The Social Media Lynch Mob
It was hailed as the dawn of the ‘Web 2.0’ era. The internet was (again) regarded as humankind’s most significant bastion of free speech and personal expression. What is it becoming? An angry mob of hyper-sensitive, overreactive twitterites who seem hell-bent on breathing new life into the once-distasteful cause known as “political correctness.”
Perhaps the reason why the NSA and other government agencies have gotten away with such blatant invasions of our privacy is because a large percentage of americans have no regard for privacy at all – their own or anyone else’s. What this means is that if some damning piece of personal information about you should get out, even if what you did is perfectly legal, it is your fellow citizens that you should fear – not just the government. Case in point: Brendan Eich and his short-lived tenure as CEO of Mozilla Corporation.
What happened here was that Brendan Eich, after a longstanding career with Mozilla, was given the seat as CEO. The popular dating site OK Cupid publicly blackballed Eich, calling out the fact that he had supported California’s Proposition 8 – the ban on gay marriage. Let me get one thing clear – before the newspeak media sets their sights on me: I am a libertarian and this is a libertarian news site. I support marriage between consenting adults and I do not believe that “marriage” should fall under the provincial dictatorship of the government: may it be gay or straight.
On a personal note, I support acceptance of people as individuals regardless of gender, race or sexual orientation. But as you’ll see, the hashtag-activist hyper-left is anything but tolerant. “Agree with us, or get destroyed,” so they would say – and that is exactly what happened to the career of Brendan Eich. Eich faced nothing less than a digital lynch mob, a witch hunt on a sharable, viral, re-tweetable scale. Hashtag-activism requires little to no thought, only the base-outrage, thus what behavior so commonly rules the left-liberal mind has now become socially “weaponized.”
You might say “it is only speech,” and you would be right. Nobody is advocating silencing liberals by way of force. What I am attacking here, is their underlying ideology: conform to the social-progressive ideal, or face the wrath of a thoughtless, reactionary twitter-mob. The mob will obliterate your reputation, annihilate your career, bully, harass and publicly shame anyone who lands in their sights. The hashtag, to them, are crosshairs for their ideological enemies.
What is the mature response to someone that you don’t agree with? I remember a time in my life, before the internet came around. Sometimes another kid would say something to me that was demeaning or rude. The sagely advice from my mother: “just ignore them, why should you care what stupid people think?” This is a mature response. How far we have come! When Brendan Eich was publicly confronted about his personal feelings about gay marriage, Eich asserted that he was there to uphold the values of Mozilla – inclusiveness, and a free and open internet.
Today we are seeing the dark side of the internet and the social revolution. Your personal business is not just the business of the government, it is everybody’s business. If you have said or done anything that belies the strict moral guidelines of the hyper-feminist, hyper-liberal, hyper-androgynous, hyper-politically correct digital Paris mob, you just might find yourself unemployable. Large corporations might not want to hire you, or at the very least, they will keep you out of the public eye.
Be Tolerant, or Else
Let’s rewind to the so-called Arizona Anti-gay Bill, or so it was dubbed by the mainstream media. The bill itself, was not an “anti-gay bill” but a bill that would, in essence, assert the property rights of business owners. Should businesses be allowed to discriminate? Yes, just as you enjoy the freedom to discriminate for or against who you allow into your own home – why should a business be any different? Left liberals believe that if such freedoms where given to businesses that discrimination would run rampant, but of course this would not be the case. Openly discriminating against any person would simply be bad for business – meaning that no mainstream popular business or brand in this day and age would engage in such self-destructive behavior. It is the market that brings about social progress and inclusiveness, not government force.
The thing that really itches left liberals is the nagging possibility that there might be a christian bookstore somewhere in the south that might not want gays in there, and that said bookstore might actually prosper. The liberal left is, essentially, governed by this fear – that humanity cannot be trusted, that some people might have different ideologies than they do. This is the insidious, quite intolerant side to the self-proclaimed moral-superiority of the “progressive.” Dissenting opinions are simply not to be tolerated. “Intolerance” will not be tolerated.
I ask you, if you are a gay person and you found out that the owner of a local eatery was “anti-gay,” would you really want to go there? The liberal mob can and does vote with their dollars, but again -this is not what disturbs them. “Include everyone or be destroyed.”
Christina Hoff Sommers, in her wonderful book The War Against Boys, wrote about a thriving school for boys that was forcibly shut down by the local government for “excluding girls.” Of course, feminists are all in favor of schools for girls, like Oprah Winfrey’s Leadership Academy for Girls, so much for the plight of South African boys, hm?
Feminism = Domination by Victim-status
Feminists don’t care about equality, and they certainly don’t care about who is truly being victimized in the world. They are exclusively concerned with the perpetuity of their own perceived “victim-status” and the use of that “status” as a tool of social and political domination. In a previous article, we exposed the sheer lunacy of the #BanBossy campaign. The #BanBossy campaign was another drummed-up and (most likely) globalist-agitated publicity campaign that aimed to literally introduce the idea of Orwellian newspeak to the general population.
#BanBossy was a call, not for government censorship, but for ideological self-censorship – there are some words that you just shouldn’t say. What is so creepy about this is that “bossy” is a quite innocent word that can (and should) be used in verbal self-defense, when appropriate.
The ad campaign was intended as a countermeasure against an imaginary threat to the self-esteem of young girls, namely that if they were to assume leadership roles in the classroom, they would be stigmatized by a male-dominated populace, and be called “bossy.” As we proved in an earlier article, the statistics belie that claim – females make up the majority of college graduates at all levels: two-year degrees, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees and doctorates. We are supposed to believe that girls are victimized in a public educational system, where 87% of the teachers are women?
No man in his right mind would think to launch a campaign against calling men “assholes.” This is simply because the word “asshole” can be used as an insult, but there is no way to tell if the other person deserves to be called one or not – men call each other by that slang-term all the time, as do women use the word “bitch” to refer to each other during times of extreme disagreement.
The hidden message behind #BanBossy was “accept women as the boss.” If we were to launch a campaign entitled #banbitch, what you would be saying effectively is that women are not capable of bad behavior, only men are. There is no such thing as a “bitchy” woman, just as there is no such thing a “bossy” girl. In essence, they are advocating that society needs protected-types of people via mass-collectivized victim-worship and self-censorship via the use of public shaming rituals.
Anti-male Public Shaming Rituals Go Viral
Emma Watson set her sights on men and boys in her widely-applauded and socially acclaimed U.N. speech. Because the entire speech, and the name of the campaign itself (#HeForShe), was targeted directly at males, Watson made sure to dispel this thought-crime first and foremost, “…fighting for women’s rights has been too often synonymous with man-hating. If there’s one thing that I know for certain, is that this has to stop.”
Notice that she did not condemn the man-hating itself. She, in essence, said that “feminism is never man-hating,” that feminism has unfairly been stigmatized or improperly interpreted as “man-hating” and this is what “has to stop.” In other words, “feminists will attack you, don’t call an attack for what it is.”
The “A Voice for Men” conference at the Doubletree Hotel in Detroit had to be cancelled earlier this year, facing threats of violence and murder from insane feminist protesters. Feminist sympathizers rallied outside the conference with signs against male domination and “patriarchy.” Is “equality” really the goal of feminists, as Emma Watson claims? If this were the case, wouldn’t you expect feminists to rally in support of causes such as A Voice for Men? The purpose of the conference itself was to discuss a variety of real-world inequality issues as they relate to men, from the fact that women are awarded sole or primary custody of the children 68% – 88% of the time in a divorce, to the grossly unfair 3% of the time when men receive alimony. Or perhaps, they also discussed the fact that it is only 18 year old boys that are required to register for the draft.
Still think feminists are concerned with equality?
Emma Watson was given a rare opportunity to speak to the U.N. on the issues that women are facing in the world. It is really unfortunate that she chose to focus on the typical first-world-feminist vagueries instead of the outright and brutal mistreatment of women in the third world, such as the barbaric middle-eastern practice of dousing women in acid, or perhaps the women and children who have been maimed and killed by Obama’s (and Bush’s) war on terror.
Watson places her blame – not on the military-industrial juggernaut, or barbaric third-world cultural practices – but instead “men and boys” in general – as they are to blame for all women’s silly schoolyard insecurities.
Watson’s sob-story gave a deliberate nod to the #BanBossyCampaign. She claims that she was afraid to speak up and lead as a child because she was afraid of being unfairly called “bossy.” Yes, Emma Watson sure has had a tough time getting ahead in the world as a child megastar of the Harry Potter film franchise. He was, essentially, born into stardom. Never will she have to worry about money or make any career choices other than being a hollywood megamodel.
The message of #HeForShe, is that men are collectively guilty-by-association, and should take action and give further impetus to the women-as-victim-cult. “We want to try to galvanize as many men and boys as possible to be advocates for change.”
But again, what change? It is the girls who are dominating the first world in education, not the boys. Perhaps she is referring to the long-held fable about “income inequality.” So it turns out, men and women make essentially the same amount of money if you directly compare men and women working in the same career for the same lengths of time. Why the income disparity overall? Because men and women are different and make different career choices. But, when in doubt, says the victim-worshipper, “always claim discrimination. ” Obama went so far as to sign an executive order mandating equal pay for women in government positions.
#KillAllMen, #NotAllMen, #HeForShe, #BanBossy
We are witnessing a deeply disturbing trend – the rise of hyper-hashtag feminism amidst an invigorated sense of political-correctness. When I graduated from high school in the late 1990’s, “political correctness” as a moral imperative had begun to wane. By the early 2000’s it was largely seen as silly, not relevant, oversensitive and intolerant to the unique individual tastes of men and women.
Perhaps the difference between first-wave political-correctness, and this new-wave of political-correctness is simply in its form of expression: namely, facebook and twitter. Users of these services may think that their tweets and hashtag-activism are little more than “gossip.” They produce a mindless guttural reaction to something that offends their liberal sensibilities, they then whip out their phones (if they ever did put their phones away to begin with) and start mouthing off.
The problem is that today, it is something far more than gossip, and it is was my purpose with this article to show you that it is anything but harmless. The digital black-balling has cost people their jobs and irreparably damaged their reputations. It has been used by governments and agitators to spread ideological viruses and falsehoods, such as the myth of “first-world gender inequality.” Oh, there is indeed first-world gender inequality, but it is men and boys who are getting shafted.
Censored by an Angry Mob
Those who favor State power are not opposed to censorship, provided that it serves their own interests. Current events are beginning to show that content is actively being self-censored in an act of appeasement to the hashtag-liberal twitter-twats.
Men’s Health pulled an article (written by a woman), the article claimed that “not all women share your passion for sports… men like stats and women like the drama.” Even the female anchorperson in this segment of The Young Turks says “this is true for me.”
The digital lynch-mob will not tolerate sexism, even in a men’s magazine. Rather than risk a social-media witch hunt, Men’s Health deleted the article and quickly tweeted a shame-ridden apology.
Is this the way the world is going? The hashtag mob, in this instance, has literally prevented men from reading this content. Will we soon live in a world where male fantasy is banned – not by the government, but by a ruling ideological mob, that has zero tolerance for individual tastes and individual choices?
This is shockingly reminiscent of how Hugh Hefner was lambasted by feminists, being called a “misogynist” for publishing a magazine that was chock-full of sexualized photographs of women. How were we able to get over this silly little cultural hangup? The short answer is that society matured. We realized that a photographer who sexualizes some models in a magazine is not making a statement about “all women in general.” Furthermore, anyone who does make a statement about “all women in general” is simply exercising their opinion – it does not have to apply to you. The deeper layer to all of this is that we adopted an overall mentality of “to each his own.”
Women, by in large, do not condemn males for having sexual fantasies. The feminists realized that they too, have fantasies and that they were equally guilty of “sexualizing” men. The next time you are in the grocery store, take a moment to flip through any popular women’s magazine, such as Cosmopolitan. You’ll see the hypocrisy jump right out at you, as every issue has some-such article about how to manipulate “your man” into doing “x,y and z.” The topics are usually sexual, and might I add, quite graphic. Magazines like this have existed for decades, and only now with the twitter-revolution, is it (again) becoming an issue.
Do not feel obligated to join the ranks of #BanBossy, #NotAllMen, and #HeForShe. Most men are angered by the idea of rape or violence against women, we are not guilty by association for being men, having male needs and male feelings.