Ever since gamergate began in 2014 the popular left-wing narrative is that people who support the consumer rights movement are nothing but a conglomerate of bigots. A basket of deplorables, if you will. Anyone who so much as whispers the phrase “ethics in game journalism” is labeled an extremist who hates marginalized people of all types. In the eyes of the blue check-marked delicate flowers on Twitter, Gamergaters are fascists who want to see a violent end to those they supposedly despise.
Yet in 2019, cries for violence appear to be coming from the reflections inside the mirrors of those calling everyone else fascists.
Just this week a game developer for Impromptu Games tweeted that gamergate sympathizers should be punched in the throat. As is often the case he deleted his post after he was rightfully criticized en masse for it, upon which he went the route of playing the victim. Hearing the cries of a friend in need, the senior game designer at Guerrilla games jumped in to say that he was right to suggest people be punched.
Not satisfied with ending it there, another developer, this one from Route 59 Games, also chimed in with “Punch yr local gamergater.”
Are you following along? Because that is three game devs in a span of less than a day advocating violence. A call to arms against a portion of their consumer base. Ignoring that it’s a boneheaded marketing strategy to talk poorly of those that buy your product, the hypocrisy is what is most stunning.
Imagine for one second the outrage that would flare up and burn alive any developer who had the gall to say “anti-gamergaters should be punched.”
Such a hypothetical isn’t too hard to imagine given the careers that have been ruined not for advocating violence, but just for supporting the consumer rights movement in the first place. Or for not being too critical of it.
During E3 2017 a new game was shown off called ‘The Last Night’. Immediately the trailer for the cyberpunk sidescroller wowed those watching the Microsoft press conference with its sleek visuals and cool aesthetic. Sadly, for creator Tim Soret, the jovial moment of showing off his new game to high acclaim was cut short when the perpetually offended outrage mob dug into his old tweets and found content they deemed ‘offensive’.
Before long he was labeled as being part of a hate movement for suggesting that gamergate supporters were for journalistic integrity and honest debate. None of this was the end of it because by the time the dust settled the fringe left viewed him as an anti-feminist gamergater who didn’t support their values and who was a right wing monster.
Ignoring that he is none of those things, the damage had been done and development on his game ran into problems. So much so that just last week news broke that creation of his game is struggling amid financial and legal issues.
In the alarmingly shallow cerebral folds of those on the left, a rotten core of hate has rooted itself within the skulls of those that claim to be tolerant. Disagreement is met with cries to punch, censor, or even kill those that don’t align with their beliefs.
Gamergate may have been the catalyst for the wildly inaccurate depiction of millions of Americans we see today, but it’s certainly not where it ended. And as anyone on the right is all too well aware, the fascistic fiction has grown into an all-encompassing blob that sticks to anyone who so much as leans a millimeter to the right.
But in the wake of the smirking MAGA kid fiasco where verified journalists and Hollywood stars were calling for violence towards, and sometimes the death of a child, including one grisly picture that depicted the young teen going into a wood-chipper, it’s seriously time for the left to look in the mirror and question who are the hateful ones.
On February 1st, Talia Levin, the ‘fact’ checker who last year left The New Yorker after she falsely accused a Marine Veteran working with ICE to track down pedophiles of being a Nazi, put out an article for The New Republic about the online trolling campaign in which disgruntled Americans were bombarding recently fired journalists with tweets saying #learntocode. Being who she is, she compared it to gamergate and called it a far right harassment campaign.
Yet in many ways, the trolling campaign was wholly justified.
The media purge that wiped out 1000 or so journalists from a handful of sites occurred barely a news cycle removed from the MAGA teen incident, and considering how many of these people outright abused and slandered the kid, any rational person who saw the train wreck that was journalistic integrity barreling off a bridge had every right to be furious with journalists across America.
Would it suck to be fired and have people throwing it in your face? Yeah, it would, and a strong argument could be made that it’s up to us on the right to bring civility back to the mainstream, but in a decade where the media is constantly misrepresenting, and at times abusing people, including the aforementioned kid, frustrations are going to be understandably high. So it’s hard to fault people who slightly mocked a few folks with a phrase that is far from the vitriol these same folks have been throwing at us for years.
Consider how Laura Ingraham was crucified for making a joke about David Hogg’s college rejections, yet the same people nailing her to the cross were a-okay with comments that a kid in a red cap should be murdered. Oddly you don’t see Talia Levin writing articles about leftist harassment campaigns aimed at children though, do you? So maybe she should learn to code because she’s certainly not fit for journalism.
The left has become a bunch of intolerant brats who don’t realize the labels they so willingly stick on everybody not sharing a brainwave with them are just as representative of them. Screw ethics in game journalism, we need ethics in journalism, period.
They threaten, abuse, deplatform, slander, misrepresent, mock, harass, and spit hate towards anyone they deem an enemy.
In the biggest twist of all, they have become the very thing they’ve misrepresented gamergaters as since its very inception. The modern left is the true hate campaign, and they don’t even realize it.
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