Milo Yiannopoulos

Actually, It’s about Ethics in Stockholm Syndrome

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Typical #Gamergate celebrity reaction to any discussion of Baphomet.

Typical #Gamergate celebrity reaction to any discussion of Baphomet.

Often when I write about Gamergate and Baphomet, #Gamergaters demand I clarify how I am certain Gamergate and Baphomet are linked. They often point out to me that Gamergate top bananas get their share of harassment, with the implication that it is feminist extremists sending these threats. In most cases, Gamergate top brass blame specific instances of harassment on “aGG” individuals such as myself.

But in three cases I know of, top #Gamergate talking heads were actually targeted by Baphomet. I archived threads from Baphomet discussing the attack as it was in progress and documented these attacks in this space. In each case, I hoped that these Gamergate de facto leaders would actually look at the Baphomet threads, but none of them seem to want to see the sausage getting made, as it were. Still, it seems important enough for me that I want to review these attacks, to illustrate how Baphomet will hurt people within #Gamergate, the group that shelters Baphomet and profits off Baphomet’s work.

  1. Ralph Retort

Ralph Retort (aka Ethan Ralph) has a personal beef with Baphomet, which makes him the only GGer to explicitly disavow the group. In a February post reacting to Baphomet’s theft of Social Security Numbers, titled “Cancerous Baphomet Allegedly Gutted Over Credit Cards and SSN Postings”, Ralph wrote:

The fact is, they’re a cancer on 8chan. They should not only be gutted, but they should be deleted from the board altogether. Prominent GamerGate members have been tormented thanks to the baphomet board (if not the members themselves) time and time again (Liz, Remi, etc). Today they even started fucking with me, and I’ve been told to expect more attacks from those quarters. Instead of fear, I spent all day laughing at the bastards. One of the mods in particular actually tried to threaten your intrepid editor. It didn’t work, though, because baphomet is a paper tiger. They don’t scare me, and they shouldn’t scare anyone else. …

As I said on Twitter today, baphomet is a cancer, and their members are scum. Anyone in their clown crew who has broken the law, needs to be put in fucking jail. There is no middle ground for me. They’ve tarnished GamerGate with their bullshit long enough. Let me say publicly that I denounce their group, their members, and any operation that comes from their disgusting little board. I would encourage anyone else with good sense to do the same, but you are of course free to make your own judgments on the matter.

In response, Baphomet (and in particular, Vince, whom Ralph repeatedly called out by name) doxxed Ralph, his parents, his girlfriend, and allegedly compromised Ralph’s credit card information. Baphomet also attempted to frame Ralph for a SWAT attack they co-ordinated, and one Baphite sent Mercedes Carrera a picture of what they claimed was Ralph’s dick. Someone even set up a Twitter impersonator “@TheRaiphRetort”, which worked much the same as my own Baphomet impersonator “@idiediletante”.   Ralph may be tops on Baphomet’s list of #Gamergate people to harass, and Ralph definitely bears Baphomet no love.

But Ralph Retort is not above taking advantage of the fruit of Baphomet’s labors, either; for example, he wrote numerous articles about Sarah Nyberg in the wake of Baphomet claiming to have hacked her, all of which relied upon the leaked information. So although Ralph Retort is against Baphomet in principle (and especially when they attack him personally), Ralph does not generally excoriate Baphomet when they’re doxxing, harassing, or hacking his adversaries.

2. Milo Yiannopoulos / CH Sommers / Koretzky

Both Milo Yiannopoulos and Christina Hoff Sommers have had #Gamergate events spoiled this year by bomb threats. At one of them, a Baphomet user who calls himself “Eclipso” took responsibility for a bomb threat which cut short the afternoon panel of Airplay, a #Gamergate convention.

Gamergate should be out looking for this guy. But I don't think they will.

The Baphomet user who took responsibility for the Airplay threat.

At the time, I was unsure whether the threat was called in as a “fuck you” to the moderator Koretzky, who wasn’t being as co-operative as #Gamergate hoped, or as air support for Yiannopoulos, who was losing his cool during the afternoon panel. But this wasn’t the first time a joint appearance by Yiannopoulos and Based Mom has been spoiled by bomb threats, nor is it the first time they’ve blamed these threats on SJWs (despite a lack of evidence.) Both Yiannopoulos and Sommers hold Arthur Chu responsible for sending a bomb threat to their #GGinDC meetup, although there’s no evidence that Chu is actually responsible. (Chu had written the venue before the event, urging them to research Gamergate and consider cancelling; but there’s no evidence Chu sent a bomb threat once diplomacy failed.)

Although Yiannopoulos and Sommers both represent that these threats are really no big deal, they also have experienced firsthand how disruptive they can be. And to wit, Yiannopoulos has starting bringing escorts to his appearances, and Sommers seems not to want to appear at #Gamergate events without Yiannopoulos to act as her escort.

If I were to speculate, Yiannopoulos can’t call out Baphomet for spoiling his events with bomb threats because he’s dependent upon Baphomet for tips. Likewise, Sommers is reluctant to call out Baphomet on her own, since she knows she could be targeted hard, just like Ralph Retort was. In some ways, these people have no choice but to blame “SJWs” for the bad shit Baphomet does to them, because they’re indebted to Baphomet for doing their dirty work for them.

3. Sargon of Akkad

Sargon of Akkad (aka Carl Benjamin) was a career anti-SJW even before #Gamergate made that a viable way of supporting oneself. However, as Sargon became more popular, some fans complain that he has also become more moderate, more compromising for the sake of appealing to more than just #Gamergate. I don’t think this is the case – Sargon has become more mendacious, but not more moderate – but the impression that he might give quarter in the interest of keeping his Patreon open has made certain gamers pig-biting mad. And nobody’s madder about Sargon’s moderateness per se as the extremists on Baphomet: 

I just view it this way. He and his youtube buddies always think there is some conspiracy against him, even when fox new monetizes a vid he makes with fox news footage. If he is [doxxed], fucked with, or finds out about it, they will think its some SJW fem conspiracy against him. Then him and his youtube buddies will be triggered and make a bunch of retaliation vids and other things and him and KiA will go crazy.
As I said, I do not care about GG or SJWs. Im not either, although if I picked it would be GG. I just see the perfect oppertunity for lulz
To wit, Sargon was sent Google Street View images of his home the following day. But this isn’t even the first time Gamergate has trolled Sargon’s home address. He was also doxxed nearly a year prior to this, receiving a flatware set from Amazon which he opened on video. The flatware came with a note saying “please thrill yourself” from “EvilBobDALMYT and /gg/”. This was similar (if more polite, maybe) to the time Gamergate sent Chris Kluwe a dildo after his debate with Mike Cernovich.
Sargon always tries to put a laugh on it, but the fact is that he’s vulnerable to trolling from Baphomet whenever he says or does something they feel is not extreme enough. Sargon’s only response to this is to throw up blinders, opting for the “bury your head in the sand” strategy favored by ostriches and right-wing politicians. He will even choose to remain in ignorance if I send him archived Baphomet threads, so he can plausibly deny Baphomet’s involvement in one doxxing scandal or another. I assume this is because (like everyone else I discussed here) Sargon is simply too dependent on Baphomet for advantages over the SJWs to take a meaningful stand against them, even if that puts his own family at risk.
Gamergate’s Golden Handcuffs
In going through these cases, what strikes me is how Gamergate’s top brass seem to be vulnerable to harassment from their own fans. Ralph couldn’t speak out against Baphomet without getting targeted; and when other Gamergate figureheads saw Ralph getting harassed, they didn’t speak out about it either.
I can’t speak for why nobody defended Ralph’s hard stance on Baphomet identity theft (since #Gamergate would like to represent itself as against harassment), but I suspect the reason Mercedes Carrera laughed & played along with Baphomet’s trolling was because she knew she could be next. Likewise, I suspect that the reason Yiannopoulos and Sommers are intent on blaming bomb threats sent to their events on SJWs is because they know that speaking out about Baphomet will only make things worse for them. Similarly, Sargon of Akkad prefers to remain ignorant about what happens on Baphomet, because even though they know his address and have trolled him before, he’s better off with Baphomet as part-time allies than as full-time adversaries. And since Baphomet can be relied upon to stalk SJWs more often and more intensely than #Gamergate figures, perhaps #Gamergate’s superstars reason that so long as they ignore Baphomet, Baphomet will ignore them.
But the fact is, Gamergate allows Baphomet to hide in its ranks. Most Baphites are Gamergaters too, which is why Baphomet focuses its ire on “aGG” people with such intensity and regularity. Baphites are a subset of Gamergate’s fandom, and they demand to be catered to. If you stop short of 100% satisfaction, Gamergate (and by extension, Baphomet) typically pitches a tantrum. To quote Koretzky, “What happens when you give GamerGate panelists almost everything they want at AirPlay? They threaten to quit.”  Indeed, all the Gamergate celebrities I’ve mentioned here seem to regard getting doxxed and harassed as an inevitable cost of doing business on the Internet; like they’ve all developed Stockholm Syndrome from rubbing shoulders with Baphomet for too long.
This is why, I think, no #Gamergate figurehead (with the exception of Ralph Retort) is willing to stand up to Baphomet – they believe if they give Baph everything they want (which is mostly anyonymity and invisibility within the movement) that Baphomet will leave them be. But historically, this hasn’t been the case, so I don’t think it’ll happen going forward.

Milo Yiannopoulos & The Curious Case of Shaun King

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Baphomet hacker Joshua Goldberg was the source for Yiannopoulos's hit piece.

Baphomet troll Joshua Goldberg was a source for Yiannopoulos’s hit piece about Shaun King.

 

Having covered Milo Yiannopoulos’s personal history and work with #Gamergate in depth, I want to turn now to a different episode in the life of this sad hack.

First, the facts: Last summer, Yiannopoulos accused Daily Kos staff writer and #BlackLivesMatter activist Shaun King of lying about his race, accusing him of “pretending to be biracial in order to qualify for an “Oprah scholarship” to historically black Morehouse College.” To back up his claims, Yiannopoulos provided a police report from when King was assaulted at age 15 (in which the officer listed King’s race as “white”), and a copy of what he claimed was King’s birth certificate (which names two white people as King’s parents.)

Yiannopoulos claimed his source for this story was an “investigative blogger” named Vicki Pate, but in reality Yiannopoulos was initially contacted by a /Baphomet/ troll, who provided Yiannopoulos with photographs and the general gist of the story, including the hook that King is “much like Rachel Dolezal.” (More about this troll later in this post.)

Now, there are two things about this case which don’t pass the sniff test. First, the obvious comparison and chronological proximity between this story about Shaun King and the Rachel Dolezal scandal leave me suspicious that this isn’t wishful thinking on Yiannopoulos’s part. Secondly, the fact that Yiannopoulos (and by extension Breitbart) have to carefully select (or maybe even manipulate) pictures of King so that he looks as pale as possible suggest that they’re fudging his complexion to lend verisimilitude to their claims. Indeed, a simple image search for “Shaun King” returns photos which pretty clearly represent Yiannopoulos’s baseless accusations as just that.

Put it this way: If Shaun King is white, then so too is Julian Bond. But this didn’t stop more reputable papers, like the New York Times, from covering Yiannopoulos’s story as if it might be true.

King responded to the allegations by writing on Daily Kos:

The reports about my race, about my past, and about the pain I’ve endured are all lies… I have been told for most of my life that the white man on my birth certificate is not my biological father and that my actual biological father is a light-skinned black man. … It is horrifying to me that my most personal information, for the most nefarious reasons, has been forced out into the open and that my private past and pain have been used as jokes and fodder to discredit me and the greater movement for justice in America. I resent that lies have been reported as truth and that the obviously racist intentions of these attacks have been consistently downplayed at my expense and that of my family.

This seems reasonable. I certainly can think of people close to me whose biological fathers aren’t the ones listed on their birth certificates. There are various reasons this might be the case, but misattributed paternity (or, as men’s rights activists prefer to call it, “paternity fraud”) is a known known, and it occurs on average for 1-2% of live births (though in some sample populations, it is significantly higher.) And it really isn’t anybody’s business except the parties involved, or at least, it shouldn’t be. King continues:

For my entire life, I have held the cards of my complicated family history very close to my chest. I preferred to keep it that way and deeply resent that I have been forced to authenticate so many intimate details of my life to prove who I really am. This, in and of itself, is a form of violence.

King goes on to relate various experiences he’s had growing up being viewed as black within his own community:

When I was 8 years old and in the second grade, black children first began asking me if I was “mixed.” … After that day when I was first asked if I was mixed, while I was still a very young child, kids and their well-intentioned parents began telling me they knew who my black father was, that I was so and so’s cousin, etc… It happened regularly for years on end. By the time I reached middle school, I fully identified myself not even as biracial, but just as black. A white classmate of mine from middle school just posted her recollection of this. … I was seen as black, treated as black, and endured constant overt racism as a young black teenager. Never have I once identified myself as white. …

I was consistently called nigger, spat on, had a jar of tobacco spit thrown in my face, forced into fights, and on two different occasions chased by pickup trucks attempting to maul us. … In March of 1995, it all boiled over and a racist mob of nearly a dozen students beat me severely, first punching me from all sides, then, when I cradled into a fetal position on the ground they stomped me mercilessly, some with steel-toed boots, for about 20 seconds.

Even if you don’t want to believe King’s own statements, numerous other accounts have been posted, by King’s family, friends, and eyewitnesses to his 1995 assault; all of which substantiate his story. Hell, even the police officer who checked the “white” box on Shaun King’s police report was contacted by the media, and he denied Yiannopoulos’s claims:

“I believe that [King’s] biracial. I could just tell when I saw him. I marked him white because he’s very light complected. He was there with his white mother. My crime report there’s only two things you can check: black or white. It doesn’t say biracial…anyone from around here who knew him knew he was mixed.”

Now, I suppose a particular breed of asshole might not want to believe any of these accounts, or insist upon a DNA test to prove that the father listed on King’s birth certificate isn’t his biological father. But anyone who isn’t Milo Yiannopoulos should accept the overwhelming proof King’s brought against these accusations, stand down, and offer him an apology in their national papers (as far as I know, none have.)

And anyone with critical thinking skills might want to consider Yiannopoulos’s own history before taking his pronunciations about other people’s racial makeup at face value. Not only is Yiannopoulos a half-Greek, half-Irish immigrant who misrepresents himself as an English upper-class stereotype, but Yiannopoulos has written numerous times about his conception of black men as hypersexualized stereotypes.

He’s even written about hiring a black man (porn star Jovan Jordan) to escort him at #Gamergate event, referring to Jordan entirely in terms of his dick:

As Breitbart readers will know by now, video games are serious business. Over the past year, I’ve been the target of not one but two bomb threats, just because I wanted to talk about gaming.

So when I was invited to another meetup of gamers in Los Angeles this past weekend, I decided I needed protection. Over 6 feet of protection, specifically, with rippling black muscles and an unfathomably gigantic appendage. Enter Jovan Jordan.

Yes, I hired a black porn star to protect me at a GamerGate meetup. Haters and losers will accuse me of being a vain, exhibitionist homosexual attention-seeker with a fetish for black men, blowing his expense budget on trivial, ego-feeding social media bait. I don’t know where they get their ideas. …

No doubt people are still wondering why I hired a porn star, and not a regular bodyguard. But isn’t it obvious? My most ardent haters are feminists, and their fear of penises is well-known. It was vital, therefore, that I sought the services of a man believed to have the biggest dick in the porn industry.

They fear both actual minorities and the patriarchy, and Jovan Jordan was the most magnificent specimen I could find of both – and also quite a badass, and the perfect gentleman. …

Some readers may be left undecided that my choice was effective. A hung jury on Jovan! But, I assure you, it stretches the limits of credibility to disbelieve that he was capable of defending me with every inch of his manhood.

And it worked! Jovan and his penis kept the mad feminists away, just as I predicted. See, I knew a member that size would scare off any sex negative-feminist scold…

To sceptics who think this was all some kind of stunt, I say this. Would I really hire a porn star with my bodyguard allowance just because I find online threats to be a joke and it’s a hilarious way to get attention? Does that sound like me at all? Thank you.

I only hope that other critics of feminism realise the effectiveness of this strategy, and make a point of advertising their large penises ahead of public meetings. No ulterior motive here, I’m just trying to help.

I’ve heard of synecdoche, but this is ridiculous. Milo Yiannopoulos seems to really only value black men for one thing, which he mentions in this article titled “16 Movements Less Ridiculous than Black Lives Matter”:

BLACK DICKS MATTER
It is an incontrovertible fact that the darker the berry, the sweeter the juice, and it is time for an activist group to stand up for this cause. Expect the donor pool to include a lot of gay men and white women. (I speak from experience.) This means the coffers will be overflowing because let me tell you, us chi-chi men got dollar.

BLACK SEX DRIVES MATTER
See above.

BLACK HOLES MATTER
Minds out of the gutter, please! This group is focused on equal rights for black holes, the most powerful celestial bodies in the universe but viciously slandered as “dangerous.” Yet another example of how the word “black” is applied to powerful and dangerous plane-swallowing entities. But expect some confusion at rallies from punters expecting this to be a sister movement – amirite?! – to Black Dicks.

In an article titled My Grindr Profile Says “No Whites” – Am I Racist?, Yiannopoulos says it pretty explicitly:

“In the heterosexual world, for instance, black women don’t get a lot of action. … Black gay men, on the other hand, are lusted after ceaselessly.

And (of course) Yiannopoulos has this whole fantasy mixed up with notions of blackness as “belonging to the criminal underclass”:

I’ll never forget the precise moment I chose to be gay. It was the endpoint in a process of rebellion against my white middle-class parent that climaxed with me smuggling a black drug dealer into my bedroom at 3 a.m. on a school night aged 15.

They have a word for this in America. Bratty young white girls who shack up with African Americans (preferably belonging to the criminal underclass) are known as coalburners.

Is this the kind of guy whose opinions about race are worthy of public discussion? The guy who fetishizes black men as “rippling” musclebound hunks with “unfathomably gigantic appendages”? The guy who thinks Barack Obama is a “pretty white president”, the “product of elite American insitutions and corrupt Chicago politics”, and that “Donald Trump Would Be the First Real Black President?” Is that the opinion to which the NYT decided to lend legitimacy? No wonder this country has problems with racism.

 

Although Yiannopoulos claims his source for the Shaun King story was “investigative blogger” Vicki Pate (who, according to Yiannopoulos, “provided key documents”), evidence suggests Yiannopoulos was first contacted about the story by troll/master sockpuppeteer Joshua Goldberg, who currently facing federal charges of terrorism. Goldberg, who created numerous fake internet personae (including a straw feminist “Tanya Cohen” on Daily Kos), was arrested on September 10th for providing an FBI informant with bomb-making instructions while playing the part of an ISIS guerrilla online. Goldberg substantially confessed to distributing this information when confronted by the FBI. (When this happened, Milo went into full damage control mode, deleting all public correspondence between himself and Goldberg and wildly pinning the blame on Brianna Wu, who was also targeted by Goldberg under the “Tanya Cohen” persona.)

This Goldberg guy is linked to /Baphomet/, the same group which sent bomb threats to at least one of Milo’s speaking engagements this past year. How can I be sure Goldberg was involved with Baphomet? Here’s a screencap of Goldberg talking shop with Benjamin Biddix, owner of /Baphomet/,specifically about creating sockpuppet Twitter accounts. Surprisingly, Yiannopoulos was willing to overlook (or simply didn’t bother looking into) Goldberg’s connections to a group of illegal hackers when he reached out to Milo on Twitter.

And Goldberg, for his part, was so proud to help Yiannopoulos that he also posted their emails about Shaun King publicly:

"This is right up my alley. Do we have a line to the parents?" - Milo Yiannopoulos

“This is right up my alley. Do we have a line to the parents?” – Milo Yiannopoulos

 

So, it would appear Yiannopoulos used an alleged terrorist from /Baphomet/ as a source in his hit piece against Shaun King – which is of a piece with other untrue hit pieces Yiannopoulos likes to present as fact. Considering that Yiannopoulos has his own terrible opinions about race, it’s a surprise anyone paid attention to this story at all. Perhaps the Rachel Dolezal story primed people (and the media especially) to suspect every light-skinned black person of being “secretly white” – or maybe it’s subconscious racial bias directed towards King for being articulate and educated, for not suiting the stereotypes Milo Yiannopoulos enthusiastically fetishizes.

There’s at least one more post about Yiannopoulos in the works; a sort of tasting menu of some of the worst opinions he’s adopted in the interest of getting attention from the press. I hope you’ll join me for that, but until then, thanks for reading.

Milo Yiannopoulos: #Gamergate Propagandist

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#Gamergate Poster of Milo Yiannopoulos

Actual #Gamergate Fan Art of Milo Yiannopoulos

 

Thanks for joining me in my ongoing retrospective about Milo Yiannopoulos. If you haven’t read it yet, I suggest reviewing my post regarding Yiannopoulos’s Catholic Guilt, Ambition, and Failure. That has the whole 411 about his self-hating homophobic bigotry, the Kernel employees he didn’t pay, the possibly fake engagement “to a woman” he announced in 2011, that graph from that spreadsheet he used to keep strategically ranking his friends, and so much more. This post will cover Yiannopoulos’s co-dependent relationship with #Gamergate, the poorly organized hate group willing to grant Yiannopoulos legitimacy provided he does the same for them. I expect to release two more posts about this guy, provided I don’t get totally fed up with reading Milo’s “journalism”, which is so divorced from reality it belongs on the ‘fiction’ aisle.

Milo Yiannopoulos became involved with #Gamergate in September 2014, around the same time he stopped writing for The Kernel (no longer owned by Yiannopoulos) and Business Insider. Despite his previous statements deriding gamers as “beta-male bollock scratchers and twelve-year olds” whom “no one has cared about, ever,” Yiannopoulos was sympathetic; perhaps because #Gamergate seems to hate women nearly as much as he does. Milo’s first article for Gamergate, originally titled “Lying, Greedy, Promiscuous Feminist Bullies Are Tearing the Video Game Industry Apart” marks his entree to the movement. In my opinion, it may be one of the most callous and hypocritical attack pieces he’s ever written:

Step forward Chelsea Van Valkenburg, who goes by the pen name Zoe Quinn. Quinn recently released an online novel called Depression Quest, described as an “interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression.” It’s an internet version of one of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books – except boring, and as excruciatingly badly written as its promotional material suggests.

You can play it here, if you’re feeling masochistic. It’s barely a game at all, really, more of a hyperlinked Tumblr blog. Anyone could have made it, as this cruelly worded but factually sound run-down of the current controversy around Quinn points out. Quinn started furiously marketing her game just after Robin Williams died. Tasteless and opportunistic, sure, but many gave her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she was just trying to “raise awareness.” But what later came out, thanks to a startling series of confessions from Quinn’s ex-boyfriend, is just what an unpleasant and manipulative human being she is.

It’s hard to believe some of the allegations made about Quinn, who has been held up as an icon of probity by the liberal tech press, but web sleuths have provided copious evidence in support of their claims. Though she presents herself as a champion for depression sufferers, Quinn picked on a forum for depressed men called Wizardchan, misrepresenting content there to claim she was being harassed. She used her influence to torpedo a charity – a charity! – which was later hacked by one of her supporters.

First, the “copious evidence” Yiannopoulos links to is an unavilable Youtube video. (Sorry about that =/.) Secondly, the link Milo provides to prove this “charity” (which is not really a charity) was “hacked by [Quinn’s] supporters” states: “It’s unclear at this time who was responsible for the hacking”. So a lot of what Milo’s writing here is simply untrue; and the links he’s using directly contradict what he’s saying.

Third, Quinn didn’t “pick on” the shut-ins at Wizardchan; Wizardchan began harassing her once Depression Quest was listed on Steam Greenlight. The lonely boys at Wizardchan were pig-biting mad that Quinn, a woman, was releasing a pay-as-you-wish game about depression via Steam’s development channel, with some of the proceeds benefiting the National Suicide Prevention Hotline. In response, these lonely channers dug up her phone number and masturbated at the receiver when she picked up. So Yiannopoulos has got this backwards – unless making a video game about living with depression counts as “bullying depressed men”.

Quinn is not alone. There is a platoon of irritants in the media whose talents are vanishingly slight, but who generate column inches by the thousand for victimising innocents and manipulating their way around an over-sensitive industry. Some of them,such as Anita Sarkeesian, have no discernible higher purpose in life, except to bother innocent games developers.

These women purposefully court – and then exploit – boisterous, unpleasant reactions from astonished male gamers and use them to attract attention to themselves. What’s remarkable is how deeply unpleasant the skeletons lurking in their own closets often are, how completely those skeletons give the lie to their public image, and how uncritically their claims are repackaged by credulous games journalists.

This bit really illustrates the double standard Milo Yiannopoulos applies when it comes to women and online abuse. According to him, Quinn and Sarkeesian “purposefully court” abuse, but when gamers react by abusing them, Yiannopoulos minimizes it as  “boisterous, unpleasant reactions from astonished male gamers.” And he sincerely believes women do this in a calculated manner, as if it was Quinn’s and Sarkeesian’s intent to be followed around by angry mobs who want them dead. But Milo has more to say about the death threats:

Let’s be honest. We’re all used to feeling a niggling suspicion that “death threats” sent to female agitators aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. And indeed there is no evidence that any violent threat against a prominent female figure in the media or technology industry has ever been credible – that is to say, that any feminist campaigner on the receiving end of internet trolling has ever been in any real danger.  Even in the most famous American case, that of Kathy Sierra, there is no evidence the target was ever at risk.

Basically, because none of the LWs have been stabbed yet, this proves precautions they take for their safety are unnecessary. This makes about as much sense as saying it’s unnecessary to lock your door if you’ve never had a break-in, and puts the targets of these threats in a double bind: if they take precautions for their security, they’re overreacting, and if they don’t, they deserve whatever happens to them. Yiannopoulos continues in this victim-blaming vein for quite some time:

But that doesn’t stop women like Quinn from using these admittedly feverish tweets and emails from angry men to change the subject (usually from their own shortcomings and misdeeds) and play the victim with the help of limp-wristed journalists. Tweets tagged #GamerGate, from video gamersfrustrated by the antics of women like Quinn and the journalists who ignore her sins, have been skyrocketing in the past few days.

They’re ungallant, obviously, but death threats are sent by bored, lonely people – or simply out of casual malice.What’s even more pathetic than taking to the internet to work off your anger, though, is using death threats to get sympathy, or to vindictively pursue your ideological opponents and see their lives destroyed with jail sentences.

Showing off injudicious responses from bewildered men has become something like a badge of honour for a certain generation of feminist campaigner, which gives you some indication of how seriously they take the implied threats. (That is: not in the least.) It’s a sort of online Olympics, where women strut and peacock and compete to show off the most explicitly-worded and imaginative hate mail they’ve received.

Often, they call law enforcement agencies, try to get perpetrators banged up, and even tweet about how they’ve been “forced out of their homes.” Broadcasting information about your whereabouts on social media is an odd strategy for a person who claims to be in fear for their life. The police tend to advise against it. But even drawing attention to that fact is enough to get you slandered on the internet these days, and branded a hateful bully.

Again with the double standard: Feminists are calculated provocateurs looking to entrap male gamers, but the male gamers actually making the death threats are merely “ungallant”, “bored, lonely people” “taking to the internet to work off [their] anger”. The threats are “admittedly feverish” and “injudicious”, but Yiannopoulos seems to think the men making these threats are the real victims here, not the women who receive them. Not only is this a really callous stance to take, but it sympathizes with people who send death threats as “frustrated gamers” and “victimize[d] innocents”. It’s doubly hypocritical when you consider Yiannopoulos has recieved threats himself, but still discounts the ones other people get.

#Gamergate has some unreliable allies. Two of Milo’s events have been evacuated by anonymous bomb threats this year, at least one of which came from #Gamergate’s doxxing and raid board, Baphomet. Unfortunately, Baphomet seems to enjoy doxxing Sargon of Akkad as much as they do SJWs. Yiannopoulos relies upon Baph users as sources from time to time, so he doesn’t retaliate against the board. Instead, he minimizes the threats he himself recieves, and blames them on SJWs:

“most of the threats come from either edgy teenagers, blue-haired bra-burners or the fans of former Jeopardy! winners… and aren’t serious in the slightest.”

But when his own ass is on the line, Yiannopoulos seems not to want to risk actual bodily harm to prove Internet threats are just the “ungallant” and “admittedly feverish” writings of people “work[ing] off anger”. When he’s the one attending the convention, Yiannopoulos hires an escort. According to him, the “real quantifiable threats” Milo Yianopoulos has experienced are different from the “odd disobliging tweet” feminists receive.

 

#Gamergaters basically welcomed Yiannopoulos, eager to have a journalist – any journalist – who would cover their movement favorably. That’s Yiannopoulos’s function within #Gamergate – to attack their critics and write puff pieces how glorious and great #Gamergate is. In his article “Gamergate: Angry Feminists, Unethical Journalists are the Ones Not Welcome in the Gaming Community” (URL Title:”The Gamergate Movement is Making Great Progress, Don’t Stop Now”) Yiannopoulos relates basically how the movement sees itself:

The video game community is perhaps the most inclusive, gender neutral and colourblind on the internet. It’s also remarkably diverse, producing such offbeat pleasures as My Ex-Boyfriend The Space Tyrant and Gender Bender DNA Twister Extreme. So it was a strange choice of target for feminist culture warriors, who heaved ominously into view a few years ago, like the genocidal, psychopathic aliens in Independence Day.

It was time to do away with all that “fun” people were having, said these grievance-mongering killjoy arrivistes, and start taking seriously the overwhelmingly clear moral obligation to include at least six minorities, four gay dudes and a paraplegic illegal immigrant lesbian in every major video game release.

I’m exaggerating, obviously. But not by much: these bizarre campaigners, deploying a series of disingenuous and morally questionable tactics, such as goading people into making unpleasant remarks and then using those statements to publicly beg for sympathy and cash, have made gamers’ lives a misery these last few years.

There’s a lot to unpack in here. #Gamergate thinks of itself as “inclusive, gender neutral & colourblind”, but IRL this works the same as “no one knows you’re a dog on the internet.” The chan virtue of everyone being anonymous (and therefore, equal) also makes everybody male by default.

#Gamergaters also believe games are just fine as is, and that any changes would amount to “grievance-mongering killjoy arrivistes” shoe-horning “at least six minorities, four gay dudes and a paraplegia illegal immigrant lesbian” into what #Gamergaters perceive as “their” games. The idea that women and minorites do in fact play games, and that new games may be released to cater to those demographics is apparently the truth #Gamergate can’t handle:

To the feminist campaigners trying to ruin video games for everyone and a press that refuses to reform itself despite clear evidence of professional failure, gamers have responded with all the heroic defiance of Will Smith delivering a nuke into the mothership — and with just as much style. Through a series of fundraisers and lobbying efforts, as well as polite but firm advocacy on Twitter, they have begun to formulate a coherent intellectual and activist response to those who mystifyingly claim that their games and their culture are both somehow ugly, bigoted and evil.

Uh, I don’t think calling Anita Sarkeesian a “verified cunt” on Twitter is “a coherent intellectual and activist response”. But let’s agree to disagree, and consider Gamergate’s virtues:

#GamerGate has raised over $5,000 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, blowing past a $2,000 target in just an hour. This figure easily eclipses the sub-$1,000 donation that activist developer Zoe Quinn, whose personal and professional antics kicked off #GamerGate, says she donated to iFred.org.

Remarkably, users of popular messageboard 4chan in a single evening contributed over $20,000 to The Fine Young Capitalists, a charity drive for women in gaming that Quinn’s supporters attempted and failed to sabotage, according to organisers.

Posters on 4chan’s video game messageboard, /v/, helped to create a fictional character, Vivian James, an ordinary girl who happens to hate “social justice warriors” and love playing video games — like many women in the gaming community. The Vivian James meme is slated to appear in a future Fine Young Capitalists release and serves as a reminder that not only is the gaming community welcoming and tolerant but that it deals with insurrectionists with good humour, creativity and kindness.

As proof a movement isn’t “hateful, bigoted, and evil” this could be more compelling. “Creat[ing] a fictional character”, for instance, doesn’t prove “the gaming community [is] welcoming and tolerant”, because Vivian James’s catchphrases are “shut up and play” and “get off your high horse, bitch!” Nor does raising $20,000 for a glitchy game made by a for-profit guy with offshore labor and a reality-show concept selection process qualify as “contribut[ing] to a charity drive.” Even the $5k for suicide prevention gets all the niceness sucked out it, since Yiannopoulos can’t resist mentioning how that donation “easily esclipses” what Zoe Quinn raised from Depression Quest. Dude- I know you’re Catholic, but I don’t think the charity counts if you announce it with trumpets. After a few more paragraphs, Milo says this of gamers:

#GamerGate has exposed both the feminist campaigners and even some gaming journalists as completely out of touch with the very reasons people play games. Gamers, as dozens of readers have told me in the relatively short time I have been covering the controversy now called #GamerGate, play games to escape the frustrations and absurdities of everyday life. 

That’s why they object so strongly to having those frustrations injected into their online worlds.The war in the gaming industry isn’t about right versus left, or tolerance versus bigotry: it’s between those who leverage video games to fight proxy wars about other things, introducing unwanted and unwarranted tension and misery, and those who simply want to enjoy themselves. 

So, gamers “play games to escape the frustrations and absurdities of everyday life.” They object to “having those frustrations injected into their online worlds”, causing them “unwanted and unwarranted tension and misery.” But if some feminist game really bothers them so much, couldn’t they just… not play it? It’s not like there are any shortage of “hardcore” games out there marketed towards straight male players. Are feminists ruining Gamergate’s life by making games targeted towards other demographics? Because it seems like what Yiannopoulos is saying is that because games like these make straight male players uncomfortable, they can’t be allowed to exist:

In any male-dominated industry, you’re going to find people who speak about women in ways you’d rather they didn’t. (That cuts both ways, of course: women when they get together aren’t shrinking violets when it comes to discussing the size of their boyfriend’s penis, and what he does with it.) And you’re going to find games catering to male sexual appetites by including explicit imagery of women. Game developers who pay heed to the conceited attention-seekers and useful idiots in the media are likely to see their creations fail in the marketplace. 

According to Yiannopoulos, “any male-dominated industry” is a self-justifying phenomena. Because it’s male dominated, it has to “cater to male sexual appetites” (though notably not Milo’s own) “by including explicit imagery of women”, and anybody who makes a game that isn’t all Solid Snakes, cigars, and T&A “are likely to see their creations fail in the marketplace.” (Yiannopoulos is dead wrong – the Portal series, for example, features no “explicit imagery of women” or “catering to male sexual appetites” and guys still played it.) It’s weird how Yiannopoulos defends this status quo “natural” when he himself proves #NotAllMen are attracted to this sort of thing:

There’s an assumption in these feminist critiques that this is somehow a cause for shame or outrage. It is not. There’s nothing unnatural about male gamers enjoying attractive female characters. What’s unnatural is trying to police it. Feminist campaigners such as Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian won’t like this comparison, but what their mission represents is a new kind of sexually dysfunctional authority clamping down on the sexuality of the great unwashed, like politicians and some churches throughout history.

Wow. We’re getting back into that whole self-hating gay man thing; Yiannopoulos idolizes “male gamers enjoying attractive female characters” as “nothing unnatural”, and disparages feminists as “clamping down on the sexuality of the great unwashed”. Yiannopoulos always phrases this group as “male gamers”, too – as if the normal male sexuality is a heterosexual one, and the imposition of gay characters (or a “paraplegic illegal immigrant lesbian”, if you will) into a video game would be “sexually dysfunctional” authoritarianism. This guy is ruining games for everybody.

Unhappy, egotistical people will always try to spread their misery around. So it is with Quinn and Sarkeesian. But we should resist their attempts to cover this innocent pastime in shame and opprobrium, because their criticisms are entirely without merit. If there’s one thing #GamerGate activism is proving, it’s that there is no bigotry problem in the gaming industry: it’s an illusion, cooked up by people with axes to grind.

Wait, what? Yiannopoulos was just going on about how predominantly male, straight, and white gaming was, and how that reflects the tastes gaming’s customer base. But there’s “no bigotry problem in the gaming industry”? He can’t quite decide whether the problem is an illusion, or if it does exist, but it’s a non-problem because gaming is a refuge for traditional masculinity.

Frankly, Yiannopoulos posts about #Gamergate can get a little tedious, because it’s always about the damn feminists. Yiannopoulos even shoe-horns that subject into an article titled “Superman Actor Dean Cain on Gamergate: I’m On The Gamers’ Side”:

Having defeated Lex Luthor in the 1990s, Cain has now thrown his hat in the ring against a nefarious new super-villain: the rainbow-haired social justice warrior. On Steven Crowder’s show earlier today, Cain & I discussed the threat to artistic freedom posed by pearl-clutching activists whose fact-free rants about sexism and violence have infuriated both gamers and game developers.

While Cain disputes the idea games cause violence, Yiannopoulos seems as obsessed with SJWs as ever:

GamerGate supporters advocate for higher ethical standards in games journalism and reject the advances of feminist critics who say video games are overly violent and sexist and have a deleterious effect on the real world. They have been wrongly accused of rape and death threats by far-left social activists and bloggers. …

As regular readers will know, the mere mention of GamerGate is kryptonite for so-called SJWs – reason enough for right-thinking people to support it. Now closing in on its one-year anniversary, the hashtag has become a rallying cry for everyone with an objection to hand-wringing moral panickers.

If you want to signal your opposition to hectoring, bullying, public-shaming political correctness, there is no faster way to do it than go on Twitter and type “I support #GamerGate.” That’s what Cain did on Crowder’s show today.

It’s a bit confusing. Whereas Cain expresses solidarity with #Gamergate by being a gamer himself, Yiannopoulos says #Gamergate “has become a rallying cry for everyone with an objection to hand-wringing moral panickers.” Talk about scope creep: I thought #Gamergaters just wanted to play video games, but Yiannopoulos seems to think of them as a personal army.

Yiannopoulos personally is certainly more invested in attacking individual feminists, over and over again, like he does in a post titled “Zoe Quinn is the Perfect Person to Address the UN on Cyberbullying”:

A failed game designer and professional victim most famous for cheating on her boyfriend and inspiring a year-long hate campaign against video game enthusiasts has tweeted that she will be speaking at the United Nations this week as part of a panel called “Cyber Violence Against Women & Girls: A Worldwide Wake-Up Call.” …

Quinn is the video game developer – in the loosest and most forgiving definition of that term – who served as a flashpoint for #GamerGate, the consumer revolt against the authoritarian Left’s incursion into gaming and the unethical gaming press that serves as its entry point. Quinn hasn’t done much developing recently, because she is busy with a Kafkaesque “anti-harassment” project called CON. (The “Crash Override Network”… I wish I was making it up.)

I say Kafkaesque because Zoe Quinn, like most of the intersectional feminist left, exists in a quantum superstate between aggressor and victim, provoking, demonising and ridiculing people she doesn’t like and then instantly crying foul when they respond in kind, retreating into damsel-in-distress mode and calling on men she’s slept with (allegedly) or tried to sleep with (allegedly) or who have tried to sleep with her (allegedly) in order to brand her enemies – most of the rest of the world, it seems – as “bullies,” “abusers” and “harassers.”

Once in a while, Quinn descends from her lofty internet perch of hypocrisy, self-aggrandisement and malice, taking a break from the exhausting duties of being a white middle-class feminist to lecture the world on precisely the sort of behaviour of which she herself was guilty before she realised that, to the media and the authoritarian-progressive political establishment, victimhood is a perfectly acceptable alternative to talent. …

The only problem with this argument is that the real quantifiable threats are almost always against people Quinn doesn’t like: that is, gamers, not feminists. Sure, feminists get the odd disobliging tweet, but real-world bomb threats in Florida and even Washington, DC have only ever been deemed credible by the police when directed at gamers.

Does this all sound a little… familiar? This post is in many ways exactly the same as that other post about Zoe Quinn, although Yiannopoulos wrote these articles about a year apart.

Reading this, it seems like #Gamergate is in the exact same place they were 12 months ago – they’re angry at women in tech, they’re angry at minorities in tech, and they’re angry other at cis, white, het gamers for not respecting their authority. They’re so desperate to be taken seriously that #Gamergate’s been exploited a bunch of times for money, pageviews, and as a recruiting ground for terrorists.

That is really the most dangerous thing about this Yiannopoulos guy – he leaves the door open for creeps like Weev, who described Gamergate as “the biggest siren bringing people into the folds of white nationalism.” Yiannopoulos worked with Weev on articles attacking his ex-girlfriend magazine editor Shanley Kane, including an interview with the man himself. By acting as #Gamergate’s publicist, Yiannopoulos attracts other scumbags he works with, like Weev  and Roosh V to the movement. #Gamergate has been exploited dozens of times for money, time, and upvotes, and Yiannopoulos in particular exploits #Gamergate for pageviews. Another benefit is that Yiannopoulos has got #Gamergate in the tank when it’s time to defend Roosh V’s character, or attack abortion rights, or bitch about female Thor.

I could continue linking to ridiculous, repulsive things Yiannopoulos has written or said in #Gamergate’s defense – truthfully, Yiannopoulos has been banging on about #Gamergate for so long I’m surprised his editors at Breitbart haven’t told him to knock it off – but I think I’ve made my point. So I’ll let Milo finish himself off, with this Hair Club for Men style endorsement of #Gamergate, taken from an article by him titled “Sneaky Little Hobbitses: How Gamers Transformed the Culture Wars”:

So, here’s a confession. I don’t just call myself a reporter covering GamerGate any more. I am a proud member of the movement myself. And it’s a wonderful, remarkable group to be in, packed full of some of the quirkiest, smartest, funniest, most welcoming, tolerant and warm people I’ve ever met. Here’s to another terrific 12 months, shitlords!