Robert Stacy McCain salutes the downfall of #GamerGate enemy Max Read. It’s good to see that conservatives, who are also hated by SJWs, are finally beginning to grasp that #GamerGate is an important development in the cultural war. There is a lot they could learn from it, to be sure, and they would be wise to adopt its 4GW tactics. However, the neocons and GOP conservatives, and in particular, the self-serving famewhores among them, should be warned that any attempts to coopt #GamerGate like they did the Tea Party will fail in a brutally spectacular manner.
“Never underestimate your enemy,” is a maxim of military strategy. Before you decide to go to war on the Internet, first consider the fate of Max Read, who was riding high as editor of Gawker until he decided that insulting #GamerGate was a smart move. He chose poorly.
When a friend, Beth Haper, first alerted me to the cultural significance of #GamerGate, I was skeptical. Really? A bunch of gamers were going to expose the bias and corruption of the media? This seemed improbable, but the fact that #GamerGate was arrayed against feminists drew my interest because, of course, I was working on a book about radical feminism’s War on Human Nature. Let us stipulate that #GamerGate is not “political” in the usual Left/Right Democrat/Republican way that Americans typically think about politics. Nevertheless, as fate would have it, the exposure of the Zoe Quinn/Nathan Grayson connection made gamers aware how unscrupulous women could exploit feminist politics and how unprincipled journalists were willing to assist this tawdry little racket. (See “The #GamerGate vs. Gawker War.”)
In war, your allies are whoever is fighting your enemies, and the motives of your allies matter far less than their skill in battle. Say what you will about #GamerGate, they are skilled and determined fighters.
Operation Disrespectful Nod is making believers of anyone who ever made the mistake of underestimating them. Just ask Max Read.
Conservatives should absolutely learn from #GamerGate. Given their own troubles with the SJW-dominated mainstream media, they should study and adopt its tactics, even though many of those tactics, such as the rejection of Narrative and central leadership, and the devotion to truth rather than spin, will be anathema to some of them. What they should do is form their own groups and conduct their own operations; the brilliant exposure of Planned Parenthood is an example of the sort of thing they can do.
#GamerGate is a model, not a vehicle to be captured and steered in a new direction.
But these conservatives with a newfound respect for #GamerGate would do very well to stay out of GG proper, and the conservative media whores should absolutely refrain from following their usual practice of leaping in at the front of the parade and claiming to be leading it. I, for one, haven’t forgotten when shills like Dick Armey, Dana Loesch, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann began proclaiming themselves to be leaders of the Tea Party, or when Joseph Farah wrote The Tea Party Manifesto 18 months after the movement was in full effect. Even at the time, I remember thinking, “do you seriously think you’re going to get away with it?” Then CNN hired Loesch as its “senior Tea Party correspondent”…. The fast and furious entrance of shills was one of the reasons I refrained from ever doing anything more than expressing general sympathy for the Tea Party’s original goals; you may recall I predicted early on that it would end up amounting to nothing.
I’m skeptical that anything of note will come of it. But it’s nice to see the scope of American discontent even so. And anything that the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover can’t be all bad….I’d quite like to see a few Republican politicians punched in the face at these events. The damned whores did NOTHING when they were in power, so to see them attempt to coopt a popular movement in order to retrieve what they threw away is particularly disgusting.
– April 15, 2009
I don’t hear any powerful Republicans showing much concern of the Tea Party turning on them, and more to the point, I see a lot of signs that the Tea Party has already been co-opted. When establishment Republicans are talking about gradual change and bipartisan consolidation while neocons like Sarah Palin and Dana Loesch are hailed as Tea Party “leaders”, it doesn’t take a genius to see that what has happened time and time again to rebellious conservative grass roots organizations is already happening to the Tea Party.
– November 2, 2010
American media conservatives would be wise to understand that #GamerGate is transnational, apolitical, doesn’t support political parties, and won’t hesitate to do what we did to Gawker and turn a Disrespectful Nod in the direction of their advertisers if they try to coopt us or pull that lame sort of self-promoting shill shit.
The Tea Party naively welcomed the conservative shills who coopted their movement and steered it right into the shoals of the Republican Party. #GamerGate hates shills with a passion second only to their hatred of SJWs and has been proactive about how to deal with them from the start. So don’t even think about it unless you want all your hashtags to belong to us and your Twitter feed full of porn courtesy of Mercedes.
To quote an influential #GamerGate document: “No leaders. – This is a 100% shill idea.”
I am the Leader of #GamerGate and so can you.