0:00

Time for a quick break to talk about

0:02

McDonald's. Mornings are for mixing and matching at

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McDonald's. For just $3, mix and match two

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of your favorite breakfast items, including a

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sausage McMuffin. Today

0:25

we cancel Amanda Mark-Kott, feminist writer

0:28

for Salon, and I'll admit canceling

0:30

Amanda Mark-Kott is perhaps a little

0:32

cheap. It's like canceling stubbed

0:34

toes or indigestion or head lice. A

0:36

little too obvious. In any case, Mark-Kott

0:38

has earned her spot in this segment

0:40

today by publishing an article for Salon

0:42

that is so crushingly stupid, so fantastically

0:44

ridiculous and dishonest that it's somehow against

0:46

all odds, manages to lower the bar

0:48

for feminist writers and Salon, a bar

0:51

that was already sitting approximately 10,000 feet

0:53

below sea level. Here's the headline. Men

0:55

punching random women in NYC, a desperate last

0:57

gasp of the male rage fueling MAGA. You

0:59

are fake news. This is another one of

1:01

those headlines that I saw circulating on social

1:03

media and I had to stop to verify

1:05

that it was real. At first,

1:07

I honestly thought that it wasn't. It's the kind of

1:09

thing that a right-wing meme account might create as a

1:12

joke. And if they had, it wouldn't

1:14

have even been very funny. But this is

1:16

not a meme. It's an actual article, written

1:18

and published without a hint of irony. Quote,

1:20

men are punching random women on the streets

1:22

of New York City, as usual with these

1:24

kinds of diffuse and chaotic stories, there's much

1:26

that is unknown, including how often this is

1:28

happening, how many people are involved, or whether

1:30

it's at all coordinated. Women report being assaulted

1:32

by men of different races and ages. Well,

1:35

actually, no, there's not a lot of racial diversity in the

1:37

men who are committing these assaults. We'll

1:39

return to that in a moment. Still, across the

1:41

different stories, a couple of similarities pop out. The

1:44

alleged victims are mostly young and pretty, and most

1:46

of them say they were minding their own business

1:48

when they were attacked. Some were on their phones

1:50

or reading on tablets. Others were speaking to friends

1:52

or daydreaming. Whatever they were doing, they were just

1:54

living their lives and that it seems is what

1:56

enraged their assailants. While it rarely turns to violence,

1:58

most women who spend much time walking around... around

2:00

in public have experience with men who berate

2:02

them for paying attention to something other than

2:04

the man who is now, off out of

2:06

nowhere, spewing invectants in our modern era that

2:08

often manifests with men who are infuriated at

2:10

women for looking at their phones. But I'm

2:12

old enough to remember when I would get

2:15

yelled at for reading books in public. Quick

2:17

aside here, that didn't happen. Nobody yelled at

2:19

her for reading a book in public. Much

2:21

of what she said in that paragraph is

2:23

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3:19

Let's get to the crux of the

3:21

issue from Amanda's hallucinatory perspective. Quote, whatever

3:23

the excuse the angry man concocts, the

3:25

impetus is always the same. The eyes of

3:27

a woman are directed at someone or something that is

3:29

not him and he is indignant over it. These

3:32

stories resonate as well because the nation is

3:34

having a moment of increasingly unhinged male fury

3:36

at women for daring to have lives that

3:38

are centered around something other than catering to

3:40

a man's every whim. Unleashed by Donald Trump

3:42

and the MAGA movement, there's an upswell of

3:45

loud male entitlements shouting at us from every

3:47

corner. We see it in the male fans

3:49

of Jordan Peterson who clamor to his events

3:51

to hear him croak out a just so

3:53

story about how lobsters justify their faith in

3:55

male dominance or the rise of tradwives online

3:57

who make a living pretending they're unemployed and

3:59

helping. or Ben Shapiro setting fire to

4:01

a Barbie doll because he can't stand that

4:04

a blockbuster comedy starring a woman is about

4:06

anything but her quest for male affection. The

4:08

rise of magma is fueled by misogyny, but it's less

4:10

a backlash than a tantrum, a

4:12

rage explosion by men who want to restore their

4:15

dominance but fear that this time women won't buckle

4:17

to their bullying. This rash of men

4:19

punching women in New York City captures this moment in

4:21

a dark way. That's just lazy writing. Now

4:25

before we get to the content of this screed such as

4:27

it is, the first thing we notice is just how tired

4:29

and lame and dull the writing is. Amanda

4:31

Marcotte has been writing essentially the same article over and

4:34

over again for 20 years. Now, of course, 20 years

4:36

ago, she wasn't talking about Donald Trump or MAGA, but

4:38

the basic themes and concepts are the same. And there

4:40

really is only one theme and one concept, which is

4:42

that men are misogynists and various bad things are happening

4:44

because of our misogyny. And this is my biggest problem

4:47

with people like Amanda Marcotte. It's not that everything they

4:49

say is wrong, and that's a given. It's

4:52

that they can't even manage to be vaguely interesting while

4:54

being wrong. Oh, so bored.

4:57

And as for the claim that she's making,

4:59

obviously violent crime in New York City

5:01

has nothing to do with Trump or MAGA. The

5:03

men assaulting random, you know, committing random assaults

5:06

in Manhattan. These are not Trump voters. These

5:09

are not Jordan Peterson acolytes. They're

5:11

not listening to Ben Shapiro's podcast. They've

5:14

never heard the term tradwife, most likely. And

5:17

these are almost exclusively black men. Oh,

5:20

hell no. Oh, hell no. Oh, hell

5:22

yes. And Democrat voters,

5:24

if they vote at all, which they probably

5:26

don't, they are repeat violent

5:28

offenders, career criminals who are on the street,

5:30

able to attack and victimize random women because

5:32

of policies that Amanda Marcotte supports. In fact,

5:35

not only is this not a MAGA phenomenon,

5:37

but if you go somewhere that is really

5:39

MAGA country, a predominantly conservative place where you're

5:41

likely to see American flags and red hats

5:43

and all the rest of it, in those

5:45

places, women aren't getting brutalized as they walk

5:48

down the street. These

5:50

attacks on women are supposedly the result of right wing

5:52

male rage, and yet they're only happening in

5:54

blue cities. Go to pretty much

5:56

any neighborhood with a majority of Trump voters, and

5:58

any woman will be perfectly safe. walking down the

6:01

street at any time of day or night. Amanda

6:03

hates white Republican males more than anything. She blames

6:05

us for all the violence against women. And

6:07

yet, you never hear about a rash

6:10

of violent attacks on women in white

6:12

Republican areas. So she's obviously wrong about

6:14

who was responsible for this violence. She's

6:16

also wrong about the why. Why,

6:18

why, why, why, why would they do this?

6:20

These attackers aren't going after these women because

6:22

they feel entitled to their time, or they're

6:24

mad at the women for looking at their

6:26

phones, or because they're filled with some kind

6:28

of patriarchal sense of entitlement, they do it

6:30

because they can. And they'll keep doing it

6:32

for as long as they can, until

6:34

we make it so that they can't. And

6:37

we don't do that by printing, you know,

6:39

scolding lectures in salon. Now, what you

6:41

do is you do that by locking them in prison forever.

6:43

But Amanda Marcotte doesn't want that. She's an

6:45

advocate for criminal justice reform, quote unquote, which

6:48

means putting these violent predators back on the

6:50

street and keeping them there. You've got to

6:52

be kidding. I mean, she doesn't care if

6:54

the violent attacks continue. At least it gives

6:56

her something to write about, even if she's

6:58

writing the same article over and over and

7:01

over again, and somehow still missing the point

7:03

every single time. And that is why she

7:05

is today. I'm not saying,

7:08

can't say. Midnight, where

7:10

the stars and you.