Tale of 2 hoaxes: The Seth Rich conspiracy theory and "Conceptual Penis" prank both expose a fear...
TUESDAY, MAY 23, 2017 04:58 AM EDT
Tale of 2 hoaxes: The Seth Rich conspiracy theory and “Conceptual Penis” prank both expose a fear of women’s power
2 blatantly bogus internet hoaxes spread rapidly by pushing the same message: Women with power are dangerous
AMANDA MARCOTTE
Last week the portion of the internet dedicated to a bipartisan male freakout over women’s gains in the professional sphere became caught up in not just one but two obnoxious hoaxes: a conspiracy theory accusing Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee of having a young staffer named Seth Rich murdered, and the false claim that the entire field of gender studies had been exposed as a fraud by two male scholars.
At first blush, these two stories don’t seem much alike. The first is a lurid right-wing conspiracy theory and the latter is an academic prank to spoof the sometimes abstruse discourse associated with postmodern cultural theory. But scratch the surface and it’s easy to see that these two stories are deeply rooted in misogynist fears about allowing women access to the halls of power. Both stories serve as warnings that feminism leads to decay, destruction and even death.
Sadly, while both stories were mostly perpetuated through right-wing channels, they were embraced by a number of prominent, supposedly liberal-minded men, proving yet again that there’s all too often an asterisk meaning that women have been excluded from a vision of the progressive future.
The Seth Rich story is the simpler one of the two. Rich was a DNC staffer who was murdered, seemingly at random, while out in the early hours of Sunday morning in Washington last summer. As David Weigel of The Washington Post elegantly chronicled this past weekend, rumors that Rich was the source of DNC emails acquired by WikiLeaks during the presidential campaign started almost immediately and, for various reasons, received heavy amounts of coverage last week. Naturally, conspiracy-minded Clinton haters have concluded that Rich was bumped off either by the Clintons or the DNC as an act of revenge.
more
http://www.salon.com/2017/05/23/tale-of-two-hoaxes-the-seth-rich-conspiracy-theory-and-conceptual-penis-prank-both-expose-a-fear-of-womens-power/
= new reply since forum marked as read
