waggishly announces that he’s going to dispel the myth that “women are like dogs.” Because, you see, women are actually WORSE than dogs.

“Women are so far below dogs,” he contends,

that to compare a woman to a dog is an extreme form of white knight cuckoldry. Anyone who has ever been around both a woman and a dog will not make this comparison, so anyone you find comparing a woman to a noble dog you can mark as an absolute virgin.

A woman can be more appropriately compared to an intestinal parasite.

Weird, because that’s what most people who’ve heard of Anglin think of him.

And while Anglin used to encourage his followers to at least enjoy sex with these allegedly filthy creatures, he now seems to be promoting a sort of voluntary (?) celibacy.

Having sex is overrated and mostly boring. Certainly, it is less enjoyable than video games or going to the gym.

And it is actually the only and single thing that a woman has to offer, and what does she demand in return?

Your human soul.

His concludes with something so horrible you may just want to skip right past it. (Alas, this is a fairly standard “argument” for him.)

Women deserve to be beaten and raped, NOT treated like they are humans, because they are NOT humans.

So, yes, Anglin has managed to come up with an answer to the “female question” that’s somehow even worse than the standard neo-Nazi one. Most contemporary Nazi men, like Hitler himself back in the day, prefer to keep women largely confined to the private sphere — a.k.a.  Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, the kitchen, and the church). They tend to see every white women as a potential white baby factory, pumping out product — the children talked about in the neo-Nazi catachism known as “the 14 words.” (“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”)

But Anglin, evidently single, doesn’t want a TradWife or even a TradGirlfriend. That. at least, is a little bit of good news for the women of the world. Go your own way, young man, and go as far as possible away, until you fall off the edge of the earth.

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By David Futrelle

The internet has answers to almost any question under the sun. Trouble is, not only are most of the answers wrong, but a lot of the questions themselves are, well, pretty fucking terrible.

Consider the case of this fellow, who turned to the commenters on AskMen.com with a query whose answer was already contained within the question itself.

Dude, the women didn’t answer the question “besides a warm mouth and a vagina, what would you bring to the table?” because you asked them the question “besides a warm mouth and a vagina, what would you bring to the table?”

If you’re asking a question so misogynistic and dehumanizing that it repeatedly causes the women you’re dating to no longer speak with you, the problem isn’t the women, it’s the question — or, more to the point, the person asking the question.

Hope that helps!

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By David Futrelle

People find their way to this blog in a wide variety of ways — through mentions on other blogs or in the press, from discussions on Reddit, through my posts on Facebook and Twitter. But a surprising number of visitors get here through weird search queries that have only the most tenuous connections with anything ever discussed here on We Hunted the Mammoth.

So let’s take another stroll through some of the more unexpected search queries that have led people to WHTM over the past year or so.

I always feel a bit sorry for these people; they must be so disappointed when they get here. Imagine typing in an innocent query like “hillary clinton pedavore” or “how to impregnant women with out them knowing it” (both real queries I’ve run across) and ending up, well, here, where no answers on these pressing issues can be found.

Naturally, this being the internet, many of the weirder queries have to do with sexual fetishes — or at least I’m assuming that’s what these are.

girls hairy armpit images

women who wear their hair in a bun

whitewomen who were their hair in a bun

breasts star wars

fat girl and cars

cassie jaye feet

I’ve left out some of the cruder examples; you can imagine how much worse it gets.

I’m not sure if this one represents a fetish or a complaint:

british women ass smell

I can only hope this next one is not a fetish, or a real thing even.

penis in a cat

Obviously the only penis that should ever be in a cat should belong to another cat.

There are a surprising number that relate to castration, and which seem to represent both sides of the “is castration good” debate, which apparently is a thing.

don’t want no short dick man castrate him

feminists castrating men for fun tumblr

castration is love

I’m not going to investigate this particular topic any further and I’m going to try to forget I saw any of these.

There are some queries so full of typos I’m shocked they led to any websites at all, much less this one.

hu hunted rge mannoth

stormy danielle claim the trip has small penis

But alongside all these crude and badly mangled queries, there are some, however weird, that I think deserve some sort of answer. And so, as a public service to anyone who finds this blog through search queries like the following ones, I’m going to try my best to answer them

do people who masterbate hands become soft

No.

girls who fart lose attraction

Possibly? It really depends on the size and frequency of the farts.

feminists secretly want what attractive women want

You mean like happy and fulfilling lives, good jobs, partners who love and respect them, no one to assume that feminists and attractive women are distinct categories, that sort of thing? Yes.

male feminists are pussies

No, male feminists OWN pussies, like the one pestering me for dinner right now.

what accounts for increase in female beastiality

I don’t think that’s a thing, dude.

is robot good or bad

I don’t know, dude, I really just don’t know. Honestly, I think about this all the time. I guess we’ll know when the singularity is here.

But enough depressing talk. Happily, there are some weird queries that I have actually written about here, and I’m happy to remind everyone of the answers to them right now.

freddie mercury cats

Yes, yes, yes. FREDDIE MERCURY CATS. I got your FREDDIE MERCURY CATS right here.

matt forney reservoir dogs

A reference to one of the greatest videos ever made. Alas, it has been pulled from the internet. But you can still see it in its entirely, albeit in a shrunken-down form, with commentary from Hbomberguy.

You can find an explanation for this weird bit of alt-right cinema in my post here, alongside the original Reservoir Dogs sequence and, for some reason, a video of a capybara eating celery.

This brings my survey of weird search terms to a close. Any questions?

For more weird search queries, check out the related videos below.

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By David Futrelle

There are few things MAGA Redditors love more than demonizing a woman. In The_Donald — Reddit’s main hangout for Trump fanboys, now quarantined for threats and doxxing — the regulars are as obsessed with Hillary as the man in the White House. And they relish mocking and smearing other female politicians they hate — which is most of them — from AOC to Nancy Pelosi.

The MAGAs also enjoy going after female celebrities — or at least that portion of them who’ve said negative things about their orange idol. It probably won’t surprise you that they despise Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, But you might be a little surprised — I was — by the vehemence of their hatred for … Miley Cyrus.

They hate Miley for an assortment of reasons. She’s an overtly sexual — and openly bisexual — young woman who hates Trump and supports abortion rights. She dresses provocatively, sometimes wearing a strap-on dildo when she performs. She said she would move to another country if Trump was elected, but didn’t.

Not long ago she posed for a photo licking a cake emblazoned with the motto “Abortion is Healthcare.” MAGA Redditors hated the cake thing so much they posted and reposted the original photo and assorted photoshopped variants some two dozen times.

But some of the MAGA, er, “critiques” of Miley are a little stranger. Here are 12 of the weirdest MAGA takes on Miley. (And yes, it appears that most if possibly not all of these were meant seriously.)

She’s probably stinky

She’s probably stinky (in a weirdly ethnic way)

She’s had, like, hundreds of abortions, maybe

She doesn’t even need abortions because she’s ruined her uterus with too much sex, or something

Her ass is too mannish

Her boobs, which do not look particularly fake, are “plastic”

She’s too old

She might be a zombie

She drinks the blood of aborted fetuses, making her more a vampire than a zombie

She’s not even the real Miley:

She — assuming she is the real Miley Cyrus — is a “product of Disney” and also possibly a lizard person

There is one Miley-related issue on which MAGAhead Redditors disagree strongly: her pledge to not have children until global warming is fixed. While MAGAs hate even the mention of global warming, many say they’re glad that Miley won’t be “breeding.” But not all MAGAs agree:

TFW your hunger for increased white baby production outweighs your hatred of Miley Cyrus.

That’s the sort of moral and ethical dilemma you might expect to find only on Stormfront or The Daily Stormer. But, nope, it’s on Reddit, in a subreddit with 775,000 subscribers. Because that’s how fucked we are.

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