dismantling the manosphere with fd signifier & robert evans

into the series. In our last episode, we took a look at how the manisphere has developed in the last decade, beginning with gamer Gate and the Ilavista killings in twenty fourteen, all the way through now where Joe Rogan is getting name checked at a fascist acceptance event. It's a journey.

And today I wanted to share two conversations I've had with two really wonderful people who have been studying this area for quite some time, which brings me to just a little bit of housekeeping at the top, an apology from me Ian if you could put on some like

YouTuber apology music. As I mentioned in my last episode, I've been getting some kickback on this series for not including the voices of men enough, and so to start to also men listening, I just wanted to apologize if you felt silenced or quite frankly attacked by my bitchy little voice. You are valid, you are heard, you are kings. And obviously you didn't listen to the end of the last episode because I said that today I would be speaking with two men who I admire very much. But still,

I'm sorry. I get it. You guys are like super super busy. So let's get into it, shall we. Both of my guests today are talented and prolific writers, and in a very weird coincidence, both just released very thorough

analyzes of Diddy. First, I was really thrilled to get the chance to speak with FD signifier, a YouTuber I really admire who has been analyzing the Manisphere on his channel four years and does something I've seen others consistently struggle to do, which is hold empathy for men sucked into that space while always prioritizing those most deeply affected

by it. Beginning with a closer look at the Black Manisphere specifically, FD has gone on to look at the world of in cells, speak to former members of the Manisphere, take a look at how popular media reinforces these narratives, and has taken a look at how the Manisphere prays on the neurodivergent. Truly, if you take in anyone else's work on this subject, let it be his. Here's my talk with FD signifier.

So yeah, there's a lot there, and a lot of it has to do explicitly with masculinity, So there's a lot of there there.

this is actually way more serious than I thought. I started seeing it boomerang back to my real life, where I would have parents of other children say my son brought home this and started saying this stuff about femoids and all kinds of weird crap about women, and I'm like, oh, I actually know that guy. H Yeah, let me maybe this is a real thing that I should get into.

And then I also recognized, as I allude to earlier, that no disrespect to a lot of my contemporaries, none of them were really putting in useful analysis as to the true causes and underlying elements. Nobody had really broken down, like my first video is understanding the manisphere. It doesn't take much, especially amongst you know, my audience, to say, yeah, this is dumb. These people are dumb. Don't be like them.

It's more valuable, I think, long term, for more people to have a developed analysis of how this world functions, so that we can have a better tools for how to make it not function anymore, and more explicitly, for parents, for people who have these types of guys in their lives to know what it is that is bringing them. Like the first thing you'll see as a friend or a peer or a parent is really like the fifth

step of the problem. Right when they start repeating these talking points to you in real life, they've already been deep in for a while where they get comfortable to.

hope to contribute to. One of the things that is often a failure on our part to understand is that these are actually very complex communities with very intelligent, nuanced contributors. It requires like that level of respect to understand what's going on. Otherwise you just won't know. They've built their communities for the sole purpose of keeping normal people out by being repulsive or cryptic in the way they engage with each other.

some of their peers. They may be late social bloomers, late physical bloomers. They may have genuine behavioral or mental health issues that make it hard for them to socialize. They may have a physical disability. They may be poor, they may be a minority of some sort. All these things could could contribute to a sense of otherness and then the targeting of ostracism, and that contributes to the desire to find places where you can feel belonging, community

and power. Not all cases, not all cases, but in some of these cases, these young men become targeted by these different communities, different grifters looking to get a quick buck out of them. Mold, you're not feeling good about society, Well take this class and I'll teach you how to be a big baller or whatever Andrew Tate was selling. Aside from offering them a false like solution to their problem, the biggest thing that people don't get is that it

offers them belonging. People that stay the longest and fall in the deepest is because that is where they found community. If it's community built around misogyny or racism or something else, fine, but it's more than the community they had, you know, away from their keyboard. Michael Kimmel has some good stuff on this. I have the obligatory point out that Michael Kimmel has a me too, several me two cases out there, and Michael Kimmel calls agrieved entitlement, which is connected to

a lot of this stuff. And it's you know, especially for white, young white men who while this is a very diverse community, people don't give you enough credit for how diverse it is. But for white men in particular, these young white boys are told that they're the you know, the protagonist, the heroes of their own stories in all of our media, it's in our mythology. And then they grow up and find out, no, you're just a peon at best. You're a worker, you know, and the people

that you know have the power over you. Their parents also have the power over your parents, and their grandparents have the power over your grandparents. And there's nothing you could do about it. It just lends itself to a unfortunate cocktail of toxic elements that for a handful of these young men makes a edge lord creator talking about how women shouldn't be able to vote and that'll fix all our problems. It makes that appealing. So I, as a young man, did not have a lot of success

with women. You know, I did not have any I'd never had girlfriend in high school, have plenty of girls I liked and I crushed on, no success. It wasn't until halfway through college that I started to kind of figure things out. And it was only after I had done some traditionally masculine things to make myself just service level more appealing to women. And there was a bitterness there around that. There was a frustration, There was some

animosity and some misogyny involved in that experience. My general theory is that most boys that end up in this space even today grow out of it just by necessity of continuing go on with life. That grow out of it, they may have some residual effects. I'm not saying everybody just completely perfectly grows out of it, but you grow

out of the danger zone, so to speak. But today, it's just you don't have to as much Like I had to grow out of that to get on with my life, to go get a job, to continue to try to find partners, partners in love, et cetera, et cetera, to learn how to talk to women face to face because there was no swiping left right. So like, there's so much of our society has been atomized. I think young men who have those challenges are never put in

positions to overcome them in productive ways. And then you have this entire ecosystem of grifters who are collecting money off of their pain, you know, and so that just kind of makes it stronger, makes it hold longer. And we're sitting here trying to figure out what to do about it.

address in any form of fashion. You know, the one of the premitive conversations in the manisphere of red pill whatever space is is, you know, income and being a high value man and making money because you need money to attract a mate. And that's just true, that's just reality. If you have less money, you will have less options

in the dating market. That is more of a problem in twenty twenty four, in our modern economy, in our modern work world, where making more money is difficult, women have gotten to a point where they can make their own money. And we're not going back to the sixties and fifties when a woman needed a man to survive. And so you have a lot of dudes that never develop personalities because they thought they would just have a good job. There's so much to that, the dregs and

and scourge of late capitalism. But these young men who grew up watching, you know, all these images of masculinity, who grew up being taught all these things about masculinity, they do not care. They want their tread wife and their factory job back. They will literally tear everything down trying to get it back. Tear everything except for the thing that needs to be torn down trying to get it back.

not that it's not that deep. There's an angle there to discuss, but let's not I think a lot of people are trying on purpose to miss the forest from the trees. Then that require them to do some self reflection on their own politics. We want to stick to the manisphere.

in the manisphere, that's your fault. You have created an environment where that seemed like a reasonable response to his own pain and concerns and issues, and that is not just the individual's fault. That's a cultural standard. The normous misogyny, the norm is racism, the norm is in aphobia. Those are American principles that we don't like to admit are there.

And so it of course individuals weaned in that culture, in that environment are going to respond and without anyone to kind of like, hey, nope, not here, not in this house, not this community, not in this family, if there's nothing to curtail that, it's going to be very easy for those types of messages to resonate, for those type of messengers to pull them into those spaces. And

so we have to do two things. One, we have to be responsible with the culture and community we're producing so that it's less likely to produced those types of things. But the other big thing is we also have to as as you know, as creators spend a little more time celebrating and contributing to the creation of media. That's

just I talk about Star Trek. I wish I had talked about like One Piece, which is an anime, and so many other types of media that are about a world that is more virtuous and kind of more gets to like the type of world we're trying to create through our politics, as opposed to we're going to comment on how bad the world is through this dark white guy who does edgy things and is really cool and has a jacket and guns. But you know, you're not supposed to want to be like them.

I would agree with. The Black Manisphere comes out of like a history of gender conflict within Black America between black men and women, which is a byproduct of you know, the history of racism, the dregs and results of slave ran, Jim Crow segregation, etc. And just the genuine fact that black men and women were never supposed to operate in America as men and women the same way white people were.

And so that creates a just stew of issues and conflicts as men black men are trying to pursue manhood and masculinity in a way similar to white men do, and as black women try to pursue femininity in a way similar to white women do. And this creates all these different venues for conflict that has historically made the talk show with you know, why are all men dogs? You know, why don't black women let a black man lead? That's literally going back to the seventies, that's been a

thing in our media. And so the manisphere starts to become a thing in the two thousands with the onset of YouTube and the Internet communities, because now these men who feel these things about black women, much like the normal manosphere, can come together and start to voice their issues YadA, YadA, YadA. Beyond that unique like origin point, no how that kind of vacillates that throughout the culture. It's not that different. It's still misogyny and masculine conflict.

It's still men and boys trying to claim a sense of power in their masculinity through the denigration of women. It's a little less racist most of the time, it's a little less xenophobic most of the time. It's just as misogynistic. There's a couple of differences, Like a lot of the Black manisphere people, some of them try to present themselves as pro black and pro black people, and so they can kind of sneak things in in ways that if you're not alert to it, you don't hear it.

So their misogyny can be very sublimated into like these just classical images of masculinity and gender because there's a feeling, well, black people's problems that the black family isn't in order, which is true to an extent. There's validity to that statement. So that's why black women need to stop worrying so much about their education and stop telling black men what to do. That it is so like it's oh there,

it is, oh exactly exactly. For me, talking about it was almost more difficult because there's a thing that happens when you kind of know your enemy, you cut deeper.

talk about it. Because I feel like, like you're saying, like, even creators I enjoy, a lot of people blow through the like let's just give the raw emotion to it, as opposed to like really thinking about it, because your work is so thorough and so thoughtful, and you're also thinking,

you know, coming from the perspective of a parent. My sort of worry is that this is going to turn into some kind of moral pan that will be deeply unproductive and send people further, like send you know, young men further into this think it.

being sneakier. But you definitely don't don't want to be complete, like stop handing the tablet to your kids and saying go nuts. These companies, these organizations, these the AI, the algorithms, all these machines are trained to addict your child to the screen and they do not care how they do that. And one of the most fundamentally predictable ways they know they can do that, and you can probably got this one of videos is through making them upset, making them angry,

making them outrage. And one of the easiest way to piss people off is to show them a woman doing the thing a woman's not supposed to do. Like being sexy but not but in public, or you know, wanting more money than she's willing to work for some other Oh, she cheated on her boyfriend and then rolled her eyes like whatever. Like so many of the videos start with girl does thing and then gets put in place by

alpha male. Like that's sixty percent of the video titles. Yeah, and so when you're your twelve year old watches that, like, stop letting them watch. That is what I'm getting to. The Other thing is you have to be willing to dismantle. And this is why I don't think it'll become a true moral panic. Moral panics tend to be truly transgressive. Misogyny isn't transgressive. Misogyny is reinforcing the social norm. Transgressive is feminism, Transgressive is queer, transgressive is black. Like, so

those things create moral panics. Heavy metal created the moral panic because it was counterculture and subversive and anti authoritarian and all those things. This stuff is just a little too. It's embarrassing little Timmy says something really misogynistic to his sister, and now I have to deal with this at home. And because it would shine such an ugly eye on the true nature of some people's households and some communities.

I don't think it'll ever reach the true moral panic, because according to certain people, this is what won the election for Donald Trump. But to fully go back to answering that question, you have to dismantle the utility of this ideology in your their own home. And that doesn't mean you have to become like a hardcore feminist and read JUDITHH. Butler and Audie Lord. Just make it so it's not so easy for misogyny to pass in your home.

Tell your brother in law to shut the fuck up when he says something sexist and says it's a joke. Build into goodness with your child, not based on their ability to perform masculinity, but in their innate goodness. Let them feel comfortable being emotional. Let them feel comfortable about crying. Explain to them how corrosion it is when they like a girl. Let them know you can like this girl.

She may not like you, and that's okay, And that doesn't mean an think about you, and it definitely doesn't mean anything about them. And challenge the stuff when you see it. That, along with a slow of other things that I don't have time to get into, is going to be way more useful than even just sending them one of my videos. One of my videos is more for you to understand it so that you can address it in reality. One of my mentors talked about the

fact that this isn't an issue of misinformation. This is an issue of disinf The knowledge is out there. We just have to get it in the right places and get it into people's systems for real.

fifty dollars about it. And to close out part two of our Manisphere series, I'm speaking with one of the producers of this very show, Robert Evans, who's been both reporting and commentating on Manisphere spaces, specifically extreme All to Right spaces for years and famously connected a series of

mass shootings we discussed earlier to in cell forums. In this house, we love Robert, and so here's our chat because we've like talked about this before, and we've both spent the better part of our lives on the internet. When did you start seeing communities like this cropping up?

people who were like getting really angry because I was, you know, I was more or less just a libertarian at that point, a libertarian who had like voted for Obama because Bush was a fucking disaster, right, But I didn't really think about I didn't think about like writing, you know, doing articles with like trans people about the

realities of transitioning as like a political act. I was just like, oh, I don't know much about what it's like to be trans. This is interesting, you know, but it was pissing some people off a ton and so I was like, well, this is odd, and it all kind of crystallized in twenty fourteen, when back at Cracked, we did a sketch comedy video, the premise of which was, what if all of like the main websites on the Internet today were kids in a high school? Right, okay?

It was not clear to me at that immediate point that this was like going to redefine how politics worked in the country. Right when it became clear to me, because those kids get kicked off a four chan, eight chan is started and eight chan becomes their home. They develop a board on eight chan called Baphomet, which is

where like harassment campaigns are architected. And this video comes out and whoever wrote it, I forget which of our writers like actually did the script, but they envisioned eight chan as like this little nerdy kid who was just constantly sexually harassing the popular girl who was the stand in for Facebook, right, and like it was not a super deep thing here, Like that was the joke, right, is that like eight chan is the creepy kid harassing the popular girl, right.

dead animals to her parents' house. They're sending her like pizzas and death threats and like, and they're chronicling it all live on Baphomet in like this thread that I the day it starts, I find the thread and I'm like archiving and clicking out. I wanted to report on it. I calling David Bell, wanted to start filming a documentary right then, I'm there. Like his premise, which I think in retrospect maybe we should have done, would have been

like what is the Internet done to us? Right? But we didn't in part because it would have directed more harassment to this young woman, right like that That's why ultimately it was like no one went, no one said anything about it. But that is why, you know, in twenty nineteen, my career like really was ignited in a large way because of my reporting on eight chan during the christ Church shooting. Well, I was I had been stalking e I had about once or twice once every

month or two. I had been going by eight chan and keeping an eye on how things were developing there. Ever since twenty fourteen, as a result of guests, right like, that's when I really got into looking at a lot of this stuff.

that kind of shit. When does it really feel like these communities get empowered and start to escalate?

we talked back then best. But like, you know, the f slur was like every third word out of my mouth and out of the mouth of like every kid I knew, right like that is was just incredibly common, right.

more serious than I had initially recognized. I think maybe initially I saw it as a little less serious than it was because it was so familiar, and you know, I think it says a lot about how social media traps us at certain ages by trapping us in social circles and trapping us in patterns of talk and patterns of like in mimetic patterns that can lock us at periods of development, because you know, my friends and I stopped talking that way very quickly after high school, because

we got out into the world and we made more friends who like wouldn't stand for that shit and realize like, oh, you actually don't talk like that. That's actually fucked up.

people in. You've written really cogently about how this like escalation of it starts as a joke and becomes real continued and at this point, I mean, is there any spaces where it's still being treated as a joke at this point?

the that's part of the story of partisanship. I'm not saying that as a way to say, like, and so the wokes are just as responsible for everything getting so divided. I'm saying it's like a natural reaction. You see this one group of people who used to play games with and like bullshit with online become Nazis. You don't, you want to make it very clear, I'm not one of them.

some point, but also they did not disappear into dust, and a lot of them sort of doubled down. I guess I'm curious of your feeling of that period of time, of the time where there was this deplatforming movement. What did this space learn from that?

in the fight. Right, So it's not good enough. You can never you can never just deploy a tool like the platforming once and say well we did it, Joe, you know, we're done, right, like they are, there's going to be a counter move, and the counter moves against guys like Jones number one, they all came too late, right. Part of it is that could by the time Alex Jones started getting deplatformed, he was so embedded in the

culture and so influential. You know, I don't know that like any of the kind of airsats deplatforming, you know, strategies that were adopted, could have really stopped him from being someone whose voice mattered, right, Like, that's just a reality of the situation. Some of it is that like if you just kind of let this shit go on for a while, it metastasizes until the point that it's terminal.

And ironically, I think there's a chance that like Alex and a lot of these guys who have been more on the we're going to wind up fighting the left in the streets side of things have some trouble in the coming years, as there's a lot less impetus, you know, for Trump supporters to believe that's happening. But I don't

really know what's going to go down there. If you're looking back, like what could have been done to have stopped this, There's only one very clear answer to me, and it is you need to put in legal consequences

for algorithms working the way they work. That's what should have been illegal from the beginning, was algorithmically pushing people towards shit like fucking the Boogaloo boys and militias and towards like neo nazi, you know, race realist organizations exposing children to that at scale in order to get engagement

hours and bring in ad revenue. If that had been illegal from the beginning, if there had been immediate, severe penalties that hurt the bottom line of these social media companies, I think we'd be in a different situation now right now. Would that ever have been that certainly didn't happen, So would it ever have been politically viable?

saying we should do all along. Just give us some money. Right, Be very very not that there aren't like, for example, I think a lot of the getting out of this I think is going to I think unions are going to be a very important part of that story. But I also think like unions are also part.

Democratic Party. It's this very simple thing, because what takes us out of this is not going to be simple and be hesitant to embrace people who come to you with simple solutions.

White House chief of staff. And also I don't think I don't see not that he's not going to put through a bunch of policies that are bad for women, but like a lot of women voted for him, so I don't necessarily see him as being like, well, repealing the nineteenth Amendment is my number one priority, right, he likes winning elections, and I do think that a lot of what he does once the own the Libs high comes down and they see that they're not going to

get a lot of what they wanted because it's stupid and because it doesn't benefit Trump to give it to them, and he had no problem lying to any of them. Trump is not particularly interested in giving you all of these crazy things that you want, because like that's never been his politics. Right, is Trump going to make us a Catholic fascist state? I don't think Donald Trump gives a shit about that. I don't think he's really an into Catholicism, you know. I don't know if that's the

threat model. I think that's more freaks online. I think that's more Nick Fuintz weirdness. And I think those guys, you know, there's a chance they get really angry as a result of, you know, as it becomes clear what they're going to get and what they're not going to get. I mean, I think in terms of explaining the Manisphere to people, you say, it's a group of content creators who are generally aligned by a financial alliance on selling supplements to make people huge, selling advice on how to

pick up women. Their audience is largely frustrated young men who think that they are not having all the sex that they should have, and a lot of them have gotten into kind of Nazi adjacent racial politics as part of their general frustration at the things the world hasn't given them, and they see that their alliance with the right wing is because the right wing will make things harder for women and make them more necessary again, you know,

Like I think that's important. Like these guys are very influential. Millions and millions of people listen to them. It had an impact on the election, right, Yeah, you.