August 7, 2019
NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:
To Learn About the Far Right, Start With the 'Manosphere': The sexist world has become a recruiting ground for potential mass shooters. (HELEN LEWIS, 8/07/19, The Atlantic)
It is therefore not surprising that anti-feminism is an entry point to the online far right. "Misogyny is used predominantly as the first outreach mechanism," Ashley Mattheis, a researcher at the University of North Carolina who studies the far right online, told me. "You were owed something, or your life should have been X, but because of the ridiculous things feminists are doing, you can't access them."One recruiting ground is the collection of sites known as the "manosphere," which the British anti-extremism charity Hope not Hate considered a serious enough force to include in its most recent "State of Hate" report. "It's a very difficult movement to get to grips with," says the Hope not Hate researcher Simon Murdoch. "It's a very loose movement. And because it's online, people are usually anonymous."The manosphere stretches from the kind of lukewarm anti-feminism that would pass virtually unremarked in a newspaper column through to glorifications of extreme misogyny. Although the manosphere's leading figures have appeared at far-right events, and vice versa, the links between the two are more about an exchange of ideas than shared personnel.As young men are drawn deeper into these online communities, the anti-feminist message transforms into one with racial overtones, Mattheis said. "Once you engage with the idea that a social-justice-warrior club and the feminist movement have increased the precarity of men," she said, "that moves over time into the increased precarity and endangerment of 'the West.'"These ideas circulate through YouTube videos, anonymous message boards such as 8Chan, Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts. The online ecosystem allows dense, rambling conspiracist tracts to be chopped up and recirculated in more palatable forms. Camus' book-length version of The Great Replacement, for example, was condensed by the Canadian far right activist Lauren Southern in a YouTube video that now has more than 600,000 views. Southern is no fringe figure: She is verified on YouTube, and she was retweeted by Donald Trump in May.Anti-feminism and the far right overlap because both weave narratives around real, observable phenomena surrounding race and reproduction.
Ohio gunman's ex-classmates decry missed chances to stop him (MICHAEL BIESECKER and JULIE CARR SMYTH, 8/06/19, AP)
High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended years ago for compiling a "hit list" and a "rape list," and questioned how he could have been allowed to buy the military-style weapon used in this weekend's attack. [...]The former classmates told The Associated Press that Betts was suspended during their junior year at suburban Bellbrook High School after a hit list was found scrawled in a school bathroom. That followed an earlier suspension after Betts came to school with a list of female students he wanted to sexually assault, according to two of the classmates, a man and a woman who are both now 24 and spoke on condition of anonymity out of concern they might face harassment."There was a kill list and a rape list, and my name was on the rape list," said the female classmate.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 7, 2019 4:25 PM