Brace yourself, because there’s really no way to prepare you for how terrible this song is.
The lyrics are a bit difficult to figure out using, you know, your ears, so watch this in fullscreen mode so you can read them.
And no, this isn’t a joke. It’s a serious song made by serious #GamerGaters on 8chan. See this thread, or the GamerGareSings Twitter, for more details.
They are hard at work on more of these. A lot more. Here are a couple of works-in-progress. Put them in your ears if you dare.
GamerGaters claim they’re on the side of truth and righteousness, but they sure do love monologuing like cartoon villains.
They claim to be shocked by alleged evidence of journalistic collusion, yet they happily plot strategies and “operations” together both in secret and in broad daylight. They claim to be about ethics, but regularly employ not-so-subtle subterfuge to try to disguise their carefully coordinated propaganda campaigns as spontaneous uprisings.
This week, GamerGaters on 8chan launched a new “operation” to win over the hearts and minds of the masses on Tumblr. And it’s as ethically bankrupt as anything they’ve ever done.
Operation Firefly, as it’s officially known, is an attempt to take the GamerGate “fight” to a “new frontier.” Tumblr. As the originator of the initiative explains it in a somewhat less-than-stirring manifesto:
GamerGate, so depressing and destructive and … inadvertently hilarious?
Like the MRAs I write about so often here, GamerGaters have a certain fondness for the propaganda of the meme, attempting to win hearts and minds with elaborate infographics, repurposed propaganda, and basically any sort of graphic they can pull together in a few minutes with Photoshop or MSPaint.
They are, unfortunately for them, terrible at it. It’s not just that the amateur graphic designers of GamerGate lack a basic understanding of good design. They are also so completely lacking in self-awareness that they are unable to see when their graphics completely undercut the messages they are intended to convey.
So today, let’s take a look at the The Top Five Most Ridiculously Ironic #Gamergate Memes that I’ve found posted recently on 8chan and Twitter.
The other day, I posted a screenshot of an 8chan comment featuring the drawing above, a crude caricature of Anita Sarkeesian that’s a not-very-subtle variation on a racist and anti-Semitic cartoon that originally ran in a neo-Nazi newspaper.
A We Hunted the Mammoth reader was inspired by this post yesterday to do a dramatic reading of one of the more melodramatic 8chan posts from my list of 22. I’ve pasted the original screenshot of the post below if you would like to read along.
Last night, as you may have heard, the woman known to #GamerGaters as “Literally Who 2” pulled off a bit of a media coup, appearing on The Colbert Report for a brief interview by the sympathetic Colbert, who gently satirized some of the sillier “arguments” of the Gaters with a series of deliberatly obtuse questions. You know, his regular schtick.
When Anita Sarkeesian posted the picture above (well, a non-blurry version of it) to Twitter yesterday evening, thus alerting the world to her upcoming appearance on Colbert’s show, it set off a wave of panic and despair on 8chan’s /gg/ board, one of the central organizing hubs of the GamerGate “movement.”
GamerGaters sometimes try to rebut charges of misogyny by pointing out that the targets of their wrath aren’t only women. And that’s true. They also target men … who stand up for women.
Mike Stuchbery, a writer and teacher in England, recently aroused the wrath of the Gaters by posting a brief essay titled “A Letter To The Gamerdudes In My Classes” on his blog. In the essay, he wrote “[d]on’t be part of the mob that attacks whichever target GamerGate is going after this week.”
So now he’s become “the target GamerGate is going after this week.” Or one of them, anyway.
The latest brilliant plan by the GamerGaters to bring gaming industry corruption publications that say mean things about them to their knees?
OPERATION KRAMPUS, which is literally a plan to RUIN CHRISTMAS by … boycotting every game maker that continues to send review copies of games to the ever-growing list of game-related publications that the GamerGaters have decided aren’t sufficiently adoring towards the GamerGate Revolution.
Yesterday, fed up with the equivocating bullshit that’s constantly being said in the media and within gaming circles about #GamerGate, and pissed off at all those who think of themselves as good people but still refuse to see the hatred and misogyny and harassment and doxxing that has been central to GG since the start, Quinn posted a series of (justifiably) angry tweets calling out the cowards in the profession who know that what’s going on is deeply evil but won’t say anything, and documenting the unending harassment she and her boyfriend, and her family, and his family are still getting.
Was that even a sentence? I don’t know. The point is she’s STILL getting harassed. She’s STILL getting “prank” calls. She’s STILL getting death threats. People are STILL digging around in her personal life and the personal life of everyone connected to her.
The memes above? A fan of indie game developer Brianna Wu made them, using the text from some of Wu’s acerbic tweets about #GamerGaters. Wu thought the memes were funny, and posted them to Twitter.