10

 	WHY GAMERS DON’T HATE ME

 	In 2013, the left-leaning Guardian proudly proclaimed the “fourth wave of feminism” was upon us, and that it was “defined by technology: tools (that) are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online.”177 In other words, now women can bitch about their existence to millions of strangers online, rather than just crying while ironing like they’re supposed to.
 	A good example is the “Donglegate” scandal, in which tech evangelist and ardent feminist Adria Richards overheard a couple of men making lewd jokes about “dongles” at a tech conference, tweeted a picture of the two men, and got one of them fired. When the internet reacted with outrage against Richards, WIRED magazine cited the scandal as evidence of “misogyny in tech culture,”178 rather than what it was: an insane overreaction cooked up by a professional malcontent and grievance-monger.
 	The existence of fourth wave feminism and its supposed reason for existing has created a chicken and egg type of conundrum. With so much of their activism linked to the internet, they unavoidably encounter dissent. Sometimes a great deal of it, considering how unpopular feminists are. #YesAllWomen, intended to protest “misogyny,” was met with the parody #YesAllCats. Comment threads under notorious feminist provocateur Jessica Valenti’s column regularly attract thousands of critical comments. Critics of feminism on YouTube began to attract as many views as the feminists themselves, while dissident communities like Reddit’s Men’s Rights hub ballooned in size.
 	Upon seeing how many people disliked them, feminist activists started complaining that online harassment was giving them PTSD.179 They used politicians, activist groups, and sympathetic media outlets to apply relentless pressure to social media companies, demanding they clamp down on “harassment,” by which they meant people with opposing views. Any criticism of fourth wave feminism became known in the media as “trolling,” “harassment,” “misogyny,” and “abuse.”
 	Anita Sarkeesian, once an unknown vlogger who whined about alleged sexism in video games with cherry-picked data, rose to prominence after she tapped into the trolling panic. After trolls from 4chan and other communities mocked her in 2012, posting rude comments underneath her YouTube videos and photoshopping her into porn, Sarkeesian attracted massive media attention.
 	An online fundraising project for her series on women and video games soared past its targeted $6,000, ultimately receiving almost $160,000 in donations. Sarkeesian was invited to speak at the video games studio Bungie, and to TEDxWomen 2012.
 	In 2013, game creator Zoe Quinn was having business problems. Her new game, a rudimentary point-and-click adventure called Depression Quest, needed thousands of votes from gamers to be “greenlit” for publication on Steam, the largest digital distributor of video games. Guess how she got that publicity?
 	Quinn said she was being tormented by trolls from a little-known online community called Wizardchan, a 4chan clone populated largely by men with social anxiety. She claimed they had sent her harassing phone calls, of which there was no real evidence provided, but still, articles appeared in the games press claiming that Quinn was facing “extreme harassment because she’s a woman.”180
 	Less than a year later, transgender game developer Brianna Wu, deliberately antagonized GamerGate with a trolling campaign, and used the resulting backlash to claim that she, too, was a victim of online harassment. Claiming to have “fled her house” because of anonymous death threats, she then did what any traumatized victim would do. She went on a media tour, talking to MSNBC, The Guardian, The Boston Globe, and any other media outlet who’d listen to her. Previously a nobody, she’s now running for Congress.181
 	Isn’t it weird how these women all end up far better off after their trolling ordeals?
 	Feminists in gaming capitalized on the buzzwords and campaigns that had appeared in the “fourth wave” of feminism. Fake threats, trolling, and lewd remarks on the internet weren’t just flippant jokes by teenagers; they contributed to “rape culture.” Criticizing feminists for being too rude or obnoxious was “tone-policing.” Feminists, by 2014, had an entire arsenal of buzzwords to help them sideline dissent and paint any and all critics as bigots.
 	No matter how legitimate the criticism, gaming journalists were committed to their narrative: it was feminist heroines versus evil misogynist trolls who just wanted to terrorize them. If a single troll from 4chan sent a single death threat (and let’s be clear, all of these “threats” were hoaxes) to a feminist, then that was the story, not the legitimate concerns of gamers.
 	The only logical conclusion to the feminist-led campaign against “online harassment” was censorship. Unless, a new hero could emerge, one with the power to stop this draconian crackdown on free speech.
 	BIRTH OF A MOVEMENT

 	The Joker fell into a vat of chemicals, which drove him insane. Magneto was imprisoned in Auschwitz, where he saw the worst in human nature. Doctor Doom decided to take over the world after a vision of the future revealed humanity destroying itself.
 	My supervillian origin was GamerGate, a bitter war between gamers, anonymous internet trolls, hectoring feminist scolds, and left-wing journalists. If you only follow mainstream media, you probably only know GamerGate as grown men playing videogames all day and harassing women on the internet. In reality, it was the first battle in an anti-leftist, culturally libertarian, free speech movement that led directly to Trump’s election. Let me tell you the real story.
 	GamerGate, often considered a bewildering topic, is in fact relatively simple. In early 2014, Nathan Grayson, of the Gawker-run gaming blog Kotaku, wrote favorably about Depression Quest, a game for which he acted as a consultant, without disclosing his involvement in the project. Grayson’s connection to the game and his romantic relationship with its creator, Zoe Quinn, was discovered after an exposé from Eron Gjoni, one of Quinn’s ex-boyfriends.182 Upon reading Gjoni’s story, gamers began to suspect that game developers and journalists were literally in bed with each other.
 	I have some sympathy for Quinn and Grayson. Sure, what Grayson did wasn’t ethical, but in normal circumstances it wouldn’t lead to a culture-war cataclysm. The games press wasn’t unlike any other sort of trade press. It was characterized by pathetically low journalistic standards, an ideologically homogeneous atmosphere, cliquey politics and innumerable overlapping conflicts of interest. However, few people beyond journalism professors really care if a reporter is friends with, or even fucking, one of their reporting subjects. And yet, thanks to the dreadful professional track record of the games press, and their appalling response to gamer’s concerns, it just happened to become a thing.
 	Following the discovery of the Grayson-Quinn connection, gamers across the web embarked on one of the greatest acts of collective internet sleuthing in history. Virtually overnight, “GamerGate” discussions sprang up on some of the web’s biggest communities, like the anonymous discussion forums 4chan and Reddit, and #GamerGate began trending on Twitter.
 	Gamers quickly uncovered a web of connections between games journalists and their reporting subjects. Games journalists had reported on their friends without disclosure, and in some cases had even donated money to their reporting subjects.
 	Critical Distance, a hub of social justice-oriented games critics, repeatedly gave favorable coverage to multiple game creators who had given them monthly donations through the crowdfunding site Patreon.183
 	Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander published dozens of articles lauding her personal friends.184 Multiple other journalists were found to have similarly dire track records, which are now catalogued at the GamerGate-created website DeepFreeze.it.
 	All of this was embarrassing for the games media, especially since hard-core gamers have an innate respect for fair play. But it was hardly an international scandal. The real reason GamerGate became a gigantic story was due to the reactions of these media outlets when they were exposed as ethically compromised.
 	For Leigh Alexander, there could be no quarter given to gamers. “These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers—they are not my audience,” she wrote.185
 	In the space of 48 hours, a dozen articles were published in a similar vein. All op-eds, all repeating the same opinion: gamers are bigoted white males trying to make the world of video games less inclusive. Arthur Chu at Daily Beast called gamers “misogynist losers” who were “making us all look bad.”186 Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett described them as “reactionary holdouts that feel so threatened by gaming’s widening horizons.”187 VICE lamented that Eron Gjoni’s “embarrassing relationship drama” was “killing the gamer identity.”188 The Daily Dot described GamerGate simply as a “sexist crusade to destroy Zoe Quinn.”189
 	At the same time, a discussion about the ethics of games journalism on Reddit’s gaming subforum, one of the largest gathering-places for gamers on the web, was completely nuked. Over 20,000 comments were deleted, making it one of the largest—perhaps the largest—suppressions of discussion in Reddit’s history.190 NeoGAF, already known for its ban-happy owners, started kicking GamerGate supporters off the platform left, right and center. Popular YouTuber Boogie2988 was banned just for taking a neutral stance on the topic.191
 	Even 4chan, known for hosting discussions about anything, no matter how vile, rolled out a blanket ban on GamerGate in mid-September. The decision sent shockwaves through its pro-free speech user base, leading to a mass exodus to alternative site 8chan.192 Fallout from the decision would eventually convince Christopher “Moot” Poole, the site’s founder, to leave 4chan after 10 years at the helm.193
 	GamerGate wouldn’t have got off the ground without a great deal of assistance from would-be censors. The very first YouTube video about the drama surrounding Eron Gjoni and Zoe Quinn attracted a meager 4,599 views on its initial run.194 Then Quinn lodged a false copyright claim against the video, taking it offline, and the internet exploded. It’s weird that someone like Quinn, who was deeply embedded in web culture, would make such a mistake. After all, it was false copyright claims that propelled the rise of Anonymous.195
 	Shortly after the games media launched its volley of articles smearing gamers as sexist, misogynist bigots, #GamerGate surged in activity. It would retain a high trending position for much of 2014, and well into 2015.196
 	By late 2014, it was apparent that GamerGate no longer described a scandal, but an entrenched consumer movement—tens of thousands of gamers fully prepared to wage war against a gaming media that had turned on them.
 	GamerGate wasn’t going to be a flash-in-the-pan controversy. It was here to stay.
 	A COOL FAGGOT, LIKE FREDDIE MERCURY

 	I entered the story in the early days of GamerGate, when an anonymous Twitter account with an anime profile picture and the handle @LibertarianBlue sent me a couple tweets explaining the controversy. The account belonged to Allum Bokhari, now one of Breitbart’s most gifted writers. He spoke of journalists engaging in nepotism and censorship, and critics being smeared as misogynists. I asked for more information.
 	Out of our collaboration emerged my first story on the controversy, which was the first published story that unapologetically took the side of gamers. While the rest of the media lamented the alleged “hate-campaign” against women in gaming, I took the ethics concerns of gamers seriously, and listened with an open mind to their complaints about a partisan political press and out-of-control feminist narratives that were slamming the lid on open discussion in the games world. “Feminist Bullies Tearing the Video Games Industry Apart” was the headline I chose—understated, as always.
 	It turned heads, and it set the tone for later coverage. Having watched the “online harassment” panic grow to absurd heights, I was determined to show that criticizing and even mocking feminists did not make you a misogynist. As for exposing the biases and ethical failings of the press—well, that was even more important. It was also trivially easy to accomplish, thanks to an anonymous source who is now one of my most trusted contacts in the industry.
 	A month after the gamers and games journalists went to war, I was handed the most explosive story of the entire controversy: a series of leaks from “GameJournoPros,” a secret email list used by journalists from gaming and tech publications including Kotaku, Polygon, Ars Technica, Rock Paper Shotgun, WIRED, PC Gamer and The Verge. I wasn’t sure why I had been chosen to deliver these logs to the public, but I did know exactly what to do with them: publish them all on Breitbart, and watch as the flames of the greatest lulz-fire on the internet leapt ever higher into the sky.
 	The logs confirmed gamers’ worst suspicions about collusion behind the scenes in the gaming media. Journalists from competing outlets appeared to be in cahoots, making decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.
 	The games press was biased beyond belief. Kyle Orland, games editor of Ars Technica and the founder of the email list, was seen calling the concerns of gamers “bullshit,” and encouraging other editors not to cover the GamerGate controversy at all, and instead use social media to reproach gamers.
 	An editor at one publication, Polygon, was seen urging the editor of another publication, The Escapist, to censor discussion of GamerGate on The Escapist’s message boards. Orland was also seen encouraging other journalists to contribute to a fundraiser for Zoe Quinn. At this point, Kotaku journalist Jason Schreier wisely pointed out that a fundraising campaign for a game developer might not be the best idea at a time when games journalists were facing mass allegations of collusion and political bias.
 	For gamers, the fact that such a thing had even been suggested by a games editor at a major tech publication said it all.
 	There’s no better feeling for a journalist than breaking a big story that other publications are afraid to touch, and I was already having a great time. But I was having an even greater time because at last, I had discovered a corner of the internet to call my own. I had discovered web culture.
 	Anonymity or pseudonymity instantly clued me in on why gamers were proving to be such tough adversaries for the biased progressive media, and for the feminist architects of the new moral panic. The irreverence of 4chan was the product of an anonymous online environment, which minimized the usual social consequences associated with taboo-defying speech. Progressives and feminists, the modern-day guardians of social mores, naturally think this is terrible. Leftist actor Wil Wheaton has even suggested banning anonymity in online video games.197
 	Shortly after I began my reporting on GamerGate, I took a trip to the video games board of 4chan, known as /v/, then one of the hubs of the movement. I was met with what I would later discover were called memes and shitposting. Virtually everyone told at least one gay joke.
 	My face was photoshopped onto a picture of the interracial gay porn movie Poor Little White Guy. Another 4channer posted an image proclaiming that I was not simply a faggot, “but a cool faggot like Freddie Mercury.” Having spent my professional career in the stultifying, politically correct world of tech journalism, I was amazed—and overjoyed—to discover there was still one place of pure, unfiltered mirth in the world.
 	I had found my people.
 	If I were a disingenuous left-wing blogger, I could have painted my anonymous hosts on 4chan as the vilest of homophobes and bigots. But that wouldn’t have been true, would it? It was obvious on its face that the people talking to me were not bigots of any kind, just irreverent teenagers with a healthy disregard for language codes. This was their way of showing affection, not disdain.
 	Furthermore, the GamerGate supporters who came from /v/ and its more politically incorrect sibling /pol/ didn’t even meet the standard progressive definition of bigots. From the pages of The Guardian, Jessica Valenti—with no evidence whatsoever—denounced GamerGate as a “last grasp at cultural dominance by angry white men.” It was a glorious moment, watching leftists on social media accuse Twitter users of being white dudes, only to see them dumbfounded as the users responded with face pics clearly identifying themselves as women and/or minorities.198
 	As GamerGate gathered steam, thousands of female, gay, and ethnic minority gamers tweeted #NotYourShield to protest at having their identities used as “shields” to deflect the racially obsessed lies of rubes like Valenti.
 	The first reaction of the games media was disbelief. Rabid SJWs considered #NotYourShield to be full of “ill-informed women” with no purpose other than “shut[ting] down talk about racism.”199 A piece in Ars Technica, perhaps the most brazen report of the entire controversy, claimed that accounts posting #NotYourShield on Twitter were just “sockpuppets” and not genuine minorities.200 Other left-wing journalists made similarly disparaging comments, or, more commonly, ignored the tag entirely, pretending instead that GamerGate was an exclusively white male uprising.
 	If that sounds familiar, consider the apoplectic response from feminists and mainstream media journalists to Trump’s success with female voters. Lena Dunham went on The View in full schoolmarm mode to remind the feminist sisterhood of its duty to re-educate those poor, ungrateful, ill-educated female hillbillies who voted Republican. (Those weren’t her exact words, but we understood what she meant.)
 	Is there anything more revealing than leftists shutting out the voices of women and minorities because they’re telling them things they don’t want to hear?
 	This is the true story of GamerGate, not the “misogynist white dudes” narrative you’ve heard from the mainstream media. It was about issues that would become dividing lines in the emerging millennial culture wars, as well as in the 2016 general election: free speech, the future of the open internet, and a nightmarishly partisan press corps that demonized critics of fashionable progressive causes as hate-filled bigots, while holding up their spokespeople as saints who could do no wrong.
 	THE NEW MORAL PANIC

 	In the 2000s, Jack Thompson, a conservative lawyer, filed a lawsuit against Take Two Interactive, then publishers of the Grand Theft Auto series, on the grounds that it inspired murder. He was mercilessly ridiculed in the games press, which then appeared to be performing its function as the defenders of creative freedom against absurd political crusades.
 	Because of battles like this with the conservative Right in the 1990s and early 2000s, gamers developed a resistance to politicization of any kind. “I just wanted to play video games” was one of the slogans of GamerGate. Gamers took pride in their hobby’s resistance in the face of an increasingly politicized world. This is how video games managed to escape the first wave of the Left’s cultural takeover.
 	Researchers can find no evidence that games make anyone violent or sexist.201 The studies that leftists and moral crusaders frequently cite are those that show a link between violent video games and aggression—but similar links are also found with sports games.202 You play a high-adrenaline sport and you become more aggressive. Who knew?! But that’s nowhere near the same as video games turning people into killers.
 	A lack of evidence never gets in the way of a good storyline. You may remember Elliot Rodgers, the “killer virgin” who went on a shooting rampage in May 2014.203 Naturally, the fact that he played video games was invoked. No evidence that games had anything to do with his actions was ever presented, but no evidence was needed. The storyline that video games must be involved in bad behavior was simply too compelling to pass up for the media.204
 	The same thing happened to Marilyn Manson, who was blamed for the Columbine school shootings, even though the shooters themselves hated him and didn’t listen to his music. One media report simply decided Manson was to blame, and the rest followed suit.
 	When feminist critics began taking tentative steps into the sphere of games criticism, the new allegation was that even though games can’t make you violent, they can make you sexist. These were not psychologists or researchers who had data to back their claims. They were “gender activists and hipsters with degrees in cultural studies,” according to feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers.205 They didn’t know much about video games, but they knew cis-heteropatriarchal capitalist oppression when they saw it.
 	What I call the left-wing war on fun has a long academic pedigree, stretching back to the rise of “critical studies” in the late 60s and 70s. Critical studies viewed art, literature, and entertainment through only one lens: how it critiqued, or failed to critique, dominant “power structures” (capitalism, Christianity, patriarchy and all the rest).
 	No longer were these forms to be criticized on their ability to inspire, awe, shock, fascinate, illustrate, or depict: all that mattered was how well (or how poorly) they critiqued the boogeymen of gender studies departments.
 	Like overzealous Freudian psychologists who manage to link virtually every human experience back to childhood sexual trauma, progressive cultural critics find a way to interpret every artistic expression through their own particular lens of victimhood.
 	Lisa Ruddick, an English professor at the University of Chicago (an institution in the running for the smartest and most forward-looking university of modern times) is one of a growing number of dissidents challenging this orthodoxy. In her influential essay, “When Nothing Is Cool,” she describes how one scholar used critical studies to turn Buffalo Bill, the sadistic antagonist of Silence of the Lambs, into a gender-defying feminist hero.206
 	By removing and wearing women’s skin, Bill apparently refutes the idea that maleness and femaleness are carried within us. “Gender,” Judith Halberstam explains, is “always posthuman, always a sewing job which stitches identity into a body bag.” The corpse, once flayed, “has been degendered, it is postgender.”
 	Halberstam blends her perspective uncritically with the hero-villain’s posthuman sensibility, which she sees as registering “a historical shift” to an era marked by the destruction of gender binaries and “of the boundary between inside and outside.”
 	The lunacy here isn’t just that a serial killer who targets only women could in any way be a feminist hero, it’s that the scholar who wrote it actually thought her interpretation was believable. To most people, Silence of the Lambs is simply a masterful psychological thriller, full of compelling characters, emotionally powerful moments, and no deeper meaning beyond the protagonist’s terrifying and engrossing journey through a world of cannibals and serial killers.
 	To a left-wing culture critic like Halberstam, it’s unacceptable that a movie could simply be intended to entertain, shock, or amuse. It must say something deeper, even if its creator didn’t intend it to. And if a piece of art or entertainment really seems designed with no hidden political message? Well then, that means its creator and those who enjoy it must be just fine with the status quo—this makes them either blind, or the enemy (depending on how far gone the libtard is).
 	To a culture critic, everything is political, even when it’s not trying to be. The Los Angeles Times interviewed Jordan Peele, the creator of Get Out, one of few politically motivated movies that still manages to entertain, and asked him about the significance of one of the white actresses in his film drinking milk. “Milk,” The Los Angeles Times offers, “is the new symbol of white supremacy in America, owing to its hue and the notion that lactose intolerance in certain ethnicities means that milk-absorbing Caucasian genetics are superior.”
 	Get Out is about a white family that kidnaps black people so they can brain swap with their younger, “cooler,” and physically superior bodies. The theme could not possibly be more racially motivated, and still, the The Los Angeles Times has felt the need to find racism wherever it looks. Peele did not back up this milk drinking as racism thesis in any way, and yet, Los Angeles Time’s headline still read, “Jordan Peele explains ‘Get Out’s’ creepy milk scene, and ponders the recent link between dairy and hate.”207
 	Little wonder that culture warriors hate video games, many of which are clearly designed for no purpose other than wild abandon. Imagine the fury of Anita Sarkeesian and her dour erstwhile male assistant Jonathan McIntosh, as they scoured games like Team Fortress 2 and Pong for hidden political messages. Imagine it dawning on them that the millions of people who log into World of Warcraft every day are doing so primarily to have fun with their friends, and not to consider how well Illidan Stormrage symbolizes inexorable patriarchal forces.
 	To a leftist, where everything is political and nothing is fun, gamers are a nightmare. Gamers feel the same about their critics.
 	Gaming culture is naturally resistant to political correctness. Online video games were the original social networks: gamers were chatting on games like Everquest and Runescape years before Facebook and Twitter came into their own. And, crucially, communication in these games tended to be anonymous. Like 4chan and Reddit, the furthest most people would come to identifying another player was via their pseudonym—and there’s not much you can do to track someone down when the only lead you have is a username.
 	Anonymity, mixed with the competitive nature of many online games, led to a culture of “trash talk” amongst gamers.
 	Keemstar, a popular YouTuber, explains how alien and shocking gamer culture must seem to polite society:
 	I’ve received many death threats. I’ve been told that I’m going to be raped. People have said they were going to do sexual things to me while I was playing these games, because it’s part of gaming culture. I’m not saying it’s right, but any real gamer has experienced this, and they know it to be somewhat normal. This is what people say online to each other while they are gaming.208
 	If you’re not familiar with gaming culture, the whole idea that this kind of talk is normal must seem very strange. But this is merely the kind of joshing that goes on between best friends, especially in young male communities. Nobody feels threatened because everyone knows the rules of the game.
 	For example: “Hey filthy fucking dickwaffle,” might be used as a friendly greeting. Some of the most common topics for casual jokes include rape, necrophilia, and Nazism. If someone thinks you’re behaving stupidly or disagrees with you, “go kill yourself” will be a common, almost automatic, offhand remark. The biggest mistake you can make is to take any of this language at face value. Sure, it may be jarring for someone who’s not used to the conventions of this speech community, but that is no excuse for condemning it as bigoted or misogynist, when it clearly is not.
 	And if you don’t like it, online games afford multiple opportunities to set up your own gaming servers with stricter rules.
 	Mainstream society finds it impossible to reconcile this language with the reality that most gamers are actually left-wing, not to mention completely comfortable with diverse, tolerant societies. To leftists, rejecting their language codes is the same as being racist, sexist, or homophobic. Gamers know it isn’t. And that made them the perfect enemies for an increasingly progressive movement hell-bent on shaming ordinary people for violations of their dreary, stultifying language codes.
 	SHAMERS

 	In the years preceding GamerGate, left-wing SJWs had turned social media into their personal playground. With the aid of outlets like BuzzFeed, Gawker and The Guardian, they engaged in relentless public shaming campaigns to socially ostracize individuals, businesses and organizations that failed to abide by their increasingly restrictive set of politically-correct norms. Justine Sacco, a communications executive whose life was upended by Gawker after she tweeted a joke about white people not being able to catch AIDS, is a well-known example. Ironically, Sacco’s tweet was an attempt to make a point about the injustices of white privilege. For that crime, she became the most hated woman in America, and lost her job. The point of public shaming isn’t merely to offend or annoy, but to cause total social ostracism—the ultimate punishment for violating society’s taboos.
 	Video games did not escape the rise of public shaming. In May 2014, a small-time video games developer, Russ Roegner, discovered his career was in jeopardy.
 	“Be careful with me,” warned Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander. “I am a megaphone… I wouldn’t mind making an example out of you.”
 	“This has been an amazing look at someone just starting out burning every bridge possible,” remarked games journalist Ben Kuchera.
 	“Really. Just. Stop,” said Ian Miles Cheong, editor-in-chief of Gameranx. “You’re not helping your case.”
 	What had Roegner said to attract such warnings?
 	“There’s no issue with gender equality in the game industry. I wish people would stop saying there is.”
 	Expressing such a view was career endangering in the video game industry of 2014.
 	Another infamous case of media-led public shaming in the gaming industry was the campaign against Brad Wardell, CEO of software and games development company Stardock. In 2010, Wardell was falsely accused of sexual harassment by a former employee.
 	Ben Kuchera wrote an article initially claiming that the case against Wardell had “damning evidence,” and included some of the most disgusting accusations from Wardell’s accuser (including the claim that he asked her if she “enjoyed tasting semen.”) Wardell was not contacted for comment before the article ran.209
 	Kotaku ran the same story, covering the accuser’s allegations in similarly lurid detail. The article contained the full allegations of Wardell’s accuser, but, deplorably, no counter-arguments from Wardell or his legal representation. That was because Kotaku had only given Wardell an hour to respond with his side of the story.210
 	As a result of this sloppy, Rolling Stone-tier journalism, Wardell faced years of smears and attacks, and even told me that his kids were being shamed at school because the first Google result for his name was the Kotaku article. It is worth noting that Wardell is one of the few open political conservatives with a position of prominence in the gaming industry, which might explain why the campaign against him was so relentless.
 	The case was dismissed in 2013, and the former employee apologized for her claims.211 GamePolitics, one of the outlets that reported on the unsubstantiated allegations against him, apologized for its sloppy reporting. Others followed suit, but it was too little too late. There’s no way to unstab someone once your pitchfork has pierced their flesh.
 	Public shaming relies on isolating its victims, who are made to believe that they are alone against an overwhelming tide of majority opinion. It’s a feeling that was shared by Donald Trump supporters—until they started winning. In reality, the shamers are usually part of a vocal minority, allowed to dominate the conversation by terrifying others into silence.
 	But gamers are hard to frighten. During GamerGate, they came out in droves to show the world how small and hysterical the purveyors of social ostracism really were. KotakuInAction, the leading Reddit community for GamerGate supporters, has more than 70,000 subscribers. GamerGhazi, the hub for feminists and social justice warriors in gaming, has a mere 11,000.
 	Gawker, one of the worst public shaming organizations to ever exist, was even kowtowed by GamerGate. Editor Sam Biddle, who had been personally responsible for destroying Justine Sacco’s life, was forced to apologize for anti-GamerGate tweets he said were jokes. It was a rare apology from one of the most unscrupulous sites on the internet. Soon, Gawker’s disgusting lack of journalistic integrity would kill the site. If it weren’t for GamerGate, Gawker would still be here.
 	Through numbers and tenacity, gamers broke through their fear of social justice warriors. The months following the birth of GamerGate saw a full-scale backlash against SJWs. Sites like Kotaku and Polygon, bastions of SJWs, created new disclosure policies in response to GamerGate demands.212
 	Before GamerGate, victims of public shaming like Justine Sacco had virtually no allies in the press. Many disagreed, but did not want to get on the wrong side of the social justice mobs. After GamerGate, victims like Dr. Matt Taylor, the British astrophysicist who was driven to tears after he was attacked for wearing a shirt featuring allegedly “sexualized” drawings of sci-fi women, could rely on an increasingly confident community of moderate liberals and conservatives who loudly and sternly condemned their persecutors. The silence had been broken. And we had gamers to thank for it.
 	UNLIKELY HEROES

 	GamerGate was hugely significant. It was the first time consumers of a major entertainment medium staged a mass resistance to the influence of the political left. Gamers showed frightened, isolated dissidents that it was possible to fight the cultural left, and win.
 	No one was more amazed than I was. I once described gamers as dorky weirdoes in yellowing underpants. And, let’s be fair, some of them are. Probably perfectly nice people. Yet here were these dorky weirdoes, taking on the fury of the leftist media-activist complex without flinching. Unpaid, undisciplined, and in some cases, yes, unhygienic—but they were winning cultural victories that eluded even million-dollar conservative PACs.
 	After GamerGate, never again can gamers be mocked as awkward losers. They might be awkward, but they’re definitely not losers. In a Breitbart column on the movement’s one-year anniversary, I compared them to Hobbits; unlikely heroes who just wanted to be left alone, but ended up saving the world. In retrospect, it’s perhaps not so surprising that a bunch of people who spend all their spare time conquering kingdoms, killing dragons, and racking up high scores knew how to win.
 	The Left didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when they went after video games. This was the hobby of the millennial generation, enjoyed by millions around the world—often together. What chance did the Left have, with their usual allegations of bigotry, against such a naturally diverse hobby? The sight of the Left attacking innocent gamers as a menacing force of intolerance was laughable. Perhaps the fears of the Left weren’t so hysterical. Gamers were the first group of people to beat them in the millennial culture wars. Their tactics helped inspire a new movement of cultural libertarians, setting off a chain of events that put Trump in the White House. When The Washington Post called Donald Trump the “GamerGate of American Politics,” they weren’t entirely wrong.213
 	While most of the hard work was conducted by tireless, relentless, and often anonymous gamers who received no thanks for it beyond smears from the mainstream media, I was proud to be a part of the movement as well.
 	Gamers taught me that with humor, memes, and a little bit of autistic single-mindedness, no battle is unwinnable.