The Real Leader Of The Trolling Revolution

By Parker Marie Molloy

Salon recently devoted an article to saying Thought Catalog has started a “trolling revolution.” James B. Barnes has already written a response piece to that (thanks for the shout out in there, James!), but I’d like to talk about a website that actually is trying to start this revolution: the people of returnofkings.com.

If you’re not familiar, returnofkings.com is run by a bunch of “Men’s Rights Activists” (i.e. white guys who think the world is somehow out to get them for being white guys… yeah, it’s as ridiculous as it sounds) who seem to strive for a world straight out of a Tucker Max book. Or maybe a Chuck Palahniuk novel? Oh! I know! The Matrix. MRAs absolutely love the Matrix. In other words, it very well may be the worst website to exist in the history of the internet.

Anyyyyyyway. Let’s take a look at their “About” page.

Return Of Kings is a blog for heterosexual, masculine men.

Okay, well, every site has to have a demographic. Fair enough.

ROK aims to usher the return of the masculine man in a world where masculinity is being increasingly punished and shamed in favor of creating an androgynous and politically-correct society that allows women to assert superiority and control over men. Sadly, yesterday’s masculinity is today’s misogyny.

Hrm…

Women and homosexuals are prohibited from commenting here.

Um… Well, let’s see what they list under “Community Beliefs.”

1. Men and women are genetically different, both physically and mentally. Sex roles evolved in all mammals. Humans are not exempt.

I worry about where this is going..

2. Women are sluts if they sleep around, but men are not. This fact is due to the biological differences between men and women.

After the first sentence, I had hope that they were making a point of highlighting one of society’s greatest double-standards. As it turns out, they simply want to reinforce it.

Let’s skip down a bit.

6. A woman’s value is mainly determined by her fertility and beauty. A man’s value is mainly determined by his resources, intellect, and character.

Hear that, ladies? If you’re not fertile and beautiful, you have no worth. Guys, on the other hand, have free reign to be sterile and ugly, while not being judged on that basis.

7. Elimination of traditional gender roles and the promotion of unlimited mating choice in women unleashes their promiscuity and other negative behaviors that block family formation.

Oh, what the fuck? What decade are we in? Hell, what century are we in?

References to “Tyler Durden” and “taking the red pill” make up the basis of so many of the site’s posts. “Have you swallowed the red pill?” one article asks. It seems entirely lost on the site’s writers that the very imagery they’re referencing are the creations of people who wouldn’t even be allowed to comment, let alone post on their site (Chuck Palahniuk is gay; Lana Wachowski, one of the writers and directors on the Matrix — where the red pill/blue pill originated — is a transgender woman). There’s certainly some irony in the fact that their core philosophies are based on the writings of people they advocate against.

There’s also quite a bit of hypocrisy among the authors. In various pieces, they lash out against those who hide in anonymity on the internet. They accuse people of trying to manipulate and misrepresent who they are. All of this, of course, is said as they write behind ridiculous pen names like Law Dogger (whose most recent piece is titled “The Worst Bang of My Life”) and Nascimento (whose most recent article is titled “Why You Should Try Sober Game” and describes himself as a “young and aspiring Casanova”).

Somehow, this bastion of misogyny has generated more than 2,000 fans on Facebook (click here to see if anyone you know likes them), and more than 400,000 unique visitors have stopped by the site.

More than ⅓ of the site’s readers are under the age of 25, 40% of visitors don’t have a college degree, roughly 70% of readers are men, and nearly 80% of visitors to the site are white. More or less, it’s exactly who you’d expect to visit a site like this.

I read through their entire archive, and I’d like to highlight the 20 trolliest examples of trolling to have ever trolled. Most articles are NSFW for content purposes, and consider a trigger warning for misogyny, rape apologist language, transphobia, homophobia, and cissexism to be applied to all of the below.

In order to keep my out faith in humanity alive, I really do have to believe this is just a collective of trolls. I shudder at the thought that there actually are people who believe the ridiculous, sexist, delusional things that get posted to that site.

image – Return Of Kings