Like Bruce Wayne who glimpses the Bat signal in the dark skies above Gotham City, Carl Benjamin has put on his dusty Sargon of Akkad superhero costume and has returned from retirement to comment on Gamergate 2.0. Sargon is a battle-tested culture warrior who has handily vanquished many foes. We should be very grateful to have such an eloquent and thoughtful intellectual on our side.
What follows is a thought-provoking epic analysis of the current culture war:
For posterity, I have included a full transcript below followed by my commentary:
Gamergate 2.0 by Sargon of Akkad
I’ve had a lot of people ask me my opinion on Gamergate 2, as much has been made of Gamergate in the ten years since it happened, but little understanding has been gleaned from it. These are my thoughts. While it started from a small and personal affair, it revealed a set of cultural fracture lines which broke apart into warring factions, which were of course much greater than any one individual.
To say that Zoe Quinn was responsible for Gamergate is to say that Franz Ferdinand was responsible for World War I. The issue has been caused by a parasitic class of woke activists who had infiltrated the institutions of the industry and had set about reshaping it to fit their ideological agenda. Without relitigating the numerous problems of modern progressive ideology, this class of activists despise straight white men and take pride in degrading and immiserating them.
When they can’t humiliate men of European descent, they actively marginalize and ostracize them under the rubric of inclusion. This is the sole focus of their activism and has been for decades now. They are proud of it, they proclaim it, and they have achieved it. This is, of course, a form of racism and sexism. Most people are not in favor of racial or sexual discrimination when it is carried out with this kind of malignant attitude.
People will happily consent to having gender-segregated bathrooms or accurate racial representation in movies because those things are done for the good of the subject itself. It is an unwelcome imposition to allow men into women’s bathrooms or to have a movie portrayal of a famous historical figure not be accurately representative.
However, that is not why woke activists discriminate. They discriminate out of malice. It is not that straight white men are not welcome to become woke activists either, they absolutely are, but what this means is to take upon oneself the yoke of privilege in which they are to receive lower status and recognition in penance for being straight white men and the alleged natural advantages that this brings over women, people of color, or homosexuals. Whether such advantages exist is highly questionable, especially when compared to the kind of men that tend to join the woke coalition, But these men are content to accept their moral inferiority and self-abnegation as the ritual humiliation which allows them to take their place at the bottom of the hierarchy of the woke tribe.
This door swings both ways. Anyone who fits the race, gender, or sexuality hierarchy can also be expelled for insufficient commitment to hating white men. This identity caste system is not something that liberal-minded people feel like participating in. It is repugnant to them. Most people hold a much more egalitarian view of personal interactions and feel that they should treat others as they themselves wish to be treated. Most feel that it is a person’s merit that should be rewarded, and the way they act towards others is the appropriate metric by which to make character judgments. It is the imposition of the identity caste system on a group of people who did not wish to participate in it that is the root cause of Gamergate.
In August 2014, a series of articles were published by the parasite activist class which attacked the dissidents in the only way they knew how, through their identity, which was interpreted as a kind of slave identity in which pathetic, weaselly, straight, white male gamers were incapable of grasping the propitious moment in which they found themselves to become beacons of progress for this new moral order.
And thus began a guerrilla war between the activists and the dissidents, with the activists occupying the institutions and seats of power and the dissidents having a large base of disaffected gamers from which to draw aid and succor. The insurrection lasted for well over a year, but eventually petered out as other real-world events took precedence and further populist revolts erupted in other spheres of life. The gaming industry’s revolt was not unique, it just happened first.
However, Gamergate was not a success. And once the energy of the insurrection had faded, the woke activists still controlled the positions of influence and continued to further inject their ideology into the gaming industry. Now it is not uncommon to find games allowing people to choose unsuitable pronouns for their characters, or have game developers deliberately removing straight white men as the default or even as an option from modern video games.
The inability to properly organize is why Gamergate was not successful, but also why it was able to persist. The large swathe of gamers who objected to the woke hegemony came from a variety of walks of life and political beliefs. Many simply wanted just to be left alone. However, the woke activists have a particular moral homogeneity and will not leave anything alone. They are on a moral crusade to bend the industry to their will, and they get paid to do it. Every day they wake up excited to advance their interests at the expense of yours and have, like termites, eaten into the core of every major studio and influenced nearly every major production.
Without a totemic axis around which to mount a coherent resistance against the paid activist class, which can present an alternative moral order which is also consistent and compelling, there appears to be no way for Gamergate to actually win.
The best Gamergate supporters can do is wait for them to fail on their own.
Gamergate was, fundamentally, a collection of liberals who were not happy with woke ideology because it flew in the face of their sensibilities. However, woke ideology comes out of liberalism and is deliberately attuned to its weaknesses, which is a subject I have covered at length elsewhere, and I will leave a link in the description if you would like to know more. Liberals are not in favor of racism but refuse to attack what the woke activists see as established racial hierarchies, and so seem, from the woke perspective, content to live with the last generation’s racism. The woke activist has the upper hand over the liberal here, as liberals do believe in universal recognition of value, but are unwilling to restructure the world to achieve it, and believe that if we continue forward in a generally liberal way, we will eventually achieve this goal.
The difference between the liberal and the woke activist, then, is merely in method, not in ends, and the woke activist has a vast amount of intellectual labor behind their organization and subversion, whereas the liberal has been coasting along on the same doctrine since the 1960s. So it appears to me that any revival of Gamergate is doomed to fail. The desire to resist woke ideology is of course sensible, but the old-school liberalism of those in objection to it is essentially negative and has no forward-facing plan for what ought to be done.
The message, when it’s boiled down to its most essential characteristic, is do nothing. Without this moral impetus to do one thing and not the other, the woke activist is able to fill this void with imperatives that fundamentally align with the end goals of liberalism even if the means are repulsive. Diversity is good, says the liberal, therefore we shall force diversity, says the woke activist, to which the liberal can do little but wring their hands in protest. Liberal insurrectionists do not have a positive doctrine to advance, which is at the same time a contradiction of the woke ideal, and thereby cannot also be a continuity of it.
To be left alone is not enough. Because while you fight each defensive action against the woke incursion, the woke activists are in a constant state of advance, planting their flag over each new institution, until the insurrectionists are encircled, totally discredited, ostracized, and then treated like a pest to be exterminated. They have a moral order that they are seeking to bring into being, and you are the obstacle to it. They know who their friends are, they know who their clients are, and they know who their enemies are. You don’t. The gamers did not have a plan to eject woke activists from the industry, but the woke activists do have a plan to eject you. They have spent the last ten years working against you, every single day. You haven’t. And that’s why you’re losing.
References
Please support Carl Benjamin if you are so inclined:
Carl’s website, the LotusEaters.
Sargon of Akkad’s YouTube Channel.
My Commentary
Sargon claims that Gamergate was not ultimately successful. I would agree but with an important distinction: it was the first time that the cultural Marxists were exposed and defeated in a battle. Even though we are losing the culture war, we at least won one battle.
Let’s not forget that the attack on unsuspecting white heterosexual male gamers was well-planned and orchestrated by various radical left academics, intellectuals, journalists, and developers. All of them conspired to fundamentally transform the video game industry the same way President Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform America. The unfortunate election of Obama gave leftist activists the green light to wage war on America and Americans and inspired them to take action.
Gamergate also managed to red-pill many gamers to the machinations and plans of the radical left. Most people are unaware that Marxism has always planned a long march through the institutions. Chris Ruffo explains:
The “long march through the institutions” is the skeleton key for understanding the modern Left: it’s how they captured power, how they shape the narrative, and how they influence what you think about the world around you.
Sargon paints a gloomy future for the video game industry because he rightly acknowledges that the radical left has indeed captured most if not all of the institutions.
What we all need to understand is that the leftist activists and gamers have diametrically opposite motivations. The gamer sees video games as an outlet for escapism and amusement; the leftist activist sees video games as just another transitory vehicle to promote their ideology and gain status within their cult.
Even Anita Sarkeesian admitted that when she started Feminist Frequency, she wasn’t a gamer and had no real love of video games. Charlatan Sarkeesian was clever enough to realize that the video game genre was ripe for the picking and could easily be transformed by her radical third-wave feminist ideology. Since many video game developers were leftist in their worldview, her crusade had lots of sleeper cells ready and willing to fight for her cause, fellow travelers like Brandon Sheffield, Phil Fish, and Damion Schubert, and many more skulking in the shadows.
As humans, we are predisposed to believe that everyone is just like us and thinks like us. That kind of thinking is a mistake. (Many idealistic feminists who travel to Muslim countries soon find this out and end up being raped and killed). Gamers believed this as well about women and minorities. They felt flattered that their nerdy hobby was becoming more popular in the zeitgeist and they foolishly welcomed them when they should have been gatekeeping and preventing their Trojan Horse from entering.
What they didn’t realize is that these newcomers weren’t here for the love of video games, they were here to plunder and pillage and fundamentally transform video games into a carnival sideshow of progressive demands: elimination of biological sex designations, blackwashing, race swapping, token black faces, gay characters, trans characters, ugly defeminized women, fat women and so on.
Another big problem is that gamers simply want to be left alone to play video games. Most are not interested in becoming pro-gamer activists. They are fleeing the overly politicized world to find an oasis of escapism. Gamers don’t want to be drafted into a culture war, they want to play games. But the problem is, the longer they delay their involvement, the worse video games will become and then they will be left with nothing to play. Without a fix, they will be forced to confront their addiction to video games and be left with an existential crisis and they may even be forced to confront the truth about the universe and eternity.
The best advice Sargon gives is to let the video game industry die from its self-inflicted wounds of creating content that is unpalatable to gamers. In the final analysis, gamers need to stop purchasing games with any hint of wokeness and vote with their pocketbook. Gamers need to learn to control their passions, put limits on what they will accept, and show some discipline. This also applies to everything in life and includes pornography and other vices. As St. Dominic wisely said:
“A man who governs his passions is master of his world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them. It is better to be a hammer than an anvil.”
Gamergate 2.0 is currently underway and we should be grateful for it. The prideful devil, his demons, and his worldly minions always overplay their hand. The black non-binary imbecile from Sweet Baby Inc. who started all of this did everyone a big favor in exposing the corruption and rot that has taken hold of the video game industry. Sweet Baby Inc, Kotaku, Black Girl Gamers, and their accomplices have unwittingly accelerated the much-needed demise of the DEI industrial complex.
Comprise with these cultural terrorists and treacherous ghouls is impossible and unwise. The existing AAA video game industry that despises its target audience needs to be burned to the ground and shoveled into the dustbin of history.
–Wolfshead
Sargon is spot on!
In addition to that also good comments to the video that expand upon what he said, I would like to echo one in particular “GamerGate 2.0 is just the ignorant normies finally realizing gamergate 1.0 exists and never ended.”
Yes, that’s it. This ideology from hell never gave up, the people are still there and active, even Gamer Gate 2.0 is just a setback. They lost some influence and credence, but they are still infusing too many studios with their sick ideology.
It is also not only a “Gamer” Gate. This is affecting and targeting society as a whole. The very same people and methods are at work in literature and the movie industry.
The most compromised institutions are sadly schools, universities. They manage to poison the river at the source this way, and thus the future, unfortunately.
People have seen the woke ideology in action by now, not only Gamer Gate. Most might have noticed the Bud Light ads.
Sargon gives good advice, but uniting gamers, particularly young ones who don’t yet see it, is the biggest problem and I have no answer for it. Except for this one: Stand in for what is right, do not give in to wokeness. Be an example for others. Unfortunately, people are, unlike the diversity guys (so ironic!), really very diverse in their interests and might have little common ground besides that.
But spread the message, that’s what people can unite behind: Say no to wokeness. You have seen what they do.
That’s what you pointed out, people noticed for the first time that something odd is going on. I hope more people wake up to the horrors of wokeness. Waking up to Wokeness… oh my, puns totally unintended, just like being more diverse than the diversity brigade. I still appreciate the irony.
Sargon is right. After Gamergate, it got worse — just look at what happened to Blizzard! They got woker and woker as the years progressed. Nobody except for a few people like myself held them accountable. That scumbag Asmongold sure as hell didn’t.
The thing is that wokeness is unsustainable. You can’t keep hating your customer and giving them garbage and expecting them to pay for it. They could get away with adding an occasional gay or a trans character but these zealots simply cannot control themselves. They are incapable of restraint and the could care less about what the average white male gamer wants. Blizzard just added a new non-binary character to Overwatch named Venture.
The lawsuits against DEI are already starting. Activision-Blizzard are being sued for DEI. DEI is completely illegal. But they are so high on their own supply of self-righteousness that they don’t see reality starting at them in the face.
Watch the video from David V. Stewart that I posted. Combine the wokeness with a lack of skill and the AAA video game industry is going to die when all the old white straight males retire. That will happen sooner than we think.
@Wolfshead
Thing is, there looks to be always more than enough money for ESG DEI
Remember, the WEF guys are more than confident they can get rid of rural areas, including farms for their plans to make people live in 15 minute cities like that one area in the Netherlands being built
Your USAF also have to deal with the same IdPol and other departments being corrupt AF, it’s why no one looks to be panicking that they have a population that’s too obese, too drug addicted, too criminal to join the army. And for those with the ability and right mindset? Being insulted by things like the “Emma and Her Two Moms” ad, means you can count out as many social conservative guys, especially from rural areas
There looks to be no end to the funding of colleges/universities, even as less and less men start coming in due to the IdPol and it not actually being a road to success…..no worries on alienating young men still
The Passport Bros and MGTOW types have increased, in part because women in Western nations are becoming uglier, more into becoming “toxic masculinity” themselves, more hateful, more manipulative and with court laws more in their favor. When you have less men slaving away to pay for their wives and families, you lose more cash for the economy.
There is definitely a longterm plan of sorts going on. There is definitely more cash to throw away. There is way more sheer horror, disgust and moral degradation to go.
And worse, it’s an American Election Year, I expect some more big events to be used as an excuse to control people’s lives all over the world.