Inside the Dangerous Convergence of Men’s-Rights Activists and the Extreme Alt-Right

James Harris Jackson is brought to Manhattan Central Booking on Wednesday, March 22, 2017. He is charged with stabbing a black stranger in Midtown. Photo: Jefferson Siegel/NY Daily News via Getty Images

James Jackson had a plan. Traveling by Bolt Bus from his home in Baltimore to New York City, the 28-year-old Jackson hoped to strike a blow for the beleaguered white race by carrying out a bloody massacre of black men in Times Square, using a two-foot sword he’d brought with him for the occasion.

He didn’t get that far, turning himself in to NYC police after stalking, stabbing, and killing 66-year-old can collector Timothy Caughman in midtown in a “trial run” for the planned massacre. In a jailhouse interview, he told the New York Daily News that the murder had been a mistake. He had intended to kill a “young thug” or “a successful older black man” out with a blonde, an act he somehow thought would scare “white girls” away from black men.

It’s not hard to see where Jackson picked up at least some of his noxious views. He was, he told the Daily News, a regular reader of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer; on YouTube he subscribes to the channels of a vast assortment of alt-rightists and fellow travelers, from Hitler-worshiping revisionist “historians” who call themselves things like Esoteric Truth and the Impartial Truth to conspiracy-addled right-wingers like Alex Jones and the resolutely anti-feminist, anti-Muslim YouTube “philosopher” Stefan Molyneux.

But what is equally disturbing is that Jackson also subscribes to a vast collection of channels promoting the “Men Going Their Own Way” movement, a more radical and openly hateful version of men’s-rights activism, sans even the pretense of activism. MRAs may do precious little actual activism in the real world, but they do have a range of issues that they discuss on a regular basis, some of them legitimate issues they have seized upon largely for propaganda purposes (like male suicide and workplace safety), others generated from their own paranoid fantasies (the supposed epidemic of false rape accusations that leaves every man at risk of being jailed based on nothing more than a woman’s word).

MGTOWs, as they are known, have largely abandoned these issues to focus almost entirely on the airing of grievances. They claim to proudly reject women, but seem to spend most of their time obsessing over them, spouting endless rants about the alleged evils of women on YouTube and assorted online forums. Jackson subscribes to the channels of popular MGTOWs bar bar, Thinking-Ape, and Sandman, as well as many lesser-known names.

While MGTOWs and alt-rightists regularly spar with one another online, the two movements now appear to be converging, with alt-rightists increasingly spouting anti-feminist, anti-women talking points familiar to anyone who has paid attention to the men’s-rights movement; meanwhile, more and more MGTOWs are becoming less shy about expressing their racism, with many openly identifying with the alt-right.

The two movements are drawn together by a shared obsession with, and paranoia about, the sexuality of women.

White supremacists have, of course, long sought to “protect their women” — that is, all white women — from the sexuality of black men. In the several heydays of the Klan, southern whites lynched literally thousands of black men based on accusations of rape that were often wholly false, intended to punish those who willingly crossed the sexual color line.

Alt-rightists today remain obsessed with “race mixing.” The Daily Stormer, in its troll-ish but completely sincere style, rails against miscegenation in posts with titles like “Exposing the Race-Mixing Agenda” and “Tom Hanks’ Jigaboo Granddaughter Reminds Us Why Race-Mixing Shouldn’t Happen.” With something close to glee, the site regularly mocks “mudsharking” white women who end up brutalized by their black boyfriends.

In a post last year, Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin declared that racists like him react with “a lot of anger” to white women who have children with black men “because it’s OUR WOMB — that’s right, it doesn’t belong to her, it belongs to the males in her society — that is being used to produce an enemy soldier.”

As racists like Anglin see it, when white women become sexually involved with black men they are in effect cuckolding all white men. This insecurity about “race cucking” is undoubtedly the main reason alt-right men are so fond of calling other men “cucks” — a handy way to project their own anxieties onto others.

Anglin assures his readers that the anger they feel about “race mixing” is perfectly natural. “[W]hen you see women with non-Whites, it’s a biological response that you’re having,” he writes. “Women’s eggs are infinitely more valuable than men’s sperm. So there is an inborn drive in men to constantly protect women. And when you see them with non-Whites, you immediately respond negatively.”

Tellingly, Anglin feels no such anger about white men in relationships with black women. While “gross” and wrong, he explains, this “weird fetish … doesn’t trigger the same visceral reaction when you see it, because in terms of the survival of the race, it doesn’t make any difference.”

It seems fairly clear that the relative values of eggs and sperm have little to do with Anglin’s reaction. Black men dating white women trigger his sexual insecurities; white men dating black women don’t.

MGTOWs are similarly obsessed with women having sex with men other than them. While MRA complaints — especially those involving alleged “false rape accusations” — often reek of sexual insecurity and aggrieved sexual entitlement, MGTOWs seem to be motivated by little other than their own sexual anxieties and resentments. In comment sections and YouTube videos they regularly hash and rehash what is perhaps the central MGTOW myth, that of the “cock carousel.” As MGTOWs see it, women in their prime live in a state of sexual overabundance and endless male affirmation, flitting from alpha male to alpha male in an endless utopia of casual sex — riding that so-called “carousel.”

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of men in their teens and early 20s live in a parched sexual desert, scorned by women, who have eyes only for the studly and confident jocks that have become known, at least among the bitter young misogynists of the internet, as “Chads,” short for “Chad Thundercock.” Young women consider him far more exciting than the genuine “nice guys” who remain trapped in an extended period of involuntary celibacy because their shallow female counterparts can’t see just how deserving of love and sex they are. MGTOWs see themselves as the innocent victims of a grave sexual injustice, essentially cuckolded by the lucky minority of men who get to enjoy sex with women still in their “prime.”

All this changes when these young women “hit the wall” — that is, hit the magical age in their late 20s or thereabouts when their youthful allure begins to fade. Deprived of easy sex they had previously enjoyed with an endless succession of Chads, these no-longer-young women, now desperate, do their best to attract the attention of the kind and hardworking “beta males” they’ve been ignoring for years.

On the forums at MGTOW.com, a fellow calling himself Geeves complains of one ex-girlfriend who gave her “best years” to Chad instead of him.

“[S]he was 24-25 when she was with this guy,” he grouses. “Her prime age of looks and reproductive abilities. He got her in her prime that mother fucker. Then when her clock started ticking and she wanted to settle down and have a family, she meets me. And I’m supposed to get a ring, pay for a wedding, honeymoon and be her slave the rest of her life? FUCK THAT!”

The fact that the “cock carousel” myth bears virtually no resemblance to anything that actually happens in the real world does not in any way undercut the fervency of MGTOWs’ belief in it. Or the anger it helps to nurture within them.

MGTOWs are generally young white men stewing in their own aggrieved entitlement, and Chad is always envisioned as another white guy. But he has a black counterpart — a young fellow that the casually racist MGTOWs have labeled “Tyrone,” basically identical to the “young thugs” that Jackson, in the real world, planned to kill.

With the alt-right still in the ascendancy, the racism in the MGTOW movement is growing more obvious and more extreme. You can see this clearly in several of the channels Jackson subscribes to on YouTube. The YouTuber who identifies himself as The Angry MGTOW more than lives up to the name, literally shouting out endless half-hour rants. The most popular of these, with hundreds of thousands of views, are diatribes calling out white women for a multitude of sins, including the cardinal sin of dating black men.

YouTuber Xpall Odoc, meanwhile, identifies himself as both a MGTOW and an alt-rightist; he believes white women, too childish to make their own decisions, need to be expressly forbidden from even socializing with black men.

On MGTOW forums like Reddit’s Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, it’s similarly obvious that the alt-right is leaking in. In one recent discussion of cuckoldry, a Reddit MGTOW offers some thoughts that would not sound out of place at some drunken Klan after-party.

“Even married women who proclaim how pure and innocent they are, will fuck some thug convict or dump whomever she married to chase some jackass,” T0000009 complains. “Females [don’t] give a fuck about culture or society, their family or heritage, they just want some stupid savage to breed them and it’s the only thing on their tiny mind.”

The Dangerous Convergence of Extreme MRAs and the Alt-Right