From GamerGate to Trump, Buzzfeed tells of Breitbart's relationship with Nazi's

General Discussion Politics
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BuzzFeed got their hands on a lot of emails that tell the tail of how Steve Bannon took Milo under his wing, and used him to weaponize his brand of white supremacy through the pages of Breitbart and social media, and later having direct contact with Peter Thiel and the Flynn family.

The emails also contain names and messages of several journalists that wrote anti-GG articles, but were very much for GG; to the point that they were providing material to use against anti-GG people like Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu.

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First of all fuck all these people.

That was a wild read. It’s so weird to live in a world where a bunch of GG people have a large impact on world politics. Hopefully Milo’s career will stay dead now that there is footage out there of white supremacists giving him a Nazi salute, but who can say these days?

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I remember being completely perplexed at the time why Slate, an ostensibly liberal-leaning and fairly well cited news source, would take the side of gamergate. Any cursory investigation would have shown the allegations against Zoe Quinn and others to be completely false, but here was Slate parroting lies without verifying them. Turns out the author being a proto-alt right bigot was the correct explanation. God, I hate 2017.

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None of this article was particularly surprising other than the depth of the machinations, and least part that was surprising was that liberal and lefty men still cling really tightly to being sexist if it gets them ahead with other men.

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This is true of so many loudly, self-declared Male Feminists™ on Twitter, too. It’s always upsetting to see people still retweet them after the curtain has been drawn. One just hopes it’s due to ignorance of their shitty behaviors and attitudes, which they never make a real effort to change because when you’re a successful grifter why be anything else?

Uh, so, how about that Vice editor for Broadly, gang?

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, a Vice spokesperson wrote, “We are shocked and disappointed by this highly inappropriate and unprofessional conduct. We just learned about this and have begun a formal review into the matter.”

Except that Sunderland has been this way for a long time. His first essay was a loving homage to Ann Coulter, which ended with a declaration that we should all hope to be so unapologetically honest; he’s gone on Twitter to say he would rather hang with Trump than any SJW; and has always supported Yiannopoulos.

Now, I like Broadly. It publishes good articles and a lot of good writers are over there. But his presence has always been gross.

I’m also not saying “fuck Vice,” like Lindy West understandably did. We’re all consumers of Vice media simply by being here. My point is that a lot of these men had made known who they were, publicly and for years, but no one seemed to care.

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Or alternatively, that right-wing men are capable of going through the motions of appearing liberal if it gets them ahead with people who actually are.

It seems a reasonable assumption to me that what they were doing in private is a truer reflection of who they actually are than their performative public personae were.

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I feel that this could end up going a bit down the “but they weren’t REAL Christians” road. I interpreted the original message as being about communities and self-presentation/self-identification rather than about True Inner Ideology or what-have-you. If there is a pattern of sexist men who identify as liberal/leftist and are active in liberal/leftist spaces, especially as authorities or respected figures, then that is a pattern which needs to be recognized and addressed, regardless of what they really should be labeled as.

edit: I think I clicked the wrong reply. I am good at internet.

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Some of them are definitely right/reactionaires but the basic fact of the matter is that there’s a lot of performative feminists in the world and sexist attitudes are extremely common.

The fact that this article came out at the same time as the Stranger’s article about Seattle’s tech-nazis made it just a “yep, mmhmm” kinda day.

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These emails and the google essay fully bares lot of simmering angry people (mostly men but some women as well) pretending to be progressive to get along at work.

Being good to other people was being forced on them by the lefties etc. Rather than just being something we should all aim for.

This comes out in the mainstream in “anti-PC” brigade. Rallying against perceived curtailing of freedoms.

The sad thing was, we had started to reach a point where it was negative to say terrible things to people. Now the pendulum has swung the other way because groups of people feel persecuted for not being able to freely use the N word/abelist/ homophobic whatever language.

My only hope is that we have to start again but from a less regressive place and can build to somewhere better.

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I feel like there’s a lot of shit that comes with being founded by someone like Gavin McInnes (as long ago as that was) and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some at the top who don’t quite know what that is or what to do about it.

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I have questions.

There is a world of evidence that men in tech never had to hide their misogyny, and never did.

Are you suggesting that people like James Damore worked in a leftist culture that silenced their hate publicly, even as they clung to it privately?

I don’t think what’s igniting people’s rage, re: the Buzzfeed revelations, are that they reveal a lack of propriety, common sense, or manners in American society.

For example, do you think black people in America ever lived in a time when white people didn’t insult them with racial slurs?

Yes, we all hear the n-slur in the mainstream much more now than before. Then again? It was always mainstream in gamer culture. Everyone knew, talked, and joked about how “that’s just the way the internet/culture is” with regards to, say, bigotry heard on Xbox Live. Or literally any online voice chat.

When I was in high school, the f-slur for homosexuals and the ablest r-word were commonplace.

More to the point, this Buzzfeed article is about the behind-the-scenes of GamerGate. How media men fed information and other material to GamerGaters that fueled bigotry and harassment. Even if your pendulum was the way you say it used to be, these were plots done in secret. Though, as Zoe Quinn and many others have been saying, there were people talking about these private actions. It’s just that no one listened or believed them. The Buzzfeed article reveals a collaboration of both liberal-leaning men as well as right-leaning ones, one which eventually led to the current national nightmare.

I agree that the way Neo-Nazis and white supremacists feel empowered on a national scale is new. Yet, though white people will denounce the KKK, they will agree with white supremacist talking points if not they’re linked to the KKK. Of relevance here is an excellent essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates on why the rise of Trump after Obama makes sense.

I kind of feel like the desire to restart everything from scratch comes from a place of privilege. Throwing up our hands and saying the only hope is a big reset unintentionally absolves us from ever having to step up, I think.

I get despair. We’ve fucked up the oceans so much as a species that jellyfish are on their way to potentially becoming their dominant animal. Still, us men? The message I hear a lot from women is that we need to step up and help fight toxic masculinity by addressing it with our male peers. By not becoming apologists for sexism from men of any political alignment. And by fighting these machinations, as AppleCider put it, as best we can when we know about them.

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Not working in tech or living in America, what I say is more coming from personal experience of a completely different culture. So feel free to correct me on anything pertinent to America and the culture there. What I wrote is really me getting my thoughts out of my head.

Casual racism, in modern society is generally frowned upon. By this, I’m ignoring the internet, which people treat as being not part of real life, for whatever reason.

There was a large South East Asian population where I grew up. Asian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and many other origins.

Many people, my own family included would refer to them with a particular racial epithet. These are virulent racists, I’m talking about. They had long since learned about not saying the N word. I was the only mixed race person in the area. I was the blackest person I knew or saw (and I’m not very black) and I only once was called that word. The Asian community was always referred to with this particular epithet however.

That doesn’t happen anymore. This kind of widespread racism, that was considered low level by the people using it, doesn’t happen in the light anymore, in my experience. That doesn’t stop the underlying cultural racism that results in black people being stopped and searched more.

That perception swung and it was no longer acceptable. I am totally aware that many people (hopefully my family not included) still hold preconceptions about the Asian community.

This does not mean we have solved racism but by making it unacceptable in common parlance we have gone someway to making minorities feel more comfortable and pushing horrible ideas to the fringe.

The problem with this is that ideas fester at fringes and the internet allows people with these terrible ideas to collaborate and build a community. So before these people would be isolated on the fringes, now they have somewhere to develop their ridiculous ideas.

So, I wasn’t trying to suggest that there was no misogyny or racism left in society, it is just harder to do in the open. Not impossible and there are still loads of examples of people ignoiring or enabling it but it not thrown around casually as it once was.

In turn the internet has enabled people who are vehemently misogynist or racist to gather and develop conspiracy theories to explain away their hate.

Certainly you are right, I didn’t really consider how even now, there is plenty of barely hidden sexism in many areas, especially tech.

This is kind of the crux of what I was (trying) to say, the world seemed like it had started to move past allowing people to be so blatantly misogynist/ racist etc. This may only be a surface level thing but it is a vital step to show that it isn’t acceptable. It prevents the momentum of hate building, spreading to younger generations.

Unfortunately, and this where my unwieldy pendulum metaphor comes in, making all this unacceptable has made large part of the population feel like they have been disadvantaged. Causing them to fight back and events now feel depressingly familiar to some of the worst moments of the last century.

Trump’s image is built on being no nonsense (read- is happy to insult others, especially minorities) advocate for the common man. This is of course nonsense.

Brexit is the same, “The big evil Europeans are re- directing your money and you get nothing for it”

It is, of course, far more complicated than that but there is certainly an element of “you’re not allowed to say anything anymore” behind this right wing lashing out. So the progress that was made caused a direct response. So by going so far in one direction a force was created that pulled us back towards where we were.

By that, I didn’t mean, starting from scratch. We have been forcibly regressed from where we were. We have to work back to a place that we were previously before we can move on. Absolutely, it requires those of us who can to stop enabling those who would do the worst while claiming non complicity. This whole Harvey Weinstein thing being a prime example.

Momentum is with the racists and misogynists (I’m sticking with this pendulum thing) but it can’t stay that way forever. Trump’s stumbles from one disaster to the next while getting very little he promised actually done will eventually anger his base.

If Brexit happens (I hope it doesn’t) I’m hoping that the British population will eventually realise it was a terrible idea.

It’s a slow war of attrition and it does no one any good but I’m hopeful things wil get better but doubtful it will every be completely “right”.

OK that’s far too much writing but hopefully I’ve explained myself better.