The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity

by Douglas Murray

One of the previous popular hashtags used on Twitter by feminists was ‘Kill All Men’. Fortunately the journalist and commentator Ezra Klein was available at Vox to decode this one. Whilst conceding that he had not enjoyed seeing the hashtag ‘Kill All Men’ or the moment when this phrase leaked out from the virtual world into the real one, the words did not mean what they appeared to mean. As Klein explained, when people he knew and ‘even love[d]’ began to use the term in casual conversation, he at first recoiled and felt defensive. But he explained that he came to realize ‘that wasn’t what they were saying’ (italics in original). He realized that not only did they not want to kill him or kill any men. In fact it was better than that. ‘They didn’t hate me, and they didn’t hate men.’ Klein’s discovery was that ‘Kill All Men’ was merely ‘another way of saying “it would be nice if the world sucked less for women”’. A hell of a way to say it, but Klein went on, ‘It was an expression of frustration with pervasive sexism.’