Jew World Order

In the final days of May, after police in Portland, Ore., reported that Jeremy Joseph Christian stabbed three men on a train, killing two of them, an unusual theory as to why the attack occurred emerged in certain parts of the internet. Mainstream commentators had already pointed to Christian’s alt-right flavored racism, which seemed obvious enough; the victims, after all, had been defending two Muslim women from his Islamophobic abuse, according to the police. Others raised the possibility that Christian was mentally unstable. But according to this new theory, the primary blame lay not with Christian at all and instead with an ideology internalized by the victims.

“Two good men killed by chivalry,” tweeted Paul Elam, a notorious figure in the field of “men’s rights activism.” “Let this be a lesson to your sons.” In follow-up tweets, Elam elaborated: If the victims had not been culturally conditioned to risk their lives on women’s behalf, they would still be alive. Therefore, while Christian was heading to trial, the real perpetrator was America’s anti-male status quo.

I don’t follow Elam on Twitter. I came across his theory only thanks to the blog We Hunted the Mammoth, run by a 51-year-old Chicagoan named David Futrelle. In a post called “Killed by Chivalry: Everything Wrong With the Men’s Right’s Movement in One Tweet,” Futrelle mockingly summarized Elam’s hypotheses and then went on to argue — making heavy reference to Elam’s writing over the years — that this “killer chivalry” argument epitomized a general disdain in the men’s rights movement not only for women but for the very notions of altruism and empathy.

Over the course of seven years spent running We Hunted the Mammoth, Futrelle has made himself an expert on the “manosphere”: the amorphous, fractious constellation of online men’s groups united in their belief that feminism is ruining the world. Most days, he trawls a constantly-updated list of sites he hates (including Elam’s “A Voice for Men”), seeking out arguments he finds repulsive, baffling and, he admits, fascinating to watch play out in real time. Clicking through his list, he reads post after post, charting the themes and preoccupations of the day, the latest catchphrases and memes, the shifting alliances and disputes.

“I plunge myself into this endlessly swirling caldron, and I see what’s new,” Futrelle told me recently. When he began the site in 2010, it was an after-work hobby. Since 2014, it has become a full-time enterprise, bankrolled by advertising revenue and PayPal donations from his readers. Most of those readers, Futrelle says, are women, for whom the site’s lively discussion threads offer a place they can talk (and laugh and cry and yell) about internet misogyny without being harassed on all sides by internet misogynists. The discussion under “Killed by Chivalry” quickly stretched to over 700 comments.

Futrelle’s journey toward his idiosyncratic career began in the late 2000s, when he kept finding himself in long, drawn-out Reddit arguments with self-described men’s rights activists (M.R.A.s, in manosphere shorthand). At first he was shocked to discover that M.R.A.s even existed — that there really was, in his words, “a group of guys who saw men as America’s most oppressed class.” Some of these men, he realized early on, were hardened misogynists or trolls: They argued that only men should be allowed to vote, or they gleefully condoned the use of violence to keep women in their proper place. But some of the less extreme posters reminded Futrelle uncomfortably of his younger self. Looking back on his high-school years, he saw himself as under the sway of some of the same flawed assumptions prevalent among the M.R.A.s.

“Like the ‘nice guy’ fallacy,” he told me, referring to the implicit belief that being persistently “nice” to a woman could lead to her owing you sex. “It’s rapey and gross. But it’s very widespread. And I had a little bit of it, back then.” Challenging those notions online sometimes felt, for Futrelle, like a form of penance; whether he was changing minds or not, he felt compelled to keep arguing.

Futrelle started his own site in 2010, originally under the goofy name Man Boobz, aiming to build a stand-alone repository of careful anti-M.R.A. analysis. Perhaps, he speculated, his site could become a web destination that a confused young man might conceivably stumble upon while Googling for answers. “That does happen, now and then,” he told me. “I’ll get an email saying, you know, ‘Thanks, I was going down a bad path.’ ” At first, almost all of his readers were committed M.R.A.s; they had followed him for Reddit so they could leave argumentative comments under whatever he wrote about them. But within just a few months, Futrelle was attracting a significant female audience: women eager to learn what men were getting up to online but put off by the prospect of trudging through the manosphere themselves.

“He’s basically our filter for looking at an eclipse,” said Jaclyn Friedman, a feminist writer and activist who relied on Futrelle and his site while assembling an early guide to the manosphere for The American Prospect, in 2013. As Friedman’s work became more visible, she was increasingly mentioned in the manosphere or contacted by its participants, occasionally in posts or emails suggesting she deserved to be raped or killed; Futrelle, she says, would help her sift through the threats, using his experience to make judgments about which were worth taking seriously.

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As Donald Trump blustered his way to the presidency, Futrelle watched the manosphere thrill to the rule-breaking candidate as an avatar of their collective worldview: an old-school misogynist unshackled by politically correct strictures; a self-proclaimed anti-elite outsider but also a boastful “alpha” male who unapologetically did what he wanted with the political establishment, much like, it was gleefully pointed out, a powerful pickup artist or “seduction artist” did what he wanted with unsuspecting women.

“It’s hard to overstate the extent to which, for a lot of these guys, Trump is a wet dream come true,” Futrelle said. Increasingly, staying on top of his beat has meant adding more destinations to his daily roster, following his manosphere subjects as they branched out to a new generation of racist alt-right stamping grounds and meme-filled neo-Nazi sites like the Daily Stormer, which, as he documented, was now making calculated appeals to a manosphere readership, claiming that all-male neo-Nazi clubs could be hubs for sharing tips and tricks on how to “hunt and capture your own women.”