Last year, Southern Poverty Law Center’s Spring “Intelligence Report” exposed hate groups, focusing on “patriot movements.” The same ‘Issue 145’ profiled online spaces for Men’s Rights Activism as “woman hating,” and it’s posted to SPLC’s website.
It references Manboobz.com as a source, which accounts for why pick-up artist urls are next to MRA websites and the term “manosphere.” Manboobz.com is a self-described site for mockery. In April, posts about MRA website A Voice for Men used images of the KKK and Nazi symbols.*
In saying Manboobz.com is a “resource” (with a url), SPLC puts their organization’s endorsement on the content. Southern Poverty Law Center is an organization of legal professionals, backed by lawyers. In effect, content for mockery in one space is turned into information.
A blog can now cite Southern Poverty Law Center as a credible source. KKK and Nazi associations–which also appear on SPLC’s “Hate and Extremism” page–are in a new context.
Ryan Holiday, in his book Trust Me I’m lying, calls the cross-referencing of links recursion. Now other blogs, like in this piece from The Good Men Project, use SPLC in their coverage of Men’s Rights Activists.
A consequence of this kind of loose association is the language of a protest group who clashed with MRAs in Toronto last month. Through a megaphone, they shouted “Racist, Sexist, Anti-Gay!” and accused MRAs of being a “front group for white supremacists.”
At a new level of recursion, ABC’s 20/20 is sourcing part of its news story about MRAs and A Voice for Men to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Description of an “underbelly” alludes to SPLC’s “underworld.” (There’s a quote.) The editor-in-chief of SPLC’s “Intelligence Report,” Mark Potok is quoted as an “expert.”
The promo video shows an anchor woman wearing a distressed facial expression questioning A Voice for Men‘s Paul Elam. With a Southern accent, he talks about “a change in the world in the last 50 years…”
Mark Potok was interviewed in 2012 by Abby Martin on Breaking the Set. She asked:
“When you juxtapose these groups… when you characterize them as groups that one should be watching out for… put them under this blanket next to hate groups… Do you think this does any damage?”
*(Manboobz.com also used KKK and Nazi associations prior to 2012.)
- Caitlin Moran’s Feminism Box - December 14, 2013
- My Tweet to Lena Dunham, Re: Feminism, Ableism - December 4, 2013
- Recursion: SPLC Sourcing Manboobz, ABC Sourcing SPLC - October 23, 2013
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This is a new form of woozling, really. In this form you woozle the credibility of a bullshit claim by laundering it through a supposedlu rleiable source.
You can call it information laundering, although I am not quite comfortable with calling their bullshit information.
D. Futrelle is a bigot, bully and liar…
He will often misquote someone by taking part of something they said out of context, then putting the flashing Sarcasm button for plausibkle deniability.
However…
P. Elm made some unfortunate associations and many questionable choices…
and when I see some cesspool like the Spear-Head with White Nationalists like Jack Don-ovan and C.Rudd (chuck Ross/GL Piggy) spouting their race realism/HBD nonsense in place of “men’s rights'” –I’m confident this is not a “movment” I want any part of.
Yes, it was weakness and stupidity for the MRA’s to allow WN’s and traditionalists into their house and shit all over the carpet.
SWAB,
Those were some serious nasties, but now they have thrown them out and Elam has cut them off form his wing of the movement. You won’t be folowing the whole soap opera, but Welmer is leaving Speahead and apparently he and Elam had a falling out a short while ago.
Elam said soemthing interesting in a comment. He said the first wavers, like Chapin, Spearhead and so on often times were guys who were hurt and angry out oa divorce, and you got all kinds, but none much inoot building any kind of framework of insights. A lot of them were straight up tradcons who just wanted everything put back the way it was.
This is what Paul actually said:
“This is precisely why I found all the latent racism that was in the first wave so frustrating and confusing. How could those guys on one hand complain about how they were treated in court, simply for being a man, or treated unfairly by police, or by a woman, all for the same reason, then turn around and take a crap on people because of their skin color or their sexuality?
But then I figured it out. The first wave, or most of it, was men who got a raw deal in family courts. The had plenty of reason to be angry, sure enough. But they were not necessarily thoughtful or well rounded men. A lot of them, I am sad to say, were really just blue pill guys with a divorce under their belt.
They did not feel for other men, or necessarily even see what was happening.
This is why it is so important to consider what Peter Wright is talking about with the second wave. We are a different, by far, group of men (and women). I am very, very thankful for that.”
See the difference?
This isn’t a new thing, it’s as old as the oldest 1-in-4 Woozle in the annals of feminist history. The only difference now is that they’re hoping to continue replicating their past propaganda success in the age of the internet. In reality, though, they’re taking a huge gamble in hitching their wagons to every personality disordered self-loathing lunatic who feeds them what they want to hear for the sake of attention. You’d think they would have learned their lesson with Hugo Schwyzer. I can’t wait to see what the saga of David Futrelle turns out to be.
“You’d think they would have learned their lesson with Hugo Schwyzer.”
Won’t happen. Assholes will always find followers and a man who makes the right noises will delude them until it all hits a wall. The same goes for women who make the right SJ noises. They get unqualified support as long as they flatter their audience the right way. Of course that changes the way all fashions do and it’s a lot of work to stay current.
My favorite part is how many feminists go (incorrectly) “the SPLC said MRAs are a hate group!” without explaining who the SPLC is or why anyone should care about its opinion.
@ not-SWAB:
Oh, he doesn’t just push it. There’s a reason it’s said right up front, in the header, in the title. A former commenter wrote something about the tactics they used, which Toy Soldiers’ criticized, and my favorite part may be how she admits that the tactics she described don’t work outside of Manboobz. In other words, unless you have a mod to back you up and shut down dissent. She literally admits to actively provoking people, and has the temerity to call them trolls. Another candidate for favorite part is how she says a site that admits to being about mockery as it’s top priority is about “critique”.
Then again, the term “troll”, to increasing numbers of feminists, means “people who say things I don’t like”. This also gives them an excuse not to engage in debate, because that would be feeding the troll.
I have the first comment on that post, and I linked to Futrelle actually trying to debate. He literally couldn’t keep himself from quote-mining, even when he was talking to the person he was quote-mining.
@dungone:
Also, a gamble on arguing in a medium when they can be cross-checked and disproven in seconds. Which is why the tactics are increasingly switching to silencing, discrediting, and censorship.
The sound of squealing rubber as they begin to backpedal. Heck, even Jezebel’s readership is increasingly calling them out for sexism, such as in their two articles about Chris Brown being a rape victim. They’re still NAFALTing, but progress.
@Ginkgo;
Sure is weird how most feminists only complain about generalizations about feminism when they’re negative.
Lindy West managed to contradict herself several times in that one article. Few people seemed to notice.
It seems weird to me to see the Spearhead getting lumped in with White Nationalism all the time when I recall that Obsidian guy regularly posting about men’s issues from a black man’s perspective. It’s not like he’d feign from criticizing white men in doing so, either.
haha, Obsidian regularly picks fights with GL Piggy. It’s pretty funny.