GamerGate provides a rare example of rats climbing aboard a sinking ship.
As the “movement” stews in its own conspiratorial rage, a small army of reactionary misogynists, sensing opportunity, have joined the cause. Sure, right-wingers like Adam Baldwin and Milo Yiannopoulos have long been Gaters, but it’s only in recent days that they’ve been joined by some of the better-known manospherians, from angry lawyer and juice seller Mike Cernovich to the charming Roosh V.
The latest manosphere douchebag to take up the GamerGate cause is the lovely and talented Matt Forney, who has promptly claimed for himself the mantle of GamerGate leader and hero.
Oh, sorry, he hasn’t done this, as this actual tweet from his real Twitter account makes clear:
I'm not a hero or a leader. I'm not here to be worshipped, merely to be read. All I care about is the truth. #GamerGate
— Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 27, 2014
No, he’s just a humble man drawn to the movement because of his deep Vivian Jamesian love of video games. Oh, wait, that’s not it either?
I have no designs on being a #GamerGate leader or major figure. I don't even really play games anymore. But I hate hypocrisy and liars.
— Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 27, 2014
Ok, well, maybe he feels a certain kinship with gamer culture? I mean, like a lot of angry gamebros, Forney likes to think of himself as a sort of outsider maverick misunderstood and underappreciated by the masses.
Maybe these excerpts from a post he wrote last year will help to shed some light on this. You know, the one where he described hardcore gamers as
narcissists. … the basement-dwelling, poorly-shaven, masturbating troll of legend. The kind of person who doesn’t shower and has gigabytes of porn on an array of portable hard drives. The nerds. …
Because these dorks don’t have the social acumen to build normal human relationships, their false identities involve submerging themselves into trashy pop culture. …
I remember trying to research an article about Mass Effect around the time of the game’s release, sifting through thousands of angry threads on BioWare’s forums before giving up out of depression. Seeing all these people crying, fuming, screaming, acting like their lives were over because of a fucking video game… it made me want to drink.
Huh.
Well, anyway, he’s part of #GamerGate now, and hoping that the movement will help him in his neverending battle with the Real Enemy: “Weird Twitter.”
No, really. He thinks the anti-GamerGate “movement” is an elaborate plot orchestrated by Gawker and a bunch of people who make weird jokes on Twitter.
How many of these Weird Twitter sockpuppets are formally connected to Gawker? How many of them ARE Gawker writers in disguise? #GamerGate
— Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 25, 2014
We've already seen massive collusion between SJW game journalists. Weird Twitter being a Gawker operation is not impossible. #GamerGate
— Matt Forney (@realmattforney) October 25, 2014
There’s just one problem with Matt Forney’s new gig as not-leader and not-hero of GamerGate: he’s such a reprehensible pice of human dogshit that even GamerGaters find him a bit repellent.
After all, this is the guy who thinks women with tattoos are “broken,” psychopathic, “unlikable cunt[s].” He’s the pudgy wannabe Lothario who believes that “fat girls don’t deserve to be loved.”
He’s the guy who once declared that “[w]omen should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps,” and who wrote D-I-Y guides titled “How to Beat Your Girlfriend or Wife and Get Away with It” and “How to Crush a Girl’s Self Esteem.” (As Forney sees it, constant gaslighting and generous helpings of emotional and physical abuse will do the trick.)
Anyway, in order to address the issue of his own loathsomeness, Forney today posted what he called a “Publisher’s Statement Regarding Matt Forney’s Articles and GamerGate.”
Yes, he published this on his own blog. He’s the “publisher” making the statement, and referring to himself in the 3rd person.
In the “statement,” Matt Forney’s publisher, Matt Forney, offered a bit of a mea culpa for some of his more, er, questionable past statements.
I have said things that I have later disavowed. For example, two years ago I wrote an article gleefully celebrating the suicide of a teenage girl who engaged in a gangbang with several football players. While I still believe that [name redacted by DF] behavior was evidence of a poor upbringing and deeper psychological issues (which the media coverage about her suicide completely ignored), rejoicing in her death was morally abhorrent. For that, I apologize.
Well, gosh, I guess you deserve a few points for recognizing that a post “gleefully celebrating the suicide of a teenage girl” doesn’t look too good on your resume. Pity you had to sully that “apology” by suggesting that she was psychologically damaged and that the media should have been saying even worse things about her than it did.
Still, given that a lot of GamerGaters seem to have no problem gleefully harassing vulnerable women, Forney’s other big apology might turn out to matter more to his potential gamebro allies:
[F]our years ago, I wrote an article for my now-defunct In Mala Fide blog titled “Why Nobody Likes Nerds, and Why You’re Justified in Hating Them” that advocated bullying as a way to “shame” nerds into normality. …While I am and will remain critical of nerds and geek culture (a big part of why I have no desire to be a “leader” of GamerGate), I’ve since realized that bullying is wrong. I may not want to hang out with nerds, but they’ve never hurt me and they just want to be left alone. Again, I apologize.
Huh. Well, that may be all you need to become a GamerGater in good standing.
Matt Forney, I now pronounce you King of GamerGate.
PS: Forney has the approval of at least one prominent GamerGater: the amazing Davis Aurini:
@freiherrKvK @jordanowen42 imo, @realmattforney is a modern bukowsky; his stories should make you cry, but you're too busy laughing.
— Leo M.J. Aurini (@Aurini) October 26, 2014
Uh, you spelled Bukowski wrong. But you’re right about one thing: I’m laughing.
“rats climbing aboard a sinking ship!” LOLLOL
I have to confess following these guys (Roosh, Forney, Cernovich) on twitter is very entertaining as they flail about, manically summoning the forces (“The People Have Spoken! The Enemy Must Be Destroyed!”) under the banner of #gamergate. The reactions of their targets (most of whom have never heard of them until now since none of these idiots are in any way part of the gaming culture) are hilarious. If anything will squash #gamergate once and for all, it will be the New Misogynists’ inserting themselves into the fray.
I imagine him wandering around town with a blanket cape and a scepter made of a wrapping paper tube, loudly proclaiming that he did not ask for this burden of leadership whenever people ask him for the time or to please move out of the way.
There appear to be several of them hustling around trying to find the front of the parade.
Remember, he’s not only the “publisher” of his own blog, he’s also the reviewer of his own books!
@cinzia: no ethics breach there, because it’s not games journalism!
Anyone know a good tools to get, say, the top 20 most frequent users of a hashtag? I found a few analytics sites that give you stats like “most influential”, but that’s heavily skewed by follower count (in this case, putting wikileaks on top, despite only having a few tweets on the subject). I’m more interested in the raw numbers.
I’m curious who the most vocal gaters really are, rather than the ones with the largest audience. Not that I expect any surprises.
Such entertainment!
Gamergate is about the only thing that’s made me wish I understood Twitter. I have an account and follow some people but the whole thing is still sort of mystifying. Like yesterday, I was going to tweet a cute pic my daughter made while she was grounded from Minecraft to Anita Sarkeesian, (’cause my daughter is a much cuter disgruntled gamer than gamergaters are.)
but the last time I tried to tweet at someone I am pretty sure I screwed it completely up, like a grandma posting something personal to someone’s facebook 3 times in a row, in all caps. YOUR MOM TOLD ME ABOUT YOUR YEAST INFECTION DID YOU TRY THE GARLIC TRICK LOVE YOU LOTS! GRANDMA
https://www.hashtracking.com/explorer/?hashtag=gamergate
Also found (in case this gets held up in the mod queue, these are a lot of lins to answer studiokagato):
https://tagboard.com/gamergate/search
http://www.twitonomy.com/search.php?q=%23gamergate but the search features you would like are only available in the premium (paid) version of this at $20/month
http://trendsmap.com/topic/%23gamergate is a geographical look at the tag
This site you need to sign up for, to use it for free (initially) and I didn’t bother: http://keyhole.co/
Yeah, I tried hashtracking, but the free access only gives you about a 30 minute window, so not very representative results. http://hashtagify.me/hashtag/gamergate has better data but doesn’t present it in the free view (that’s where I got the top influencers from). Keyhole would probably do it, but they’ll charge for historical data.
I can’t blame them for charging for access; but I’m not so interested in the data that I’ll pay to find out.
What can be said about this? #GG keeps consistently attracting the worst human being they come across, and welcoming them with open arms.
@pallygirl
My country seems to be delightfully empty of #GG at the moment.
I’ve seen someone call GamerGate a giant honeypot that catches all of the Internet’s stupid.
I think it’s like the hate group version of a psychotherapist’s blank face. Since there’s nothing at the center everyone is free to project their own personal hate and stupidity onto it. Like a horrible ink blot that hates women.
I will from now on begin my tweets with “Im not a cat or a tree all I want…”
Thank you King of Gamergate.
With all the Brietbart hacks, women haters and goose stepping Nazis I actually wonder what percentage of people still using the gamergate hashtag are actually, you know, people who like computer games.
Hey everyone, stop trying to make Matt your leader!
Sorry, I’m just reading this for the first time and I can’t stop laughing. Owww, cripes, my sides are hurting.
I just glanced over the “review” this guy with the ridiculous pseudo-German name wrote about Owen and Aurinis novels. I haven’t brought myself to really read most of this wall of text, but it’s hilarious. He compares them to Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, but claims they fight today against a tyranny “more insidious” than the Nazi regime, because it is “less physically lethal”. He thinks that equating their style with Wilbur Smith’s is a compliment. He tries to sound intellectual by using words as “Anabasis”, but writes its plural as “Anabasises”. He claims they have found inspiration in the writings of Ayn Rand and Margaret Atwood, which he doesn’t like and did not read because they forced him in school to do so. He goes on long-winded rants about what they forced him to read in school (The Hobbit, the poor soul!) and why Mandela was an evil communist. He produces gems like this sentence:
<blockquoteMost people were shocked when they heard that my biggest reaction to Schindler’s List was my criticism of the fact that Amon Goeth does not follow the proper procedure for clearing his jammed P.08.
And he closes with this:
<blockquoteIt is said that the best predictor of the future is past behaviour. Going by this saying, then, Eros Empire and As I Walk These Broken Roads indicate that Messrs Owen and Aurini’s current project will not only be a superb piece of filmmaking, but a thoroughly honest, fair and balanced documentary as well.
ooops. damn blockquote…
@pallygirl – I wouldn’t tweet a pic of your daughter to @FemFreq unless you want the trolls who stalk her to have access to the image.
…Unless you can do like a private tweet.
Can you do that?
I don’t understand/use Twitter, either.
GET OFFA MY LAWN, YOU KIDS!
(True story: My now-husband broke the ice with me with a slightly crude [implied] joke about Twitter/Twitter users.)
Don’t forget the construction paper crown.
No glitter, though – that’s for girls and manginas.
Shame, too.
Glitter would make it.
@proxieme, I thought about that– the gamergaters are terrifyingly apt to go on the offensive in reaction to anything involving a girl gaming, even if the girl in question is 8.
But it’s a cartoon she drew, not a photo of herself. I wouldn’t even consider putting a pic of her anywhere a ‘gater was apt to sniff it.
He’s not the hero the ‘gaters want.
He is the hero they deserve.
Well, if he thinks that gamer dudes want him to lead him due to his natural manly superiority just like women do then I guess at least he’s consistent. Delusional and not too bright, but consistent.
So basically alot gamergate is an anti girl/gamer hate campaign by misogynist non-gamers?