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Donald Trump and the Men’s Rights Movement: It’s Complicated

by DanStringfield Posted on May 20, 2016

Mother Jones

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At a Trump campaign rally last week in Spokane, Washington, Donald Trump slammed Hillary Clinton for “playing the women’s card” to gain campaign support. When citing Clinton’s criticisms of him, Trump mimicked the candidate, straightening his shoulders and flattening his voice to convey a cold, prim demeanor. He concluded the performance with the pronouncement: “All of the men, we’re petrified to speak to women anymore…You know what? The women get it better than we do, folks. They get it better than we do.”

The audience erupted into cheers and applause.

Moments like this one—where Trump’s unabashed political incorrectness and machismo are on display—resonate with many of his supporters. But his message in Spokane made headlines in part because the notion that men have it worse off than women echoes a central tenet of the Men’s Rights Movement (MRM), a network of activists who believe that in many contexts, men are a disadvantaged class. New York magazine even offered its readers a quiz: “Who Said It, Trump or a Men’s Rights Activist?”

It seems like a no-brainer that men’s rights activists would admire Trump’s rhetoric on gender and thus support his candidacy for president. But several leaders of the movement who spoke to Mother Jones are ambivalent about Trump, at best—one has even donated to Hillary Clinton—and say that many others in their community haven’t been won over by Trump’s bluster. But why do many members of a group that would appear to be his natural constituency not support Trump for president?

“It’s nice to hear him say” things that align with the men’s rights movement says Dean Esmay, now a contributor to and formerly the managing editor of A Voice for Men, a blog and men’s rights discussion hub, but those talking points aren’t enough. “Somebody had the guts to say that men have it tougher than women, it gives you an emotional rush,” he continues. “But when you listen, where’s the meat behind it? What’s he offering? I see nothing.” Trump isn’t offering much by way of policy substance, Esmay says, both on issues key to MRAs, such as incarceration or the treatment of fathers in family courts, or on others.

“Why do I think he would make a bad president?” asks Esmay. “Because he is a loose cannon. You don’t know what he’s going to do. We have a student loan debt bubble that’s going to burst. We have a middle class that’s imploding. And Donald Trump is going to fix it all by saying ‘Believe it, baby?’ Give me a break.”

Warren Farrell, widely-considered the father of the men’s right’s movement and the author of one of its foundational texts, The Myth of Male Power, says he’s a “very strong supporter” of Hillary Clinton. He has attended several campaign events for Clinton and donated the allowed maximum of $2700 to her primary campaign. Still, Farrell says he thinks Hillary is “the worst candidate in recent history, in my lifetime, on gender issues from the perspective of understanding and having compassion for men.” But Farrell, who has a Ph.D. in political science, still supports Hillary in part because, he says, “Even though I care about men’s issues a lot, I care about this country being led by the most competent person.”

“Its very hard for me,” he continues, “because Trump does have a clue about what’s happening with men’s issues. But Trump is the quintessential example of the immature man and men at their worst.”

Farrell falls into a more liberal faction of the men’s rights community, says Gwyneth Williams, a professor of politics at Webster University who also studies men’s movements. But some of Farrell’s more conservative colleagues also have serious concerns about Trump.

“I think Trump was right on for saying that men are afraid of upsetting women,” says Paul Elam, the CEO and founder of A Voice for Men. But Elam notes that he doesn’t buy that Trump would be “some sort of savior for” the men’s rights movement, and that there are other Trump positions he finds especially worrisome.

“Trump talks a lot about building a wall and the outlandish proposition that he’s going to stop drugs from entering the country—which is impossible” says Elam. He’s wary of a candidate who would further criminalize drugs, leading to greater incarceration of men. While Trump hasn’t directly promised this, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, one of Trump’s surrogates and a potential vice-presidential pick, has said he supports the criminalization of marijuana use. That’s why both Elam and Esmay say that the possibility that in a Trump administration Chris Christie might be elevated to a position of power might push them to vote for Hillary.

But many men’s rights activists are definitely not Clinton fans: Both Elam and Esmay referred to her as a “lizard” in speaking with Mother Jones, and men’s rights forums on Reddit and elsewhere are filled with anti-Hillary sentiments. But in spite of their Clinton scorn, many MRAs say that it’s obvious that Trump is more swagger than substance. “Trump doesn’t have the ability to successfully call out Hillary on her sexism. He is to sic crass and doesn’t grasp the issues,” writes one user on the men’s rights subreddit. Another sums things up: “Trump VS Clinton. Whoever wins, America (and the world?) loses.”

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Donald Trump and the Men’s Rights Movement: It’s Complicated

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Are Solar-Powered Homes Jacking Up Everyone Else’s Electric Bills?

by MorganZEEZ Posted on March 25, 2015

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Mr. Biscuit

Solar power is having a major moment. It’s growing faster than any other energy source—in 2014, a new system was installed in the United States every three minutes—while the price of a typical panel has dropped 63 percent since 2010. By 2016, experts predict that solar will be as cheap or cheaper than conventional electricity in most states. But solar companies are warning that the boom could soon end, if utilities and some Republican state lawmakers have their way.

Power companies’ beef with solar boils down to a clever payment system that was largely responsible for bringing about the solar boom in the first place—a practice known as net metering. Most solar homes aren’t actually “off the grid”: They stay connected to transmission lines, using regular power when their panels aren’t operating (like at night). But they also feed electricity into the grid when they produce more than they can use.

Sounds great, right? Not really, say the power companies. They pay solar homeowners for their excess kilowatts—but argue homeowners aren’t paying their fair share for grid maintenance. That has utilities in revolt, and the fight has reached a fever pitch in Northern California, where the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric, serves more residential solar homes than any other.

Like many utilities, PG&E charges customers on a multitiered price scheme—the more electricity you use, the more you pay per unit. That can incentivize power hogs to conserve, but it can also mean that a poor family of four in California’s AC-dependent Central Valley can end up paying rates far above the national average (and what it actually costs PG to serve them), while a Google-employed bachelor millionaire gets a bargain. If that tech dude decides to install solar panels, he pays even less—even though he still uses the grid.

To be fair, customers who generate their own electricity also save the utilities money, causing less wear and tear on transmission lines and less power lost along the way. But a study commissioned by California’s Legislature found that in the Golden State at least, these benefits do not fill the hole left by lost revenue. Net metering cost the state’s privately owned utilities $254 million in 2012, a price tag estimated to jump to $1.1 billion per year by 2020 as an estimated 500,000 more homes go solar.

The solar industry shot back with a study of its own, arguing that those costs are minor compared with the roughly $32 billion that California’s major utilities earned in 2013 and that, for PG&E, the problem is not really caused by solar but by the huge gap—about threefold—between the company’s lowest and highest rate tiers. Since solar is attractive to high-tier customers, who stand to save the most money, each one who saves by installing a system is a big blow to the utility’s bottom line. Smooth out the rate tiers, the study suggests, and the problem disappears.

In 2013, California lawmakers told the state’s utilities to do just that. PG&E’s proposed solution, set to be voted on by state regulators in the spring, would reduce the number of price tiers and add a fixed monthly grid maintenance surcharge. The problem is that the fixed charge will erode the cost advantages of going solar, since you can’t avoid it just by using less power from the grid. Sanjay Ranchod, a policy analyst for the solar installer SolarCity, sees the change as a sneaky way for the utilities to kneecap the competition. Imposing a fixed monthly charge, he says, is “one way you can inhibit the growth of distributed solar.”

Similar battles are playing out from Utah to Wisconsin, as utilities fight to roll back net metering, restructure their rate systems, or impose special fees for solar users—and it’s easy to see why power companies are sweating. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates that the gap between the cost of maintaining the US grid and the available funds will grow by $11 billion per year through 2020, since the revenue streams utilities have traditionally relied on to pay for those costs—investments in big power plants they can recover through increased sales—are drying up.

John Farrell, a program director at the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, argues that to succeed down the line, utilities will have to act more like grid managers, connecting power from a host of sources (much like data flowing into a server from many places) and investing in technology that helps consumers use power more efficiently. “There’s no outcome 10 or 20 years from now that looks anything like what utilities have been before,” Farrell says. “It’s going to happen anyway, and you just have to choose whether you’re gonna like it or not.”

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Are Solar-Powered Homes Jacking Up Everyone Else’s Electric Bills?

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