The Beginner’s Guide to #Gamergate - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Beginner’s Guide to #Gamergate
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If you had to describe the emergent media phenomenon known as #Gamergate in one sentence, it would be this:

#Gamergate is a media scandal surrounding collusion between left-wing journalists and the people they are supposed to cover, in some cases including the interaction between a sexual relationship and positive media coverage.

However, as with most one sentence descriptions, this fails to capture the essence, so here is a hypothetical situation that may help conservative readers understand #GamerGate better:

Imagine that tomorrow, news broke that Anthony Weiner had been sleeping with Melissa Harris Perry during the summer of 2013, just before Harris Perry devoted a lengthy segment to bemoaning the sexting scandal as a distraction from “real issues.”

Got it? Now, imagine that the mainstream media absolutely refused to cover news of the relationship. No, I don’t mean “buried it on page A6,” I mean didn’t cover it at all.

Now, imagine that when media consumers started protesting to ask why the relationship was never mentioned, the media smeared everyone asking about the story as anti-Semites for badmouthing Anthony Weiner.

Now, imagine news came out that the reason they didn’t cover it was because there was a secret email list being maintained by prominent media members, where Weiner allies were threatening anyone who talked about the subject into silence.

Now, imagine that even after these revelations came out, everyone still pretended the only issue was anti-Semitism.

And finally, imagine that the few times that people decided to get together to talk about the scandal, or just to socialize with each other, left-wing activists, allies of our hypothetical Anthony Weiner, called in bomb threats to stop them.

Imagine that, and you have #Gamergate, if it took place in the world of politics, rather than the world of video games journalism.

The Anthony Weiner in this analogy is independent game developer and radical left-wing activist Zoe Quinn, who has been confirmed to have begun a romantic relationship with Kotaku writer Nathan Grayson (among others) shortly after the latter wrote positively about her video game Depression Quest. The trouble is that Quinn was, reportedly, already in a relationship with a man named Eron Gjoni at the time, so this romantic relationship was also an instance of infidelity, as well as a corruption of journalistic ethics. Quinn, who has stated on record that she regards infidelity as morally equivalent to rape, admitted privately to Gjoni that she felt sick at the prospect of now being a “rapist.” According to Gjoni, this did not stop her from “raping” him four more times, however, as she engaged in four other affairs.

In response, the games press, which had previously been all too happy to publish lurid accusations of sexual misconduct against people like Cards Against Humanity creator Max Temkin, refused to cover the story. In fact, whenever it was brought up by ordinary, concerned gamers, most gaming media sources claimed that the only reason anyone cared about a journalist sleeping with his source (a clear ethical violation) was because of (wait for it) sexist hatred for the source herself. Indeed, numerous gaming publications released articles proclaiming that the “gamers” who wanted them to cover Grayson’s ethical violations were horrid, sexist, basement-dwelling trolls, to use the nicer terminology. This brutally contemptuous attack by media sources on their own audience was carried out with such efficiency that a cynic might think it had been synchronized.

Actually, it had, through an email list known as GameJournoPros, uncovered by Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos. Beyond simply coordinating their responses using that email list, Quinn’s friends and ideological allies used the list to threaten anyone who asked about the subject with professional assassination if they so much as breathed a peep about the story being accurate. These threats were not idle. Many game developers (including at major studios) have spoken out about their terror that offending a left-wing activist like Quinn could get them fired due to backlash from the equally left-wing gaming press.

The collection of disaffected gamers who wanted honest coverage of their hobby independent of sexual or social connections has since banded together under the name #Gamergate, a term coined by actor Adam Baldwin. Along with forcing coverage of the Quinn scandal, #Gamergate has donated money to charities that promote women in the games industry, has gotten an adult film star back onto her feet after her house was robbed and she was brutally gang raped, and has called out transparent bullying by professional trolls posing as anti-harassment activists. For their efforts, they have been branded as sexist and misogynistic trolls, even though many of their members and prominent spokespeople are women and minorities.

This cannot be stressed enough: despite the smears, #Gamergate has proven more capable of holding the left-wing media accountable for its lies than any other mass consumer movement. And while their primary concern is unethical practices of the sort employed by Grayson and Quinn, a sizable portion of the movement sees political correctness as the handmaiden of media corruption. Even two bomb threats have not stopped them from ruthlessly trying to purge these twin evils. And while the majority of them still identify as liberal, their devotion to seeing their hobby protected from the radical Left could lead them to vote straight Republican if that’s what it takes to protect it.

We conservatives know what it is to be victimized by political correctness and media corruption. We have been fighting it for decades. And now that a mass movement has arrived that is ready to join is, we should enthusiastically pick up our swords, fight alongside them, and give them as many reasons as possible to stay on our side.

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