Forward: On Jezebel, classics scholar Donna Zuckerberg (who happens to be Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister) raises an important question:
“[W]hy have so many white, male leaders of communities and websites that used to focus on sex and gender shifted in recent months to anti-Semitism, white nationalism, and complaining about “(((the media)))”? In part, of course, because these men were always grossly bigoted and racist. The outspokenness of the alt-right empowered other men to share anti-Semitic views that they might otherwise have been quiet about. But in addition, the alt-right was getting a lot of attention. And attention, more than anything else, is what these men crave.”
And in a New York magazine piece, Claire Landsbaum further unpacks the relationship between the major players and ideas of, on the one hand, men’s-rights activists and pick-up artists, and on the other, the “alt-right” (that is, the rebranded white supremacists one hears so much about these days). The longtime anti-feminists are embracing anti-Semitism, the newly mainstream anti-Semites, anti-feminism:
“When Trump won, RooshV saw it as a victory for the PUA movement. ‘I’m in a state of exuberance that we now have a President who rates women on a 1-10 scale in the same way that we do and evaluates women by their appearance and feminine attitude,’ he wrote. [….] In the same way that RooshV began to adopt alt-right ideology, the alt-right began to publish stories grounded in the principles of pickup artists and the men’s-rights movement.”
