“In the wake of the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by Trump supporters, bystanders on social media had plenty to say about the root causes and contributing factors that may have led to this flash point. Among these was Gamergate,” according to Vox, “the year-long harassment campaign from 2014 to 2015 that eventually became subsumed into the greater rise of the alt-right movement online.”
Fact Check: TRUE
Although “harassment campaign” is a misnomer, Gamergate can accurately be described as the first shot of the revolution we still find ourselves struggling through today. Moreover, it’s a microcosm of that revolution. What began as a reasonable request for accountability in public institutions unleashed a deluge of pent-up cultural hatred, and uncovered a conspiracy which has essentially turned Western Civilization into a socially-engineered Ponzi scheme.
In August 2014, a gamer published a blog in which he accused his ex-girlfriend, herself an amateur game developer, of cheating on him. He alleged that her behavior was part of a quid-pro-quo, wherein she traded sex with gaming journalists in return for positive coverage. As the story spread, and gamers began voicing concerns about a lack of integrity in their industry, they were suddenly met with a shocking level of vitriol, lies, censorship and… organization. Honest and fair questions were treated as sexist harassment and reciprocated with insults, and discussions of the scandal were ruthlessly suppressed online.
But then the gamers did something the powers that be did not expect – they fought back.
It quickly became apparent that this group was unlike anything militant leftism had engaged with before. Already treated as outcasts by society, the gamers were impervious to the threats and shaming tactics that had always forced others to cave. Even worse, nobody could figure out where to find them, or who they even were. The network of gamers was leaderless and anonymous, a phantom menace that forced their enemy to publicly double down. This posed a huge problem, as the only card the gaming media had to play was to continue lying.
But lie they did, and as an army of feminist journalists from the gaming, and now political media entered the fray, every last one of them had their feelings hurt in ways they could never have imagined. They labeled themselves as victims and martyrs, eventually taking their case all the way to the United Nations (seriously). The wave of death threats they received was promptly investigated by the FBI, but even that organization, rotten to the core and with a penchant for political witch hunts, came up with nothing.
One of the more hilarious aspects of the whole fiasco was that many of the gamers weren’t ideologically driven, or even that motivated. Oftentimes, the histrionic women simply fished for opinions they knew would upset them, then became upset after said opinions were received, thus furthering the number of “harassment” claims. It was the feminists themselves, not the gamers, who eventually crafted the “feminists vs. gamers” narrative in the media.
As Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos reported, “Instead of addressing allegations of corruption, examining their own prejudices and giving consideration to an industry-wide failure to provide any kind of acceptable service, the games press rounded on its own readers, accusing them of bigotry and misogyny and refusing to acknowledge that the community was sick of being lectured to and guilt-tripped on a daily basis by hypocrites and liars.
Watching the fallout on blogs, in forums and on Twitter, it’s tough to understate the extent of the shockwaves from all this, or the rift that has opened up between writers and readers as a result of Left-wing journalists reflexively defending their ideological allies. Gamers have uncovered evidence of such widespread corruption and conflicts of interest that the gaming blogs may never recover from it. The response from reporters – for the most part, denial and dismissal – is akin to mass professional suicide.”
A blatant example of that widespread corruption happened about two weeks after the scandal broke, when over a dozen media outlets seemed to collude by simultaneously publishing articles declaring “gamers are dead.” This wave of articles, and the immense backlash they drew, launched Gamergate onto the national stage. The collusion was confirmed a month later, when Yiannopoulos published the names found on GameJournoPros, a mailing list of 150 journalists and industry leaders, including those at the outlets in question.
The plot soon thickened when a video by Sargon of Akkad linked those names to an international think tank called DiGRA, or Digital Games Research Association. DiGRA had previously promoted academic papers about how to use critical theory (yes, Marxist critical theory) to deconstruct the identity of the gamer, which academia described as straight, white and male. Those same papers were then cited by the “gamers are dead” pieces. (The chart below can be viewed in a higher resolution here.)
This is when things got dark, when some of the more enterprising gamers, determined to find the truth, found out just how deep the Gamergate rabbit hole went.
They found that the social deconstruction of the gamer identity was done to make video games attractive to people of all backgrounds, so as to get a larger segment of the population playing them. Once this was achieved, video games were set to become an important component of Common Core, the agenda to force working class Americans onto a single education standard. In reality, the mission of DiGRA is to figure out how video games can be used to control people, then re-package that knowledge for consumption by making it seem positive and needed. Just as the gaming media used the information gathered by DiGRA to influence public opinion, lobbyists used that information to promote Common Core legislation in Congress.
This two-pronged approach engineered the government to provide what the public was engineered to demand.
The money trail behind these efforts leads to an organization the Quite Frankly audience has become intimately familiar with over the past few years. According to a 2014 Washington Postarticle, “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.” The foundation’s Wikipedia page further explains, “As part of its education-related initiatives, the foundation has funded journalists, think tanks, lobbying organizations, and governments.”
All of a sudden, it made perfect sense why so many people would tank their careers and reputations to defend a nobody who cheated on her boyfriend. It was all part of a cover-up.
There’s much more to Gamergate that can’t be covered here, but by now the gist of the story should be clear. It was the first iteration of a cycle that has only intensified, in which people are gaslit by the media after complaining about problems in their communities, then discover a conspiracy behind the lies. It was also the first time a large group of normal, non-political people took the time to actually study extremist Left-wing groups like radical feminists and social justice warriors, and realized just how absolutely batshit crazy they are.
To this day, Gamergate is still deeply triggering to the far left. It revealed their psychopathy, as they attacked innocent people, then took deep, personal offense, and reframed themselves as the victims, when those people fought back. To make matters worse, their opponents were able to formulate a blueprint to defeat them, and have used that blueprint in the years since to drive them to the brink of insanity. After decades of easily steamrolling their opponents, Gamergate represented their first true defeat in the culture war. Just the name of the scandal arouses a primal fear in their subconscious, a fear of not having control, and which sends them into a rage. That fear is the actual source of their comically tragic reactions to everything we do, and one day, that fear will ultimately destroy them.
