A Critic Reads the News Archives

From the Daily Mail — From the *Daily Mail*

Note: The following article concerns some very troubling online communities; while I cannot assert that the hyperlinks are to non-triggering content (almost all probably are), they are nevertheless exclusively to mainstream media and feminist writers/websites; none directly link to Roosh V.’s work or like-minded thinkers’ websites.

The less insane parts of the Internet today are having a field-day with mockery of Roosh V. (Wikipedia), the pick-up artist (PUA) and Men’s Rights Activist (MRA, just to understand the lingo, even if he wouldn’t agree with the term) who may or may not be living in his mom’s basement (NYMag).

The background of this is that Roosh V. announced last week his intention to hold an international meetup of “neomasculinists” (his term) in 43 countries this Saturday (since cancelled due to “security concerns”). This supposed meetup (more in a minute on that qualifier) got a lot of press because Roosh V. has argued in the past that, essentially, some forms of rape should be legal. Hence their characterization as “pro-rape rallies.”

Anyone really interested can research more of this themselves. These people and their ideas aren’t news to me, unfortunately, but the publicity Roosh V.’s claims generated got a lot of attention from people who perhaps more blissfully unaware. And I found myself reading numerous outraged posts on social media about the event, mostly written by people with little or no knowledge about how people like Roosh V. operate. Which was problematic, because at least one of his prominent critics was consistently arguing that the entire affair was essentially a canard, a ploy for attention that would result in a predictable public backlash, grant valuable publicity to Roosh V., who likely never intended nor would have been able to pull off a 43-county collective protest against feminism by people who explicitly or implicitly endorse rape.

For some time now I’ve been thinking about starting to write about what I see in the news. Not as political commentary exactly, but rather as an extension of my work as an arts critic—a critical lens on how I see ideas being formed not only in the media but also among the online communities I find myself part of. I resisted for a long time because it’s a slippery-slope down into the think-piece industrial complex, but I figured I’d give it a stab.

Today, I want to write about “terrorism.” I hate the word. I think it’s overused. I think people rely on it as a rhetorical crutch. And all of that does real work in the world that I find very frightening.

Terrorism is a subject on which so much has been written, which intersects with so many different sorts of discourses, there’s not too much to add. Yet ironically, we in America seem to constantly be fighting about who is or is not a terrorist. Consider the man who just murdered three people in a mass shooting at a Colorado Planned Parenthood. Intersecting as it does with the messy and vicious Republican presidential primaries, liberal and even mainstream publications have been tracking with intense interest which candidates have chosen to name these shootings “terrorism,” which apparently would imply a willingness to risk alienating Christian Evangelical voters, who might not look so unfavorably upon an individual motivated to kill in the name of protecting unborn children.