My dude. There was a #killallmen hashtag that trended in 2020. It was covered in major left leaning magazines like Atlantic and Vox. So of course the right pick it up to pull more men into their coalition.
I don't care if it was ironic. You can't build consensus with that kind of bombastic language. The wsj recently had an article on how men are moving to the right[1]. The left needs to avoid identity politics and focus on material interests that help everyone for the sake of politics.
This isn't all some right wing propaganda effort. It's also the left's own goal.
No one is saying militancy doesn't exist. Only that it's not synonymous with feminism. The illiberal powers will always try to associate a movement with it's most extreme members. It's the equivalent of labeling conservatives as Nazis because Nazis exist at the fringe of conservatism.
it behooves people to reject the toxic members of their community though.
If someone comes up with "Kill all Jews", as a right wing person you should kick them out and shun them.
Right now it's much more like "I'll take all the help I can get" and those equivalent statements are not denigrated from both sides, so of course everyone understands it as accepted positions.
I think that is a problem of the right for sure but the left also suffers from moral elitism and this is evident in their choice of terminology. Ultimately I think all of these issues are much more complex than their labels suggest and it is a product of the information age requiring neat buzzwords to profit off of confirmation bias. There were times when people discussed the ideas themselves and used fewer catchall labels like feminist, woke, snowflake, antifa, etc. For the record, I am a feminist but can’t deny that it has a culture just like any other movement and that means some people feel othered
Feminism doesn't have a specific culture and beliefs. Like any other social and political movement, it has a diverse and often internally divisive set of ideologies sharing common general axioms. Of course, one can still be feminist without being "militant," what ever that actually means.