A fake conservative’s fake history of GamerGate

Neoclown Ekaterina Jung is more concerned with attempting to gatekeep conservatives and keep them away from those unsavory nationalists who might actually try to win rather than go down in graceful defeat than she is in actually addressing any of the actual history in an article that purports – mostly falsely – to explain GamerGate four years later:

Was GamerGate a precursor to the alt-right and did it prepare the ground for Trump’s election?

In a literal sense, the answer to the first part is a clear no: The alt-right as a white nationalist fringe existed at least since 2010, when Richard Spencer launched the Alternative Right website. However, it is true that the alt-right’s online presence skyrocketed in 2015 and that a major vehicle for its attempted mainstreaming was Breitbart, the right-wing site which also embraced GamerGate.

In his perceptive Vox article in 2014, Klein noted that despite the left-of-center politics of most GamerGaters, media treatment of the controversy had been sharply divided along left/right lines: Liberal opinion was “in lockstep against Gamergate,” while some conservatives and critics of the social justice left were sympathetic. Breitbart, in particular, made GamerGate its pet cause, starting with a September 1, 2014 article by the soon-to-be-infamous Milo Yiannopoulos titled “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart.” Yiannopoulos also championed GamerGate on Twitter; with his flashy bad-boy persona, he quickly became a hero to many in the movement, even those who otherwise had no affection for Breitbart’s politics.

It is also true that there were alt-right-type elements within GamerGate. As I cautioned in an early article on the movement, any backlash against extremist versions of feminism and “social justice” is likely to be a magnet for actual misogynists, bigots, and far-right extremists. (Ironically, one example I cited was pro-GamerGate lawyer Mike Cernovich, whose past misogynist tweets had been flagged by a GamerGate opponent — and who went on to become a prominent alt-right figure before eventually attempting to distance himself from the extremist fringe.) There were also the “edgy” teens who came in by way of “/pol/,” the 4chan “Politically Incorrect” board notorious for racist and anti-Semitic memes, and who thought it was good fun to post a cartoon of Sarkeesian as a greedy Jew.

“Since GamerGate didn’t have any sort of people controlling its population, and it was nominally against leftists, it attracted /pol/, obviously,” a Jewish GamerGater who wanted to be identified only as David, a politically centrist tech worker in his late twenties, told me in an email. Yet David also stressed that he saw “very little” anti-Semitism in GamerGate-related conversations and made many Jewish friends through the movement.

Far from setting the tone in GamerGate, its far-right members felt sufficiently embattled to start a separate 8chan forum, /ggrevolt/ (GamerGate Revolt); its denizens often disliked “regular” GamerGaters at least as much as they did “social justice warriors.” Video blogger June Lapine (“Shoe0nHead” on YouTube), a 28-year-old New Yorker who was involved with GamerGate from the start, says that /ggrevolt/ was her “first introduction to what [the] ‘alt-right’ was.”

There is strong evidence that as the alt-right began to gather steam in late 2015, Yiannopoulos tried to channel GamerGate — which he often tried to treat as his private army — in its direction. In January 2016, someone leaked chat logs in which pro-GamerGate blogger Ethan Ralph, who was close to Yiannopoulos, and several of his friends from /ggrevolt/ trashed GamerGate, agreed that the culture war needed to move on to the alt-right, and discussed plans to “reappropriate” GamerGate for the alt-right by purging liberals, who were mocked as “SJW-lite.” These revelations, which coincided with intensifying harassment of GamerGaters by /ggrevolt/ types, rocked what remained of GamerGate and got Ralph banned from the Kotaku In Action board (which did not stop The Daily Dot from calling Ralph a “GamerGate leader” when he was arrested several months later for assaulting a police officer).

In the end, the GamerGate-to-Alt-Right pipeline never materialized. However, a number of previously liberal GamerGaters did get on the “Trump Train” in 2016. At present, still-active GamerGaters to whom I have spoken estimate that about half of the posters on Kotaku In Action are pro-Trump. Some may have fallen for the Breitbart lure; others saw Trump as the answer to “political correctness” or shared his hostility to the mainstream media, which they (correctly) felt had been extremely shoddy and biased in its GamerGate coverage.

The slide toward Trumpism disappointed many GamerGate sympathizers; it also made some left-of-center GamerGaters such as Matt Jarbo — a.k.a. “Mundane Matt,” the YouTuber whose video on the Quinn cronyism allegations helped start the controversy — worry if they’ve helped elect Trump. “I definitely don’t want that on my conscience,” Jarbo joked uneasily in our recent interview. Others, such as fellow YouTuber Lapine, a self-described “proud social democrat,” dismiss the idea as “delusional.” As Lapine puts it, “everyone is always pointing fingers at who is to blame for Trump.”

Jung is just trying to work in a hit piece attacking the nationalist Right that she fears while ostensibly writing about GamerGate. It’s highly amusing that she takes shots at both Milo and Cerno, as well as the Alt Right, without ever mentioning the one individual who was, unlike either Mike or Milo, both a pre-Quinnspiracy OGGer and openly Alt-Right.

But mostly it’s bad journalism; she doesn’t bother to talk to any of the major GamerGate figures or follow-up on what has happened to them since, she has no idea why the backlash to GameJournoPros took place or even mention the exposure of the conspiracy and the mailing list, and she completely fails to make the connection between the tactics successfully utilized by GamerGate and the tactics that are now commonly used for everything from Sad Puppies to consumer lawfare against the SJWs and the social media giants.

Consider what Jung claims to be the moral of the GamerGate story for conservatives:

For critics of the left, the main moral of the story is that it’s important to repudiate unsavory allies.

In other words, please cuck. This is absolutely and entirely false. If you want to understand GamerGate, you’d do far better to simply read chapter 8 of SJWS ALWAYS LIE, Striking Back at the Thought Police, which explained the relationship between GamerGate and Donald Trump back in 2015 at the very start of the chapter.

The reason SJWs have been so successful since the 1990s is that for more than two decades, they simply did not meet with any serious or organized resistance. #GamerGate represented the first serious organized resistance to them, and in only one year, the intrepid warriors of the gamer community have inspired similar resistance movements to surface in science fiction, in comics, and in romance. Echoes of #GamerGate have begun to appear in the popular culture, as Donald Trump not only refused to kowtow before Fox News’s Megyn Kelly flashing of the SJWs’ Woman card during the U.S. presidential debate but afterwards declared political correctness to be a big problem in the U.S.A. Trump’s unexpected popularity in the polls is, to a large extent, a consequence of his willingness to confront the SJW Narrative and speak the truth as he sees it.

#GamerGate tactics are also beginning to be adopted by other groups for unrelated purposes, as there is a distinctly GG tone to the anti-Planned Parenthood memes that have been cropping up on Twitter ever since The Center for Medical Progress began releasing its sting-videos that showed Planned Parenthood employees openly discussing the sale of human organs taken from the infants it aborts. American immigration opponents have also successfully tarred some of the leading Republican candidates as well as their media supporters with the #cuckservative hashtag, much to the dismay of both the G.O.P. elite and the New York Times alike. It is therefore little wonder that SJWs are terrified of #GamerGate and see it as their most fearsome enemy.

An actual GamerGater commenting on Instapundit provides a much better summary.

I was in gamergate and it had several interesting aspects that I personally witnessed.

1. Gamergate was first time I learned that SJWs don’t really care who they demonize. We had many Lefty type gamers that were astonished that they too would be declared “bad people” for defending their hobby.

2. Organizations have more money then you could make a dent into with a boycott, but nobody ever has enough time. We learned that you can overwhelm an organization’s customer facing department and PR with email and phone call campaigns.

3. Never ever ever make someone a leader. The Media loves to find leaders and smear them to smear the movement by proxy. Lots of people got smeared, lots of people lost their jobs.

4. Mainstream conservatives are traitorous cunts and should never be trusted to guard an outhouse. We tried to get so called conservative journalists interested in what we were doing. Most ignored us as they thought we were just “a bunch of nerds playing games in mom’s basement”, and of course we had the shitheads that said we were misogynists and games cause violence. In the end one guy gave us a fair shake, Milo Yiannopoulos and started giving us coverage. As per their nature the conservatives tried to deep six his ass and sent him to the fringes of society and the MSM was just giddy with the results.

The Hu unplugged

It turns out metal doesn’t require distorted guitars or electricity. And given where they are playing, the lyrics could hardly be more appropriate.

Years late and dollars short

Now media conservatives are beginning to talk about how the Conservative establishment should be doing what we’re doing already:

It’s time for conservatives and what Kurt Schlicter calls the “Normals” to have an entertainment industry of their own. Hollywood has effectively divorced conservatives (and the Normals). And after a divorce, as they say, “living well is the best revenge.”

The question is how. It’s not easy and one of the big reasons is the conservative world itself. Conservative financiers abjure the arts — indeed they seem even to fear them — unless it’s putting money in their local philharmonic to have their name on a plaque in the lobby. Problem is, we all love Beethoven but he doesn’t need our help at this point.

Conservative fat cats also put a ton of money in think tanks that aren’t particularly effective. I don’t mean to unnecessarily diss those tanks. Some of my best friends are, etc., etc…. but the truth is, one good movie or television series is worth more than a hundred, or even a thousand, position papers when it comes to moving society. Andrew Breitbart couldn’t have been more right when he said: “Politics is downstream of culture.” (He could have added education, which is in a sense part of the culture, now more than ever working hand-in-hand with entertainment for bad ends.)

What is needed here by investors on the right is a little guts for a change. It shouldn’t be so hard, but somehow it is — or has been. It’s obviously true that film, theatre, and publishing are risky investments, but the center-to-right audience is huge. Plenty of “proof of concept” exists with films like The Blind Side, Lone Survivor, and American Sniper — just some examples of box office smashes that fit that profile.

Not one word about Alt-Hero, Rebel’s Run, or any genuine alternatives, of course. And remember, this guy was given seven (7) million dollars by a billionaire investor back in 2004. Did he make a movie? Did he start a film studio? Did he even publish a single comic book? No, he spent it on a wildly overpriced blog.

On the plus side, however, it must be admitted that Mr. Simon was laudably open about the nature of his operation from the start.

Speaking of supporting the cultural war, you can pick up a copy of the Big Bear’s tour special here.

UPDATE: Wow, I had no idea, but apparely Roger Simon is a comically stereotypical shyster.

This. So very much this.

The invaluable Nate explains how Generation X has killed The Beatles for good.

GenZ has never heard the Beatles and likely never will… because GenX hates them and never played them for their kids in GenZ.

He’s absolutely right. Neither Spacebunny nor I ever played any of their songs for our kids. Prince, yes. AC|DC, yes. David Sylvian, absolutely. Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, The Eagles, The Beach Boys, and even Duran Duran, yes. But no Beatles, no Rolling Stones, and they are far more familiar with The Hu than The Who.

In the amusingly damning words of one GenZ metal guitar player, “The Beatles will be around about as long as Justin Bieber.”

Some things never change

A Boomer booms about how rock and roll is dying with his generation and nothing will ever be that good or important again:

Jazz died off as a mass genre for two reasons. First, as Mark Gauvreau Judge wrote in his fun 2000 book, If It Ain’t Got That Swing, postwar economics and the rise of bebop as a counterforce in jazz greatly killed off the big bands of the 1930s and ‘40s, but the complexities of bop led many teenagers in the 1950s to seek out rock and roll as a simpler music style to dance along with. Capitol Records putting the full force of their PR team behind The Beatles when they arrived in America in early 1964 cemented rock and roll as the dominant musical genre for teenage whites, as Nat “King” Cole, who helped make Capitol a dominant force in America in the 1950s, discovered to his horror when he called their flagship Los Angeles office that year and the receptionist answered “Capitol Records – home of The Beatles!”

However, by the beginning of the 21st century, rock’s dominance was already on the wane when first Napster and then Apple’s iTunes radically altered how consumers access music. MTV, which gave rock a new lease on life after music industry fears in the early ‘80s that video games would replace their product as teens’ primary consumer spending good, was itself a spent force by the mid-to-late 1990s.

Hence, the nostalgia that many rock fans feel, with little or no new product that’s equal to the material produced during rock and roll’s heyday.

There is some truth concerning the way in which the atomization of culture is preventing the monocultural dominance by whatever the mainstream media corporations decided to push on teenagers. But the idea that there is little or no new music that is equal to that produced during what Boomers consider to be rock’s heyday is patently absurd.

Today little Japanese girls wearing maid outfits not only rock harder, they play their instruments much better, than all the rockers of the 1960s and the vast majority of those of the 1970s. And there isn’t a single guitarist of that generation who could ever shred as well as the average YouTube guitarist today.

Boomers like the author simply don’t understand that the fact music isn’t being played on the radio or on the evening television variety shows on ABC, CBS, and NBC doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Withdrawal is a bitch

Apparently Creepy Joe hadn’t fed on the flesh of young Haitian children recently enough:

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s left eye filled up with blood while answering a question at CNN’s climate town hall Wednesday night. Biden was answering a question about fracking when the blood became noticeable. He then turned to take a question about China’s role in carbon emissions, and the blood was difficult to miss.

There is no way the DNC is going to permit him to be the nominee. Not when he might literally dissolve into a puddle of gore on national TV without even being staked.

You’re Doing Great Kid tour support

If you’re interested in supporting the Big Bear’s YOU’RE DOING GREAT KID 2019 fall tour but you can’t attend any of the four shows, three of which are already sold out, you can now do so at the tour video page at Arkhaven.

There are three video products available, two of which will be provided for free to Unauthorized subscribers. But you may want to order one anyhow if you want to support the tour. There will also be an official tour t-shirt, which will include the tour special, available soon as well:

– Tour special $10
– Tour documentary $25
– Signed Limited Edition DVD (250) $100

    Tickets are still available for the Idaho show.

    Winning the war

    Nothing causes more headaches, backaches, and heartaches for gardeners than weeds: these many-petaled, many-seeded, and many-rooted fiends. Stealing sunlight, water, and nutrients, they may leave our gardens looking grim and growing poorly. The chemical army is losing. Resistant weeds are spreading. Soil health is suffering. Drift and overspray destroys thousands of adjoining farms, homesteads, and properties each growing season. It is a broken system with bitter results.

    WINNING THE WAR ON WEEDS teaches you how to defeat every gardener’s worst enemy! Available at a discount for only $16.99 from Castalia Direct.

    You might think we’re crazy to publish all these gardening books, but trust me, from the business perspective, they’re some of the most successful books we publish.

    The failure of the neo-liberal order

    Prof. Stephen Walt observes, contra Fukuyama, that history didn’t end in 1989:

    As a professor of international affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Stephen Walt has a front row seat to the discussions, debates, and human types that dominate U.S. foreign policy. His assessment is bleak. With the leading lights of both parties wedded to the consensus that he calls “liberal hegemony,” the world’s predicted embrace of democratic capitalism and peaceful relations has not materialized. Instead, liberal hegemony has yielded long and inconclusive wars in the Middle East, regime change operations that have led to failed states in Libya and Yemen, U.S. military spending that dwarfs that of the rest of the world, resentment and passive resistance from our ostensible allies, along with increasing hostility from Russia and China.

    In short, Walt makes a persuasive case that liberal hegemony is not succeeding, even on its own terms….

    Walt details the practice of liberal hegemony since the end of the cold war, when the United States found itself in the position of being the “sole superpower.” He explains that “the pursuit of liberal hegemony involved (1) preserving U.S. primacy, especially in the military sphere; (2) expanding the U.S. sphere of influence; and (3) promoting liberal norms of democracy and human rights.” This approach continued through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies, in spite of their superficial differences. Indeed, the bipartisan hostility to Trump shows how much consensus on foreign policy prevailed before his election, in spite of the heated debate over the Iraq War in the mid-2000s.

    The early fruits of liberal hegemony include the ill-fated Somalia mission and the later intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. But most infamously, liberal hegemony provided justification for the Iraq War and contributed to the never-ending Afghanistan campaign. In both cases, liberal hegemony did not counsel limited punitive expeditions, nor would it conceive of classifying certain areas of the world as ungovernable “shitholes” that needed to be cordoned off and avoided. Instead, we would stay until these countries were stable democracies—100 years if need be. As George W. Bush ambitiously put the matter in his second inaugural address, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”

    One legitimate criticism of this strategy, for which we have real time confirmation, is that in addition to not achieving results in places like Iraq, Somalia, and Libya, these expansive aims have left little reserve for dealing with a genuine emerging competitor: China. Indeed, far from being prepared and equipped to counter a rising China, the NATO expansion counseled by liberal hegemony has driven the otherwise-declining power of Russia into China’s arms, while, at the same time, short-sighted free trade policies have expanded China’s economy while deindustrializing our own.

    Liberal hegemony has become simply another name for rule by neoclown. And since the neoclown objectives have remained essentially unchanged since Trotsky advocated world revolution, liberal hegemony will never accomplish its stated goals because it’s not even working towards them. So, the important conclusion is not that liberal hegemony HAS NOT worked as advertised, it is that it CANNOT POSSIBLY do so.