I see that Sargon of Akkad, who is not an MRA the last we checked, is being subjected to a whisper campaign. Similar whisper campaigns run regularly about Men’s Rights Advocates. If you don’t know politics much, especially American politics, it may surprise you, but the “whisper campaign” is a classic dodge that many politicians have used successfully to defeat their opponents.
But whisper campaigns aren’t just done against politicians; they’re run against anyone in a powerful political establishment who wants to silence critics. And while it’s not clear that the lying liar who calls himself “MrTARDISreviews” is such a paid stooge, odds are he’s been listening to other paid stooges at minimum:
We daily see people saying things about A Voice for Men and/or various members of our staff that are not true. We also see people online pretending to be MRAs advocating all sorts of crazy shit. We can frequently follow them and discover they are really sock puppets–new accounts with no history. Sometimes, they come out and outright impersonate us; the YouTuber Red Pill Philosophy (whom we have no issues with by the way, we don’t agree with everything he says but more power to him) got a letter not long ago claiming to be from A Voice for Men, declaring that AVfM created and owned the concept of “The Red Pill” and everyone “must join AVfM” and other total garbage that we never said and do not believe–in fact AVfM has never made any such claim and we fully believe not everyone should be a Men’s Rights Advocate, and even if you are one you owe us nothing (except, hopefully, not to lie about us).
Here’s what I think is really happening: for years now, all this energy was put on MRAs. The problem is, MRAs have been increasingly successful: by refusing to shut up in the face of lies and shaming, we’ve shown the wider culture that yes, feminism is not God and yes, by God, you can criticize it without being a misogynist, a woman beater, a rapist, etc. So the result is the prejudiced people and those running the whisper campaign(s) are having to regularly widen the circle of people they attack. This must be frustrating for them.
But I put this out as a warning for all: expect more of this. Expect fakers pretending to be well-known critics of feminism. Expect fakers who repeat debunked lie after debunked lie about critics of feminism, or just critics of gynocentrism. There are people pretending to speak for AVfM. They do not. There are people who claim to be MRAs who are not, and can be easily proven as fakers when they use throwaway accounts and/or get called on the carpet by actual MRAs.
Do we claim we can say who is and is not an actual MRA? No, although we claim expertise in what a real MRA looks like. Sargon isn’t one of them. Neither are a lot of phony sock puppets claiming to be MRAs while behaving like boors.
But feminism especially is a multibillion$$ multinational enterprise. The underlying gynocentrism that it depends on is also alive and well, and will also accuse you of misogyny if you just commit the sin of behaving as if women can be accountable adults.
I don’t know if there’s much more we need to say here, except that we expect other non-MRAs like Sargon to be subjected to the same whisper campaigns we have over the years. There’s nothing much to be done about it, except to recognize that it’s a real thing, it’s not paranoia, and you can usually identify the fakers by their words and actions, so don’t be paranoid, but be on the lookout.
