Gamers Are Still Over (but they’re not over Trump)
How Gamergate helped pave the way for a presidential political campaign of white supremacist hate.
In August of 2016, Hillary Clinton stood on a stage in Reno Nevada and addressed a very specific group that most people were unaware of. “This is not conservatism as we have known it,” she said. “This is not Republicanism as we have known it. These are race-baiting ideas, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant ideas, anti-woman – all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’”
Months later, alt-right Breitbart blogger and self proclaimed “villain” Milo Yiannapoulos sat in a bathtub filled with pig’s blood for a pro-Trump art exhibit called “Daddy Will Save Us All” put on by the SEC investigated Martin Shkreli.
I know about the alt-right all too well. I was given a crash course in this toxic, bigoted corner of the internet when I became a target of Gamergate in 2014.
THE AUGUST THAT NEVER ENDS
It felt like long ago, but really it wasn’t, that Michael Keaton wowed us in the critical darling Birdman, that we delighted to the offbeat dancing in the music video for Sia’s Chandelier, and that a group on 4chan decided to destroy a woman’s life just because they could.
This was the beginning of Gamergate, a harassment campaign formed by 4chan members intent on ruining game designer Zoe Quinn’s life with the made up rumor that she slept with several male game journalists for good reviews. It didn’t seem to matter that none of the supposed reviews existed and it was all at the behest of a bitter ex-boyfriend who wanted revenge. And while for the members of 4chan this was just another “Op” designed to cause damage, for it to sustain into an actual movement, it required true believers – people who believed there was an actual cause worth fighting for. Suddenly every gamer with a vague sense of frustration about industry accusations of sexism and memory of a few actual ethics violations in years past jumped at the chance to throw stones. It was from this the rallying cry of “it’s about ethics in game journalism” was born.
It became a convenient and surprisingly sustainable cover, with the core harassers pointing at new targets for the anonymous, uncountable masses to swarm and harass about invisible ethics violations. It didn’t seem to matter that very few of the targets were actually game journalists and almost all of them were women, people of colour or LGBT folk, and to deflect the very real accusations of the movement’s bigotry, they created another movement, #NotYourShield, propping up every minority Gamergate supporter possible as evidence that critics were the real bigots.
It was all keeping in line with the emerging online alt-right ideology forming on anonymous message boards like 4chan and Reddit. The ethos at the center of it is a rejection of progressive liberal politics. It’s a backlash to women and minorities demanding to be treated with respect and a world that was increasingly starting to listen. It’s anonymous groups that seek to discredit and destroy cultural progress for women and minorities through infiltration and culture jamming techniques.
It’s hard to describe the mental and physical toll becoming a target of mass online harassment has on you. My own personal story is that I was doxed (my residential address published online), swatted (false report made to police so they will respond with force, often a bomb or hostage situation), received regular COD packages ordered in my name and endured physical hate mail for about eight months. This on top of hundreds of daily abusive tweets with content ranging from demands I kill myself to Photoshopped pictures demeaning my appearance, usually from newly created anonymous social media accounts. And I got off light. Much higher profile targets had to repeatedly abandon their homes under regular threats of violence. Zoe Quinn wrote about the toll the continued campaign against her had taken in a post titled August Never Ends.
THERE ARE NO BAD TACTICS
From the outside, Gamergate appeared to be a naturally occurring phenomenon of angry people coming together, and for a majority inside the movement it was just that. But for the core group on 4chan who started the initial attack campaign, it was just business as usual.
Years ago, a Twitter campaign called #EndFathersDay was started as a extreme feminist campaign calling the day sexist. Feminists didn’t start it though, it was just another 4chan “Op” or “operation.” Even though it was quickly exposed, it didn’t stop news organizations from picking it up and reporting as if it were a legitimate story. The barrage of anti-feminist campaigns has been consistent, including #FreeBleed, #FemCon2015 or the multitude of campaigns trying to convince women to post pictures of cutting themselves in solidarity of… whatever. When Time Magazine held their annual poll of words to be banned, the same group votebombed the site to make “feminism” the winner.
But if it also sounds like innocent mischief, it’s not. The two major message boards on 4chan (and later 8chan) that spawned Gamergate were /pol/ and /r9k/. At this point, /r9k/ is most famous for having helped radicalize Chris Harper-Mercer, the UCC Oregon shooter who announced his intentions on the board the day before he shot and killed 9 people, injured 9 more and committed suicide. As the attack was happening live, members of the /r9k/ board were cheering him on in support.
During the Black Lives Matter Baltimore riots following the verdict in the shooting of Freddy Gray, the same community used fake accounts to spread on Twitter the hashtag #BaltimoreLootCrew attempting to show photos of black people proud of all the merchandise they were able to steal during the riot. Despite this being a total fiction, some news outlets were all too happy to report on it as true.
On November 23, 2015, Allen Lawrence Scarsella fired a gun into a the crowd of a Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis, injuring five. Before that, Scarsella was identified in a YouTube video where he and a friend were driving around with guns looking to dispense white justice. Scarsella was also a regular poster in the boards /pol/ and /k/(kommandos — a gun enthusiast board) under the name “Black Powder Ranger” and a member of the white supremacist group Minnesota Chimpout.
/pol/ (politically incorrect), in particular, is a board that has evolved into a full on neo-nazi message board. And while many of the posters will say they engage in violent racist, anti-semitic, and anti-feminist rhetoric for laughs, it very quickly becomes indistinguishable from genuinely sincere neo-nazis that you find on sites like Stormfront and Daily Stormer. It’s also not kept amongst themselves, as they constantly travel social media in search of targets to attack with the same violently racist, anti-semitic and anti-feminist rhetoric.
When it was believed that feminist media critic and Gamergate target Anita Sarkeesian came from Jewish heritage, it was /pol/ that developed a constant stream of anti-semitic memes derived directly from Nazi propaganda. Once it was discovered that Anita’s heritage was actually Armenian, it switched to anti-Armenian rhetoric without skipping a beat.
Their goal is to always the same — to push culture back towards a very white nationalist, male dominated place and punish those who speak up in favor of progressive politics, all the while claiming their actions constitute some kind of “satire.” I’ve taken to calling them Ironi-Nazis™.
DESPERATE TO BE DISLIKED
When Gamergate was still in it’s early formation, Milo Yiannapoulos was just a small time blogger who had been rejected by Silicon Valley and drove his online news blog venture, The Kernal, in bankruptcy, finally selling it to The Daily Dot and leaving many of his former employees unpaid. He needed to rebrand himself and found a home at ultra-right wing Breitbart News — a place where his caustic conservatism was not only accepted, but encouraged.
Yiannapoulos picked up on Gamergate in it’s infancy and took interest. It really didn’t matter that Milo wasn’t a gamer himself, or that he had publicly mocked gamers as hopeless virgins repeatedly in the past. No, the alt-right blogger had found something he deemed to be much more valuable, and that was a rabid mob he could use to try and push back against, and possibly even drive out, what he deemed as undesirable liberalism in popular media… and by extension, push public perception towards a more conservative end.
Treated as Gamergate’s defacto leader, Yiannapoulos would spend the next two years playing off their vague anxieties and persecution complex by reinforcing actions of core harassers and writing new material to get them angry all over again.
Gamergate really didn’t care if they shared Milo’s political leanings or not, and in fact many of them don’t identify as conservatives but see themselves as more left leaning. But then Gamergate has shown repeatedly that they’re willing to overlook any aspect of a person’s political ideologies for as long as they also support Gamergate. After all, when you have actual neo-nazis, rapists and MRA members extolling the virtues of your “consumer revolt,” how bad could a disgraced ultra-right wing blogger be?
But to say Gamergate was liberal would be a mistake as so much of their campaigning was against people arguing for greater inclusivity and representation in media. More specifically, a majority of them identify as hardline libertarians. So while most agree that abortion and same sex marriage should be legal — very non-conservative values — they also believe that societal problems like sexism and racism have mostly been solved and that activist movements like feminism and Black Lives Matters are needless noise making meant to artificially skew the system undeservedly. You’ll hear the term “professional victim” tossed around a lot. And while a majority of the Gamergate masses don’t see themselves as misogynistic or racist, the core group that started the initial hate campaign and directed continual harassment at new targets certainly was, and the Gamergate masses had no problem amplifying that message.
But what Milo and the core harassers of Gamergate knew was that Gamergate had nothing to do with games. It was all political theater. It was a chance to hit back at progressive groups they despised while hiding amongst a mob angry about ethics in something or other.
Milo had become the bridge between the toxic, anti-progressive subcultures of the internet’s worst elements and the alt-right, ultra conservative politics of Breitbart. He supported their “no bad tactics” approach and legitimized their white nationalist hate, sincere or not.
In a rare moment of self reflection on Twitter, Milo expressed his frustration that no one in right wing politics had taken notice of the unruly online mob he had cultivated and run with the torch to turn it into an alt-right cultural revolution that spread far beyond video games.
It was in that spirit that Yiannapoulos reached out to actual neo-nazis and tried to bring them into his alt-right fold by downplaying their sincere hatred as performative muckraking.
“In response to concerns from white voters that they’re going to go extinct, the response of the Establishment — the conservative Establishment — has been to openly welcome that extinction. It’s true that Donald Trump would not be possible without the oppressive hectoring of the progressive Left, but the entire media is to blame for the environment in which this new movement has emerged.” — Milo Yiannapoulos
Yiannapoulos ended up hiring many of Gamergate’s worst harassers as interns to write in his name and often bragged about how 8chan did all the research for the hit-pieces he would polish up and publish on Breitbart once they were squeaked past the legal department. Milo’s brand on Breitbart and the abusive harassment Ops on 4chan and 8chan had officially become indistinguishable from each other.
Breitbart suddenly found itself split into two distinct audiences — the conservative audience that just wanted to read about Cruz and Trump, and the harassment minded channers that Milo had cultivated. The two audiences didn’t mix at all as Breitbart’s regular readership became confused by articles outing trans women they’ve never heard of and comment sections filled with channer speak like “top kek” and “git gud.” So Breitbart created an offshoot brand ‘Breitbart Tech’ as a form of quarantine and hired Yiannapoulos to edit it along with his 8chan interns.
And while Milo was touring universities to upset students, funneling money from fraudulant charities and trying to trend hashtags like #FeminismisCancer, the channer audience he had developed was pushing his agenda on social media, generating Breitbart content and attacking targets.
SOUTHERN STRATEGY
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran a hard campaign based on law & order, spiking fear into people’s hearts about growing civil unrest. It was part of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which is to essentially appeal to the white supremacists of the southern states and where “crime” becomes dog-whistle political code for civil rights activist groups — namely: black power, gay rights and women’s liberation.
And it worked. By recoding language, and appealing to the bigotry of people who yearned for states rights and an end to civil rights movements, Nixon was elected — a strategy that has been part of the Republican platform ever since. Suddenly the party of Lincoln that ended slavery became the party that couldn’t win an election without embracing America’s undying white supremacists.
The era of mass incarceration of black and hispanic citizens to deprive them of voting privileges began, as did a full on backlash against feminism intended to drive women out of the workforce and emerging industries like tech.
Fast forward to 2016, and very little has changed. Black Lives Matter and third wave feminism are still being vilified by the status quo as intruding, extremist idiologies that need to be shut down. Seen through this lens, Trump seems much less of a fluke candidate and more like an inevitability.
But no one took Donald Trump seriously when he entered the primaries. It wasn’t the first time he had done so and he was universally considered a joke. Even when his campaign picked up speed and popularity, it was assumed that there was no way he could ever get the nomination of his party.
Trump took Nixon’s Southern Strategy and turned it on it’s head. He did away with any pretense of coded language and started ranting about all the same groups Nixon was concerned about. He played to people’s most xenophobic and racist fears with little worry about who he offended. The white supremacists that Republicans had spent so long trying to placate for votes were now Trump’s focus demographic and traditional small government Republicans were in the back seat.
Trump’s promises to build a border wall and deport Muslims have resonated heavily with white supremacists and neo-nazis. On sites like Daily Stormer and Occidental Observer, Trump is celebrated and endorsed as the white nationalist candidate. Given that Trump refused to denounce former KKK Grand Dragon David Duke or any white supremacist faction, it becomes apparent what Trump’s strategy is.
“The success of the Trump campaign just proves that our views resonate with millions. They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will.” — Rachel Pendergraft, Knight’s of the Klu Klux Klan
For Trump, it’s appealing to a motivated, vocal and organized hate community to get votes. But for white supremacists, it was a milestone — a turning point where a major candidate legitimized racism and white supremacy as a valid public view that would embolden it’s membership and see recruitment surge.
And it’s a message that is resonating with more than just fringe hate groups. According to a recent Langer Research Associates survey, 38% of Trump’s supporters believe that minorities have too much influence in American society.
Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy is alive and well.
JOURNALISTS ARE COLLUDING
While Trump’s success over the rest of the Republican candidates took many by surprise, one outlet was not surprised at all — in fact, they were banking on it. It was Breitbart Media.
Andrew Breitbart reportedly despised racism, but under chairman Steve Bannon, Breitbart News had turned into an incendiary, ultra-right wing, white nationalist form of political theater. Embellished black crime, irrational feminism, gay bashing and a drum beat of anti-Muslim scare stories are regular orders of the day as fabricated stories hide behind the structure of opinion pieces. It’s a website that runs headlines like: YOUNG MUSLIMS IN THE WEST ARE A TICKING TIME BOMB, BIRTH CONTROL MAKES WOMEN UNATTRACTIVE AND CRAZY and WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION REPORT: TRANNIES 49 XS HIGHER HIV RATE.
The point is never to be right or even factual, but simply loud and antagonistic. But the danger comes in when you notice that it’s always targeting those who are most vulnerable to violence in society and encourages further violence through active discrimination and tabloid-like fear mongering.
From the beginning of Trump’s campaign, Breitbart News had very firmly and loudly put all their eggs in the Trump basket, being one of the only outlets attempting to elevate Trump beyond public spectacle. Their coverage of Trump as THE candidate to vote for was omnipresent to the point of outright campaigning for him. The outlet was even accused by inside staffers of accepting money from Trump in exchange for positive coverage.
It came as little surprise then, when mid-campaign, Donald Trump hired Steve Bannon as his new campaign CEO, and that Trump’s campaign moved even further towards the white supremacist fringes that Breitbart News has cultivated.
Despite the fact that Breitbart is very actively attempting to push culture in an ultra-conservative alt-right direction, they would have a hard time if no one was buying. For them, their audience is not just the same audience that Nixon’s Southern Strategy appealed to, but also this new wave of online Ironi-Nazis™. They are consciously trying to politically activate a previously apathetic demographic that places more value on causing damage and anti-progressive ideology than a political race between Democrats and Republicans.
GAMING THE SYSTEM
4chan lives to game systems and artificially create the illusion of popular consensus. It’s one of the most common tools they have at their disposal — to find flaws in online metrics and exploit them to create the desired results.
After each debate, Donald Trump victoriously declared himself the winner despite getting repeatedly thrashed by his opponent, and he would always cite popular online polls as evidence.
But just like their previous attacks on feminism, or the artificial downvoting of the Ghostbusters trailer on YouTube, 4chan mobilized to have Trump declared the winner of as many online polls as possible.
While it may seem like an affectacious victory, and it certainly is, the point is not to win a poll but to trick people into believing that popular consensus says Donald Trump won the debates. For 4chan, it’s a win-win situation. Either people believe it and are possibly swayed to vote for Trump, or their votebombing is exposed and they get to revel in the cultural vandalism of it.
THE MEME WAR
When he first rode down that escalator to address the public, Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president and then said most Mexican immigrants were rapists. This would become the launchpad for the type of toxic and violence promoting rhetoric we would come to expect from his campaign. Every day it seemed like Trump couldn’t sink any lower, and every day he defied those expectations finding new ways to engage in misogyny and racism. He was the ideal candidate to represent places like /pol/.
As Breitbart News and Milo Yiannapoulos pushed Donald Trump as the only real candidate to support, the online alt-right went to work doing what they do best — embracing Trump’s most regressive white nationalist ideals as virtues to use against political correctness.
4chan may have gravitated to Trump without Milo Yiannapoulos, just based on the ideals of being abusive without consequence, but there’s no doubt that Milo built an expressway between the two and urged the “shitposters” on the 4chan and 8chan into Trump’s alt-right.
“If we’re serious about a Trump presidency we need to start infiltrating their conversations in order to sow more division. I’m talking systematic and long-term /mischief/, not just a few minutes trolling dumbass SJWs.” — Anonymous 4chan /pol/ Poster
It’s the sort of sub-community that narrowly focuses on the idea of trigger warnings and safe spaces as ideas that need to be destroyed; one that values abusiveness and abhors tolerance and inclusion. Trump’s reframing of hate speech as a valid retaliation against PC culture and deflecting all complaints of bigotry as an attempt to censor him was a complete extension of the existing online Ironi-Nazi™ guidebook developed under Gamergate.
Remember that Trump is the candidate who brought the women accusing Bill Clinton of sexual assault to a debate as an attempt to rattle Hillary. It was also revealed that Breitbart likely paid for the women to attend the debate, even though they’ve since reversed that story. Indeed, Trump’s campaign slogan might as well be “There Are No Bad Tactics.”
The crossover was immediate when Trump’s campaign started pulling memes from places like /pol/, with their typical anti-semitic bent, to broadcast to the public. The Star of David meme above landed the Trump campaign a lot of criticism, and they later changed the star to a circle. It’s important to note that the Trump campaign never apologized for using the Star of David to attack Hillary, and instead pretended it was meant to symbolize a sheriff’s star. But it was a meme created by white supremacists and broadcast through Trump’s megaphone to say that he is the candidate of white extremists.
In September, the Daily Beast uncovered that Oculus Rift founder and near-billionaire Palmer Luckey had been funding a team of pro-Trump “meme shitposters” under the name NimbleRichMan, a group that was promoted and supported on Reddit by none other than Milo Yiannapoulos. The goal of the team was to produce an onslaught of alt-right, anti-Hillary memes to bombard social media with.
Pepe the Frog was a character from the online comic Boy’s Club that, through the magic of internet culture, got co-opted by the 4chan community. It was a common thread almost to the point of being an official mascot and inside of /pol/ the character was often used for with a very particular white supremacist bent. The ubiquitousness of the Pepe meme to be synonymous with white supremacy prompted the Anti-Defamation League to classify the character as a “hate symbol.”
The Anti-Defamation League also found that journalists over the last year have been targeted with an onslaught of anti-semitic Tweets. Ten reporters, all Jewish, have received 83% of the abuse. New York Times editor Jonathan Weisman quit Twitter entirely when the anti-semitic abuse wouldn’t subside.
Ben Shapiro in particular, has received a lion’s share of the hate because he committed the ultimate sin in the eyes of the alt-right. Not only is he Jewish, but he quit Breitbart News after the media company refused to support Breitbart journalist Michelle Fields when she was assaulted by Trump’s campaign manager.
Over the past year, the Anti-Defamation League tracked 2 million anti-semitic tweets which achieved a combined total of 10 billion impressions. 60% of the Tweets were replies to journalists
Update 2016/10/27
The members of /pol/ on 8chan have released dox containing the home addresses of over 100 journalists deemed to be anti-Trump. When a dox is dropped like this, the intent is for other members to use the information to cause as much harassment and harm as possible. It’s crowdsourced terrorism, and I can tell you from experience that being doxed is never the end of it.
REAL WORLD VIOLENCE
White supremacist and white nationalist hate groups are a serious problem in the United States and always have been. After the attacks on 9/11, the government shifted almost all of it’s resources from tracking and monitoring white extremism groups and focused it on Islamic terrorism. Now the tracking of white extremist groups has fallen largely to independent organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center.
But the white extremism groups didn’t go away, in fact they’re on the rise, and they’re responsible for more violent deaths inside of the United States than Islamic extremists by a wide margin.
It’s only been a year since the Dylann Roof murdered 9 people with a gun in a predominantly black Charleston church. Even more recently, 5 men were arrested in Kansas for plotting to bomb a Muslim mosque and apartment complex.
It starts to become increasingly difficult to disconnect violent domestic terrorism against black and Muslim communities from Donald Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric he uses to whip his supporters into a frenzy. With Trump now accusing the voting process of being rigged against him and urging his supporters to monitor all minorities at polling stations, the 2016 election is increasingly becoming a powder keg for white extremist violence.
THE REAL COST
The 2016 election is currently only two short weeks away and all genuine polling indicates that Trump is going to lose by a wide margin, giving us the first United States woman president. History will be made.
But history already has been made as we’ve never seen hate speech brought into the mainstream and so legitimized by a presidential candidate before. Trump isn’t to blame for the hate groups and chans anymore than he’s responsible for creating racism and misogyny. But he purposefully ran a campaign that would appeal to white supremacist and anti-feminist groups.
The gap between the online Ironi-Nazis™ and actual neo-nazis may just be one of sincerity, but in a fight to make culture cater to to white men, beat down women, and drive out people of colour, the message is the same and any difference becomes semantic. Promoting hate as a legitimate form of expression can’t help but lead to acts of violence, and while the actual violent extremists are a minority on the fringes, it only takes one person to open fire in a church, and the damage they cause is severe. In this anti-progressive war of white supremacist propaganda, the alt-right cannot be without blame.
