Science 'Splains: The GerManosphere

In yet another public-private partnership™ (fascism), the German branch of the Institute of Strategic Dialogue declares German men to be a pathological problem

And thus we crawl down yet another rabbit-hole: did you know that there’s something like a ‘GerManosphere’? If you didn’t, well, please allow me to elucidate with references to specifics.

All non-English content comes to you in my translation, with emphases and [snark] added.

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A few days ago, I noticed a seemingly absurd, if eye-catching, piece on Austrian state broadcaster ORF’s ‘Science’ (sic) website (9 May 2025):

How the ‘Manosphere’ Radicalises Young People

Experts warn of the ‘manosphere’ in social networks—misogynistic groups that spread destructive images of men and radicalise young people. A new study for Germany has analysed the extent to which misogynist groups are networked with each other and where they stand politically.

That sounded…well, intriguing, isn’t it?

I’ll spare you the further particulars of that ‘Science’ article (for the time being), for it’s all about bad™ role models, such as Andrew Tate (not a fan) who is placed in the direct context of the Netflix show™ ‘Adolescence’ (which, let’s not forget, is an entirely fictional thing).

These things are, of course, so relevant that the following aspects are listed specifically (and, of course, are deemed very dangerous™) as follows:

The ‘Manosphere’ is made up of several digitally networked, anti-feminist groups and ideologies. In addition to the Incels, it consists of, among others:

• Masculinity coaches such as Andrew Tate, who tell young men on social media how to behave as a dominant and ambitious ‘alpha’ man or aloof and egotistical ‘sigma’ man [as an aside, ORF’s ‘Science’ team here links to—Wikipedia]

• ‘Pick-Up Artists’ (PUA) are dating coaches who give manipulative tips online, how to humiliate women, and get them into bed [huhum, I’m unsure about the logic here: am I supposed to ‘humiliate women’ to ‘get them into bed’? Now, as a man, husband, and father of two daughters, I’m unsure if that kinda works as advertised…]

• militant men’s and fathers’ rights activists who feel discriminated against by the law [apparently, it would seem, that these aspects could be improved upon yet we might need to talk about family legislation and court practices]

• the radical group ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ (MGTOW), which avoids all contact with women because they are supposedly parasites on men

With these preliminaries settled for the time being (as far as they are necessary for what follows), let’s take a closer look at the ‘new study for Germany’ that ‘has analysed the extent to which misogynist groups are networked with each other and where they stand politically’.

‘Mapping the GerManosphere’

To their credit (lol), the ORF’s Science (sic) team has linked the below content, which is found on the website of the so-called ‘Institute for Strategic Dialogue’ (hence ISD) and bears the amazing title ‘Mapping the GerManosphere’.

Here’s a bit from the ‘study’, which isn’t published yet (due in May, ORF noted) but one of its authors, Dominik Hammer, will present it during the upcoming ‘Conference of the Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy’, to take place at Queen Mary’s University in London on 9-10 June 2025; there I also found the following abstract:

The pilot study entitled ‘Mapping the GerManosphere’ is the first study to comprehensively analyse and map the misogynist ‘Mannosphäre’ on the German-speaking internet. The ‘Mannosphäre’, like the international Manosphere is a collective term for movements such as “incels”, “pick-up artists” and “men’s rights activists”. These groups propagate misogyny, radically reject gender equality and a liberal-democratic social order [as if all these kinds of deviant behaviours are of equal importance…]. They are united by a belief in natural gender inequality and male supremacy [no room for the Patriarchy™? I’m kinda shocked…]. This ideological background [in the singular, no less] enables the online rooms of the Manosphere to serve as the antechamber of extremist movements [as far as I understand these words, whatever goes on in these chat rooms or the like may be impolite and offensive (and then some), but it’s apparently not a crime]. Employing qualitative methods and social network analysis, research for the study ‘Mapping the GerManosphere’ found, which platforms Mannosphäre actors are present on, how their network is structured and which central narratives the different groups are spreading [oh, this is kinda down my alley as a history professor: note the term ‘qualitative methods’, which simply means that there’s no quantifiable data behind this study™; social network analysis is, if done well, a kind of illustration or visualisation of (cor)relational databases, but since the author admitted that there’s no data in the first place, it’s just ghibberish] The study was conducted by the Cluster of Excellence ‘Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS)’ at Freie Universität Berlin in collaboration with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) as part of the transdisciplinary research project ‘Misogyny on the Net’.

So, with these absurdities masquerading as (Political) Science™ (are you surprised?), here’s a bit more from the ISD’s dedicated website:

The project ‘Mapping the GerManosphere’ is a research project of the Cluster of Excellence Contestations of the Liberal Script (SCRIPTS) at Freie Universität Berlin in cooperation with ISD Germany.

Aims of the Study

As a consortium of eight Berlin research institutions funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2019, SCRIPTS is investigating the current controversies surrounding liberal social orders. The joint pilot study to record and analyse the German-speaking ‘mannosphere’ in detail is intended to provide answers to questions about the size, networking and actors of this milieu and document their influence on social media and the target groups concerned.

The findings should help to develop recommendations for dealing with gender-based online violence and identify the need for support for those affected.

And here’s a bit about the study™ itself:

Using ethnographic analysis [so, we’re looking at ethnic Germans only, right?], the most important actors and digital spaces of the German-speaking mannosphere are mapped [basically, names/pictures of select individuals] with a view to their networking and influence. These include various movements, including so-called incels (involuntary celibates) who blame women and feminism for their loneliness, pick-up artists who teach men manipulative ‘seduction tricks’, and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), who see society as a ‘gynocracy’ and want to renounce the treatment of women.

However, this also includes RedPillers, who justify male superiority with pseudo-scientific interpretations of the theory of evolution, men’s rights activists, and other actors. The pilot study is based on the analysis of these profiles in order to identify the prevailing narratives and strategies [basically, whatever input is ‘mapped’ is derived from publicly available online profiles: where’s the difference to a mediaeval pillory? Oh, what we’re doing is Science™].

An accompanying literature review sheds light on the current state of research and supports the understanding of the historical development of the GerManosphere [everything is historical, isn’t it?]. Guided interviews with experts from the fields of extremism and gender studies supplement the findings in order to formulate practical recommendations for combating gender-based online violence.

Basically, what the authors did was look up popular online profiles and see if they are (somehow) link-able on a ‘map’, did a literature review of what experts™ wrote, and spoke to some of these experts™.

Oh, they also did ‘formulate practical recommendations for combating gender-based online violence’.

Is this the last word on this issue? Of course not, for that might indicate the end of the grift. Hence, the results™ of this study™:

The ‘Mapping the GerManosphere’ project serves as a preliminary study for in-depth research and lays the foundation for further projects in the field of gender-based online violence.

The results should serve as a basis for the development of prevention and intervention measures dedicated to the protection of democratic values and the support of those affected.

The Science™ in action.

Also, note that the Austrian state broadcaster ORF’s Science™ team wrote about the conclusive nature of these findings.

Legacy media™ in action.

And with these notions out of the way, shall we take another look?

What is ISD and Who Funds Them?

Would it surprise you if I told you that I’ve looked at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s ‘History’ on their website:

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has worked closely with German partner organisations since it was founded in 2006. Particularly noteworthy is the trustful cooperation of our CEO, Sasha Havlicek, with the German government in the Policy Planners Network, which ensured better international coordination of counter-extremism efforts from 2008-2019.

In light of the massive rise in hybrid democracy threats, we decided to establish ISD Germany gGmbH and deepen our work in the DACH region and the European Union. In summer 2020, Huberta von Voss opened the Berlin office as Managing Director and was quickly able to build on ISD’s existing international relationships.

Here’s from the parent institution’s ISD Global ‘About’ section:

Our global team of 150 researchers, subject matter and policy experts, former government and law enforcement officials, frontline practitioners [I don’t know what that is], and technologists have kept ISD’s work systematically ahead of the curve, to safeguard communities and democratic process.

ISD has offices in London, Berlin, Amman and Washington DC, and regional Strong Cities Network Hubs serving East & Southern Africa, Southeast Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Western Balkans.

So, would you care to guess who founded the ISD? As per their Wikipedia entry, we learn the following (I kept the references for your perusal):

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) is a political advocacy organization founded in 2006 by Sasha Havlicek and George Weidenfeld and headquartered in London, United Kingdom…

ISD partners with a number of Western governments, including agencies in Canada,^[6] Norway,^[7] Germany, the United Kingdom,^[8] New Zealand,^[9] Australia, the United States,^[10] and the European Commission.^[11] It also works on funded projects with technology companies and organisations such as Google,^[12] Microsoft,^[13] Meta,^[14] [you are the company you keep] and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.^[15]

Other institutional partners include the Global Disinformation Index,^[16] the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society,^[17] Institut Montaigne,^[18] the British Council,^[19] the German Marshall Fund,^[20] the University of Ontario Institute of Technology,^[6] and the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism.^[21] [what a who is who, eh?]

Funding for the ISD has come from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation,^[22] the Omidyar Network,^[23] the Gen Next Foundation,^[24] and the Open Society Foundation.^[25] [you’re not that surprised, are you?]

To recap: ISD was co-funded by the ‘lifelong Zionist’ (as Wikipedia has it) George Weidenfeld (1919-2016), a sometime (in 1949) worked for Israeli president Chaim Weizmann, and co-founder of the publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson, a British company whose published works include,

Among many other significant books, it published Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1959) and Nicolson's Portrait of a Marriage (1973), a frank biography of his mother Vita Sackville-West and father Harold Nicolson. In its early years Weidenfeld also published nonfiction works by Isaiah Berlin, Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Rose Macaulay, and novels by Mary McCarthy and Saul Bellow. Later it published titles by world leaders and historians, along with contemporary fiction and glossy illustrated books

As an aside, Weidenfeld & Nicolson is also the publisher of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s acclaimed history of the ‘long’ 19th century; the Austrian-Jewish George Weidenfeld was also a close contact of former Austrian career diplomat and president (in office 1986-92) Kurt Waldheim, of notorious infamy due to his service, with the Wehrmacht, in the Second World War.

Following allegations of war crimes by the World Jewish Congress in spring 1986, the so-called ‘Waldheim Affair’ eventually resulted in him being placed on the US ‘Watchlist’, the strange notions of Mr. Waldheim’s WW2 service not having been an obstacle to his two terms as Secretary-General of the United Nations (in office 1972-81) notwithstanding. Moreover, we note that the Austria-Jewish emigré George Weidenfeld also published Waldheim’s memoirs from that period, entitled In the Eye of the Storm (1985). But I digress.

Nowhere in ISD’s ‘about’ section are there indications about their funding, hence we must presume, I fear, that this GONGO’s funds come from the afore-mentioned Western governments and philanthropic (sic) foundations.

Moreover, while I don’t want to bore you with inane comments from one or the other researcher™ working on the ‘GerManosphere’, such as Research Manager Dominik Hammer or the ISD’s Director of Programs Sina Laubenstein (but if you have some time to spare, you might be intrigued to read this interview with the latter, which is replete with virtue-signalling boilerplate ‘we must defend our democracy™’ nonsense).

What is interesting, though, to figure out what kind of political-ideological bent the Institute for Strategic Dialogue may have (ahem), though, is the telling affiliation of certain individuals with one or the other party-political institution.

Take, for example, Sina Laubenstein’s connections, as listed in her ISD profile:

As Programme Director of ISD Germany, Sina Laubenstein is responsible for the design and implementation of the regional strategy in Germany. Among other things, she is driving forward the strategic expansion of the ISD portfolio in Europe. Her tasks also include coordinating co-operation between the various international ISD offices.

In addition, Sina Laubenstein is leading a project to monitor gender-based digital violence around the 2024 European elections and is co-leading the Coalition to Counter Online-Antisemitism (CCOA). In recent years, Sina Laubenstein has advised on the development of a law against digital violence, including in dialogue with members of the Bundestag and federal ministries. Until 2021, she also led an international project to combat hate speech online and is a recognised expert in this field [by whom? For what, I’m tempted to ask…] She was also involved in the curriculum development of the Business Council for Democracy (BC4D).

Let’s start with what’s there, shall we?

• the Business Council for Democracy (source) includes many partners, including Airbus (also builds military equipment), pharmaceutical-chemical giants Bayer (owner of Monsanto), Roche, and Boehringer-Ingelheim, Bosch, Charité group (they employ Christian Drosten, among others) and the Robert Koch Institute, Deutsche Bahn, Daimler Trucks, the German Stock Exchange, Fraport (ground handling across airports worldwide), Hapag-Lloyd, Lufthansa, Mercedes-Benz, the Press Office of the Federal Gov’t, one of the country’s main unions, Verdi, and Volkswagen, among many others.

• the BC4D itself is ‘a joint initiative from the Hertie Stiftung, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and ISD Germany’, and positions itself as

  ‘an innovative opportunity for adults, who rarely receive the chance to take courses on digital civic culture. Here, employees can learn more about the spread of hate speech, targeted disinformation and conspiracy theories and discover what they can do to counter such harms and how they can protect others around them.

• The Coalition to Counter Online-Antisemitism (CCOA; website) is basically a bit like the BC4D, albeit way less transparent in terms of funding; they only mention ISD and ISD Germany as their ‘partners’.

What Ms. Laubenstein omits from her bio, though, is something else:

According to the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung’s website—that would be the SPD think tank (it’s a foundation, presumably for tax-saving reasons)—Ms. Laubenstein was a Referent, or graduate employee, with the SPD-affiliated institution where she wrote (writes?) policy papers, commented on ‘online hate’ and the like, as well as did consulting on these topics.

‘Since 2016’, Ms Laubenstein is also working, or has been working (it’s unclear from information online) with the so-called Neue Medienmacher*innen, which translates into something like fully accredited ‘new media-makers’.

Neue Medienmacher*innen in turn are a committed, self-righteous bunch:

We are the New German Media Makers. A nationwide network of journalists with and without a history of immigration. We are committed to good reporting and a diverse media workforce: in front of and behind the cameras and microphones. At the editorial desks. And also in the planning staffs, management floors and supervisory bodies.

It will perhaps not surprise you that the affiliated journos™ are paid mostly by—the German taxpayer. According to their most recent financial disclosure report (from 2023), here’s where their (sic) income (sic) came from:

öffentliche Hand = public funding

93.61% of their 2023 income™ came from the taxpayer via the federal gov’t, which back then was led by the SPD in cahoots with the Greens and the FDP.

This is why I wrote that these journos™ are fully accredited—because they participate in the same grift as the ‘old’ (sic) media. We note, in passing, that former members of the ISD Germany’s advisory board included consultant Roland Berger, Matthias Döpfner (CEO of the Springer Group), and Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, former CSU Defence Minister of Germany, among others.

New media makers, my arse.

Bottom Lines

In other words: this is an old-new grift, with no morals nor shame—and whose protagonists pretend to be researchers and policy advisors merely ‘asking questions’ and ‘doing research’ (which is, of course, what The Science™ does).

Here is some background on the red-green-leftist dominance of media reporting in Germany, old and new alike:

The Dirty Business of Manufacturing Media Reporting

In the end, this is but another example of the pervasive and corrosive effects of these ostensibly-neutral (looking) efforts to mask partisan hacks as researchers™.

Funding streams are typically the give-away, yet the main problem is elsewhere: for the greatest part, online ‘hate’ is just ‘hate’, which is neither nice nor polite, but generally covered by freedom of speech legislation or on constitutional grounds (notable exceptions are quite narrowly circumscribed and vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction).

What these crusaders and their ilk are doing, though, is they are pushing for the criminalisation of online ‘hate’ with the express aim to censor such ‘harmful’ speech.

Now, I’m not in favour of stupid or such expressions, but censorship laws, once enacted, bring with them mission creep. History is full of such experiences, and it introduces staggering, and growing, amounts of arbitrariness into what is erroneously labelled ‘free speech’.

And it’s a slippery slope: once instituted, bureaucrats are hired, expert consultants are kept on retained, police and the judiciary are re-trained, and they will, once the original aim is fulfilled, go on a rampage to identify new targets.

These will likely be introduced into the various national or even regional (EU) contexts courtesy of the internationalist partners, such as ISD Global or any other related/friendly fellow warriors.

In other words: the people behind these studies™ and research clusters™ are a kind of globalist fifth column bent on furthering the aims of someone else.

As is often the case, many of these individuals don’t necessarily know that they’re doing someone else’s bidding.

Lenin use the term ‘useful idiots’ for such wilfully blind yet helpful people or groups. There’s little that would surprise me if these GONGOs and their ilk also fall into this—or the other: ‘useless idiots’—category.

Stupid Watergate's 'Useless Idiots'

One way or another, this is merely yet another grift—it might be astroturfing, but it’s our astroturfing, sayeth the German gov’t.