When I began this blog six years ago, the Men’s Rights Movement was little more than a curiosity. I’ve watched, with both amusement and alarm, as this small movement has inspired, and ultimately has been eclipsed by, a broader anti-feminist, anti-woman backlash, online and off, driven largely by the same white male rage.
Each new iteration of this backlash has been more toxic — and, sadly, more influential — than the last, ultimately culminating in the rise of the alt-right. Which is to say, the newest incarnation of fascism.
Now the openly racist, openly misogynistic idol of the alt-right has been elected president. Obviously, not everyone who voted for Trump was white or male. But his candidacy was powered in large part by the same kind of white male rage I have been writing about virtually every day for the last six years.
While Trump’s election is, without question, a catastrophe — in ways I will be chronicling in detail over the next few months and years — Trumpism isn’t built to last. Trump’s victory was a narrow one — indeed, he actually lost the popular vote — and the demographic group that served as the backbone of his movement (white men) is shrinking relative to those groups Trump has railed against.
In many ways, Trumpism seems to be a classic example of an “extinction burst,” a term used by behavior psychologists to describe a weird and seemingly paradoxical pattern of behavior. As Popsugar summed it up in a post earlier this week:
[W]hen a certain type of behavior or action isn’t really getting its desired results any longer — say, a child’s tantrums failing to get Mom or Dad’s attention — there’s often a period when a subject struggles even harder, makes more noise, and generally throws an extremely loud fit. In other words, extinction burst is that last-ditch ramping up before an inevitable flame-out.
Trumpism, like all backlashes, is doomed to fail. Unfortunately, it is likely to do a tremendous amount of damage before it goes, not so gently, into that good night. In the meantime, I will do my best to make sense of the toxic stew of racism and misogyny at the heart of Trumpism, and to provide support for those fighting against it or just trying to get by). And so I’ve changed the tagline of this blog from “the new misogyny, tracked and mocked” to “surviving the Trumpocalypse” to reflect this broader focus.
Don’t worry: I will still be writing about MGTOWs and MRAs and the other strange misogynistic creatures that I’ve been writing about from the beginning. While I recognize they are but a sideshow in the era of Trump, I just can’t quit them, and I suspect that a lot of you can’t either.
It is very important to keep track of Tangerine Hitler’s minions, yes.
I know you’re right, David. I just worry how over how many people will have to suffer and die before this angry, misguided country corrects itself.
Thank you, David, for that ray of optimism to hold on to.
Thank you, David, for all that you do.
Trump wants to talk unity now– I hope the left puts aside purity politics and unites, I hope we bring center moderates into the fold, and I hope we drag the Democratic party somewhere into the vicinity of a spine. I hope we show him and his government what unity truly means, and I hope he concedes 2020 looking 90 years old. I hope the edgelord fascists feel even more maligned, even more silenced by the end of this.
I am frightened and angry for the U.S. and the world, but I’m hopeful that this will wake the sleeping giant, that decent people will so abhor the violence, the destruction, and the cruelty that solidarity wins. In the meantime I’ll be writing letters to elected Democrats urging them to filibuster, to obstruct, to fight dirty and fight hard. What good it will do is anyone’s guess, but it’s something.
FYI, apparently Shaun King (in Twitter) has some kind of organization plan in mind, and he will announce it soon-ish. Might be a good idea to look forward to it, and possibly forge allyship there as well, if it looks good.
It’s going to be an even more foetid swamp to wade through David. I salute you and hope your cats are ready to provide you with all the brain bleach you need to survive.
Thank you, David. When we end up in prison together I’ll save you a spot by the window.
My own reaction was to shave my head. It’s what they do to uppity women anyway, so I figured I might as well beat them to it.
Thank you, David, and good luck.
I just fucking lost it. I hadn’t cried because I’ve been going between rage and numbness. Then in the other thread I read that account of the little girl being assualter at school because “if the president can do it, so can i”
I had similar thing happened to me in grade school. I thought I had been over it for years but it all came flooding back. This is going to happen to an increasing number of girls and it’s going to be endorsed by the most powerful person in the country. Instea of teaching girls that they can do anything, we’re teaching them that they’re worthless. Objects for boys to use as they see fit.
It’s disgusting.
Fuck America.
David, you are a continued inspiration to me and an example of the very best that our gender can rise to. Kudos.
We’ll get through this together, all of us.
Also, let’s keep a sharp eye out for the “Peter Creedy(s)” behind our new “High Chancellor Sutler”….
Thank you David. Hopefully he only last four years. Unfortunately, his first term will probably be able to coast on Obama’s economic successes long enough to keep affluent white racists wealthy enough to continue voting against the economy. I’m even less optimistic about the supreme court and the climate. Ugh.
I think you’re right, this is a last hurrah for white male anger before demographic and generational shifts turn the alt-right into a fringe movement.
That being said, Trumpism can still have lasting consequences, even if Trump serves only one term. Trump can appoint very conservative Supreme Court justices, who’ll stick around for a while (we still have one from the Reagan era, for fuck’s sake). Trump can gut various important government agencies, like the EPA, and hand national parks back to some of the reddest states in the nation. Trump can starve life-saving groups like Planned Parenthood. Trump can defund science, sparking a catastrophic and hard-to-reverse brain drain. Trump can privatize many things that really shouldn’t be privatized, like prisons. Trump can further militarize the police. Trump can inadvertently exacerbate anti-American terrorism (or not-so-inadvertently, since the GOP thrives on fear). Trump can help prop up authoritarian regimes in other countries, like Putin is doing.
I know I should wish good things for America, but part of me can’t help but hope Trump’s presidency is an undeniable disaster. My nightmare would be a second Ronald Reagan: a president whose policies have disastrous long-term consequences (national debt, destruction of the labor movement, neglect of emerging science, etc.), yet who, via good PR and outright lies, somehow ends up being remembered as a great president.
<3 WWTH. All of this is just breaking my heart.
Thank you David, and I was guessing that you'd be making this sort of a change. Be careful and take care of yourself – I get the impression that the new regime isn't going to be very tolerant of criticism.
I suspect there won't be many more tiny hand jokes, either. They ring a bit hollow.
Here's a start for you. https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/11/10/trump-team-takes-shape-and-its-not-pretty
remember, remember the 8th of november the treasonous fascist reign
politics we must master so this disaster should never happen again
Thank you, David, for wading into this fetid muck for us so that we can learn of it without getting too dirty ourselves. I admire your stamina and courage, and how you retain your human decency and goodness in the face of so much poison and hatred.
I so badly want to believe you, believe that this is only temporary. And I’m really going to try to believe it. But I question my own perceptions and judgement of the world now; as I stated in the previous thread, I never for an instant believed Trump would be elected. I thought it was “entertainment” of sorts, the kind of thing our 24/7 “news” cycle, quest for ratings, and online anonymity has given rise to.
For me the reality is, well, sometimes it’s too much to bear for me. That I was so, so wrong. This is cognitive dissonance, I think. It is tough to bear.
But I will keep reading, and I will keep supporting and speaking out against the hatred. And I will try to hope for hope.
There is an article on the BBC website about Brexit and Trump and crunches some of the demographic numbers. Some interesting (and hopeful) results.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37943072
A woman at another nearby college received rape threats from a group of men. I am going to offer her safety in my room. My campus has tight security because our campus is small. You can’t go upstairs without an ID, and guests have to sign in with the person they’re staying with.
I haven’t met a Trump supporter in my department or school because we only have a handful of them. They’re designers of some sort and I don’t interact with any because they live on a different campus.
I went to a protest last night and met a lot of lovely people. It was highly cathartic and stabilizing for me. I recommend it! Detroit voted deep blue, so we were pretty safe.
Thank you so much for your hard work, David. I don’t say often enough (maybe not at all?) how much I enjoy reading this blog, and how important what you do is. I appreciate it, and will even more in the future.
I hope you won’t stop covering the ridiculous side to these people (Trump, his supporters, and the manospherians in general) as well as the more serious stuff. They are certainly legitimately scary, but being able to laugh at them from time to time helps them to become less so and remind us that we can overcome them. As well as being therapeutic!
He also plans on freezing new hires in the federal government outside of military/his friends and as retirements leave vacant positions at numerous federal agencies he doesn’t consider necessary, he wants them unfilled so those agencies are so hampered in their duties they struggle to do any of them properly until ultimately they close. That is what republicans and puppet Trump want for America.
Please may I release a bunch of pent up frustrations here? I need to let this out somewhere. I’ve never told my story to anyone in “real life” (i.e. not on the internet).
When I saw how many White women had voted for Trump, I was dismayed but not surprised. I know exactly why. I saw the analyses on why the polls were wrong – that White women had told pollsters they wouldn’t vote for Trump because they truthfully didn’t want to. But then when it got time to voting, they voted for him despite hating him.
I grew up in a religious community in the Bible Belt where women and children were considered to be owned by men. What blew my mind even when I was very little was how willing women and children were to go along with this. Somehow I was the only one that questioned it, which drove me insane then and still drives me insane now.
My dad used to beat up my mother and me, and he would lock me in a chest because I had “the devil in me” whenever he thought I was a nuisance. I begged my mother to leave him when I was little, and I will never forget what she “explained” to me. She told me that women can’t get by on their own, that they need a strong man to rely on. She told me that the fact that he beats us just shows that he is exactly the kind of strong man that we need to keep us safe. She encouraged me to seek a similarly “strong” (i.e. violent) man to marry when I grow up, warning me that I would never be able to get by without one.
I ran away when I was 16 and what followed was a world of rape and abuse and I found out exactly what I had always been told I need to be protected from. I am incredibly lucky that I’m still alive. Fifteen years later my PTSD is still in full force, but at least the depression and suicidalness have finally passed.
I still don’t regret running away. I am still furious with my mother for trading her freedom, dignity and sanity for economic security. I am still furious with her for trading my freedom, dignity and sanity for economic security. For trading the freedom, dignity and sanity of all the other women and children in the community.
Then I see that all these White women went to the polling stations thinking that yes, he’s a rapist and a racist and a demagogue, and yes I hate him, but he seems so big and strong that he will take care of the economy and ISIS. All of these women just like my mother. Why why why do so many women think that way? Why are those of us who don’t think that way in the minority?
Thank-you David. I find great comfort in the idea that this represents the death throes of bigotry.
Stay safe.
Also fuck Warren Buffet for saying we need to come together and respect Trump. Typical privileged bullshit. The FUCK am I going to respect someone who blatantly thinks that me and so many other people are subhuman.
Has there ever been a President as hated as Trump? I haven’t been alive that long, but I don’t remember learning about protests like the ones we’ve been having lately.
I hope the people in the electoral college start to think “Hey, maybe these people have a point.” Won’t get my hopes up of course.
Also, at the risk of topic whiplash, how do I change my avatar? I’d like something more fitting than a red-brown geometric design.