A Voice for Men tries to distance itself from Roy Den Hollander’s violence … by citing an article they published by him threatening violence

By David Futrelle

A Voice for Men is trying its best to distance itself from Roy Den Hollander, the rabidly antifeminist lawyer thought to have gunned down the son and the husband of a federal judge and who seems to be linked to the murder of a rival Men’s Rights attorney in California.

But they’re going about it in a mighty strange way — by citing the violent portion of an article that Den Hollander published in AVFM in 2010.

In a post on AVFM yesterday, Robert Brockway complained that the media were making too much of that one article — and its literal call to arms.

Den Hollander wrote one article for A Voice for Men (AVfM), which was published on October 24, 2010 – nearly ten years ago. A quote from this one article has been widely circulated in the media as it attempts to link AVfM to violence. The mainstream media focuses on the mention of firearms. 

Boy, it’s puzzling that the media would focus on the mention of firearms in a piece written by someone who gunned down three men, killing two of them.

Here’s the quote in question from Den Hollander:

The future prospect of the Men’s Movement raising enough money to exercise some influence in America is unlikely. But there is one remaining source of power in which men still have a near monopoly—firearms. At some point, the men in this country will take the Declaration of Independence literally.

Brockway continues his attempted whitewashing by pointing out that AVFM head boy Paul Elam later turned down another piece by Hollander allegedly based upon the premise that “the best way to preserve men’s rights is with a gun” — as if Elam’s rejection of this second post somehow erases that fact that they published the first one. (And, though Brockway never mentions it, that Elam also praised Den Hollander effusively in a post from 2011.)

The fact is that Den Hollander wasn’t the only one advocating violence in the pages of A Voice for Men. Indeed, the site once hosted, for several years, a manifesto by Men’s Rights activist Tom Ball, who committed suicide by lighting himself on fire outside a courthouse in hopes that his act would inspire other men to begin firebombing courthouses and police stations in protest of alleged anti-male bias in family courts. He wrote:

So boys, we need to start burning down police stations and courthouses. …

You need to flatten them, like Wile E. Coyote. They need to be taught never to replace the rule of law. BURN-THEM-OUT! …

There will be some casualties in this war. Some killed, some wounded, some captured. Some of them will be theirs. Some of the casualties will be ours.

AVFM did remove a small portion of Ball’s manifesto in which he offered specific tips on how to make effective molotov cocktails.

Despite hosting this manifesto in AVFM’s “activism” section Elam insisted that he and his fellow MRAs weren’t actually advocating violence themselves, just “predicting” it. As Elam explained it,

Thomas Ball represents a tragic, dysfunctional reaction to chronic, systemic abuse. There are many possible reactions. Some even worse than his. And while we cannot, must not, condone violence, we had better learn to expect it as long as an ideological war against men is allowed to make a battlefield in our justice system and within the heart of our own families.

AVFM took the manifesto down shortly after the Boston Marathon Bombing in 2013.

For another example of Elam “predicting” violence, see here.

Meanwhile, in addition to “predicting” violence, Elam has won himself something of a reputation for publishing assorted fantasies of violence over the years. Consider the infamous article in which he suggested “satrically” that Domestic Violence Awareness month be replaced with “Bash a Violent Bitch” month, celebrating those men who responded to domestic violence directed at them by female partners by beating the shit out of said partners.

I’d like to make it the objective for the remainder of this month, and all the Octobers that follow, for men who are being attacked and physically abused by women – to beat the living shit out of them. I don’t mean subdue them, or deliver an open handed pop on the face to get them to settle down. I mean literally to grab them by the hair and smack their face against the wall till the smugness of beating on someone because you know they won’t fight back drains from their nose with a few million red corpuscles.

And then make them clean up the mess … .

He cautioned men from taking his advice literally — not because he felt it was wrong to beat the shit out of “violent bitches” but because it

isn’t worth the time behind bars or the abuse of anger management training that men must endure if they are uppity enough to defend themselves from female attackers.

For more on this, and on Elam’s violent rhetoric more broadly, see here.

In short, Paul Elam is the world’s least convincing pacifist. He can’t disassociate himself from Den Hollander’s fantasies of violence any more than he can disassociate himself from his own. I can only hope that, unlike Den Hollander, Elam doesn’t attempt to turn his violent fantasies into reality.

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