How is everyone leaving out literally the entire genesis of the problem and the reason it was called Gamergate and the most important aspect of it? How are you skipping the step where THE ENTIRE THING HAPPENED? Oh, right. Because even the people who want to be even-handed are utterly in the thrall of liars and sociopaths and cannot help but be called to them.
Eron Gjoni makes The Zoe Post about what a psychopathic abuser Zoe Quinn is, and details her misdeeds. This is not the first or the last time this kind of thing happened. People on imageboards and forums were mocking it with the hashtag #fiveguysburgersandfries because of the five dudes she slept with at whatever place. This was the same level of reaction people had against Brad Wardell when the allegations of sexual misconduct came out against him. (Those turned out to be false, filed by someone who was fired after stealing a bunch of shit.)
But then something odd happened that hadn’t happened with Brad Wardell or anyone else before. Every single forum where people discussed video game news suddenly had every single thread about this deleted with no comment. Even fucking 4chan, you know, the shithole that doesn’t moderate at all. If you posted about the Zoe Post, it went away, and if you kept posting about it, you were banned, and nobody said why, and nobody acknowledged they were doing it.
Then, within the span of 24 hours, eight (I think? around that number) major gaming websites all published editorials about how “Gamers” are bad people who are misogynist racist trolls and should be rebuked, how “gamers don’t have to be your audience, gamers are over”. Gaming journalism sites, a whole bunch of them, in what was CLEARLY a concerted effort, all came out to say that gamers were stupid misogynist neckbeards who hated women and were threatening to women and loved harassing women.
I cannot possibly overstress the importance of this. This is the event. People were not mobilized by the Zoe Post. People weree mobilized when the entire, as in the entire, as in all of them, the entire indie game and game journalism community united to delete threads where people talked about the awful things Zoe Quinn did, and then said taht gamers all hate women and should be reviled.
Cannot possibly stress this enough. If you think you understand Gamergate and your understanding is not focused on this event, you are wrong.
The accusations of the harassment campaign came BEFORE IT EXISTED.
Everyone involved denied any coordination, of course, it was just obvious that these things were true! The reason it was about ethics in games journalism was all of thesre game journalists forming a literal and not metaphorical conspiracy to use their outlets to gin up outrage at their own customers in order to make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn. That’s why it was about ethics in game journalism, because of the unethical conduct of the games journalists in defending Zoe Quinn, a psychopath who has never contributed anything to the world other than the abuse of other human beings.
This was the coverup. This was the thing that turned heads. Before it was drama. Now it was a literal conspiracy. #Gamergate was coined by one of the Baldwins, in a tweet about THIS EVENT. Not a nebulous concept of women who haven’t been harassed enough, but a specific and ludicrously damning event that has been forgotten.
They claimed to have not coordinated, and guess what! That was a lie too! They were all collaborating on a mailing list called “GameJournoPros,” which was later released to the public. On that list, you can see them talking about what could make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn, and then they decide that what they should do, on the games journalism sites they control, is say that gamers are dead as an audience because they hate women. That was the plan they formed to make people stop saying mean things about their friend Zoe Quinn, a psychopath who would years later drive Alec Holowka to suicide with incontrovertibly false accusations of abuse that she made because people weren’t paying attention to her.
This was a literal and not metaphorical conspiracy. It is the entire thing that happened. You cannot discuss gamergate without discussing this event that is gamergate. Okay?
A literal and not metaphorical conspiracy who literally and not metaphorically control output of information and public opinion decided, in e-mails that are now a matter of public record, that they should accuse gamers of being misogynists who harass and hate women, so they can get gamers to stop talking about all the awful things their friend Zoe Quinn did.
They created the story they wanted to see happen. They defined the harassment before it occurred. They defined it in terms of what would be most useful to them. And they were caught again and again and again and again falsifying harassment of themselves in order to point to gamer harassment as a reason they should be given social power. Sarkeesian screencapped mean Tweets about her… from an account that had never tweeted before, one second after the tweet was made, while she was logged out, while there was no way to search for it. She made them herself and screenshotted them. There were harassing comments posted as proof that had the red spellcheck lines under them, meaning they were screencapped while being written.
Candace Owens, insane conservative black woman, went insane because she had an “outpouring of gamer harassment” after having talked to Zoe Quinn about her dumb “Social Autopsy” idea, realized that the harassment was coming to an e-mail she never associated with the project and figured out “wait this entire wave of online harassment is coming from Zoe Quinn and Randi Lee Harper.” Everyone in the media she went to instantly fell in line, telling obvious lies to defend Quinn, even having never been in contact before. you know what? That’s the kind of thing that drives someone insane in our political system! You would completely rebuke every single thing the liberal media stood for after that!
What are the odds that this literal and not metaphorical conspiracy, whose existence is public record, would come up with a plan to say how nasty gamers were in order to cover for their friends’ misdeeds, and then it would turn out that the lie they made up to feel good and cover for their friend, the lie they decided to tell everyone, would just so happen to become true after they already told everyone in the media that lie?
Gamergate is the event that didn’t decide the political future, it just showed it. People lie to defend psychopaths for no other reason than to defend psychopaths. They side with liars for the joy of siding with liars and no other reason. Lies are told openly, blatantly, and people who know they are lies will say “Well, but the lie DOES feel good to believe…” People will say “well nobody looked good” comparing “the evil deeds of one side” and “the lies told about the other side from the same side who did those evil deeds.” The media is wall to wall shameless liars with agendas who enjoy hurting people for not being their own feelings. Journalists should always be assumed to be lying even when there is no material gain because they lie just to be in the club of liars.
Once the existence of GameJournoPros came out, the game journalists all went from “that is an insane conspiracy theory” to “well of course we were on a mailing list, that’s normal, why would anyone object”. The narrative, told by the liars, has completely omitted the step where the entire event happened, and the liars have told you that it was this spontaneous inexplicable overreaction to The Zoe Post and not their malicious intentional actions.
All is lost and death is the only escape and this is why. These facts cannot find purchase on the surface of the brain. I have told people IN THIS VERY CONVERSATION about this before and they forgot, and they went back to the story the liars told, because social power is definitionally invincible and social power does not diminish and all are enthralled to social power. This. This is the entire thing that showed that the grinding of social power was all that would ever happen again, and cruelty would be all humanity ever makes again, because it is not possible for people to form the intent to oppose the socially powerful, social power rewrites their perceptions to align with social power no matter what.
Everything that has happened since has only proven me right. This is the only thing that will ever happen again. Social power is invincible, everyone will betray you just for the joy of betraying you, and the only respite is the grave.