webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

gamer -gate

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SEE CULT WAR WEDGE

see man male

MERRI OK

--> generic for encroachment of female diveristy gay on boy's club

4/18 primary, watershed, signal flare breakthru, we can do this too, see anti-semitic

8/17 node expand to videogamer community highjacked, see red pill anti-fem, men's rights

12/17 pioneer for thugswarm alt tr

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MAJ REPT 2 26 DIGBY BANNON BOOSTED GAMERGATE AT bb

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AN 11 26 REBOOT?

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RWW 11 26

Joel Webbon Says The Message Of Star Wars Is 'Entirely Wrong' Because Darth Vader Is 'The Good Guy'

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KATIE MILLER FIND YR ANNIKIN?

The Blaze reports a growing cohort of scorned young conservative men are trying to commandeer major franchises and famous brands and twist characters into MAGA champions.

“Over the last several months, we’ve seen this very strange kind of happening online where some of the biggest franchises in entertainment, whether it’s 'Star Wars,' 'Harry Potter,' other franchises,” said far-right BlazeTV host John Doyle. “These are now being reimagined by young guys on the right who are taking characters once celebrated by liberals and turning them into symbols of something completely opposed to the values of just contemporary society.”

One such repurposed character would be the reimagined female version of Harry Potter’s Draco Malfoy, called “Malfoid.”

“People were asking this [artist] to make a version of Malfoy that was trans or lesbian, and the artist completely refused, and they were like, ‘I drew this to make guys yearn again,’” Doyle said, allegedly to appeal to “sensitive, young” MAGA men.

Wired.com reports Trump’s Department of Education is even promoting the “Malfoid” meme.

Another character, said Doyle, would be the MAGA-tized version of Anakin Skywalker, a good guy gone bad — but only because of the universe’s perceived “rejection of young white men in favor of third-world immigrants,” he argued.

“[Skywalker] wanted to bring order to this corrupt and dysfunctional society. He wanted to have it all, right? A beautiful wife, a family, the power to actually protect the people he loved who were being harmed,” said Doyle. “But instead, he’s surrounded by incompetent politicians, hypocritical religious authorities, and this disgusting, decaying republic that can’t actually accomplish anything. … And so eventually, yeah, he decided that he’s had enough.”

Anakin Skywalker’s character eventually massacred a whole class of small Jedi children, but Doyle said that despite his “bad guy” label there’s a great reason so many young men relate to the mass murderer.

“If you’re telling a story about a naturally gifted young man who is prevented from reaching his potential by old people who are lecturing him but ultimately refusing to answer his questions or address the problems he’s facing, yeah, it’s called being a young white guy,” said Doyle. “… He’s withheld from positions which he has actually earned by merit. He’s told that he can’t have things that he looks for, such as, you know, a girlfriend, for these vague and silly reasons … [and] he’s tortured and harmed by weird alien freaks that society doesn’t actually bother with meaningfully dealing with.”

“And all of this is in the wake of literally decades of the young, straight, white male being demonized, being talked about as a threat, something to be dealt with,” Doyle said, while adding that “unsurprisingly liberals are not taking [the movement] well.”

“Naturally, this has made a lot of people very angry because in their mind, only they get to reimagine what these characters were supposed to be for, what these franchises are supposed to be about, the new DEI sequels and revamps and so on,” he said.

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rww

08/24/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

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AHA VIOLATES JINGOISTIC NAT’L, MAN NOT COMPASSION

AN AH 7 25

ALTHO... es Gunn's new "Superman" movie is performing well at the box office, many right-wing media outlets are attacking it as "woke." The film touches on immigration, much to the chagrin of Fox News and others.

In an biting article published on July 21, Salon's Amanda Marcotte argues that right-wing media attacks on Gunn's film aren't just silly, but underscore their troubling view of the world.

"Every time there's a pop cultural phenomenon — a blockbuster movie, a chart-topping single, a hot new fashion trend — conservative media and MAGA influencers rush to denounce it as anti-American, anti-family or even demonic," Marcotte observes. "Labubu dolls are Satanic. The 'Barbie' movie is anti-male. Conservative men are being traumatized by rap songs informing them that women can experience sexual arousal — not that said conservative men are willing to believe it."

READ MORE: 'Can't beat the president': Former Trump lawyer issues major prediction about Rupert Murdoch

Marcotte continues, "The reasons right-wing pundits engage in this are transparent. The biggest is simple attention economics. Glomming onto popular topics is a good way to attract new audiences, especially those who may not be that political, and lure them into engaging with reactionary content. It also helps feed the paranoia that fuels the right, by propping up the narrative that all of pop culture is out to destroy them and their way of life."

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

IFrame Content

The "MAGA talking heads" attacking Gunn and his "Superman" film, Marcotte observes, are "mad" because "Superman is an immigrant" in the movie.

"My initial reaction when I saw right-wing media conduct its all-too-predictable tantrum over the new 'Superman' movie was that it’s just more of the same: Claim it’s 'woke' propaganda, work the audience into a tizzy of boycott threats and reap the reward of alienating their base further from the rest of society so that the MAGA cult is all they have left," Marcotte explains. "Which, to be fair, is bad enough. But the actual content of the complaints made this whole exercise even more sinister."

The Salon journalist continues, "The attacks on 'Superman' are part of a larger effort by the right to completely rewrite history, so they can pretend that being a patriotic American means embracing authoritarian values…. Immigrants and kindness are both canceled in Donald Trump’s America, so the right was outraged. Jesse Watters of Fox News 'joked' that Superman should have 'MS-13' on his cape…. There have been a lot of dutiful, fact-check-style responses pointing out that Superman is an immigrant and the character was always 'woke,' in that he has a history of fighting fascists and KKK members. But in a sense, that was unnecessary, because everyone already knows this. That's where this Fox News gambit goes from being stupid to deeply sinister: They are asking their audience to deny not just the facts, but a fact we all grew up with, something woven into the DNA of our American identity."

READ MORE:'Reeks of regret': Republicans suffering 'remorse and shame' over 'grudgingly' obeying Trump

:{Amanda Marcotte's full article for Salon is available at this link.

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MMA

Fox News hosts launch extended unhinged attack on Superman’s message of kindness towards immigrants

07/07/25

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// gamergate

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Right-wing media have repeatedly launched wild attacks against Taylor Swift | Media Matters for America

Right-wing media spent 2023 lobbing sexist attacks at pop star Taylor Swift. According to them, Time magazine’s 2023 Person of the Year is a fake Christian, a Democratic agent, and possibly a witch. She’s also ruining football by dating an NFL player.

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// gamergate

https://www.mediamatters.org/ben-shapiro/ben-shapiro-attacks-trans-people-who-identify-spider-woman-across-spiderverse

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NZ livestream // call of duty?!

http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/

at end sez most surprise was jnx xian ID?

Chapter 1: The Eternal Fascist

There is nothing new under the sun. In this chapter, you’ll learn about “Ur-Fascism”, and how humor and irony have historically been used to enable its rise.

Chapter 2: An American Fascist Faith

The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting, the Poway Synagogue shooting, the Olympic park bombing and dozens of other terrorist attacks all have one thing in common- Christian Identity. In this chapter, we delve into a cultic belief system at the heart of American fascism.

Chapter 3: The Apostle of Fascism

William Luther Pierce is the most important Nazi you’ve never heard of, and his work has helped inspire a generation of terrorists- right up to the present day.

Chapter 4: How to Build an Army

Louis Beam was once a normal American soldier. But in the wake of the Vietnam War, he would painstakingly craft a vicious fascist insurgency. When Beam’s ground-level activism met Pierce’s propaganda, the result was the birth of a terrorist movement that still stalks us to this day.

Chapter 5: The Hidden Civil War

Inspired by Beam and Pierce, a young man named Bob Mathews attempted to spark a Second American Civil War. Whether he succeeded or failed is still up in the air.

Chapter 6: The Perfect Soldier

In his life and death, Timothy McVeigh represented the best-case scenario for the kind of warriors Louis Beam wanted to inculcate through his “leaderless resistance” strategy. His story is a tale of triumph for American fascism.

Chapter 7: The Digital Reich

This is where we are now: an era where a distributed network of individual extremists are able to radicalize each other and inspire acts of violence worldwide. This is not the result of an unhappy accident, or an unforeseen consequence of the digital era. It’s the result of decades of careful planning.

...... Christian Identity theology also spread online in this period. I found an article in the Journal of Black studies written by Tonya Sharp in 2000. She noted, "the internet has become a primary means for disseminating information for these groups. Currently there are 25 websites and 13 newsgroups specifically devoted to identity christianity on the world wide web, as well as 130 websites that are devoted to similar and related topics. Individuals can tap into these websites to find procedures for making bombs, obtain hate propaganda tracts, and request catalogues that market white supremacist books and paraphernalia."

Bit-by-bit, and almost entirely in a decentralized manner, the digital reich came together in the early 2000s. Law enforcement was not only helpless to do anything, it's debatable whether or not they even realized what was happening. Most of their online efforts were spent keeping track of known-quantities with long-standing online ties, like Don Black's popular fascist website, Stormfront. Stormfront is important, nearly 180 hate crime murders have been traced to the site, but the FBI wasn't even particularly good at monitoring them. In July of 2019, in response to a FOIA request, the Bureau admitted that they had - somehow - lost almost all of their files on Stormfront.

The FBI only did a 1/4-ass job of monitoring even the most obvious nazis online, so it's no surprise that they completely failed to notice when fascists began infiltrating communities like 4chan and reddit. It happened slowly, camouflaged in irony and humor. As a young man I was only vaguely aware of the changes in the digital spaces I had grown up around. Holocaust jokes became more common, so did racist humor. More than just growing more frequent, these jokes grew more specific, evolving from jibes about Jewish people being stingy with money - clearly inspired by South Park - to memes about 'Hitler Did Nothing Wrong' and image macros that repeated bad science about race and IQ. In 2018 I found an article from 'the Observer' by holocaust scholar Timothy Snyder. In it he comments on the use of irony and humor by fascists to mainstream their views. Quote, "What the 21st century culture has introduced is that nothing is really serious, and that is an interestingly dangerous idea, because if nothing is really serious you can have this ambiguity where you can actually be doing something very serious but you're pretending not to, and you can always fall back and say 'well that was just a joke', because everything is just a joke, but of course you don't really believe that everything is just a joke or you wouldn't be promoting fascism, or white supremacy, or whatever it may be."

In 2014, things on the internet rather suddenly boiled over into the cultural phenomenon known as 'gamergate'. On the surface, gamergate was a reaction to corruption in video games journalism. In reality, it was an eruption of white and male supremacist hatred, an attack on modernity and liberalism by an army of young men who believed they'd been wronged by society. There has not yet been a great deal of research into whether or not there'd been an organized attempt by the white supremacist movement to co-opt gamergate, but there is ample evidence that the ideas of that movement quickly made it into popular memes spread by gamergaters.

During my research I came across a thread on the website recetera filled with other confused digital natives trying to figure out just what the fuck had happened with gamergate. One user posted a series of memes he'd saved during that time. In retrospect they seem to show a progressive descent into white nationalism. The first is a propaganda poster featuring a cartoon mascot of 4chan's /pol/ board, 'Polina', advising the anons of pol on how to effectively aid the movement. Polina is blond haired and blue eyed. At the top of the poster are the words 'Who is that girl? Blond haired, blue eyed, fair skin? Why, it must be Polina!'

Another meme, from further on in the collection, is significantly nazier. It's based around an old labour movement political cartoon, 'the pyramid of a modern capitalist system', showing laborers at the very bottom being exploited by the classes above them. In the gamergate adaptation, gamers are at the bottom of the pyramid, with games journalists above them, critical theorists and social justice warriors above them, cultural marxist academia above them, and then FAFSA loans above them at the top represented by the all-seeing illuminati eye symbol. We don't see explicit anti-semitism in this cartoon, but it is there subtly, in the caricature drawings of Jewish video game critics. It's clear at this point that some white supremacist talking points had started to mutate to better appeal to modern and extremely online youths.

Eventually the harassment of video game journalists and critics, most of whom were women, grew severe and illegal enough that 4chan exiled its gamergaters. Many of them migrated to 8chan and over the next several years, they grew more radical and more explicitly fascist until, eventually, they were openly planning for how to cause a new holocaust. It's impossible to know how much of the ironic fascist shitposting started off innocently, and how much of it was seeded by white power activists, but we know they were engaging in that sort of behavior purposefully for over 20 years, and in the years after gamergate this work has paid dividends. The true danger of the digital reich was best expressed by Alex Curtis, publisher of a neo-nazi magazine and self-proclaimed 'lone wolf of hate'. In the early 2000s he wrote of his hope that, "Some well placed Aryans will one day cause some serious wreckage. A thousand Timothy McVeigh's would end any semblance of stability in this racially corrupt society."

We have not yet reached 1000 Timothy McVeighs thankfully, but we have seen a marked increase in the amount of right-wing domestic terror over the last several years and it certainly seems to be driven largely by online radicalization. ......

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https://www.mediamatters.org/diversity-discrimination/manosphere-influencers-are-teaming-anime-obsessed-content-creator-who

no lnx etc

violent misogynist and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate is now promoting dangerous incel culture to his audience of millions.

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Tate and his associates have teamed up with and are promoting an anime-obsessed content creator and misanthrope who glorifies school shooters, pushes Holocaust denial, and promotes the hyper-sexualization of underage girls. 

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Tate and his acolytes Justin Waller and “Sneako” have aligned themselves with “Waifu Watchers,” a viral content creator who appears to be obsessed with sexualizing underage cartoon anime girls. Waifu Watchers’ content promotes an incel-aligned and misogynistic ideology;the same kind of extremist rhetoric that has led to real-world violence, harassment, and is correlated with mass shootings.

This is an example of Tate and his adherents leaning into and helping to popularize violent incel culture while using Tate’s massively viral nature to push a new set of dangerous misogynistic ideas to his followers. This could be dangerous for Tate’s large fanbase, which includes susceptible kids and teens who idolize him.

In May 2022, Tate bestowed Waifu Watchers with the title of “G of the week” after he made a TikTok gloating about being legally allowed to be sexually attracted to underage anime girls because they aren’t real.

“I want you to follow this guy, Waifu Watchers. This is an official shoutout.” Tate’s co-host and brother Tristian said. “Can you follow this guy, everybody. He’s a fucking hero.” 

“Hero. He ain’t taking shit,” Tate added.

Recently, Tate posted a photo of himself wearing a “Waifu Watchers” jacket standing alongside two female anime characters. Tate and the influencer have been pictured together numerous times. Waifu Watchers claimed that he stayed with Tate for a week, and that Tate gifted him cryptocurrency.

WW Tate

CitationScreenshot from Waifu Watchers' Instagram page

Tate and his adherents' decision to platform and promote an anime-obsessed misogynistic edgelord continues the pattern of far-right figures using anime and Japanese entertainment to push dubious narratives.

What is a waifu?

According to Dictionary.com, a “waifu” is “a term for a fictional character, usually in anime or related media, that someone has great, and sometimes romantic, affection for.” The term is taken from the English word for “wife.”

Some anime consumers have a “pseudo-intimate relationship” with waifus. This becomes insidious when anime watchers fixate on underage female characters as waifus, as some of these characters are drawn to be hyper-sexualized and fit coming of age stories.

Waifu Watchers promotes extremist and predatory views to his audience

Online, Waifu Watchers has promoted the sexualization of underage cartoon girls, Holocaust denial, and the glorification of school shooters.The influencer goes by “chaiinmail chase” in some of his videos.

Here’s a breakdown of the content creator’s history of pushing extremist views:

In a YouTube Shorts video, the influencer douses himself with what he pretends is the urine of an underage-looking anime girl.

In another YouTube Shorts video, the content creator celebrated the sound of a female anime character getting her finger broken and screaming.

On various occasions, Waifu Watchers has posted misogynistic content about women.

The content creator made a fake Joe Rogan interview with an anime character where she defends Hitler and promotes Holocaust denial.

During a vlog, the influencer said “I would never shoot up a school” unless it was a place that was “indoctrinating” kids into believing that three million Jews died during the Holocaust. He bleeped out the word Holocaust during the entirety of the vlog.

During the same vlog, he told his audience, “I hope you’re keeping those streets clean and those schools empty.”

The influencer sells t-shirts that glorify school shooters, rapper Ye’s (formerly Kanye West) “White Lives Matter” stunt, and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The content creator posted a photo of himself holding what appear to be firearms with the words “don’t log into twitter tomorrow,” appearing to refer to the phrase “don’t come to school tomorrow,” which was popularized as a meme following the Umpqua Community College shooting.

He admitted to making a fake, racist article that went viral on social media.

Some of the influencer’s YouTube content may violate the platform's terms of service against hate speech. Earlier this year, YouTube began monetizing YouTube Shorts for creators. Some of the short videos feature outright bigotry and misogyny. Tate’s own content is reportedly all over YouTube Shorts, despite being banned from the platform.

Online misogyny leads to real-world violence

Online misogyny has led to real-world violence and harassment. Incel culture and domestic violence have inspired mass shootings across the country.

Early manosphere influencers were a critical driverof Gamergate, a harassment campaign against women who worked in the video game industry that pushed violent misogyny and anti-feminism. Several women received death and rape threats for years from online harassers.

Viral influencers like Tate and Sneako promoting hateful or misogynistic content online have reminded some audiences online of the rhetoric that was used to attack women during Gamergate.

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https://theconversation.com/heres-what-itll-take-to-clean-up-esports-toxic-culture-143520

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/11/qanon-trump

amanda

Trump's attempts to steal the election are fruitless. His legal theater is going nowhere, and it's becoming apparent that this is more about shaking down credulous supporters for cash than about actually overturning the election results. Michigan pounded another nail in Trump's coffin Tuesday, when two Republicans who were blocking the vote certification in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, relented in the face of public outrage. It's all over but the grifting, which will likely continue as long as Trump keeps getting people to give him money for his "legal defense" — money that is being funneled through a PAC and likely straight into Trump's pocket.

Yet the Republican establishment is still tiptoeing around Trump, coddling his fragile ego by refusing to admit he lost the election. Some are going a step further, such as South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been exerting pressure on state officials to toss out legally-cast ballots. Why are all these Republicans so afraid of Trump, who will no longer be president in 63 days?

The main reason appears to be that Republicans really are worried about their electoral prospects after Trump. The record Democratic turnout in the 2020 election — President-elect Joe Biden turned out 14 million more voters than Hillary Clinton in 2016 — caused many Republicans down-ballot from Trump to sweat their re-election prospects. Luckily for them, however, Trump also turned out an eye-popping 10 million new voters, which was enough to save the skins of many GOP candidates, even as Trump lost by slender margins in swing states.

Trump is a turnout machine for Republicans, who have been desperately casting around for years now for a way to save their party despite demographic changes that make the Democrats more popular among voters. The question of whether there will be Trumpism after Trump now dogs both Republicans who want to replicate their electoral successes under the reality TV president and Democrats who dearly hope this whole disaster was an anomaly.

"[S]ome conservative opinion leaders are already looking forward to a post-Trump future where the viable things about the 45th president can be neatly separated from his troublesome persona," Ed Kilgore writes for New York.

He cites "a representative fantasy" by right-wing writer Kristin Tate at The Hill, who longs for a "Republican with the political positions of Trump, but without decades of tabloid fodder," proposing that candidate might avoid "the bandwagon effect of suburban voters eager to show their public disapproval of his latest action."

Kilgore explores the various hopes that Republicans have for a "new Trump." Will it be Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Bible-thumper straight out of "The Handmaid's Tale" who has some crossover appeal for his occasional swipes at corporate America (though mostly for its perceived degeneracy)? Or Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who brings the racism and militant neofascism of Trump, but without the gleeful sleaze of a shameless sexual assailant?

These choices expose why Republicans fear that there may be no way to have Trumpism without Trump. Those guys and other contenders are all missing the secret sauce that helped Trump recruit so heavily among non-voters and infrequent voters. And no, it's not his so-called charisma.

What Trump really has going for him is what I call the "crackpot factor." Trump speaks to voters who share the racism and sexism of typical GOP voters, but who often don't vote because they think politics is boring and are awash in conspiracy theories about how the system is "rigged." Those voters saw a kindred spirit in Trump, a man who speaks fluent conspiracy theory and who got his start in politics by promoting claims that Barack Obama wasn't a native-born U.S. citizen.

Before the 2020 election, the team at FiveThirtyEight took a deep dive on the views of people who vote infrequently or not at all. There's a lot of reasons for non-voting, such as a belief it doesn't matter or the obstacles that make voting difficult, but one important factor was a lack of trust in the system. For some voters, especially nonwhite voters or liberal-leaning voters, this is unfortunately a realistic assessment of the situation, where social progress often feels glacial and voting doesn't seem to make much difference.

But for right-leaning voters, I suspect a lot of this distrust flows from a conspiratorial mindset, born from a steady diet of misinformation that has been made all too readily available by the internet. These are the types that populate the audience for Joe Rogan and Alex Jones. These are people who hate Democrats but also feel alienated by the religiosity and elitism of mainstream Republicans, and turn to "alternative" sources of information that are thick with paranoid conspiracy theories. Trump, who indulged the same "alternative facts" that they enjoy, stirred something in them that other Republicans simply couldn't.

In 2014, Pew Research, using extensive data, developed a political typology that sorted Americans into six groups. Two of the Republican-leaning ones are incredibly familiar to political observers, the "steadfast conservatives" and "business conservatives," or, respectively, the religious right and the rich folks who are in it for the tax cuts.

But they also detected an emerging group, which they deemed "young outsiders," who "do not have a strong allegiance to the Republican Party" and, in fact, "tend to dislike both political parties." These voters registered as "socially liberal," insofar as they don't support bans on abortion or gay marriage and, importantly, aren't especially religious.

But the "young outsiders" do share the racism of traditional conservatives. They are easily riled up by the demonization of social spending programs like Obamacare or food stamps They approve of programs, like Medicare, that are viewed as benefiting white people. They're in favor legal marijuana but oppose gun control. And they vote far less often than other conservatives.

I personally believe that the Pew research failed to capture how sexist this group is. The usual proxy questions to measure sexism, such as attitudes towards abortion, simply aren't adequate in this context. I suspect this group, while not as opposed to abortion as other conservatives, is angry about other feminist concerns such as the #MeToo movement, where men's privilege to mistreat women are being attacked.

These are, I suspect, the Gamergaters and the alt-right types who flocked to Trump in the years after this survey. They gobble down internet conspiracy theories like QAnon, which creates engagement with right-wing politics for those who aren't religious conservatives or business elites. They like to imagine that embracing more authoritarian attitudes is an "edgy" revoltagainst liberalism. They are overwhelmingly white (though 14% are Hispanic), and under 50 years old. While more than half of those defined as "strong liberals" are college graduates, three-quarters of the "young outsiders" don't have college diplomas.

Trump got a whole lot of those people who don't usually vote to do so, turning out more non-college-educated white voters in 2016, for example, than Mitt Romney did in 2012. These voters overlooked his alliance with the religious right and were instead fixated on his playboy persona, his over-the-top sexism and racism and, of course, his sweeping embrace of nutbar conspiracy theories of all kinds.

Over the past four years, everything that Trump's opponents hate about him — his grossness, his cruelty to women and people of color, his rejection of the polite norms of D.C. politics and, of course, his conspiracy theories — likely generated even more enthusiasm from this subset of voters that other Republicans have had trouble capturing or motivating.

That's why it's reasonable to be skeptical about the likely success of the current crop of wannabe Trumps. Hawley's religiosity and culture-war rigidity won't play well with these Trump Republicans who are just fine with premarital sex and legal weed, even if they're not fond of women having the right to file sexual harassment complaints. Cotton may roll out fascist fantasies that appeal to the QAnoners and the alt-right, but he's a stiff and, I suspect, won't appeal to those who enjoy Trump's wrestling-heel gift for insulting and degrading people. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who also wants to be the next Trump, has intense weenie energy that makes it hard for him to win these people over.

Trump speaks to the great American crackpot, especially the younger set that was otherwise more interested in perusing conspiracy theory websites or "pick-up artist" forums than in voting. These folks won't be moved by Hawley's promise of a handmaid in every bed or Cotton's promise of stormtroopers on the streets. In the face of the growing Democratic majority, Republicans need this subset of crank voters, who don't care about old-school culture-war fights over abortion or evolution, but sure do love QAnon. Without Trump's demented tweeting and his willingness to leave empirical reality behind, it's not clear how the GOP can keep the crank vote going.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

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proto? note attack on spice girls girl power

origin in hacker culture:

https://www.inverse.com/gaming/pwned-meaning-definition-origins-video-games-internet-hackers

COINED

HOW “PWNED” WENT FROM HACKER SLANG TO THE INTERNET’S FAVORITE TAUNT

If you use the internet, you’ve probably been pwned before.

DANNY PAEZ

3.17.2020

SMACK TALK IS AN INESCAPABLE PART OF ANY KIND OF COMPETITIVE ACTIVITY. WHETHER YOU’RE PLAYING PICK-UP BASKETBALL OR SQUADDING UP IN CALL OF DUTY: WARZONE, THERE WILL MOST LIKELY BE SOMEONE TRYING TO GET UNDER YOUR SKIN BY CALLING YOU A NOOB OR WORSE.

But for a long time, the specific type of trash talk used in gamer communities pretty much stayed there. Then, massively popular games like League of Legends and Fortnite made online gaming into a mainstream hundred-billion-dollar industry, dragging those gamer terms into the spotlight, and there’s no word that better embodies how geeky jargon has made it into the mainstream better than “Pwned.”

The gamer slang is a misspelling of “owned” that has come to mean a person being totally and completely dominated by an opponent in any situation. If your trivia team loses by double digits, then you’ve been pwned just as badly as getting zero-to-death comboed in a match of Super Smash Bros.

“'Pwn' is a lot like the sense of 'own,' which means ‘to have power or mastery over (someone),’” the Merriam-Webster dictionary explains. “It has also been used to describe the act of gaining illegal access to something.”

That secondary definition stems from thehacker and programming community that have used the word to describe obtaining unauthorized control of someone else’s computer. It’s a word steeped in internet history, but its origins predate the web and were largely based on misunderstandings and typos that were then adopted as an idiom.

THE ORIGINS OF “PWNED”

The earliest use of the word pwn might come from a game of chess in 1935, decades before the internet was invented.

The match was between Grandmasters Alexander Alekhine and Max Euwe, and rumor has it that Alekhine — who might have had a bit too much to drink — shouted, “I will pawn to your knight” with a heavy Russian accent. Euwe and the spectators present were said to have heard, “Evil pwn you tonight.”

“EVIL PWN YOU TONIGHT.”

There aren’t any audio or written records of this outburst and there’s some evidence that it was a myth. (Chess grandmaster and author Raymond Dennis Keene posted a thread on the Chess Games forum where he claims Euwe told him that Alekhine was sober during their infamous game.) Keene also never mentioned anything about Alekhine's alleged smack talk, which leads me to believe this is more folklore than reality.

But chess would eventually turn pwn into a word used by early programmers.

PWNING AT PROGRAMMING

The advent of digital computing in the 1950s resulted in a generation of programmers who attempted to create a machine that could play chess.

Computer science students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1960s turned developing the best chess-play program into a friendly competition. A definition on Urban Dictionary claims that these students would call themselves “kings” and others “pawns” when their program bested a competing one.

At this point, pwn allegedly meant to demote or dethrone someone, but the slang was quickly picked up by early computer-users that exchanged messages on FidoNet, a system created in the 1980s for exchanging emails or text on digital bulletin boards. This is where pwn slowly transformed into the insult we know today.

THEN CAME THE HACKERS

By the late ‘80s, only 8.2 households in the U.S. owned a computer, according to the Census Bureau, but many of these users were probably familiar with “pwn,” especially if they were members of the early hacking community.

Members of this online group published a newsletter titled Phrack World News (or PWN, for short), the earliest record of the word being used online. This was around the same time as the rise of leet (l33t) speak, which is essentially Pig Latin for hackers (h4x0r) that wanted to secretly communicate in public message boards.

Pwn didn't necessarily follow the rules of leetspeak, which is a system of modified spelling that replaces certain letters with numbers. The word was also being used interchangeably with “own” by this time to describe gaining administrative control of someone else’s computer. One famous example was the 1997 defacement of theSpice Girls website, which was hacked for several days that November as a statement against the mainstream adoption of the internet.

The pwned Spice Girls website.2600.com]

This apparent misspelling of the word “own” led many to believe that pwn gained popularity because of a common typo since the letter O and P are right next to each other on English QWERTY keyboards.

PWN’S DEBUT INTO THE MAINSTREAM

Leetspeak and hacker jargon seeped into mainstream internet culture in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That brought slang like n00b and pwn to a new generation of internet users and gamers that used these terms to taunt their opponents after a particularly flashy kill in a first-person shooter or fighting game.

Different spellings, like “pwn3d” began to pop up across the internet, many of which referred to video games but this is around the time when the pwn broke free of its geeky past. One example posted on Urban Dictionary in 2004 uses it as a non-gaming related flex.

Person A: "I spent a long time writing the entire script to Harry Potter.”

Person B: "Yeah, I downloaded it off the internet too."

Person C: "PWN3D!"

That same year a mockumentary web series titled Pure Pwnage was created by a group of Canadian comedians. The series followed the daily life of a self-proclaimed pro gamer. By 2006, hundreds of thousands of people had watched Pure Pwnage on YouTube, cementing its place in video game culture.

Google Trends shows that pwn reached its peak search popularity in mid-2009, which is around the same time that Microsoft warned of a security vulnerability on Windows XP and 2003 that could leave users open to a “browse-and-get-owned” scenario.

Then in 2013, when various web services and sites saw an uptick in personal data breaches, security expert Troy Hunt created the website “Have I Been Pwned?” Anyone can type in an email address into the site to check if their personal data has been compromised in a security breach. As of June 2019, Hunt’s site averaged 150,000 daily visitors, according to a post on his personal blog.

So while pwn might have begun as an obscure programming term, it’s become such a part of internet culture that if you own a PC, console, smartphone, or laptop you’ve probably been PWNED more than once.

COINED is your guide to the language of video games and the people who play them. If you've ever been told to "get rekt" and couldn't tell if it was a compliment or an insult, we're here to explain where terms like that came from, what they mean, and how to use them in everyday conversation.

PREVIOUSLY ON COINED:

How "grinding" came to dominate video game culture

How "camping" became the Call of Duty strategy gamers love to hate

How "Nerf" and "Buff" became the terms gamers can't stop arguing about

How “rekt” went from obscure insult to gaming's trash talk of choice

How “n00b” became the nicest way to be mean online

How “rage quit” became the most relatable gamer emotion

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/gamergate-2-0-zoe-quinn-flamed-by-game-boys-all-over-again/

no lnx

Gamergate 2.0? Zoë Quinn flamed by game-boys all over again

Written by Amanda Marcotte / Salon August 30, 2019

Five years ago, an angry young man who furious about being dumped by his game developer ex, wrote a blog post full of the kinds of sexualized accusations abusive men make when trying to ruin women’s lives. This sort of thing is sadly common in our misogynist world, but this particular instance metastasized into what was soon known as “Gamergate“: A massive online harassment campaign attacking not just this man’s ex, but a large number of people who were targeted for advocating greater inclusion and diversity in gaming.What happened next has been documented in my 2018 book, “Troll Nation,” as well as earlier this month in a fifth-anniversary package at the New York Times: Gamergate continued to expand, growing beyond a gaming-centric scandal into a larger movement of white male resentment, which in turn helped lift Donald Trump into office.

But Gamergate going big-time didn’t mean it went away. Five years on, the whole thing may be gearing up again, because the person who was the original target of an angry ex-boyfriend — game developer Zoë Quinn — has come out with another accusation, this time against Alec Holowka, a game developer who has worked on projects like “Night in the Woods” and “Aquaria.”

On Tuesday morning, Quinn — who uses gender-neutral pronouns — tweeted out a harrowing story alleging that, during a short-lived relationship, Holowka basically trapped them in his house in Winnipeg, Canada, promising Quinn he’d buy them a ticket home but reneging when they actually arrived. During this time, Quinn alleges, Holowka subjected them to extensive abuse, both emotional and seemingly physical. (“He’d jam his fingers inside me and walk me around the house by them when I told him it hurt,” Quinn wrote.) Quinn alleges that they were only able to return home after a roommate, using accrued frequent-flier miles, bought Quinn a ticket home.

Salon reached out to both Quinn and Holowka for comment and received no reply from either.

Immediately after Quinn published the tweets, the awakened forces of Gamergate went after Quinn, accusing them of lying. You see, Quinn has accused more than one man of abuse, including Eron Gjoni, the man who started all this with his slut-shaming blog post in 2014. Because of this, Gamergaters have decided that Quinn must be making all this up to gain attention, because it’s preposterous to imagine that someone has been abused by two different people in the course of a lifetime.

“[A]pparently she’s been sexually assaulted by everyone under the sun so forgive me if I consider her credibility to be strained,” read a typical response on Twitter.

Quinn does “whatever they can to be able to claim victimhood status and MAINTAIN that victimhood status,” declared another.

“I’m sure she gets off gaslighting herself into thinking she really is some huge target for rapists,” said a typical commenter on Kotaku in Action, a forum on Reddit that has kept the Gamergate spirit alive for the past 5 years.

To bolster claims that Quinn is a repeat false accuser, many Gamergaters floated the claim that Quinn once claimed to have stabbed someone. Despite much searching, Salon could find no evidence that Quinn has ever made such a claim in public, just many instances of Quinn-haters claiming that they heard the story from someone else.

It’s easy to dismiss all this as the jabberings of misogynists — which it absolutely is — but the sad truth is that these particular misogynists are reflecting a more broadly-held notion, which is that a woman who makes multiple accusations is probably a liar. Call it the Highlander Theory of abuse: For any given victim, there can only be one man who has ever hurt them.

In reality, though, being abused multiple times by different perpetrators is quite common, arguably more common than not. Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that once a person is victimized, the odds are high that it will happen to them multiple times.

There are a couple of reasons for this. For one thing, abusers tend to target vulnerable people, knowing they are easier to control. Quinn’s account, in fact, alleges just such a situation, where they were financially and emotionally vulnerable and Holowka took advantage of that. People who are struggling with post-traumatic stress or other mental health issues resulting from abuse can become juicy targets for other abusers.

Another reason is simple bad luck. Abuse is common — really common. The National Domestic Violence Hotline estimates that there are 12 million victims of rape, domestic violence or stalking every single year. That’s nearly twice the rate of police-reported car crashes in the United States. There are more than 6 million car accidents a year, it’s no surprise that many people experience more than one in a lifetime. Intimate partner violence is even more common.

(It is worth noting that the man who started all this, Gjoni, was unmistakably abusive. There’s simply no other way to describe writing a blog post designed to whip thousands of trolls into a harassment frenzy, as a way to punish someone for dumping you.)

Another insidious talking point ginned up by the Gamergaters was that Quinn must be doing this for, sigh, attention. Quinn had posted their accusations against Holowka in response to artist Nathalie Lawhead earlier accusing “Skyrim” composer Jeremy Soule of rape. According to the Gamergaters, this means Quinn is trying to steal Lawhead’s thunder, because in the bizarro world of misogynists, coming out about abuse is what women do for fun.

It hardly bears noting that this is not the likely story of why Quinn came out now. Quinn writes that they read Lawhead’s post and felt “ashamed” of having kept their own story to themselves for so long, and that “Nathalie’s strength” gave Quinn the courage to come forward.

This is in line with what has been happening over the past couple of years with the #MeToo movement — and frankly, is implied in the name. Victims of abuse find strength in numbers, and when one person tells their story, that often inspires others to step forward. Nothing about this is unusual, and it certainly is not evidence that the allegations are false.

There’s no way to adjudicate the truth of Quinn’s allegations at this moment, but the Gamergate pile-on is a troubling reminder that we live in a time of maximized conflict over these gendered issues. On one hand, marginalized people are speaking out in greater numbers, demanding  not just equality but accountability for the various ways that men use the cover of privacy to enact oppression in the most personal of ways. On the other hand, there’s an equally robust movement of people who will use low tactics like dishonesty and bad-faith arguments in order to reassert the male privilege to abuse without accountability.

We see this cycle on a national scale. Trump won in 2016 largely because communities like Gamergate saw him as a way to shut down the internet-aided rise of feminism, Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements. But Trump’s win gave rise to the Women’s March and, eventually, to the #MeToo movement, as more women, angry that a professed sexual predator was in the White House, felt the need to speak out. This latest dust-up over Quinn is yet another reminder that the forces of progressive and reactionary politics continue to be locked in a struggle, with no real way yet to guess at who will eventually prevail.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-young-men-of-color-are-joining-white-supremacist-groups

no mnay lnx

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NEW FAR-RIGHT

Why Young Men of Color Are Joining White-Supremacist Groups

Patriot Prayer’s leader is half-Japanese. Black and brown faces march with the Proud Boys. Is the future of hate multicultural?

Arun Gupta

09.04.18 4:54 AM ET

Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast

PORTLAND, Oregon—Outfitted in a flak jacket and fighting gloves, Enrique Tarrio was one of dozens of black, Latino, and Asian men who marched alongside white supremacists in Portland on Aug. 4.

Tarrio, who identifies as Afro-Cuban, is president of the Miami chapter of the Proud Boys, who call themselves “Western chauvinists,” and “regularly spout white-nationalist memes and maintain affiliations with known extremists,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Last month, prior to the Patriot Prayer rally he attended in Portland, Tarrio was pictured with other far-right activists making a hand sign that started as a hoax but has become an in-joke. Last year, Tarrio said traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the Right rally that ended with a neo-Nazi allegedly killing an anti-fascist protester. (The Proud Boys said any members who went to the event were kicked out.)

Tarrio, who identifies as Afro-Cuban, is president of the Miami chapter of the Proud Boys, who call themselves “Western chauvinists,” and “regularly spout white-nationalist memes and maintain affiliations with known extremists,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Last month, prior to the Patriot Prayer rally he attended in Portland, Tarrio was pictured with other far-right activists making a hand sign that started as a hoax but has become an in-joke. Last year, Tarrio said traveled to Charlottesville, Virginia, for the Unite the Right rally that ended with a neo-Nazi allegedly killing an anti-fascist protester. (The Proud Boys said any members who went to the event were kicked out.)

View image on Twitter

View image on Twitter

Arun "295 Revenue Streams" Gupta

@arunindy

Patriot Prayer + Proud Boys in Vancouver night b4 Aug 4 Portland rally many fear will end in violence. Tusitala "Tiny" Toese and others make an apparent "White Power" hand gesture. T-shirts read, "Pinochet Did Nothing Wrong."

Tarrio and other people of color at the far-right rallies claim institutional racism no longer exists in America. In their view, blacks are to blame for any lingering inequality because they are dependent on welfare, lack strong leadership, and believe Democrats who tell them “You’re always going to be broke. You’re not going to make it in society because of institutional racism,” as one mixed-race man put it.

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If racism doesn’t exist, I ask Tarrio, how would he explain the disproportionate killing of young black men by police? “Hip-hop culture,” he says. It “glorifies that lifestyle… of selling drugs, shooting up.” Because of that, “Obviously you’re going to have higher crime rates. Obviously you’re going to have more police presence and more confrontations.” (Police kill black males aged 15 to 34 at nine times the rate of the general population.)

Elysa Sanchez, who is black and Puerto Rican, attended the “Liberty or Death Rally Against Left-Wing Violence” in Seattle on Aug. 18, joining about 20 militiamen open-carrying handguns and semi-automatic rifles.

Sanchez says, “If black people are committing more murders, more robberies, more thefts, more violent crime, that’s why you would see more black men having encounters with the police.”

Also in Seattle, Franky Price, who said he is  “black and white,”wore a T-shirt reading, “It’s okay to be white.”

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Members of the Great Lakes anti-fascist organization (Antifa) protest against the Alt-right outside a hotel in Warren, Michigan, U.S., March 4, 2018.

Army Parrots Racist Right’s Talking Points on Antifa]

They are among nearly a dozen black, Latino, and Asian participants at far-right rallies on the West Coast interviewed by The Daily Beast recently. They represent the new face of the far right that some scholars term “multiracial white supremacy.”

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The Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer, which overlap, embrace an America-first nationalism that is less pro-white than it is anti-Muslim, anti-illegal immigrant, and anti-Black Lives Matter. “Proud Boys is multi-racial fraternity with thousands of members worldwide,” a lawyer for the group’s leader, Gavin McInnis, said in a statement. “The only requirements for membership are that a person must be biologically male and believe that the West is the best.”

Daniel Martinez HoSang, associate professor at Yale University, co-author of the forthcoming Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity, says “Multiculturalism has become a norm in society” and has spread from corporations and consumer culture to conservatism and the far-right.

Indeed, Patriot Prayer’s leader is Joey Gibson, who is half-Japanese and claims Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as a hero. But his agenda is the opposite of King’s. Gibson’s rallies have attracted neo-Confederates and neo-Nazis.

His right-hand man is Tusitala “Tiny” Toese, a 345-pound Samoan American who calls himself “a brown brother for Donald Trump” and is notorious for brawling. By bringing diversity to what is at heart a white-supremacist movement, people of color give it legitimacy to challenge state power and commit violence against their enemies.

David Neiwert, author of Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, says, “The ranks of people of color who show up to these right-wing events are totally dominated by males.” He says the alt-right targets white males between the ages of 15 and 30 with a message of male resentment, which ends up attracting black, Latino, and Asian men as well.

Neiwert says many young men of color in the far-right grew up on conservative traditions common in minority communities. Their journey to the far-right has been enabled by the ease of recruitment in the internet age and the endorsement of extremism by Trump.

Entry points to the far-right include male-dominated video-game culture, the anti-feminist gamergate, troll havens on 4chan and 8chan, and the conspiracism that flourishes on websites like Infowars. Libertarianism is another gateway.

“A lot of these young guys,” Neiwert says, “especially from the software world, who are being sucked into white nationalism, start out being worked up about Ayn Rand in high school.”

Andrew Zhao, 25, a software engineer, says his parents, physicists who emigrated from mainland China, “are Trump fans.” He found out about the Seattle rally from Reddit and Facebook and said, “We need more patriotism. A lot of liberals don’t like America.”

“A lot of these young guys, especially from the software world, who are being sucked into white nationalism, start out being worked up about Ayn Rand in high school.”

— David Neiwert

Daniel HoSang says some people of color are drawn to the far-right because they “identify with the military, with nationalism, with patriotism, with conservatism.”

Wearing a Proud Boys hat, David Nopal, 23, came to the Seattle rally alone, like others. Nopal, whose parents crossed illegally from Mexico, said, “I’m very patriotic. The U.S. isn’t perfect, but we are a hell of a lot better than other countries.”

Sanchez comes from a military family. “They all love America. It’s a big part of the reason I’m a patriot.”

Similarly, Tarrio attributes his anti-socialist politics to his grandfather’s experience in Cuba under Fidel Castro.

They proudly identify as “American” without modifiers. In their America they’ve never experienced racism. They eagerly talk politics, but evidence of their America is scant beyond the internet. Institutional racism has been ended by affirmative action, “black privilege,” and equal protection under the law. Any remaining black inequality is caused by social welfare and liberal policies. In any case, it was Democrats who started the Klan.

People of color within the far-right play a role that “excuses white racism and bears witness to the failure of people of color,” HoSang says, adding that they make “white supremacy a more durable force.”

HoSang said the far-right is trying to broaden its appeal from a whites-only movement in a multiracial America, so it is “laying claim to the ideas of anti-racism, racial uplift, and civil-rights progress.”

HoSang says, “It’s hard for people to wrap their head around how Dr. King and civil-rights language are being used to legitimate positions approaching fascism and violence to restore hierarchy and order. But they are.”

Editor's Note: This story has been updated with a statement from the Proud Boys and to clarify that the group formally opposed the Charlottesville march.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/the-right-wing-internet-gets-hip-to-npc-memes

Right-wing circles online have become increasingly obsessed with “NPC” memes, which they’ve utilized to compare their critics to non-playable characters in video games. The comparison, they hope, serves to ascribe a degree of intellectual apathy to, and dehumanize, those who do not hold their own far-right beliefs.

According to the meme-tracking website “Know Your Meme,” the NPC meme originated on 4chan in a 2016 thread posted to the portion of the site dedicated to video games. The post projects a hybrid of simulation theory philosophy and belief structures held by many conspiracy theorists, who become convinced that they have discovered a “truth” that has broken them from a previously autonomous lifestyle in normal society.

In early September, the meme experienced a brief renaissance on 4Chan’s “politically incorrect” anonymous image board (known online simply as “/pol/”) but appeared to wander out of the spotlight nearly as quickly as it had entered. But since the publication of a Kotaku article explaining the meme last week, users have made a play to replace the term “SJW”—referring to the caricature of a “social justice warrior”—and has given birth to a new tangle of spin-offs. As Cecilia D’Anastasio at Kotaku explains:

In some corners of the internet, NPC is beginning to replace the term “SJW.” According to ex-World of Warcraft dev Mark Kern, NPCs have the following qualities: “Incapable of independent thought. Wants everything done for them. (Quests) Constantly needing coddling (escort quests).” He published his checklist after another developer accused him of being a “right wing hack.” The tweet evidently was meant to compare so-called SJWs to these NPCs.

It’s a now-common refrain on Reddit, with posts on /r/The_Donald saying, “The Left is just a meme of lunacy come to life. They’re just NPCs in the game of life” or, in reference to economic experts widely condemning tariffs, “here we are with one of the best economies in US history. Only brainwashed NPCs believe what ‘experts’ say when those claims are contradicted by reality!.”

Now that the NPC meme has been re-framed as a way to “own the libs,” it’s inspired a new wave of enthusiasm among Trump supporters online. Google Trends shows a massive spike in interest in the meme....[graph]

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//?

AN

What in the universe could be more powerful than the Force? Government cyberwarfare groups’ trolls, as it turns out.

An academic paper published by researcher Morten Bay of the University of Southern California, entitled “Weaponizing the Haters: ‘The Last Jedi’ and the Strategic Politicization of Pop Culture through Social Media Manipulation,” analyzed the pattern of tweets from online trolls that organized an ongoing campaign to polarize public opinion over the 2017 film “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.”

“The study finds evidence of deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments,” Bay writes. “ The likely objective of these measures is increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society.”[cf chris hedges ANOMIE]

The findings specifically concluded:

“Among the 967 tweets analyzed, 206 expressed a negative sentiment towards the film and its director, which is 21.9% or a little more than one in five fans. This number includes all negative tweets analyzed, i.e. also those who came from the 44 accounts identified as bots, sock puppet accounts and trolls. It also includes 61 users who showed clear political agendas in their tweets against the film. Thus, the number of fans whose tweets are purely motivated by a negative stance towards the film is 101 or 10.5%.

Overall, 50.9% of those tweeting negatively was likely politically motivated or not even human.”

These findings corroborate ongoing suspicions that organized trolls who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election weren’t trying specifically to elect Trump, but rather to further divide the country by perpetuating politically polarized views and opinions. Perpetuating such divisions can, over time, fracture the social fabric of a country and sow political and cultural discord; while Russia has been prominently singled out as perpetuating this brand of cyberwarfare, the U.S. government actively uses similar cyberwarfare campaigns to meddle in the political affairs of many different sovereign nations, in an attempt to prop up American interests.

The Russian cyberwarfare campaign that seized on “The Last Jedi” vitriol had a common thread with Russia’s earlier Facebook disinformation campaigns, initiated during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “Some [trolls] were less focused on politics of party or specific issues and more on identity politics, posting anti-feminist or anti-homosexuality messages, and tweets of a racist nature were also frequent among the accounts in this category,” the study explains.

Not too long after “The Last Jedi” hit the silver screen in December 2017, Kelly Marie Tran, one of the saga’s new breakout stars, suffered an ongoing online harassment crusade that eventually compelled her to terminate her social media accounts. Likewise, racist anti–“Last Jedi” trolls of similar motivation emerged from hiding to throw virtual tantrums on the wiki website FANDOM, defacing Tran’s character’s page with racial slurs.

The abuse wasn’t exclusive to FANDOM’s wiki or Tran’s personal social media pages; vitriol about “The Last Jedi,” mainly complaints that it was overly politically correct and represented a threat to hegemony, pervaded all manner of social media; to this day, there are numerous Twitter accounts with display names like “Star Wars Lives Matter” and "LastJediAwful" devoted entirely to denigrating the movie for the aforementioned sociopolitical reasons. After Tran quit social media, she wrote about how the harassment impacted her in the New York Times.

While Bay’s paper does not specify how many of the government–sponsored troll tweets were directed specifically toward Tran, Bay notes that both the institutional and organic harassment had the same political repercussions.

“Whether the criticism comes from a Russian troll/bot or from a fan who feels increasingly distant from the values presented in the new Star Wars films, the objective of their actions is a political one,” the paper states. “Russian trolls weaponize Star Wars criticism as an instrument of information warfare with the purpose of pushing for political change, while it is weaponized by right-wing fans to forward a conservative agenda and for some it is a pushback against what they perceive as a feminist/social justice onslaught.”

Perhaps it should not be a surprise, the study says, given the political undertone the “Stars Wars” franchise has always had. As the paper continues:

“The Star Wars franchise is an interesting object of study in this regard. Even though it was originally targeted towards cinema-goers who were too young to vote, Star Wars was always double-coded, with layers oriented towards adults, often involving subjective critiques of contemporary politics. Star Wars movies, books, video games, tv shows and comics have consistently attempted to convey left-leaning values. For years, the franchise’s creator, George Lucas, has explained the series’ impetus as partially being a comment on the Vietnam war, which ended just as Lucas started work on the first Star Wars film.”

Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center and professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University, told Salon that Russian trolls championing cyber-harassment is troubling.

“I think it is cause for concern because social media platforms would not want a specific side or party to dictate their goals of open, impartial conversation and interaction (because if they allow it indirectly or directly, they alienate a massive swath of their user base),” he told Salon in an email. “Based on our conversations with tech companies, they are aware of the role of bots and are devoting more resources towards attenuating their influence — first in the area of online harassment, and next when it comes to political discourse."

Hinduja said he is “cautiously optimistic” progress will be made in this area.

“Unfortunately, bots are here to stay, bot creators seem to remain one step ahead with their cloaking and replicating efforts, and machine learning is not yet where it needs to be to perfectly identify and quarantine/block malicious automated scripts,” he added.

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The videos these people produce are a lot of things – "amateurish" and "mind-numblingly tedious" are among the main descriptors I'd use. But somehow, they're incredibly effective. Let's face it: anyone who can get hundreds of thousands of views for a one-hour rant about Owen Jones is worthy of at least our anthropological interest, if not quite our respect.

The most famous instance of far-right views being disseminated on YouTube is PewDiePie – the site's biggest star, commanding an audience of literally millions of impressionable teenage boys, who for some reason want to watch him play computer games**. He was dropped by Disney after it emerged that his videos included antisemitic jokes and Nazi imagery. PewDiePie wrote a blog post declaring: "I am in no way supporting any kind of hateful attitudes... Though this was not my intention, I understand that these jokes were ultimately offensive."

What PewDiePie does is very different from the likes of PJW, but this ironic racism can offer us a good example of what happens when these views, prominent in YouTube's ecosystem as they are, become normalised. Such videos are – at least anecdotally – having a measurable effect on how these kids talk about Jews, or the Nazis**.

Here's my hypothesis: Twitter is the natural home of the left because Twitter – participatory; open; capable of presenting multiple viewpoints to the reader simultaneously – is well-suited to the expression of left-wing views, which are (to draw however loose a family resemblance between often disparate warring factions) typically somehow egalitarian.

Contemporary right-wing politics, by contrast, is driven largely by the unexamined prejudices and anxieties of (primarily) white men. Any white man who wants to hold on to their prejudices and anxieties is going to have a tough time of it on Twitter – but they're going to have a grand old time standing in front of their wall, alone, ranting.

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https://www.alternet.org/heres-how-us-became-troll-nation-gamergate-rise-trump

primer/ sum

...

sad truth is that Trump owes his victory to a very dark turn in American conservatism.Unlike right wing ideologues of old, who at least tried to portray themselves as stabilizing and constructive, the right in the era of Trump is a movement of annihilation. They are bigoted, sexist, and mean, and often don’t even try to dress these destructive impulses up in the garb of tra­dition or religion.

They delight in cruelty for its own sake. Building something positive has no real value in this new right wing. Pissing off per­ceived enemies, such as feminists and liberals, is the only real political goal worth fighting for.

They are, in other words, a nation of trolls.

Trolling is a term that started on the internet, to describe peo­ple whose main purpose online was irritating other people. It’s the sort of thing that people of all political stripes used to engage in, a casual bullying for its own sake that was low stakes. But as the boundaries between real life and internet life have broken down, and as the internet has become the primary form of polit­ical communication, trolling morphed into something of a right wing philosophy.

No longer do those on the right feel any need to offer a partic­ularly positive vision of America. Even Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was rarely backed up with an artic­ulated vision of what, exactly, that greatness entailed. Instead, it was an angry yelp, aimed at liberal America. It’s about tear­ing apart a new America that was becoming more feminist and racially diverse. When social progress cannot be argued against, its opponents instead turn to trolling. And Trump — ignorant, thoughtless, mean, barely literate — would be their leader.

Trump’s election had the strangest of bellwethers: the world of video games.

It’s hard to believe it now, but in 2014, a storm of controversy raged for months in the online world of video gamers and became the template for what has been deemed “Trumpism.” Before there was Trump, there was “Gamergate,” where the smaller but equally American community of video game players was torn apart as the same bitter white guys (and their sad suck-up female supporters) lost their minds because some women had opinions about video games.

To most people who witnessed it at the time, Gamergate seemed like one of those incomprehensible internet wars that fades as quickly as it erupts, but in retrospect, it was an alarming portend of the rise of Trump, the alt-right and an America that now has torch-wielding white supremacists starting street fights in the name of fascism. It foretold a country where the American right has devolved into a nihilistic movement, prepared to tear down the country rather than share it fairly with women, LGBT people and people of color.

Like many historical calamities, Gamergate began because a young man did not accept it when a woman told him no.

In August 2014, a man named Eron Gjoni wrote a nearly 10,000 word essay about his ex-girlfriend, a video game developer named Zoë Quinn. The piece, which he posted online, was an incoherent train wreck of thwarted male entitlement, in which Gjoni obsessed about Quinn’s sex life. Calling a girl a slut online is often enough to get the internet hoards to attack her, but Gjoni’s real stroke of genius was in claiming Quinn’s professional success was not a result of her talent, but due to her trading sexual favors for good press coverage....

The accusation, and this cannot be stated clearly enough, was flat-out false. (Quinn did date a journalist, but he never wrote about her work.) But it played off the resentment so many men feel when they see a woman who has more professional success than they do. The lie gave these men a comforting fiction to cling to, which is that women who excel aren’t really talented or inter­esting, but instead must be cheating — using sex or liberal guilt or anything but their actual talents to get ahead.

It’s the same myth that millions would later use to convince themselves that Trump was somehow more worthy of their vote than Clinton.

Gjoni shared his post on internet forums where a lot of young men had already gathered to complain about women who were gaining a foothold in the video game industry. The result was the stalker’s dream: Hundreds, possibly thousands of young men (and some women!) became lieutenants in Gjoni’s quest to punish Quinn for dumping him. They harassed and threatened Quinn until she was forced to leave her home.

The campaign continued to spiral even further out of control, as the online mob expanded the circle of harassment. The targets of the Gamergate are familiar to anyone who watched the rise of Trump. While women who were viewed as uppity were the main hate objects, accusations also flew against journalists, deemed corrupt and out of touch by the Gamergaters. People who advo­cated for gender and racial equality were sneeringly dismissed as “SJWs,” short for “social justice warriors.” The vitriol was always justified by a hazy nostalgia for the good old days, when video games were supposedly simple and didn’t bother players with all this political correctness.

Gamergaters, one could say, wanted to make video gaming “great again.”

While the entire debacle garnered a lot of media attention, mostly from journalists—including myself—who couldn’t believe how angry so many young men were, one enterprising young writer named**Milo Yiannopoulossaw an opportunity. He saw that Gamergaters were incoherent and unorganized, but with a little leadership, they could be whipped into a hard-right youth movement. Yiannopoulos got to work injecting himself into the middle of Gamergate, writing apologies for the movement on the far-right site Breitbart and riling up the harassment mobs on Twitter.

Mainstream conservatives tend to lean on arguments of tra­dition and morality in order to undermine women’s progress. Older conservatives try to spin their sexist views in positive terms, claiming that putting restrictions on women’s reproduc­tive rights and job opportunities is about constructing a happy family life. Traditional conservatism is genteel and condescend­ing to women.

Yiannopoulos, despite — or because — he’s both gay and Brit­ish, seemed to get why Gamergaters were different. He dispensed with the niceties of the past and embraced a politics of unvar­nished resentment. He told angry young men that they were being terrorized by “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct Amer­ican tech bloggers,” and gave his young followers permission to embrace the politics of destruction.

Milo didn’t pretend to be motivated by sexual morality or family values. Instead, he wallowed in foul language and bragga­docio about his sexual exploits. He told his readers that they were justified in their feeling that women had, by striving for equality, stolen something from them. He offered them an anti-femi­nism stripped of any pretense towards chivalry, instead giving them permission to embrace a politics composed of nothing but resentment and destructive urges. He let them believe that the minor bumps and bruises of young adulthood, such as career struggles or dating struggles, [ snowflakes] were the direct result of women’s efforts towards equality — and that justified harassment and cru­elty towards women in return.

Gamergate faded, but Yiannopoulos’s star continued to rise. Mainstream media sources were fascinated by how he was selling a right wing politics that wasn’t interested in the usual justifica­tions of social order or religious faith. Milo portrayed himself as a rebel, framing destructiveness as subversion. He harnessed an army of young male supporters he cultivated by tapping their resentments towards women, and pointed their ire at targets, such as Muslim immigrants, that fit the larger Breitbart agenda of white nationalism.

It was Yiannopoulos who really grasped, for instance, that the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters, which starred four women instead of four men, created a perfect opportunity to tap into a vein of male outrage. For every man who still can’t believe women are allowed to reject him, for every male college student angry that a girl got better grades, for every sexist still bitter that a woman got promoted over him at work, Milo offered yowling about the supposed injustice of Ghostbusters as an opportunity for revenge.

Yiannopoulos called the movie “an overpriced self-esteem device for women betrayed by the lies of third-wave feminism.” It was a perfect distillation of his immense powers of projection. It’s his audience whose self-esteem is shattered by seeing women in the kind of comedic roles they wish to believe that only men are capable of mastering. And it’s his audience that would rather tear the Ghostbusters franchise down by its ears than have to share it with women.

As with Gamergate, Yiannopoulos was a ringleader in the movement to destroy Ghostbusters through an online harass­ment campaign, a movement that unsurprisingly focused mostly on the one woman of color on the cast, Leslie Jones, who Yian­nopoulos called “barely literate” and “another black dude.”

Even Trump got involved, putting out a 6-minute video where he whined, “And now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women. What’s going on?!”

The harassment of Jones got Yiannopoulos kicked off Twitter, but his banning only seemed to reinforce the view of Yiannopou­los’s fans that they are victims of a “politically correct” culture that supposedly wishes to suppress supposed truths about race and gender through shaming and censoriousness.

To be clear, neither Yiannopoulos nor the modern right writ large invented this idea of trolling the left as a political ideology onto itself. Plenty of right wing personalities laid the pathway for the idea that messing with liberals is a reasonable substitute for having a coherent political philosophy.Rush Limbaugh, for instance, has maintained a multi-decade career as a radio talk show host by focusing his show primarily on the subject of the alleged evils of liberals and why listeners should hate these omi­nous creatures.

But after decades of that kind of propaganda, trolling liberals is no longer considered just a fun sport, but the ultimate purpose of conservative politics. The idea of making a positive argument in favor of conservative values has atrophied, leaving only the desire to troll in its place.

Ultimately, Yiannopoulos’s most lasting legacy will likely be in his support for the Trump campaign, which in turn helped a generation of resentful young men believe that voting Trump, who Yiannopoulos called “Daddy,” was the ultimate way to troll the feminists and liberals they hate. That Trump had nothing positive to offer doesn’t bother Milo and his fans. If anything, that is seen as a plus: Trump is the politics of destruction, per­sonified.

“I can put up with almost anything from Donald Trump, because of the existential threat he poses to political correctness,” Yiannopoulos told me when I interviewed him in October 2016.

“He’d rather grab a p**sy than be one,” Yiannopoulos said after a tape was released of Trump, apparently unaware of a hot mic, bragging about how he likes to kiss and grab women “by the p**sy” without their consent. Sexual assault is of no concern to this new right. It angers feminists and puts women in their place, after all. What else do you need to know?

Milo and his millions of supporters embody the nihilism that defines the new right under Trump. They don’t particularly care if Trump is a failure or incapable of doing or creating anything positive. He’s just a human sledgehammer to wield against a world that is starting to question whether white men are inher­ently superior to the rest of us. He’s revenge for every woman who wouldn’t fuck them, every black guy that got better grades, every younger relative who wrinkled their nose at them when they had too many drinks at Thanksgiving and let loose with a racial slur.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump bragged while campaigning for the Iowa caucus.

It’s a brag that rings true, at least for his most ardent support­ers. Depending on whom he shot, they might even cheer.

But imagine if Trump got hit on the head and had a person­ality change that led him to declare that, in interest of rectifying hundreds of years of white supremacy, he was supporting repara­tions. Then, after all this time, his base would turn on him.

Both Gamergate and the Yiannopoulos-led campaign against Ghostbusters have much in common with the strategy Trump used to transition out of being a reality TV star and into poli­tics: Birtherism, a widespread conspiracy theory on the right that holds that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president because he was supposedly not born in the United States.

Trump didn’t invent birtherism, which writer Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built.” But Trump did use his fame as a tabloid fixture and the host of The Apprentice to repeatedly inject the conspiracy theory into mainstream media spaces that used to be hostile to the kind of people who breathlessly recite racist urban legends.

Starting in the spring of 2011, Trump appeared on Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, and CNN, claiming, falsely, that Obama was hiding his true birth certificate and that a “tape’s going to be produced fairly soon” proving Obama was born in Kenya. Even after Obama, in an effort to shut down the Trump-fueled media chatter, produced the birth certificate, Trump kept at it, declaring on Twitter that the birth certificate is “a fraud” and suggesting Obama was having people murdered to cover up the truth.

Trump also started pushing the idea that Obama hadn’t got­ten into Columbia University and Harvard Law School honestly. Trump repeatedly claimed he would pay millions of dollars in a ransom to get copies of Obama’s transcripts, clearly implying that Obama didn’t have the grades and had cheated to get into these prestigious universities.

Trump’s birtherism and Yiannopoulos’s campaigns around Gamergate and "Ghostbusters," are about saying, without com­ing right out and saying it, that women and people of color are inferior to white men. The implication of all these move­ments is that the success enjoyed by women or people of color is unearned and inauthentic, that people like them simply cannot actually be smart or talented or even legitimate enough to get that far. And that everyone else supposedly sees it, too, but are too cowed by the fear of being called “racist” or “sexist” to say so publicly.

This narrative has a special appeal to men like Trump, who aren’t particularly special or intelligent. The idea that the unfit are getting elevated by “affirmative action” or “political correct­ness” allows such men to believe that they would be the stars and the much-heralded geniuses, if those undeserving inferiors weren’t sucking all the oxygen out of the room.

Yiannopoulos himself was set to ride a narrative of white male victimization to the kind of fame and fortune that continues to elude his female or non-white peers in mediocrity. Even after he got kicked off Twitter, he secured a quarter million dollar advance on a book deal with Simon & Schuster and was starting to book high profile appearances on shows like “Real Time with Bill Maher,” where he received a convivial welcome.

Then a video surfaced in early 2017 showing Milo decrying the “arbitrary and oppressive idea of consent” that legally and mor­ally prevents adult men from having sex with 13-year-old boys, a social more he blamed on “the left.” While celebrating Trump bragging about the sexual abuse of adult women was treated by many in both right wing and mainstream media as a joyous assault on political correctness, celebrating the sexual abuse of boys was a bridge too far. After all, most of the people in power had themselves once been a boy, vulnerable to sexual predation.

Yiannopoulos lost his book deal and most of his mainstream media support after that. Luckily for him, the landings for the oppressed wealthy white man tend, even in 2017, to be feathery soft. Yiannopoulos self-published his book and is getting a heavy promotion schedule at Breitbart. He also has a lucrative speaking career, getting paid the big bucks by conservative groups on col­lege campuses who see booking him as a delightful way to troll the liberals.

Milo’s career demonstrates that, in the 21st century, one doesn’t need interesting ideas or any real talents to sell yourself as a thought leader on the right. All you need is an overweening sense of white male entitlement and a gleeful sadism in defend­ing it. As long as you have both those things, nothing you can say or do, no matter how offensive or terrible, will cause an audience of bitter white men (and some women!) to pry themselves away from you.

Ask Milo’s hero: Donald J. Trump. Or, as people now call him, “Mr. President.”

Excerpted with permission from "Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself" by Amanda Marcotte.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-diehard-and-former-milo-yiannopoulos-intern-stabs-father-death-calling-him

A prolific online troll and former intern of Milo Yiannopoulos has been charged with first-degree murder after allegedly stabbing his father to death in his Washington home. According to audio of the incident obtained by the Daily Beast, 33-year-old Lane Davis set upon his father after the latter called him a Nazi. "He’s chasing us around the house,” Davis' mother told a police dispatcher. “He’s mad about something on the internet about leftist pedophiles and he thinks we’re leftist and he’s calling us pedophiles, and I don’t know what-all.”

Davis has entered a plea of not guilty, and his trial is scheduled for January.

The Samish Island native fits a disturbing if increasingly familiar profile. After dropping out of Washington State University in 2004, he developed a following on YouTube peddling conspiracy theories that ran the gamut from 9/11 being an inside job to vaccines causing autism. By 2014, he had become a fixture in Gamergate, a campaign of online harassment of women in the video game industry that included doxxing and death threats. Davis would ultimately renounce his fellow travelers in the movement, but that did not stop him from targeting Joshua Idehen, whose manager, agent and charity he contacted accusing the London musician of pedophilia.

Shortly thereafter, Davis began working for Milo Yiannopoulos, with whom he co-wrote an article accusing the MacArthur Foundation of promoting censorship on social media. Yiannopoulos, who was recently outed for his close collaboration with prominent neo-Nazis and members of the alt-right, has since released the following statement to the Daily Beast:

“Mr. Davis was a volunteer for me for a brief period of time prior to my founding Milo, Inc. I was unhappy with his work and discontinued the relationship. I then experienced his anger firsthand as he threatened me and later went to Buzzfeed making false and inaccurate accusations."

Davis parlayed his short tenure at Breitbart into an unpaid blogging gig at a far-right website called theRalphRetort.com, which features such verticals as "SJW Insanity" and "Campus Crazies," and whose editor, Ethan Ralph, is serving an eight-month sentence in Loudon County, Virginia, for assaulting a police officer. Ralph's wife pledged to remove all of Davis' stories, which he posted under the name Seattle4Truth.

A fervent Trump supporter, Davis had grown increasingly agitated in recent months, so much so that his father had taken to recording his rage-fueled outbursts on his phone. On the day of his arrest, the Daily Beast reports Davis "retweeted posts celebrating the Second Amendment, bemoaning diversity, and spreading conspiracy theories that alleged Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta was involved in a child sex ring and DNC staffer Seth Rich had been murdered."

“He just lives on the internet and he gets really worked up about everything that’s going on," his mother told police. "He needs an intervention of some kind here.”

Minutes later, her husband was bleeding to death on the back porch, and her son had raised his hands in the air, awaiting his arrest.

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Watch Part 3 || Joshua Green on How Bannon’s Experience with Video Gamers Gave Rise to the Alt-Right

GOODMAN: We’re talking to Joshua Green. His new book is Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency. You also talk about how Breitbart News went after Fox News to make it more extreme, and the gaming background of Steve Bannon, recognizing that Fox News was for old folks. There was this huge young conservative set that he could bring in.

JOSHUA GREEN: You know, another story in the book—another thing I got asked about a lot as a political reporter was: Where did this idea of the alt-right come from? Who are these people? How did they infect our politics in the way that they had? And Bannon, oddly enough, is a critical figure in the rise of the alt-right, many of whose members, I should just add as a side note, read and admire Julius Evola and his thinking.

But back in 2007, after Bannon had done Hollywood and filmmaking, he wound up, for about a year and a half, as the CEO of a video game company in Hong Kong, which did not actually make video games that you play. It pioneered something called gold farming, which I had never heard of. But what gold farming is, is the process of going into these massive multiplayer games, like World of Warcraft, and winning armor and prizes and gold, which allow you to advance in the game, but then turning around and selling them to people in the real world. So Bannon’s company would hire teams of low-wage Chinese workers to play these games in 24-hour rotating cycles, win all this stuff, and then sell it to wealthier gamers offline, which was considered a serious enough business that Goldman Sachs actually invested money in Bannon’s company.

But what happened was, the gamers—most of the people who played the games considered this cheating, and they got very angry. You know, kids would spend hours and weeks and months absorbed in these games, and didn’t like the fact that there was this shortcut. And so, the gamers themselves organized on message boards. There are special message boards devoted to these multiplayer games. And they organized themselves and said, "Hey, we’re going to put pressure on these video games and make them shut down the practice of gold farming." And they did. And it destroyed—itbankrupted Bannon’s business.

But the lesson he took away from this was that there are millions and millions of young, white—mostly white—men who spend their entire lives in these online alternate realities, and that—

AMY GOODMAN: 4chan.

JOSHUA GREEN:4chan, exactly, Reddit—and that if they are motived to do so, they could be a very powerful political force: "They bankrupted my company. I want to see if I can channel them into politics." And when Bannon got to Breitbart News, he hired a notorious internet troll named Milo Yiannopoulos to be Breitbart’s tech editor and to essentially entice these legions of angry online gamers into the world of populist right-wing politics. And eventually Bannon was able to turn them on to Trump.

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alt right gamergate:

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-october-4-2017/

audio conversation with Zoe Quinn, a video game producer and a leading voice in the fight against online harassment. She is the author of the book Crash Override: How GamerGate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life and How We Can Win the Fight against Online Hate. As a symbol of what online mobs are upset about, she became the target of a massive campaign of hacking and threats, called the GamerGate. She is telling us how she went through it and helping us to understand this vicious online hate culture and how we can win the fight against online hate groups as alt-right.

game on depression

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Crash Override

Zoe Quinn talked about her book, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?429194-3/crash-override

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This is abuse, and it is abuse for a particular political purpose. Whether it is under the guise of news or commentary, the fabricated stories bouncing around r/The_Donald, often cloaked in shockingly venomous rhetoric, do not adhere to and cannot be judged by traditional journalistic standards. This type of fake news needs to be understood in tandem with its context and purpose. Some of it is just for profit. But other pieces are intended to serve as weaponized propaganda meant to inspire harassment or even worse.

The “alt-right” movement has been equated to white supremacy and neo-Nazis. That is broadly accurate, but the reality is a bit more complicated. More often than not, the gateway drug for this movement is sexism -- "extreme misogyny evolving from male bonding gone haywire,” as Aja Romano put it for Vox. White nationalism and neo-Nazism often come later.

This framework also explains why the “alt-right” tilts at so many cultural windmills. Whether with boycotts against Star Wars this year, or boycotts against Star Wars last year, or boycotts against Ghostbusters or Hamilton or other notable events that women and people of color are involved in, the intent of the “alt-right” is not necessarily to be successful in the short run: The protests are intended as a statement of white patriarchy. Anyone talking about the boycott is surreptitiously sharing the message of white, male-centric cultural identity.

Jason Wilson perfectly characterized the misogyny and bigotry of the "alt-right" when describing Yiannopoulos and his tactics:

Yiannopoulos and the alt right certainly shared a couple of traits. First, there was a willingness to dispense with the American right’s trusty dog whistle and offer frank views on race (all the while disparaging those conservatives who were more attuned to euphemism and conciliation as ‘cucks’). Second, they shared a desire to restore white masculinity to its position as the central, reigning political identity.

In Eugene, [OH], Yiannopoulos endorsed Trump’s call to end Muslim immigration on the grounds that fundamentalists ‘want to kill people like me’ – a preview of the full-throated Islamophobic appeal that he and others made to the LGBT community after the Pulse nightclub shooting the next month.

But the meat of his address was a repetition of a claim he has made repeatedly in his writings and on social media: that white men, especially the working class, are being oppressed with an elitist doctrine of political correctness.

Referring to lesbians as ‘horrendous, quivering masses of horror’ and feminism as ‘cancer’, Yiannopoulos generally castigated the ‘awful, awful, terrible, diseased and damaged people lecturing and hectoring the working class’ – those he sees as the enforcers of ‘the oppressive hegemony of social justice’. The only solution, he said, is a Trump administration.

Members of the "alt-right" don't just preach this hatred. They mobilize it. Jesse Singal examined the many similarities the “alt-right”/fake news ecosystem shares with cults, and the role misogyny plays in attracting new members:

But it’s the alt-right concept of so-called red-pillingwhere this subculture appears more similar to “traditional” cults and extremist groups. Adapted from The Matrix, “taking the red pill” or “getting red-pilled” simply means seeing the world as it really is. In the online subcultures that gave rise to the alt-right, its most famous meaning is in reference to feminism:After you take the red pill, the scales fall from your eyes and you can see that feminism is really just an attempt to emasculate and bully men, to allow social-justice warriors to run rampant over masculine (and traditional) values and ideals in favor of a shrill and judgmental far-left radicalism. Recently, the definition has expanded a bit — these days, in an alt-right context “getting red-pilled” probably means something more like “understanding that progressivism is a lie and part of a large-scale effort to hurt you and people like you.” But the basic point is the same: This is the moment at which you start to see things as they really are.

This is exactly the sort of transformative experience offered by cults and extremist movements: After this, things won’t ever be the same for you. After this, you will have a role to play in an important battle that will determine the fate of the world. Your life will take on an enhanced meaning.

At its core, the “alt-right” is just a bunch of men who feel powerless and resent women because of it. That’s why Gamergate is so crucial to understanding the movement; it truly was a galvanizing political event for a fringe movement that far too many mainstream people had overlooked because they were not the ones being harassed.

III. Historical Precedent

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

The Gamergate controversy concerns issues of sexism and progressivism in video game culture, stemming from a harassment campaign conducted primarily through the use of the hashtag #GamerGate. Gamergate is used as a blanket term for the controversy, the harassment campaign and actions of those participating in it, and the loosely organized movement that emerged around the hashtag.

Beginning in August 2014, supporters of the Gamergate movement targeted several women in the video game industry, including game developers Zoë Quinn and Brianna Wu, as well as feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian. After Eron Gjoni, Quinn's former boyfriend, wrote a disparaging blog post about her, #gamergate hashtag users falsely accused Quinn of an unethical relationship with journalist Nathan Grayson. Harassment campaigns against Quinn and others included doxing, threats of rape, and death threats. Gamergate supporters claimed unethical collusion between the press and feminists, progressives, and social critics. These concerns have been dismissed by commentators as trivial, conspiracy theories, groundless, or unrelated to actual issues of ethics.

Gamergate supporters typically organized anonymously or pseudonymously on online platforms such as 4chan, Internet Relay Chat, Twitter and Reddit. Gamergate has no official leaders, spokespeople, or manifesto. Statements claiming to represent Gamergate have been inconsistent and contradictory, making it difficult for commentators to identify goals and motives. As a result, Gamergate has often been defined by the harassment its supporters committed. Gamergate supporters have frequently responded to this by denying that the harassment took place or by falsely claiming that it was manufactured by the victims.

The controversy has been described as a manifestation of a culture war over cultural diversification, artistic recognition, and social criticism in video games, and over the social identity of gamers. Many supporters of Gamergate oppose what they view as the increasing influence of feminism on video game culture; as a result, Gamergate is often viewed as a right-wing backlash against progressivism.

Industry responses to Gamergate have been predominantly negative. Gamergate has led figures both inside and outside the industry to focus on better methods of tackling online harassment.

Contents

  [hide] 

History

Origins

In February 2013, Zoë Quinn, an independent game developer, released Depression Quest, an interactive fiction browser game. The game was met with positive reviews in the gaming media, but some backlash developed among those who believed that it had received undue attention. Quinn was harassed for months upon its release, leading her to change her phone number and screen calls.[1][2][3][4]^

Game developerZoë Quinn, the initial target of the harassment campaign

In August 2014, Eron Gjoni, Quinn's former boyfriend, published the "Zoe Post", a 9,425-word blog post that quoted from personal chat logs, emails, and text messages to describe their relationship.[4] The post, described as "a rambling online essay" in The New York Times,[5] complained, among other things, that Quinn entered a romantic relationship with Nathan Grayson, a journalist for the Gawker Media video game website Kotaku.[6][7][8][4] The post was linked on 4chan, where some erroneously claimed the relationship had induced Grayson to publish a favorable review of Depression Quest. Grayson had never reviewed Quinn's games and Grayson's only article for Kotaku mentioning her was published before their relationship began.[9][10][11] Gjoni later updated his blog post to acknowledge this.[9]^

After Gjoni's blog post, Quinn and their family were subjected to a virulent and often misogynistic harassment campaign.[12][13][14] The people behind this campaign initially referred to it as the "quinnspiracy", but adopted the Twitter hashtag "Gamergate" after it was coined by actor Adam Baldwin near the end of August.[14][15][16][17] Baldwin has described Gamergate as a backlash against political correctness, saying it has started a discussion "about culture, about ethics, and about freedom".[18][19] Journalists who did not cover the examination into Quinn's private life were accused of conspiracy, and a blacklist circulated by Gamergate supporters.[20] The accusations and harassment were coordinated by 4chan users over Internet Relay Chat (IRC), spreading rapidly over imageboards and forums like 4chan and Reddit.[7][14][21][22]^

Commentators both inside and outside the video game industry condemned the attacks against Quinn.[3][16][23] The attacks included doxing (researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information about an individual) and hacking of her Tumblr, Dropbox, and Skype accounts; she was also subjected to rape and death threats.[1][3][12][23] The release of personal information forced Quinn to flee her home; she explained that "I can't go home because they have been posting around my home address, often with threats attached to it".[24]^

At a conference Quinn said, "I used to go to game events and feel like I was going home ... Now it's just like... are any of the people I'm currently in the room with ones that said they wanted to beat me to death?".[25] One such threat, reported in The New Yorker, proposed that: "Next time she shows up at a conference we... give her a crippling injury that's never going to fully heal... a good solid injury to the knees. I'd say a brain damage, but we don't want to make it so she ends up too retarded to fear us."[26]^

Further harassment

Gamergate supporters subjected others to similar harassment, doxing, and death threats. Those who came to the victims' defense were ridiculed as "white knights", or "social justice warriors" (SJWs);[14] this characterization was intended, according to Heron, Belford and Goker, to neutralize any opposition by questioning their motives.[14] Shortly after the Gamergate hashtag was coined, video game developer Phil Fish had his personal information, including various accounts and passwords, hacked and publicly posted in retaliation for defending Quinn and attacking her detractors.[27][28] The hacks and doxing also exposed documents relating to Fish's company, Polytron.[29] As a result, Fish left the gaming industry and put Polytron up for sale, calling the situation "unacceptable" and saying, "it's not worth it".[1][27][30]^

Feminist and media criticAnita Sarkeesian received death threats after releasing a Tropes vs. Women in Video Games video.

The campaign expanded to include renewed harassment of prominent[31][32] feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian, who had previously been a target of online harassment due in part to her YouTube video series Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which analyzes sexist stereotypes in video games. Sarkeesian's attackers took her critical commentary as unfair and unwarranted, and considered her an interloper.[33][34][35] After a new episode of Tropes vs. Women was released on August 24, 2014, Sarkeesian received rape and death threats, and private information including her home address was leaked; she was compelled to flee her home.[36][37] At the XOXO arts and technology conference in Portland, Oregon, she said, in regard to the accusations that high-profile women were making up the threats against them, that "one of the most radical things you can do is to actually believe women when they talk about their experiences". "The perpetrators", Sarkeesian went on to say, "do not see themselves as perpetrators at all... They see themselves as noble warriors".[38]^

Sarkeesian canceled an October 2014 speaking appearance at Utah State University (USU) after the school received three anonymous threats, the second of which claimed affiliation with Gamergate.[39] The initial threat proposed that "a Montreal Massacre style attack will be carried out against the attendees, as well as the students and staff at the nearby Women's Center", alluding to the École Polytechnique massacre, a 1989 mass shooting motivated by antifeminism.[40] USU's President and Provost released a joint statement saying that USU, in consultation with state and federal law enforcement agencies, had assessed that there was no credible threat to students, staff or the speaker.[41]Requests for additional security measures were declined because of Utah's open carry laws, leading to the cancellation.[5][42][43] The threats drew the attention of mainstream media to the Gamergate situation.[44] Wingfield of The New York Times referred to the threat as "the most noxious example of a weeks long campaign to discredit or intimidate outspoken critics of the male-dominated gaming industry and its culture".[5] The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated the threat to attack Sarkeesian and other Gamergate-related threats.[45] The investigations, which were plagued with jurisdictional issues, ultimately closed with the FBI failing to identify the perpetrators of some threats and declining to prosecute others.[46][47]^

Video game developerBrianna Wusuffered Gamergate-related harassment beginning in late 2014.

In mid-October Brianna Wu, another independent game developer and co-founder of video game studio Giant Spacekat, saw her home address and other identifying information posted on 8chan as retaliation for mocking Gamergate. Wu then became the target of rape and death threats on Twitter and elsewhere. After contacting police, Wu fled her home with her husband, saying she would not allow the threats to intimidate her into silence.[5][48][49] Wu later announced an US$11,000 reward for any information leading to a conviction for those involved in her harassment, and set up a legal fund to help other game developers who have been harassed online.[50] As of April 2016, Wu was still receiving threats in such volume that she employed full-time staff to document them.[51]^

Harassment related to Gamergate continued for several months after the onset of the controversy. Two critics of Gamergate were targets of attempted "swatting"—hoaxed reports to emergency services intended to provoke a SWAT team response at the target's home.

...

Law enforcement:

hough Newsweek reported that the FBI had a file regarding Gamergate, no arrests have been made nor charges filed,[157] and parts of the FBI investigation into the threats had been closed in September 2015 due to a lack of leads.[47] Former FBI supervisory special agent for cybercrimes, Tim Ryan, stated that cyberharassment cases are a low priority for authorities because it is difficult to track down the perpetrator and they have lower penalties compared to other crimes they are tasked to enforce.[158] In June 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled in Elonis v. United States that harassing messages sent online are not necessarily true threats that would be prosecutable under criminal law and, according to Pacific Standard, this poses a further challenge in policing Gamergate-related harassment.[159] However, the Court's decision also suggested that if threats made over social media were found to be true threats, they should be treated the same as threats made in other forms of communication.[83]^

Wu has expressed her frustration over how law enforcement agencies have responded to the threats that she and other women in the game industry have received.[160] On public release of the FBI's case files on Gamergate, Wu said she was "livid", and that "Only a fraction of information we gave the FBI was looked into. They failed on all levels."[161]The lack of legal enforcement contributes towards the harassers' ability to maintain these activities without any risk of punishment, according to Chrisella Herzog of The Diplomatic Courier; at worst, harassers would see their social media accounts suspended but are able to turn around to register new accounts to continue to engage.[72]^

On March 10, 2015, U.S. Representative Katherine Clark from Massachusetts wrote a letter to the House Appropriations Committee asking it to call on the Justice Department to crack down on the harassment of women on the internet, saying the campaign of intimidation associated with Gamergate had highlighted the problem.[162][163] Clark also hosted a Congressional briefing on March 15, along with the Congressional Victims' Rights Caucus to review issues of cyberstalking and online threats; during the briefing, Quinn spoke of her experiences with Gamergate, which an executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence described during the hearing as "an online hate group ... which was started by an ex-boyfriend to ruin [Quinn's] life".[164] On May 27, the United States House of Representatives formally supported Clark's request for increased measures to combat online abuse against women, explicitly pressing for more investigations and prosecutions by the Department of Justice.[165][166] On June 2, Rep. Clark introduced the "Prioritizing Online Threat Enforcement Act of 2015" to Congress. The bill would have allocated more funding for the FBI to employ additional agents to enforce laws against cyberstalking, online criminal harassment, and threats.[167][168][169] Two years later, in June 2017, Rep. Clark introduced the "Online Safety Modernization Act of 2017" with co-sponsors Reps. Susan Brooks (Indiana) and Pat Meehan (Pennsylvania), which combined several of Clark's previous bills. The bill focused on penalizing "cybercrimes against individuals", including doxxing, swatting, and sextortion, as well as granting $20 million for law enforcement training to help tackle such crimes, and $4 million to establish the National Resource Center on Cybercrimes Against Individuals in order to study and collect statistics and information related to these crimes.[170][171]^

Gaming industry response

The harassment of Quinn, Sarkeesian, Wu, and others led prominent industry professionals to condemn the Gamergate attacks for damaging the video gaming community and the public perception of the industry.[104][172] Vanity Fair's Laura Parker stated that the Gamergate situation led those outside of the video game industry to be "flooded with evidence of the video-game community as a poisonous and unwelcoming place", furthering any negative views they may have had of video games.[173] Independent game developer Andreas Zecher wrote an open letter calling upon the community to take a stand against the attacks, attracting the signatures of more than two thousand professionals within the gaming industry.[123][137] Many in the industry saw the signatures "as proof that the people sending vicious attacks at Quinn and Sarkeesian weren't representative of the video game industry overall".[174] Writing for The Guardian, Jenn Frank described the tactics used in the harassment campaign and the climate of fear it generated through its attacks on women and their allies, concluding that this alienating and abusive environment would harm not only women but also the industry as a whole.[175] Frank herself received significant harassment for writing this article, and announced an intention to quit games journalism as a result.[79][144] Games designer Damion Schubert wrote that Gamergate was "an unprecedented catastrof**k [sic]", and that silencing critiques of games harms games developers by depriving them of feedback.[176] Several video game developers, journalists, and gamers from across various gender, racial, and social backgrounds adopted new Twitter hashtags, such as #INeedDiverseGames, #StopGamergate2014 and #GamersAgainstGamergate, to show solidarity with the people targeted by the harassment and their opposition to the reactionary messages from Gamergate supporters.[177][178]^

The Electronic Frontier Foundation characterized Gamergate as a "magnet for harassment", and notes the possible financial risk for companies dealing with it on social media platforms.[179] The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) issued a statement condemning the harassment, stating that "[t]here is no place in the video game community—or our society—for personal attacks and threats".[180] ESA president Mike Gallagher, speaking at the June 2015 Electronic Entertainment Expo, clarified that the ESA did not become more involved as they felt it was an argument that was outside their industry and their involvement would have been disruptive, but praised the efforts to counter harassment that will benefit the industry in the future.[181] At BlizzCon 2014, Blizzard Entertainment president and co-founder Mike Morhaime denounced recent harassment; blaming a "small group of people [who] have been doing really awful things" and "tarnishing our reputation" as gamers. He called on attendees to treat each other with kindness and demonstrate to the world that the community rejects harassment. His statements were widely interpreted as referring to Gamergate.[182][183][184] CEOs of both the American and European branches of Sony Computer Entertainment, Shawn Layden and Jim Ryan respectively, said the harassment and bullying were absolutely horrific and that such inappropriate behavior would not be tolerated at Sony.[185][186][187] The Swedish Games Industry issued a statement denouncing the harassment and sexism from Gamergate supporters.[188]^

Responses to Gamergate have encouraged the video game industry to review its treatment of women and minorities, and to make changes to support them.[189][190][191][192] Intel, following its accidental involvement in Gamergate, pledged more than $300 million to help support a "Diversity in Technology" program with partners including Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency organization and the IGDA, aimed at increasing the number of women and minorities in the industry. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich stated in announcing the program that "it's not good enough to say we value diversity, and then have our industry not fully represent".[193][194][195] Electronic Arts (EA) COO Peter Moore said the controversy made EA pay more attention to diversity and inclusion, telling Fortune "[i]f there's been any benefit to Gamergate, ... I think it just makes us think twice at times".[196]Speaking about Gamergate harassment to the Seattle Times, IGDA executive director Kate Edwards said, "Gaming culture has been pretty misogynistic for a long time now. There's ample evidence of that over and over again... What we're finally seeing is that it became so egregious that now companies are starting to wake up and say, "We need to stop this. This has got to change."[197]^

In response to a perceived conflict of interest between game developers and journalists, Kotaku and Polygon adopted policies of prohibiting (Kotaku) or disclosing (Polygon) all Patreon contributions to game developers.[9][17]^

The Electronic Entertainment Expo 2015 included markedly more female protagonists in these new games, as well as more visible presence by women at the event. Some commentators characterized this as a response to Gamergate and a rejection of the misogynistic Gamergate harassment.[198][199][200][201]^

The game Batman: Arkham Knight references Gamergate with hashtag, #CrusaderGate, which the Riddler uses to unsuccessfully try to rally the Internet against Batman; bemoaning its failure, the Riddler describes those who use the hashtag as "idiotic and easily roused rabble".[202][201]^

Gamergate representation in media

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