rantt | Last month, the Southern Poverty Law Center for the first time added two male supremacy groups to its hate group watch list, noting in their announcement
that “the vilification of women by these groups makes them no different
than other groups that demean entire populations, such as the LGBT
community, Muslims or Jews, based on their inherent characteristics.”
The
decision to officially track the actions of two groups espousing male
supremacy ideology comes at a time in which fringe and extremist groups
have become increasingly emboldened through many factors, such astheir
unprecedented access to key political leaders. And it also comes at a
time when these groups are affecting tangible, real-world damage—to
women, to marginalized people, to media, and to the overarching
landscape of American politics.
The
rise and embrace of male supremacy groups has yielded violence and
provably damaging anti-woman White House policies. But perhaps most
terrifying of all, groups that operate on the premise of white male
victimhood, of the equation of female empowerment and diversity to
anti-male persecution, are spreading the message that marginalized
voices are a threat to free speech that must be expunged. This ideology
of invalidating modern feminist speech is most recognizable in that
innocuous term, “political correctness” — the idea that basic demands
for respect and recognition are somehow far from basic, and rather, an
oppressive overreach; that speech in opposition to misogynistic, hateful
speech is somehow not free speech, but rather, the hate speech that it
responds to is.
The
very concept of political correctness, espoused by the same thinkers
who founded male supremacy activism, is meant to trivialize oppression,
and through that trivialization, silence, rewrite history, and make
marginalized groups vulnerable to political attacks.
