If a #GamerGate-r plagiarises the John Birch Society on your blog and no one notices, does it make a sound?

Reaxxion, the world’s crappiest right wing woman-hating excuse for a video game site, has now officially responded to my post revealing that a GamerGate manifesto they recently published was literally a repurposed John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents.

Whether the, er, “author” of the post was trolling, or just the world’s least subtle plagiarist, it was a giant embarrassment for Roosh and Reaxxion. And so, in the course of a nearly 1000-word post, Reaxxion “ethics officer” announces that they’ve shitcanned the author – and congratulates the site for its heroic bravery for throwing out a writer who copied his entire post from an old John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents.

That’s all well and good, because journalists aren’t supposed to copy pretty much their entire posts from a John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents. If you’re an editor and catch a writer doing this, you’re supposed to send that writer packing. (Remember Stephen Glass?)

But Roberts ignores what is really the most interesting and revealing thing about the whole incident, which is that a writer copied his entire post from an old John Birch Society newspaper ad from the mid-1960s, with words like “communist” removed and replaced with their GamerGate equivalents – AND NO ONE NOTICED UNTIL I POINTED IT OUT.

And why is that? Because the hysterical anti-communist rhetoric of the original ad sounds pretty much identical to the ridiculously over-the-top rhetoric that’s characterized GamerGate from the start. And it’s rooted in the same sort of reactionary politics.

Which is itself even more embarrassing than the plagiarism itself.

The John Birch Society, if you don’t already know, isn’t just a right-wing group. It’s a group so far to the right that even the National Review has denounced it. As a Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report notes that for years those on the left and on the right basically saw the Birchers as “the political equivalent of an addled uncle sent down to the basement rec room to drink, rant and hopefully pass out” before he had a chance to thoroughly embarrass the whole family by saying something truly dreadful.

I found the Bircher’s newspaper ad in a newspaper from 1966. At that time, the Birchers were fierce opponents of the civil rights movement in general and Martin Luther King Jr. in particular, labeling him a tool of the communists. As the SPLC report notes, Birchers feared that “the African-American freedom movement was being manipulated from Moscow with the goal of creating a “Soviet Negro Republic” in the Southern United States.”

Of course, the Birchers saw communists hiding behind every tree and under every bed. Indeed, the group’s founder, Robert Welch, was convinced that even President Dwight Eisenhower was a treasonous Communist puppet, and that LBJ was plotting to turn the United States over to the Communists even as he sent troops to fight against the Viet Cong.

So congratulations, GamerGaters, you’re now as officially ridiculous as the John Birch Society.

It might be a good idea to reflect a little on your life choices.