Watch out, Milo Yiannopoulos, you’ve got competition! #GamerGate has a new journalistic champion — and this one, like Milo, seems to have come straight from central casting, a virtual embodiment of every snooty reactionary preppie stereotype from every bad 80s movie.
A libertarian think tanker and erstwhile journalist with the unlikely name of Mytheos Holt, this new contender has one great advantage over young Milo: as you can see in the photo above, which I have not photoshopped in any way, he appears to be made entirely of wax — which means that unless someone accidentally sets him near a heater he will last forever.
Mytheos’ first intervention in #GamerGate comes in the form of a long opinion piece in the right-wing e-rag Daily Caller that attempts to recast the GamerGater struggle as a glorious resistance campaign to an ongoing #WaronNerds by “Far-Left Feminists And The Media.” Mytheos, who looks so much like an archetypical tormenter-of-nerds, might seem an unlikely GamerGate champion, but he’s a gamer, too, and his piece has been embraced warmly by the GG masses.
Commenters in Kotaku in Action, Reddit’s most influential GamerGate hangout, describe his piece as “excellent,” “insightful,” and “incredibly well researched.”
“Time for #WarOnNerds to start trending,” writes one enthusiastic commenter. “Welcome to the next level, Mytheos,” adds another, “we’re the only people in the history of ever to beat Social Justice, and this train has no brakes.”
The enthusiasm for the article might at first seem a little strange, given that Mytheos starts out by comparing GamerGaters to … a British teenager who earlier this year stabbed some girls in the face:
On February 11, 2014, the Daily Mail reported on the case of 19-year-old Ryan Walker, a thin, bespectacled “wimp” by reputation who, upon being bullied one too many times by some neighborhood girls, attacked them furiously, stabbing one in the face and bashing the other’s head against the pavement. …
And so it was that half a year before it began, #Gamergate was explained.
But the rest of Mytheos’ post reaffirms most of the GamerGate mythos: that it is a fight against corruption, not a campaign terrorizing outspoken women in gaming, and that it actively roots out the harassers in its midst. Above all, Mytheos argues that GamerGate, however rough it might be around the edges, is a justified rebellion against the Social Justice Warrior oppressors.
Mytheos’ indictment of the (alleged) evil leftist nerd-tormenters is as histrionic, and as utterly divorced from reality, as any GamerGate manifesto pasted into a bad infographic:
Along with their furious denunciations of the gaming press, the movement also appears to be fighting a new culture war — one against a new, radical and dangerously illiberal left which marinates in a hideous quagmire of resentment, smugness, vacuousness and contempt for free discussion. This movement prefers the vile ochlocracy of the Twitter mob … celebrates the Maoist public shaming of doxxing, and seems incapable of distinguishing between a .gif and an argument.
In case you’re wondering, ochlocracy means “government by mob.” It pays to increase your word power!
Make no mistake, when it comes to #Gamergate, both the SJWs and the gaming press are facing a backlash that is not only thoroughly warranted, but of their own making. …
America’s nerds are fighting back against what they rightly see as ages of persecution and dismissal by an extreme left wing fringe that they believe has co-opted the very press they used to trust and used it as a weapon of oppression despite claiming to speak for the oppressed. …
Their case is historically next-to-impossible to dispute.
Well, at least until Mytheos actually tries to make such a case. His alleged proof of the ongoing oppression of nerds by the SJW?
- TotalBiscuit, YouTube blabber and “moderate” GamerGater, has been “flamed” by GamerGate critics
- Sam Biddle of Gawker made a couple of joking Tweets declaring that “Nerds should be constantly degraded and shamed into submission.”
- Aaron Sorkin once described the dudes of Silicon Valley as “a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80′s.”
- The Nice Guys of OKCupid blog
Mytheos leans pretty hard on #4, devoting more time and energy to railing against the “feminist cruelty” of the Nice Guys of OkCupid blog (and those who were amused by it) than he does to the alleged “journalistic corruption” that is supposedly the real reason for GamerGate.
Indeed, aside from mentioning Biddle’s Tweets and taking a few swipes at Valleywag, the Silicon Valley blog that Biddle used to work at, Mytheos offers no real critique of journalistic corruption at all. NiceGuys of OkCupid, by contrast, gets more than 600 words, as Mytheos stands up (sort of) for the honor of a group he describes as
dumpy, white, awkward looking men whose primary crime in their profiles was expressing either insufficiently feminist viewpoints … or simply of being sad or angry about their lack of romantic options.
Yep. Mytheos does indeed seems to be suggesting that GamerGate is fundamentally driven by the resentment of “dumpy” white dudes who can’t get a date.
In a lot of ways, his argument is a cruder, and crueller, version of an argument I made about Men’s Rights Activists a few weeks back. In my post, I asked if
the rage that drives so many MRAs come from the same dark place in the psyche as the rage that so many romantically and sexually rejected feel towards their exes? …
Think of the fury many divorced MRAs feel towards their exes and women at large. Think of the self-pitying rage of “nice guys” MRAs in their teens and twenties who feel they’ve been unfairly “friendzoned” by stuck-up women. …
The self-righteous rage of the rejected is a dangerous thing. It’s dangerous when it’s directed at individual women. And it’s dangerous when it’s directed at women at large.
The continuing debacle that is GamerGate, which after all was called into existence by one dude’s long diatribe against the alleged evils of his ex-girlfriend, seems to reinforce this point every single day.
It’s just strange to see a supporter of GamerGate making a similar, if more simplistic, case — and being applauded for it by the very guys he describes so patronizingly as angry dateless “losers.”
NOTE: Make your own Mytheos Holt #NotYourShield memes here! And post them in the comments below!
It’s like watching a train repeatedly crash into its own caboose.
He looks like someone going to a Halloween party dressed as Alex P. Keaton from Family Ties.
Every time I see some GGer or MRAer make some declaration like ‘we’re beating social justice’ or ‘we have defeated social justice’, I both laugh and cry. I wonder if they’ve ever actually said that line out loud to realize how much of it makes them sound like a mustache-twirling movie villain.
Nah, you know who else “beat” social justice? Slave owners!
STEVE HOLT!
I MEAN
MYTHEOS HOLT!
I’m pretty sure Mytheos is a really cheap Greek lager.
David you evil person, linking us back to the Nice Guys blog after it stopped existing! This is almost pure evil! O:
I’m not sure TotalBiscuit can even be referred to as a “traditional” ‘gater at this point, even they have apparently turned on him. He seems to be happier revelling in the concept that he’s getting shit from “both sides” and bragging about how that must mean he’s right.
He’s basically just taking advantage of the situation to inflate his own ego at this point.
I think actual ballers take the labels off their cigars. And also probably — and I’m just guessing here — light them before trying to smoke them.
I’m impressed by his ability to hold a cigar, it’s a very important skill, definitely matches his ability to find the posh word for mobrule… This is the kind of “ethical” journalist they deserve, lets hope they never get investigative journalists oh! Silly me, isn’t that doxxing. They do have a very topsy turvey worldview
To be fair, everyone knows a real argument consists of .jpgs and MS Paint lines.
This seems to be an increasingly popular approach for pundits who want to try to maximize their audience–they claim to be in the ‘middle ground’, without ever evaluating the merits of the two sides’ arguments in a way that makes such a position justified. Frequently, one side really is without merit, and so a ‘middle ground’ position is simply the process of muddying up an otherwise clear choice.
Oh, yeah. Total Biscuit is a moderate. Totally. Totally. I am cringing. https://twitter.com/Totalbiscuit/status/533091171787350016
What’s that thing? You know, where you describe yourself but project it onto others? I know there’s a word for it… But… I just can’t think of what it is!
@ tinyorc – I wish I could “upvote” your comment!
Also, I don’t know about anyone else, but my mother raised me to understand that this world owes me nothing, and nobody is going to be nice just because you are a good person. So, if anyone could enlighten me as to how/why MRAs can spew verbal diarrhea about how women think they are owed something and then turn around and somehow imply that women deserve what they get because they did not reciprocate the joe blow gamer’s feelings (pretty much saying that women OWED them something). This is more than confusing. Projection is such a horrible thing. MRAs need new talking points – these are tired.
Is he wearing shoulder pads in that photo? Are we sure he isn’t three kids under a big trench coat? It would explain a lot.
Meowist? Yes, I’m a Meowist. I even have a Chairman Meow t-shirt, no lie. The Furrinati definitely rule me.
And hey! Wasn’t doxxing what those same Gomers did to Zoe Quinn? That’s how that dead squirrel landed in her mailbox, as I recall. Oopsie!
Yeah, keep suckin’ on that stogie, Wax Boy. I’ll just sit here and watch you melt into a congealing puddle of Elaborate Stoopid.
HAHA!
All you SJWs are going to hate trying to refute this Sword of Truth
Have you noticed how often MRAs fail to recognize satire. I thought after the first three dozen embarrassing incidents they would start reading the mastheads on the magazine blogs. Nope.
Mytheos.
Sweet flying Toaster Strudel on a tricycle, that’s his real name.
Are we sure that this guy’s not a Zelda villain or Game Of Thrones extra?
(I know that picking on his name is sort of petty when there’s such a Solomonian wealth of idiocy here to pick on instead, but… Fucking MYTHEOS.)
You really do have to wonder who raised that creature to baptize him thus, don’t you? Assuming that’s not a self-chosen legally changed name, like War Machine.
MYTHEOS HOLT
MYTHEOS
HOLT
…
Mytheos fucking Holt
https://imgflip.com/i/e60hf
Did I do it right??
What amuses me about his name, is that it’s a brand of cheap, fizzy and weak but tasty lager you can get in Greece.
The thing I can’t wrap my head around here is how they can be so dismissive of feminists and women and yet still consider getting called a “sexist” to be an ego-destroying obliteration of all self-esteem and happiness. A pro-life advocate argues with me about abortion, calls me a “baby-killer,” I don’t get super upset. So why on earth is the ability to call someone sexist this dark, terrible superweapon that liberals are using to take over the world?
I don’t think “refute” is the right word for someone who looks up at all the lights in the sky and sees a multitude of men. “Slowly walk away from” is what I would do.