Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Hell in a handcart

We’re all doomed

  • The girl vs the gammons

    As a rule of thumb, if Spiked columnists, billionaire Brexiters and Toby Young are against something you can be pretty sure it’s a good thing. Guess who really, really hates Greta Thunberg, the young woman who sparked today’s global climate protests?

    Jennifer O’Connell in The Irish Times elaborates.

    Even for someone who spends a lot of time on Twitter, some of the criticism levelled at Thunberg is astonishing. It is, simultaneously, the most vicious and the most fatuous kind of playground bullying. The Australian conservative climate change denier Andrew Bolt called her “deeply disturbed” and “freakishly influential” (the use of “freakish”, we can assume, was not incidental.) The former UKIP funder, Arron Banks, tweeted “Freaking yacht accidents do happen in August” (as above.) Brendan O’Neill of Spiked called her a “millenarian weirdo” (nope, still not incidental) in a piece that referred nastily to her “monotone voice” and “the look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes”.

    But who’s the real freak – the activist whose determination has single-handedly started a powerful global movement for change, or the middle-aged man taunting a child with Asperger syndrome from behind the safety of their computer screens?

    If all you had to go on was the hysterical abuse levelled at her, you’d think Thunberg turned up claiming to be the second coming of Christ and was busily throwing moneylenders out of temples.

    Other than money – at least one of the named pundits has been generously funded by right-wing billionaires, whose deep pockets have helped persuade people that there’s still a debate over climate change when there really isn’t – what could possibly motivate right-wing men to hurl abuse at a woman? Here’s Martin Gelin in the New Republic.

    In 2014, Jonas Anshelm and Martin Hultman of Chalmers published a paper analyzing the language of a focus group of climate skeptics. The common themes in the group, they said, were striking: “for climate skeptics … it was not the environment that was threatened, it was a certain kind of modern industrial society built and dominated by their form of masculinity.”

    The connection has to do with a sense of group identity under threat, Hultman told me—an identity they perceive to be under threat from all sides. Besieged, as they see it, both by developing gender equality—Hultman pointed specifically to the shock some men felt at the #MeToo movement—and now climate activism’s challenge to their way of life, male reactionaries motivated by right-wing nationalism, anti-feminism, and climate denialism increasingly overlap, the three reactions feeding off of one another.

    This is how the world ends: not with a bang, but with a barbecue.

    The New Republic again:

    Climate change used to be a bipartisan concern, the first Bush senior presidency famously promising to tackle global warming. But as conservative male mockery of Thunberg and others shows, climate politics has quickly become the next big battle in the culture war—on a global scale.

    As conservative parties become increasingly tied to nationalism, and misogynist rhetoric dominates the far-right, Hultman and his fellow researchers at Chalmers University worry that the ties between climate skeptics and misogyny will strengthen. What was once a practical problem, with general agreement on the facts, has become a matter of identity. And fear of change is powerful motivation.

    O’Connell:

    …the truth is that they’re afraid of her. The poor dears are terrified of her as an individual, and of what she stands for – youth, determination, change.

    …The reason they taunt her with childish insults is because that’s all they’ve got. They’re out of ideas. They can’t dismantle her arguments, because she has science – and David Attenborough – on her side. They can’t win the debate with the persuasive force of their arguments, because these bargain bin cranks trade in jaded cynicism, not youthful passion.

    …for her loudest detractors, she represents the sight of their impending obsolescence hurtling towards them.

  • It’s called consequences, not cancel culture

    Kevin Fallon of The Daily Beast reflects on the latest person to lose a high-profile job for having said terrible racist things, comedian Shane Gillis.

    If you’re not familiar with the story, a recap. It’s about:

    Saturday Night Live’s firing of comedian Shane Gillis, of whom videos surfaced showing him telling blithely racist jokes that caused controversy not even hours after he was announced as a new cast member on the sketch show. (That his jokes traded in boring, retrograde stereotypes of Asian Americans was all the more cringe-inducing given that SNL had just made history hiring its first-ever Asian cast member alongside Gillis, Bowen Yang.)

    Gillis’s jokes were outwardly racist. They weren’t jokes about racism, or satire about race, or illuminating truths about the marginalized. They were racist jokes, and quite bland ones at that. People were pissed. Then people became pissed that people were pissed. Censorship! McCarthyism! Worst of all: Cancel culture!

    As Fallon points out, it’s hardly cancel culture if the people who say the terrible things are almost always completely and utterly unaffected in any way.

    It would take too long to list all the recent controversies involving celebrities who said something alarming enough to detonate social media outrage: Scarlett Johansson defends Woody Allen, Dave Chappelle mocks Michael Jackson’s accusers, Lara Spencer shames male dancers, a Queer Eye host rails against his critics, some Real Housewives are caught being casually transphobic.

    Some of these celebrities apologized. Some didn’t. All were likely forced to consider the impact and the responsibility of their words, amid outcry and, in many cases, calls for them to lose their jobs. But none of them were fired.

    Many people are building their brands on pretending they’re saying the unsayable, and saying it again and again and again. But on occasion, very infrequently, a tiny proportion of those people discover that their employers don’t want to have, say, massive racists, homophobes or transphobes on staff.

    In the non-celeb world, employment contracts frequently have a clause where you can be fired for bringing your employer into disrepute. Clearly Saturday Night Live has something similar.

    A job on Saturday Night Live is not owed to anybody. It is arguably one of the highest profile gigs in comedy. Fans, audiences, and critics are right to expect some sort of responsibility or awareness, a certain standard, from those who are given that platform. They are right to be upset if it comes out that one of those benefactors has a history of espousing racist views. Gillis, in turn, had a right to respond to those who were angered. His response didn’t satisfy those critics, nor did it satisfy his employer. So he was fired. That is how jobs work.

  • This hateful ignorance costs lives

    Anti-trans bigots are the climate change deniers of gender: despite overwhelming scientific evidence that they’re full of shit, they continue to lobby against life-saving action and push long-discredited pseudoscience.

    One of their favourite conspiracy theories is the idea that being trans is contagious, that it’s a conscious choice and that you can be persuaded to become trans through peer pressure. This social contagion conspiracy theory has been debunked endlessly, but it still persists – so this report by the Australian Psychological Society won’t change any bigot’s mind.

    The APS isn’t mincing its words here.

    “Empirical evidence consistently refutes claims that a child’s or adolescent’s gender can be ‘directed’ by peer group pressure or media influence, as a form of ‘social contagion’,” APS Fellow Professor Damien Riggs said.

    “To say that there is a trans-identity crisis among young Australians because of social media pressure is not only alarmist, scientifically incorrect and confusing, but is potentially harmful to a young person’s mental health and wellbeing.

    “There is no evidence to suggest that such approaches work in terms of changing a person’s gender.  What such debunked ‘therapies’ do produce, however, are high levels of shame, disrespect and distress.

    Belief in “social contagion” goes hand in hand with belief in conversion therapy, the dangerous and discredited “pray the gay away” so-called cure that’s caused incredible damage to so many LGBT+ people: if you believe that being LGBT+ is a choice, then you’re likely to believe that people can be persuaded not to be LGBT+.

    Of course, it doesn’t work like that. But bigots’ feelings don’t care about facts.

    What conversion therapy does do is persuade LGBT+ people to kill themselves. The latest study into such “therapy” demonstrates yet again that there’s a strong link between it and mental health problems, including suicide attempts. Exposing transgender people to conversion therapy makes them twice as likely to attempt suicide.

    The bigots don’t see that as a problem, though: to them, one less trans person in the world is a result. These are people who are currently crowing about the prospect of Brexit-related medicine shortages cutting off trans women’s HRT supplies. Who cares if diabetics don’t get their insulin or cancer patients don’t get essential medicines? If it hurts (or better still, kills) trans people, it can only be a good thing.

    You don’t need to wear a swastika to be part of a hate group. Some of the most hateful people in modern society could be your neighbours.

    Here’s an example. The crowdfunding site GoFundMe has finally pulled down the page raising money for campaigns against inclusive education in schools (but not before they raised thousands). Here’s one of the key groups who campaigned for the page’s removal, the British Humanist Society:

    ‘This homophobic crowdfunder was in support of protesters who have been holding disruptive and intimidating rallies that have absolutely no place near a school. There is strong evidence that the protesters involved in these demonstrations have been uttering outrageous homophobic slurs and even calling members of school staff paedophiles which surely was in breach of GoFundMe’s terms.’

    The backlash against LGBT+ equality encompasses trans rights and relationship education at schools. It is co-ordinated and well funded and originates in the US. OpenDemocracy:

    At the London meeting of Christian conservatives this summer, our reporter – posing as a prospective teacher, to learn what these campaigners were telling teachers about sex education – found an energised opposition movement.

    In a room filled with LGBTIQ children’s books, tea and biscuits, the keynote speaker argued that equalities legislation “is not all-powerful”. Rather, he said it can be limited to protect “health and morals” of other students or teachers.

    This was Roger Kiska, in-house lawyer at the Christian Concern group that organised the event. He previously worked for Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian right ‘legal army’ and one of a dozen US groups that openDemocracy revealed have spent millions of dollars in Europe.

    Christian Concern, you’ll be amazed to discover, is a great believer in the efficacy of conversion therapy. Their communications manager claimed in late 2018 that conversion therapy is “just about any practice that offends the taste of social liberals” and added:

    If ‘conversion therapy’ means anything at all, it should surely refer to a process that treats people with cross-sex hormones, damages fertility and cuts up their bodies to portray them as something other than what they really are. In other words, gender reassignment.

    If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the same argument – using exactly the same words and phrasing – that the anti-trans activists use.

    That’s not a coincidence.

  • “This unholy alliance”

    Writing for Vox, Katelyn Burns describes how a primarily English anti-trans lobby is fuelling anti-LGBT+ sentiment and anti-women legislation here and in the US. There’s a long MetaFilter thread about it here.

    It’s a long read but a worthwhile one.

    TERF ideology has become the de facto face of feminism in the UK, helped along by media leadership from Rupert Murdoch and the Times of London. Any vague opposition to gender-critical thought in the UK brings along accusations of “silencing women” and a splashy feature or op-ed in a British national newspaper. Australian radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys went before the UK Parliament in March 2018 and declared that trans women are “parasites,” language that sounds an awful lot like Trump speaking about immigrants.

    According to Heron Greenesmith, who studies the modern gender-critical movement as a senior research associate with the social justice think tank Political Research Associates, gender-critical feminism in the UK grew out of a toxic mix of historical imperialism and the influence of the broader UK skeptical movement in the early aughts — which was hyper-focused on debunking “junk science” and any idea that considered sociological and historical influence and not just biology. Those who rose to prominence in the movement did so through a lot of “non-tolerant calling-out and attacking people,” Greenesmith said, much like gender-critical feminism. “Anti-trans feminists think they have science on their side. It is bananas how ascientific their rhetoric is, and yet literally they say, ‘Biology isn’t bigotry.’ In fact, biology has been used as bigotry as long as biology has been a thing.” (See scientific racism, eugenics, and the justification for slavery that black people were intellectually inferior to white people.)

    Many of the women in the skeptic movement blogged for Mumsnet, whose feminism discussion board has become a cesspool of anti-trans hatred and whose owners and moderators seem quite happy about that. A former moderator wrote in Huck Magazine, in 2018:

    Mumsnet has become a breeding ground for transphobic voices; a space where they can laugh about sabotaging an NHS surveyaimed at LGBTQ+ users and scorn trans participation in sport, or ponder that trans rights are a millennial issue. On Twitter, where transphobia has less of a platform, ‘Gender Critical’ users began to recommend Mumsnet as a safe space for cis women to openly attack the trans community.

    Twitter has since become much more of a safe space for transphobes, but even it draws the line sometimes and bans some of the most abusive users. More of that in a moment.

    Burns is particularly good on the links between English women building personal brands on the  back of transphobia and the US religious right. She describes the links between the most prominent English transphobes – including some high profile journalists – and US evangelical groups, and notes the way in which the work of transphobic English academics is used by evangelical front groups to advance anti-LGBT+ and anti-women legislation.

    One of the key differences between England and the US here is race. In the US, “White Feminism” – feminism that centres on white, often heterosexual, often middle-class women to the exclusion of other women – has largely been shown the door. So when people come along demanding the exclusion of a particular group women, in this case trans women, feminists can see history trying to repeat.

    the recent gender-critical wave has largely failed to gain traction in the US outside of the very far-right spheres. “I don’t think American women are buying it,” she said, pointing out that nearly every major US feminist advocacy group is vocally pro-trans rights and inclusion. “It’s because they understand what it means to be marginalized. They understand that any strict rules placed around gender are to the benefit of nobody.”

    Self-declared feminists with transphobic views were previously described as TERFs, which is short for trans-exclusionary radical feminists. Some women claim that the term was coined by trans people (it wasn’t; it was coined by feminists), that it’s a slur (it isn’t; it describes a very specific set of views among people who describe themselves as radical feminists) and that the term is misogynist (it isn’t; a significant number of TERFs are straight, cisgender white men with very unfeminist views who nevertheless claim to be feminists so they can be abusive to trans women).

    We’re in “the real racism is calling the racists racists” territory here.

    People who previously proudly identified as TERFs now describe themselves as “gender critical”. Burns quotes Gillian Branstetter of the National Center for Transgender Equality:

    Branstetter compares the deployment of so-called feminists to oppose trans rights to the white nationalist movement rebranding themselves as the “alt-right” to achieve a veneer of respectability.

    “It’s portraying it as this divide within the progressive movement or this divide within the LGBTQ community that only serves to benefit people who hate women and the LGBTQ community, including Heritage, the FRC [Family Research Council], and the ADF. Certainly, we should not be shocked that they’re desperate to sort of put up decoys — I just can’t imagine how you can walk through the doors of the Heritage Foundation as a heralded guest and continue to call yourself an advocate for women’s equality.”

    The comparison to the alt-right is important, because there are significant links between the anti-trans movement and the far right. Some of the anti-trans activists detailed in the Vox piece are loud supporters of Tommy Robinson and spout anti-immigration rhetoric; others have formed alliances with right-wing politicians or have right-wing publications on speed dial. Some even dig up old tropes of “scientific racism” but aim their pseudoscience at trans people rather than people of colour.

    Whether intentionally or accidentally, they’re playing with fire. Across the world, right-wing politicians rail against so-called “gender ideology” which to anti-trans activists means trans rights but to the right, often means feminism and women’s reproductive rights too.

    The far right sees anti-trans activists not just as allies, but as potential recruits. Neo-Nazis on message boards (including the boards where “incels” discuss their hatred of women) talk openly of their intention to “redpill” (reeducate) anti-trans women to make them “tradwives”, which the NYT describes as “the housewives of white supremacy”. They believe that these women’s ideologies are already very close to their own.

    Over the past few years, dozens of YouTube and social media accounts have sprung up showcasing soft-spoken young white women who extol the virtues of staying at home, submitting to male leadership and bearing lots of children — being “traditional wives.” These accounts pepper their messages with scrapbook-style collections of 1950s advertising images showing glamorous mothers in lipstick and heels with happy families and beautiful, opulent homes. They give their videos titles like “Female Nature and Advice for Young Ladies,” “How I Homeschool” and “You Might be a Millennial Housewife If….”

    But running alongside what could be mistaken for a peculiar style of mommy-vlogging is a virulent strain of white nationalism.

    As if to illustrate the point, just last month many of the “gender critical” people finally banned from Twitter for sustained abuse and harassment of trans women found a new home.

    Gab, the social network for neo-Nazis.

  • How free speech came to mean punching down

    Nesrine Malik writes in The Guardian – a publication guilty of some of the things she talks about in her article – about how a mythical free speech crisis has normalised hate speech and silenced minorities.

    …challenging the myth of a free speech crisis does not mean enabling the state to police and censor even further. Instead, it is arguing that there is no crisis. If anything, speech has never been more free and unregulated. The purpose of the free-speech-crisis myth is to guilt people into giving up their right of response to attacks, and to destigmatise racism and prejudice. It aims to blackmail good people into ceding space to bad ideas, even though they have a legitimate right to refuse. And it is a myth that demands, in turn, its own silencing and undermining of individual freedom. To accept the free-speech-crisis myth is to give up your own right to turn off the comments.

    …The recent history of fighting for freedom of speech has gone from something noble – striving for the right to publish works that offend people’s sexual or religious prudery, and speaking up against the values leveraged by the powerful to maintain control – to attacking the weak and persecuted. The effort has evolved from challenging upwards to punching downwards.

    It has become bogged down in false equivalence and extending the sanctity of fact to opinion, thanks in part to a media that has an interest in creating from the discourse as much heat as possible – but not necessarily any light. Central in this process is an establishment of curators, publishers and editors for whom controversy is a product to be pushed.

    Update:

    There’s a superb piece in The Nation about how the supposed crisis was created. Spoiler alert: a lot of it’s to do with the Koch brothers, who helped fund Spiked. Coincidentally, Spiked rails against protecting the environment, restricting corporations and the supposed evils of the supposed free speech crisis.

    How did we get here? Very intentionally, as it turns out: For decades, the right has claimed a monopoly on the idea of “freedom” more broadly—and speech is no exception.

    …The billionaires pushed a version of free speech that posited that limiting carbon emissions, taxing the rich, and any form of redistribution were equivalent to infractions on our constitutional rights. To do this, they not only needed to talk about market and economic deregulation; they needed to present their ideas as a radical remedy to the overbearing liberal state. So they funded dozens of books that argued that liberals were essentially limiting far-right speech through political correctness.

    Welcome to the era of our supposed free speech crisis.

  • The Tories are just as toxic as before

    Yesterday, I blogged about right wing parties deliberately stoking anti-LGBT+ sentiment for political gain.

    Last night:

    The Conservatives deny the report, as they denied reports last week that the Prime Minister would prorogue Parliament.

    Leaving aside the implication that the Tories think everybody north of Watford is a bigot, there’s a very cynical calculation here. Trans people are such a tiny minority you can demonise them without losing a significant number of votes.

    Sure, your attack ads will get many of them beaten up, maybe keep a few more in the closet, persuade a couple more to kill themselves. But that’s okay. They don’t really vote anyway, and when they do they don’t vote for the Conservatives.

  • Straight Pride isn’t about sexuality or gender. It’s white supremacy

    I’ve written before about Straight Pride and how it’s a front for the far right.

    The much-hyped Boston event took place this weekend and proved that – surprise! – it’s a front for the far right. To all intents and purposes it was a Make America Great rally, complete with police pepper-spraying counter-protestors.

    Other marchers waved placards saying “Build The Wall”, because apparently racism is an important part of straight culture too.

    Here’s Corinne Engber writing for JewishBoston:

    Bigots cannot count on a silent majority to look the other way anymore, so how do they continue to dig in their roots?

    Easy. Construct a parade in direct contrast to Pride, tapping into the homophobic leanings of those not quite convinced to join the alt-right. After all, if LGBTQ people get their day, why shouldn’t straight people? Claim straight people as an “oppressed majority” facing discrimination from the city of Boston. Claim that denying straight people their right to parade in the street is unconstitutional. Gather the wavering masses under a single umbrella and disseminate the us-and-them mentality from there. When fascism can’t take hold through overt means, move it underground. Create a system of cycling dog whistles. Enmesh bullied kids into a toxic echo chamber of propaganda and build a new generation of fascists. Easy.

    There will be other Straight Pride events, because what these rallies do is tell racists and bigots three things. One, you are not alone. Two, you are in the right. And three, the police and the state are on your side.

    Here’s how that pans out elsewhere.

    In Poland, July’s gay pride march was watched by spectators from over 30 anti-LGBT, mostly far right groups who outnumbered the marchers four to one. Those spectators didn’t just watch. They attacked the marchers with rocks. Dozens of LGBT people were physically assaulted before, during and after the event. Journalists were spat on and beaten. The police, while present, didn’t appear to do very much.

    As The Telegraph reports:

    Both the Catholic Church and the Polish state actively work to create a hostile environment for the gay community.

    …The ugly scenes in Bialystok were not an isolated incident. Several Polish regional parliaments have declared their districts to be “LGBT-free zones” in recent months…

    …Officially the government decries the violence seen in Bialystok, but at the same time hints that LGTBQ groups are out to provoke. The education minister Dariusz Piontowski has questioned whether such marches should be allowed since they “awaken resistance” in the wider public.

    The government stance is also backed by a powerful conservative media that has loaded Poland’s newstands with brazenly anti-LGBTQ magazine covers. One publication, Sieci, warned of a “Massive attack on Poland coming”, while another, Do Rzeczy, showed a mocked up prime ministerial podium flanked with rainbow flags.

    A third, the Gazeta Polska, went even further, printing a cover warning that the LGBTQ movement wanted to “destroy their civilisation” and giving readers a “LGBT-free zone” sticker showing a black cross over a rainbow flag.

    This is happening throughout Eastern Europe and in Russia, but it’s also happening elsewhere. Anti-LGBT sentiment is being deliberately stoked by right-wing politicians and media in Western Europe and in North and South America too. And that’s what Straight Pride marches are all about. They’re organised by the far right; the marchers are from the far right; their banners and memes and outfits are from the far right. And their claims of being oppressed, of being silenced… they’re from the far right too.

    Let’s not play their game and pretend Straight Pride marches are about sexuality, or about gender identity. They’re about white supremacy.

    As Anthony Oliveria put it on Twitter:

    reviewing all the footage from the Straight Pride Parade hey so quick question I don’t spend much time at straight events are there always so many swastikas when we gays aren’t around or

    Corinne Engber believes that the strategy is ultimately doomed.

    Ultimately, this recruitment attempt will fail before it begins as the environment of the country leans toward support for Jewish people, people of color and LGBTQ people.

    I hope she’s right.

  • Fascism with a Facebook page

    The very brave people at Hope Not Hate have conducted a years-long investigation into the identitarian movement, the far-right movement connected to three recent massacres.

    Imagine fascism with a Facebook page and you’ve got a pretty good idea. The identitarian movement is a modern spin on old hatreds, using social media and stunts to spread its hateful messaging.

    It’s not just racist, although it’s very, very racist. It’s also against feminism and LGBT+ rights. It claims that collectively, the women, the brown people and the queers are eradicating traditional culture – which of course just happens to be straight, white, cisgender, patriarchal Christian culture.

    The movement has made great strides online – there’s a lot of overlap with Gamergate and other far-right movements targeting vulnerable and/or disaffected young men – but it’s increasingly mainstream across Europe.

    It’s not about politics, or at least not yet. It’s about getting the media to platform their talking points.

    Identitarian metapolitics focuses on shifting the accepted topics, terms, and positions of public discussion so as to create a social and political environment more open and potentially accepting, of its ideology. It comes from a belief that this is required before electoral and policy support for their views is possible. GI’s efforts to have the media report on their fear-mongering about “The Great Replacement” of white Europeans exemplifies this, as their intention is to then use the narrative to promote a policy response of “Remigrating” non-white immigrants.

    And the media plays along: for example, on the day of the Christchurch massacre – a massacre directly linked to the Generation Identity group, which the murderer supported – BBC’s Newsnight invited GI’s UK leader, Benjamin Jones, on for a chat. This happens again and again, with far-right identitarians given the opportunity to get their messaging to a wider audience.

    And of course, there’s a very narrow line between the identitarians’ “great replacement” narrative and the anti-minority, anti-multiculturalism, anti-equality sentiments routinely printed in so many of our newspapers and current affairs magazines as they try to scare their readers about the brown people and the feminists and the queers.

    GI banner or headline from one of Rod Liddle’s Spectator columns?

    Columnists like to rail against so-called identity politics, where marginalised groups politely ask them not to be assholes. But they’re very quiet about this very real and very lethal form of identity politics – a form of politics whose key messages aren’t so different from their own.

  • #Don’tBuyTheSun

    FT.com:

    A long-running boycott of The Sun newspaper on Merseyside reduced Euroscepticism in the area and had a positive influence on its Remain vote in the Brexit referendum, university researchers have concluded.

    It’s a single study and isn’t peer-reviewed, but it’s worth considering alongside the fact that Northern Ireland and Scotland, where The Sun has different editorial teams and much smaller circulations, are also significantly less eurosceptic than England.

    As Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy rapped about TV: “Is it the reflector or the director? Does it imitate us or do we imitate it?”

  • Turning shame into sadism

    A few days ago, a thread about radicalisation went viral. In it, Joanna Shroeder spoke about the way in which far-right activists recruit boys and young men by weaponising shame.

    The process goes something like this:

    • Boys are encouraged to transgress social norms by posting racist, homophobic, misogynist or anti-semitic jokes
    • The boys are then called out on it by parents, teachers, and (especially) girls and women.
    • The boys feel deeply embarrassed and shamed.
    • The far-right tells them they’re getting into trouble for nothing, that they’re the victims of “woke” people, PC gone mad, snowflakes and so on.
    • The boys are encouraged to hate the people who called them out for their racist, homophobic, misogynist or anti-semitic jokes.
    • The more hateful their behaviour, the more their new friends praise them.

    It’s not just teenagers, and it’s not just the far right. We’ve seen exactly the same thing happen with supposedly intelligent, successful adults – mainly, although not exclusively, relatively affluent, straight, cisgender, middle-aged white adults with jobs in media – when they say something awful about LGBT+ people. Their process goes like this:

    • They say something terrible or just incorrect about LGBT+ people.
    • They are called out on it by LGBT+ people and allies.
    • They feel deeply embarrassed and shamed.
    • Bigots tell them they’re getting into trouble for nothing, that they’re the victims of “woke” activists, snowflakes, PC gone mad, a sinister lobby and so on.
    • They are encouraged to hate the LGBT+ people who criticised them.
    • The more hateful their behaviour, the more their new friends praise them.

    This is how, say, a washed-up comedy writer ends up dedicating his every waking hour to spreading hate about trans women: he writes a tone-deaf episode, gets criticised for it, and his shame becomes rage against the entire demographic.

    This is how a moderate broadsheet journalist becomes evangelical about the supposed dangers to women of a tiny group of LGBT+ people, shouting over the women and women’s charities who tell him he’s wrong. He writes something incorrect, gets criticised for it, and his shame becomes rage against the entire demographic.

    This is how a successful blogger decides to use his platform as a bully pulpit against a minority group. He writes something inflammatory, gets criticised for it, and his shame becomes rage against the entire demographic.

    These men might not be shooting up supermarkets to express their rage against women, as some incels do, or taking AR-15s to mosques. But the shame and rage is the same. These men are red-faced little boys, vowing terrible revenge on the people who laughed at them.