Vox’s Ezra Klein Defends “Kill All Men” Twitter Hashtag

In yet another article from the Left insisting that old, racist tweets from recently hired New York Times writer Sarah Jeong aren’t actually racist, Vox founder Ezra Klein veered off course into defending an old misandrist hashtag: #KillAllMen.

“A few years ago, it became popular on feminist Twitter to tweet about the awful effects of patriarchal culture and attach the line #KillAllMen,” Klein wrote. “This became popular enough that a bunch of people I know and hang out with and even love began using it in casual conversation.”

First of all, that must be some kind of bubble he lives in to have friends and loved ones who think it’s funny or normal to casually say “kill all men.”

Moving on. Klein then says he didn’t like hearing his friends say this, and that it made him defensive, but insists he knew “that wasn’t what they were saying.” (Emphasis original.)

“They didn’t want me put to death. They didn’t want any men put to death. They didn’t hate me, and they didn’t hate men,” Klein wrote. “‘#KillAllMen’ was another way of saying ‘it would be nice if the world sucked less for women.’ It was an expression of frustration with pervasive sexism. I didn’t enjoy the way they said it, but that didn’t mean I had to pretend I couldn’t figure out what they meant. And if I had any questions, I could, you know, ask, and actually listen to the answer.”

Klein did admit that he only understood this based on context, and that if he were on the outside looking in, he might have “let my initial offense drive my interpretation.”

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it only ever applies to the Left when the person presenting the alleged offense is on their side. Those people are defended, while others are pushed out.

Jon Ronson has kept track of some of these past internet mobs, including an incident from 2013 where a man and his friend were making low-volume jokes at a tech conference when a woman photographed them and complained on Twitter that they were making sexual comments. The jokes involved tech jargon such as “dongles” and “forking” and “repository.” It didn’t matter that they weren’t talking about women or sexual assault, the woman’s offense was more important. The man was fired for a private joke soon after. The woman received her own backlash, and claimed to Ronson she spoke up about the jokes because of “fear” that these men would do something to her, a person they weren’t even talking to and probably didn’t even notice.

Where was the notion that the men weren’t really saying what the woman believed they were?

The point here is that Leftists like Klein are only defensive because one of their own was involved. Even falling back on the idea that every -ism and -phobia takes power plus privilege (which is in no way the official definition, just the one used by social justice warriors), how does #KillAllMen not offend more Leftists? In their heads they seem to think it would just mean white men, which is fine and funny to them. But the hashtag would include black, Hispanic, Muslim, Asian, disabled, transgender, and gay men as well — all protected groups by the Left. Does that alter their lack of outrage?