There were no protestors outside the modest lakefront veteran’s lodge in St. Clair Shores, just outside Detroit, Michigan. The very official-sounding First International Conference On Men’s Issues was relocated here from a downtown hotel, because of what the organizers alleged were “death threats,” but was later reported by local media to be space limitations. By the time yesterday’s planned 3pm “press conference” got going 25 minutes late, there were only about 30 people in the audience, most (but not all) white middle-aged men. A handful of them were reporters. The rest were true believers in a “War on Men.” There was a disco ball in the center of the hall, draped with white paper streamers.

“Point the camera that way and that way only,” said one of the three security guards armed with superfluous walkie talkies, reprimanding someone taking video footage of the attendees, which was prohibited. The organizers introduced the speakers at great lengths, taking pride in their various appearances on Fox News. A Voice For Men founder and conference organizer Paul Elam stated that the cop cars parked outside were there because of more death threats (1:59:30 mark on AVfM YouTube):

This is where i have to be particularly blunt. When you drove in here today to the parking lot, you saw a police presence, because we became under death threats. For this conference, this panel of people.

“I’m getting tired of the death threats,” shouted a staff member.

Outside, I spoke to St. Clair Shores Officer David Burmeister about the alleged death threats. He said that no specific threats have been made at all. The cops were contracted to be there by A Voice For Men. It appeared that they weren’t there to protect them from specific and imminent danger, but to give the illusion of it.

St. Clair Shores Police

Below are direct quotes from the panelists — six females, five males fervently engaged in “the war for men’s human rights” against an “Evil Empire” of “highly-organized radical feminists” hellbent on “feminizing” every facet of law. They include repeated mentions of urgent “misandry” issues such as allegedly widespread false paternity allegations and unflattering male buffoon characters on television sitcoms.

Warren Farrell, Ph.D

The first thing that happens when I mention that there’s a boy crisis, is I can see in people’s minds that they’re not really sure that I’m maybe not exaggerating and so let me share just a tip of the iceberg evidence about the boy crisis.

Women don’t marry men in unemployment lines.

Millions of boys are getting their dopamine fixes from performing in video games, but not performing in real life.

With the increased amount of video porn, boys who are failures to launch, who aren’t doing well in school, notice that not many girls are interested in them. But they have an easy escape: Video porn, 250 million options… free.

I predict that the 21st century will be the century of the new man. Yes, the century of the new man is about a half century behind the era of the new woman.

Men questioning work full time is to this day extremely difficult especially if the man is successful.

Why, when girls are doing much better than boys, do we have a White House council on women and girls, but no White House council on men and boys?

Paul Elam

Men are 93% of all workplace fatalities. They’re currently 97% of combat deaths. They’re the majority of the homeless.

Men are sentenced on average to 66% more time in prison than women for the same crime, and are twice as likely to be incarcerated in the first place, again, for the first time. It is a gap even wider than that between black and white.

Men are subject to a family court system so corrupt and biased it represents the biggest rollback of civil right since Jim Crow. It is a system that destroys the lives of men and children by severing their bond with calculated indifference. Parental alienation is real and rampant. Sadly there is now a profit to be made in the destruction of our families.

Under the false banner of the best interests of the child, fathers are forced to pay child support as though it were mafia protection money.

Men are starting to abandon the idea of marriage in the first place. It’s a form of risk management for their lives.

Despite a compelling body of evidence, that men and boys are victims of domestic and sexual assault at rates far exceeding what most would think, the current gender paradigm ignores this and dedicates to resources all but exclusively to women.

Diana Thompson

I’ve seen many of the grievances men and father’s face; blocked visitation and unenforced visitation orders, move-away moms who use geography to drive father’s out of their children’s lives, acceptance by the court of false accusations of domestic violence or child abuser, especially as a basis for denying custody or even contact between the father and child.

Our current family court system is very adversarial. The only winner being the billion dollar divorce industry paid for by our children, even though study after study shows that children without fathers are at higher risk for social pathology such as: criminality, teen pregnancy, and drug use and there’s many more.

The Father’s Rights movement is a growing civil rights movement of our era. Men have the right to their own voices and to discuss their issues free from feminist oversight supervision and disruption.

Suzanne Venker

Today, equality is billed as interchangeability also known as an equal representation of men and women in virtually every social arena, including sports, which we all know is a field dominated by men.

Men and women don’t need to behave in identical fashion.

The lack of respect for men is palpable. The message coming from the media, Hollywood, and America’s universities, is that men are superfluous at best, dangerous at worst.

America routinely paints a portrait of the idiot husband whose wife is smarter and more capable than he. That is a war!

It’s time to stop talking about overturning a patriarchy that doesn’t exist.

Carnell Smith

We know that when it comes to matters of sex, lies and all those things in the heart, that sometimes men lie. And by shock, sometimes women lie about the relationships they’re in and the resulting pregnancies, however the law treats the situations differently.

How dare me to insist and believe that the mother, who has other intimate partners, I’m crazy enough to believe she is capable of naming the guy or guys, that could be the children’s father?

Why in 2014 are still having issues with paternity fraud? And I will tell you why. Because getting the truth of paternity was never the objective. The objective was to establish child support order against a male. Which means teen boys, single men and married men are at risk.

Dr. Helen Smith

We hear so much about men in a negative way. For years we’ve heard that men need to man up, they need to quit being Peter Pans and man-children and get married, take jobs and do the things that society wants.

But in my research I found that the problem isn’t that men are immature, it’s that men are rational actors.

The rewards for being married, having kids and doing the responsible thing have gone down, and the legal and the social risks have gone up.

We’ve seen women with increased reproductive freedom, married men often require a note from their wives before a doctor will even perform a vasectomy.

There’s a lot of institutional bias against men that we don’t even think about.

Instead of being honored as husbands and fathers, as Suzanne pointed out, men are stereotyped as losers and goofballs in everything from TV sitcoms to commercials.

69 percent of media portrayals of men are negative. They are seen as rapists, perverts, weirdos and just mean. If you want men to do the responsible thing, you need to make it a more appealing proposition.

Calvin Mann

Neglect is an all time high for young males of all types.

How can you go to a war when the troops [men] are sick?

Dr. Tara Palmatier

I’m on the front lines, I’m trying to clean up the carnage.

I help men through a chaotic and dysfunctional family court system that often time they have no idea about the buzzsaw that they’re about to walk in.

I help them to heal and pick up the pieces after they’ve gone through the trauma of family court.

Erin Pizzey

As the feminists organized themselves, and they are extremely highly-organized, they moved into every… they feminized the judiciary, they feminized all the service agencies, schools, universities, and now we see 40 years of wreckage above us.

I came across the Voice for Men by accident, online, and I heaved a huge sigh of relief. Here for once where men, roughly, rudely and in many cases crudely, saying we have had enough, we are coming back, and we are fighting. And I am very proud to be part of everything they do.

We need to unpick what I’ve always called the Evil Empire. We need to, not even engage in this so-called fraudulent gender war. It’s all been a matter of fraud.

Across the Western world have paid for this fraudulent movement on the backs of very fragile women and children. And that’s all I have to say.

Anne Cools

Politics is not a game for beginners. It’s a ruthless game and that is what I do.

I had to break through that huge big wall that monster notion that women are truth tellers. I had to engage that demon that women are truth tellers and that women are morally superior to men, women are naturally predisposed to virtue. That their morally is superior, that men are after all morally inferior if not morally defective really. I’ve had to break through all those mythologies.

Mike Buchanan

We had for more than 30 years across much of the developed world, unholy alliances between states and radical feminism.

Now radical feminism is without doubt a female supremacy ideology that’s driven by misandry; a the hatred for men and boys.

Legislation is routinely drafted to advantage women and disadvantage men.

Boys are being relentlessly disadvantaged by an evermore feminized education system.

Apparently, we need more female engineers. I’ve never quite worked out why.

It’s time to end divorce as a route to financial enrichment.

We’re calling for compulsory paternity testing at birth, so at long last we’ll find out just what the rate is.

I think this conference will be seen as a landmark event in the war for men’s human rights.

(Photos: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)