By Lisa Gutierrez
The Kansas City Star
WWR Article Summary (tl;dr) Pieter Hanson’s mom’s tweet inspired a furious round of parody “This is MY son” memes starring everyone from Donald Trump Jr. and the son from “Psycho” to Food Network star Guy Fieri.
The Kansas City Star
Dear mom, stop tweeting about me.
Seriously. Stop tweeting about me.
Signed, your son.
Thanks to his mom, Pieter Hanson is spending hours telling reporters that he didn’t know she had tweeted a picture of him in his Navy uniform with a politically charged tweet that Twitter users are roundly mocking.
“This is MY son,” his mom wrote in a tweet on Saturday that’s now deleted but lives on in screengrabs.
“He graduated #1 in boot camp. He was awarded the USO award. He was #1 in A school. He is a gentleman who respects women. He won’t go on solo dates due to the current climate of false sexual accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind. I VOTE. #HimToo.”
The #HimToo hashtag took on a political life of its own during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation drama as a backlash to the #MeToo movement, according to Wired magazine.
“It’s become the #AllLivesMatter of sexual assault: The hashtag identifies accused men as victims, using the same power-in-numbers technique that made #MeToo a force to recast the movement as a widespread feminist witch hunt, forcing men to walk on eggshells,” wrote Wired.
Despite what his mom’s tweet implies, Hanson reportedly wants no part of that.
He told The Washington Post that he was so angry about the tweet that he couldn’t even talk to his mom about it. He asked his grandmother and younger brother to ask her to delete the tweet, the Post reported, and she went even further, deleting her entire Twitter account.
He told the Post he is an ally of the #MeToo movement and, unlike what his mom told the world, he’s not afraid to go on dates alone.
“It doesn’t represent me at all,” the 32-year-old Navy veteran and University of Central Florida student told the Post. “I love my mom to death, but boy . . . I’m still trying to wrap my head around all this.”
His mom’s tweet inspired a furious round of parody “This is MY son” memes starring everyone from Donald Trump Jr. and the son from “Psycho” to Food Network star Guy Fieri.
For all comic intents and purposes, #HimToo has been hijacked.
Hanson’s brother, Jon, rushed to defend him to the world.
“My brother is trending on twitter because of my moms ridiculous tweet. I’m a mixture of laughing hard and feeling bad for him. #HimToo,” Jon tweeted.
Jon later tweeted that their mom “claimed her account was hacked and she didn’t tweet that. I don’t believe that for a second. She said she is calling the police.”
He also tweeted that he told his brother, who wasn’t on Twitter, to sign up, which Hanson did on Monday using the handle @Thatwasmymom.
He had nearly 13,000 followers as of Tuesday morning.
“Sometimes the people we love do things that hurt us without realizing it,” he wrote in his first tweet. “Let’s turn this around. I respect and #BelieveWomen. I never have and never will support #HimToo. I’m a proud Navy vet, Cat Dad and Ally.”
Hanson’s first tweets included a picture of his brother, Cooper, “a child survivor of non hodgkin lymphoma and my personal hero” — and his cats.
