If you search Google for “Anita Sarkeesian” and “not a gamer” or “not a real gamer” you’ll find links to hundreds of angry gamer tirades against the gaming critic for allegedly not knowing what she’s talking about, among them several videos devoted to proving her “not a real gamer,” an article declaring her “the worst thing to happen to videogames since Sonic ‘06,” and an Encylopedia Dramatica entry that declares her to be, among other things, “a feminazi bitch and “pop culture critic” with whore earrings” as well as “a filthy Jew and a white race traitor [with] sandn*gger parents.”
Given this obvious antipathy towards people who aren’t gamers but who still have opinions about gaming, you might not expect the #GamerGate masses to embrace putative allies who who admit they’ve never played games. Yet #GamerGaters have not only welcome but lionized neo-con faux feminist Christina Hoff Sommers, Breitbart “journalist” Milo Yiannopoulos and PUA blogger/lawyer/juice marketer Mike Cernovich, a #GamerGate crusader who recently offered to fight entrepreneur Anil Dash in order to prove something or other about bullying. (Yeah, I don’t get it either.)
Well, it turns out that not only are Yiannopoulos and Cernovich not gamers, but before their emergence as #GamerGate celebrities both of them had histories as nerd-baiting gamer haters and bullies. Matt Binder — yep, the guy from The Majority Report with Sam Seder who recently gave Paul Elam a drubbing in a YouTube debate — has been poking around in the Twitter histories of both men, and has uncovered some pretty foul stuff from both.
I mean, it’s not news that these guys are assholes, but some of what Binder found might shock their new #GamerGater friends.
Let’s start with Milo Yiannopoulos, nerd baiter:
#gamergate pic.twitter.com/4iEBRorSCu
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) October 20, 2014
wow he really respects the people in #gamergate pic.twitter.com/ayCB7Un2Ui
— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) October 20, 2014
You can find more examples in this handy Storify: The GamerGate-supporting journalist who hates gamers
But it’s Mike Cernovich who has the truly nasty past, attacking not only “nerds” but fat people, trans women and rape victims.
Here’s his take on “gaming media,” in a Tweet from August of this year:
https://twitter.com/PlayDangerously/status/505066536873521152
But that’s just scratching the surface. This alleged opponent of bullying turns out to be quite the bully on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/PlayDangerously/status/384517684764762112
For many more examples, including Cernovich’s repellent thoughts on murder, see @MattBinder reveals the truth about #GamerGate’s anti-bullying hero Mike Cernovich with his own tweets.
Meanwhile, Sam Biddle — the Gawker writer who recently became a target of #GamerGaters after posting nerd-baiting comments about gamers similar to those posted by Yiannopoulos and Cernovich — offers his take on The D-List Right-Wingers Who’ve Turned Gamergate Into Their Loser Army in a post titled, er, The D-List Right-Wingers Who’ve Turned Gamergate Into Their Loser Army.
Real charmers, this lot.
This does not surprise me in the slightest. These guys are from the same breed of right-wing hack as Jack Thompson, and yet the same gamers who fought against the Moral Guardians in the past are gladly welcoming their scions in the name of regressivism.
I saw this on Gawker earlier, and Cernovich’s bio on his website is a monument to douchebaggery. The men doesn’t have merely have issues, he has a reading room.
It’s funny how GamerGaters keep defending Pope Yiannopoulos’s horrible statements about gamers by stating that he’s sorry so they forgave him. It’s funny because Sam Biddle apologized for his nerd joke (for people who insist that feminists are professional victims, gamergaters sure are thin skinned) several days before Juice-Lawyer and his army of ‘gaters were still demanding his head on a platter for “bullying”. I guess I just don’t understand ethics.
Don’t worry, though. Thanks to the first rule of GamerGate, any GamerGater who is caught be horrible was never really a True GamerGater-man, so Juice-Lawyer totally doesn’t count.
I am absolutely shocked. Look how absolutely shocked I am. This is my absolutely shocked face, which I am displaying because of how absolute and shocky my absolute shock is at this moment.
Look. Look at my absolute shock.
http://itg.emerson.edu/word/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/CAT-SHOCKED.jpeg
Such shock.
The no-true gamergator stuff annoys the shit out of me. People, women especially, mention gamergate and get harassment afterwards. The threats don’t always mention gamergate specifically so relating them to GG is “totally unfair!”.
Fuck. I have met three-year-olds with more guile.
The grifters have arrived to participate in the flavor of the month and possibly fleece a few gators.
According to Mr. Cernovich,
(that’s one of his tweets from the link).
A true hero for the underdog, this one. All about the journalistic ethics, this guy.
@ kirbywarp – I share your shockatude! Also shocked I am! (though less adorably so)
This guy has actually cited Steve Sailer in serious, non-satirical way…Steve f*cking Sailer.
But supposedly, it’s still somehow about ethics. Probably just a coincidence that a very specific kind of people seems to be drawn to this “movement”
so shock much what
You mean that #Gits don’t actually give a rat’s haemorrhoidal asshole about either ethics or gaming and just want to pack with other morons who agree with their misogynistic, racist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic far-right viewpoints?
Allow me to third the sheer shock of it all.
That Sam Biddle post features tweets from Hugo Schwyzer calling Cernovich out. When Hugo Schwyzer looks like the classy one next to you, you’ve really sunk unfathomably low.
Yay! Casablanca reference. Agreeable.
Would it count as doxxing if I emailed this link to the Bar Association?
Drama kings.
All the internets to weirwoodtreehugger! (could someone please loan me a new keyboard? There’s coco on mine)
M. the Social Justice Ranger, if you know in what states he is admitted to practice, look over the local equivalents to the Model Rules of Professional Conduct and see what you come up with. Off the top of my head, his advice on committing murder brings to mind Rule 8.4.
Cernovich, if you can beat me in a stand up fight*, I’ll give a quarter million dollars to the charity of your choice.
*fact: you can’t
Delicious irony is delicious.
I can’t believe they’re still angry over Leigh Alexander using a couple of crude stereotypes about gamers two months ago, but they’re willing to give M.Y. a pass on saying that.
Oh wait, yeah I can. Because It’s Okay If You’re A GamerGater.
These garbage-lords are finally coming to the attention of non-gaming journalists, and predictably they’re looking really bad even under the most favourable conditions. Hopefully they’ll be relegated to a tiny fringe of the inernet where they can stew in their own bigotry and everyone else can happily move on to fix the industry without them.
http://i.imgur.com/aZdoSbf.jpg
The other problem with Milo and journalistic ethics is that he provably doesn’t have any. He didn’t pay his own staff or freelancers at The Kernel (tech news, a low-rent Register) until a judge forced him to:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/sep/12/the-kernel-sued-former-contributors
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/mar/01/the-kernel
Are people still really upset because people criticise their hobby?
Because people need to lighten the fuck up or, y’know, just go play some games.
Gonna go play Alien: Isolation just to avoid all these nerds.
But that’s technically a lack of EDITORIAL ethics, not paying the journalists, isn’t it? 😀
I think the Gators put the final nail in the coffin of their credibility when their latest attack on Zoe Quinn (who they TOTES DON’T CARE ABOUT AT ALL GUYS) involved:
a) trying to accuse her of literally murdering someone
https://twitter.com/MattBinder/status/523994551615508480
b) calling her Neo-Nazi. Because someone decided her tattoo of the recycling symbol for a swastika.
https://twitter.com/TheQuinnspiracy/status/524297624313012225
Like, that’s it, lads. That’s the bottom of the barrel. You’ve got nothing. You’re done.