SJWs Always Lie

by Vox Day

  This stage of the SJW attack sequence can take several different forms. But what they all have in common is that the outcome is always predictable and the target is always found guilty. Even when the accuser is of deeply dubious credibility, the accusation will be taken as seriously as a Rolling Stone reporter listening to a college girl claiming to have been raped by fraternity brothers.

  For example, The Daily Mail conclusively documented that Sir Tim Hunt's accuser, Connie St. Louis, had misrepresented herself on her resume on London’s City University website, never wrote the book that she was given £50,000 to write by the Joseph Rowntree Journalist Fellowship, required 30 ex post facto editorial revisions to her Guardian piece about the Hunt affair, and had her account of Hunt's behavior at the Korean luncheon directly contradicted by a number of female journalists at the event as well as a recording that surfaced more than a month after Hunt had already resigned or been fired from his various posts.

  St. Louis was an unreliable witness for the prosecution, to put it mildly. Nevertheless, despite support for Hunt's reinstatement from the Lord Mayor of London and well-known scientists such as Bryan Cox and Richard Dawkins as well as broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, Michael Arthur, the UCL President & Provost, refused to consider it, declaring that “reversing that decision would send entirely the wrong signal” and that UCL's “commitment to gender equality and our support for women in science was and is the ultimate concern.” Apparently, as far as UCL is concerned, science needs women more than it does Nobel Prize winners. Just to add insult to injury, the 20-member UCL Council met a few weeks later to reaffirm and unanimously support the university’s acceptance of Hunt's resignation.

  After all, it was his decision to resign, right? The fact that he was coerced into resigning by a threatening call made to his wife, who was told that Hunt would be fired if he didn't resign, was completely swept under the carpet and ignored by the Provost and the Council alike. This was not surprising. The verdict of the SJW show trial is always predetermined, and any appeals, however well-documented, are certain to fail.

  STAGE EIGHT: Victory Parade, or, The Ritual Display of the Corpse

  In medieval times, it was common for the bodies of executed criminals to be displayed in public in order to deter anyone who might be tempted to commit similar crimes. This was known as “gibbeting”, and refers to the mechanism from which the corpses of the criminals were hung when put on display. SJWs don't physically gibbet their victims, but they certainly do so metaphorically, as once the surrender (i.e. resignation) has been achieved or the show trial has been completed and the execution (i.e. firing) has taken place, they repeatedly display the corpse in a ritual manner, to demoralize anyone else who might otherwise be inclined to challenge their Narrative.

  Wikipedia is their favored gibbet. If you visit the Wikipedia page devoted to anyone who has been successfully attacked by SJWs, you will find that a significant portion of their page is dominated by the so-called news of their downfall. It doesn't matter if they are otherwise notable for discovering DNA, winning Nobel Prizes, or writing science fiction novels, the SJWs utilize Wikipedia as a primary means of ensuring that every time anyone looks up information about the individual, one of the first things they will see is the fact that the SJWs successfully attacked them.

  More than two thousand words, nearly 20 percent, of the Wikipedia page about James Watson are devoted to “Controversies” and the reference to his resignation is supported by no less than 17 separate citations from reliable sources, which is 14 more than anything related to his discovery of DNA or any of his other scientific or personal achievements. As an aside, it's worth mentioning that the oversourcing of critical citations is a reliable indicator that an individual on Wikipedia is hated by the SJW admins there; on the page about me, four separate sources were cited in order to establish the very important historical fact that after being nominated for a minor literary award in 2014, not only did I not win, I finished last.

  As of this writing, 55 percent of the Wikipedia page about Sir Tim Hunt, PhD, cancer researcher, Royal Fellow, Knight Bachelor, husband, father, and Nobel Prize-winner, concern “Remarks about women in science”. Of the 517 total edits to that page since it was first created in 2005, 318 were made in the first five weeks after his comments at the Korean luncheon.

  These Wikipedia gibbets are then used to seed articles in various media all around the world. When I was interviewed in Paris by Le Monde after hosting a #GamerGate event there, literally the first thing the French reporter covering the event asked me about was the “Conflict with the SFWA” section from the Wikipedia page about me, despite the fact that the events it related had taken place years before and had absolutely nothing to do with #GamerGate, my 25-year career in the game industry, or the event.

  In the case of more noteworthy victims, the Victory Parade is also used to launch more general attacks and justify political action supported by the SJWs in the media. For example, several days after Sir Tim Hunt resigned from UCL and was no longer a legitimate news story in himself, his remarks were still being pilloried by SJWs in the British media, who found them to be a useful tool for attacking city workers, senior members of the UK Independence Party, the Metropolitan police, scaffolders, the judiciary, the military, Sky Sport, the technology industry, all sporting organisations, and the BBC, as well as an excuse to call for a female leader of the Labour Party.

  All the time, for instance, that BBC producers wondered, aloud, if a woman could ever be tough enough to conduct a competent interview, Hunt, the Nobel prize winner, was in his laboratory, quietly wishing the “girls” would pack up their Bic for Her along with their smelling salts, and, to use the biochemical jargon, bugger off… As disheartening as it is, that Labour’s choice of replacements should be composed of uniformly uninspiring politicians, talking mainly indistinguishable gibberish, the party finally has a chance to pick a woman leader, and given current levels of unapologetic sexism, it is hard to see any reason not to.

  —“Sexist remarks are just the tip of an ingrained culture”, Catherine Bennett, The Guardian, 13 June 2015

  But although this 8-stage attack sequence applies to most SJW attacks, the real problem with them doesn't have anything to do with those of us who are sufficiently well known to draw hostile media attention. The real problem is how many people suffer the malicious attention of the thought police without anyone knowing about it at all. We don't know how many Americans lose their jobs every year due to SJW attacks, but we do know that there are an average of 25,000 criminal charges being laid every year in Britain for speech offences, and that over 12,000 of those judicial proceedings result in convictions.

  The SJWs are “an army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking” and their culture of thuggish speech-policing is on the verge of taking over society, if it has not already. Fortunately for both free speech and society, after 20 years of rampaging freely from one victory to the next, the SJWs have finally met with an implacable and ruthless enemy against whom their social pressure is impotent and their media dominance has proven meaningless.

  CHAPTER FIVE: COUNTERATTACK

  I don't agree with what you say and I will defend to the death the abuse and vitriol you receive for saying it.

  —Godfrey Elfwick

  In 2012, a fat and unattractive woman with blue hair and numerous piercings decided to play at being a “game designer”. She plugged forty thousand words into the Twine engine, a hypertext tool that allows people without any knowledge of programming to create interactive fiction games similar to Zork and other text adventures circa 1977, combined it with a ten-second piano loop, and called it a game.

  The “game”, Depression Quest, is described as “an interactive fiction game where you play as someone living with depression. You are given a series of everyday life events and have to attempt to manage your illness, relationships, job, and possible treatment.”

  It's even less fun than it soun
ds, and is little more than a digital Choose Your Own Adventure book that tracks three variables: how depressed you are, if you are seeing a therapist, and if you are on medication. Accompanied by a droning piano repeating the same notes over and over and over again, it repeatedly tells you how horribly unhappy you are while giving you the opportunity to make choices such as telling your girlfriend if you're feeling well enough to go to a party or not, and deciding whether or not to tell your mother everything is fine. I have never played a less entertaining computer game, which is saying something considering that I was once forced to review Inferno, ranked as the 44th worst game of all time, for Computer Gaming World.

  You are very depressed. You spend a large amount of time sleeping, hating yourself, and have very little motivation.

  Remarkably, astoundingly, unbelievably, the “game”, to the extent one could even call it that, not only garnered several independent game awards, but also received unexpectedly favorable media attention despite overwhelmingly negative reactions from the gamers who actually played it. On Metacritic, which aggregates critical and player reviews, its user score is 1.8 out of 10 and is summarized as “Overwhelming dislike based on 308 Ratings.” Nevertheless, despite being soul-drainingly boring and more than three decades technologically out-of-date, Depression Quest was somehow deemed to be genuine game news and was repeatedly mentioned by Polygon, Rock Paper Shotgun, Kotaku, as well as a number of other game sites.

  Other than mystifying every single gamer who happened to read about it, no one played Depression Quest or paid its developer any significant attention until August 2014, when an upset young man who had finally broken it off with his cheating girlfriend created a WordPress blog called The Zoe Post that documented, in excruciating detail, his experience of having loved and lost.

  Sometime around November of 2013, I signed up for an OKCupid account and got a 98% match with a cutie with colorful hair (cool), who was super into social justice stuff (good!), and was super into video games (neat!), and liked to make them (ah! I used to make them, that was fun times!), and by some coincidence turns out to have made a somewhat esoteric game I happened to have played a while back.

  That “somewhat esoteric game” was Depression Quest. What caught the industry's attention was that the flagrant cheating of which Eron Gjoni complained involved five different men, at least three of whom were involved in the game industry. One of those men subsequently hired the girlfriend in question, and, more significantly, another one was a game journalist who had written for Rock Paper Shotgun prior to moving to Kotaku. Given the very poor quality of Depression Quest, it seemed readily apparent to casual observers that the unusual amount of media attention garnered by the game must have been the result of the developer's liberal distribution of her sexual favors. While this does not appear to have exactly been the case (and I have never bothered to sort out exactly who was having sex with whom, and when), there was no doubt that a number of ethical lines had not so much been crossed as completely obliterated.

  And that's when everything started to get truly weird.

  Game journalists reacted to the gaming public's attacks on the game media by lining up solidly behind Depression Quest and its neophyte female developer. Unexpectedly, so did 4chan, a popular site with a sizable gaming contingency that had previously been ground zero for anything-goes channer culture. As charges of ethical lapses and corruption were thrown at the game journalists, accusations of death threats, sexual harassment, and doxxing were hurled right back at the gamers criticizing Depression Quest, its developer, and two notorious attention-seeking SJW fame whores who had quickly inserted themselves into the affair, shakedown artist Anita Sarkeesian and John Walker Flynt, a transvestite who calls himself “Brianna Wu”. Collectively, the three SJWs became known among gamers as Literally Who, Literally Who 2, and Literally Wu as a means of safely referring to them without being accused of harassing them, as well as driving home the point that neither they nor their identities were relevant to the larger point of corruption in game journalism.

  Being professional agitators, Literally Who 2 and Literally Wu soon came to dominate the media coverage, complete with fawning accounts of their courage featured everywhere from The New York Times to Playboy after they followed Literally Who's lead by claiming to have also been driven from their homes by similarly nonexistent death threats. Overshadowed by the two more dedicated drama queens, Literally Who gradually faded from the public eye while Literally Who 2 was later named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World.

  Things heated up rapidly in the second half of August 2014, as within a period of two weeks, 4chan purged the majority of its 45 moderators for being sympathetic to gamers, a dozen simultaneous “Gamers are Dead” articles were published on the same day by Ars Technica, Gamasutra, The Guardian, The Financial Post, Jezebel, and other sites, and actor Adam Baldwin of Firefly and The Last Ship fame tweeted a hashtag that would soon become feared and revered around the world.

  #GamerGate was born.

  I am an original GamerGater, which is to say that I am one of the gamers who was following the Internet Aristocrat and writing about corruption in game journalism related to The Zoe Post prior to Adam's famous tweet heard round the world. After being coined by Baldwin, the #GamerGate hashtag was tweeted 244,000 times in the first week alone, and since then has spawned everything from global gamer meetups to FBI investigations and an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. More importantly, the coalition of gamers that coalesced around #GamerGate has proven to be the first group to successfully drive back the SJWs assailing an industry, and for the first time, put the SJWs on the defensive. Where governments and militaries and corporations and church denominations and powerful organizations have failed to resist the SJWs for decades, a faceless group of loosely aligned gamers spanning the political spectrum has succeeded brilliantly. And in doing so, they have shown others, in other industries, how they can successfully strike back against the SJWs attacking them.

  What caused such a broad and diverse group of gamers to come together, in my opinion, was the certain knowledge that there was a media conspiracy against them. This wasn't a mere sense of being under attack either, as we were in possession of absolute proof that a group of editors, reporters, and reviewers from various gaming news sites were using a private Google Groups mailing list called GameJournoPros to coordinate their vicious attacks on the gaming community and even the gamer identity itself. The story, broken on September 17, 2014 by British journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, was entitled “Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite” and confirmed the widespread impression many gamers had that they were being betrayed and besieged by the very gaming media that was supposed to serve them. Four days later, Milo published the complete list of all 137 individuals who belonged to the list.

  The following anti-gamer articles were published in a three-day period between August 28 and September 1, just after the christening of the anti-SJW gamer movement that would soon beat them into submission. While only one of the authors, Chris Plante of Polygon, was an actual member of the GameJournoPros mailing list, the combination of the seemingly coordinated attack and the evidence of the actual anti-gamer collusion was enough to harden most gamers' opinions about the complete lack of ethics in game journalism.

  1. “’Gamer’s’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over.” Leigh Alexander, Gamasutra

  2. “An Awful Week to Care About Video Games”, Chris Plante, Polygon

  3. “A Guide to Ending ‘Gamers’, Devin Wilson,” Gamasutra

  4. “We Might be Witnessing the ‘Death of an Identity’”, Luke Plunkett, Kotaku

  5. “Gaming is Leaving ‘Gamers’ Behind”, Joseph Bernstein, Buzzfeed

  6. “Sexism, Misogyny and Online Attacks: It’s a Horrible Time to Consider Yourself a ‘Gamer’”, Patrick O’Rourke, Financial Post

  7. “It’s Dangerous to Go Alone: Why Are Gamers So Angry”, Arthur Chu, The
Daily Beast

  8. “The End of Gamers”, Dan Golding, Tumblr

  9. “Misogynistic Trolls Drive Feminist Video Game Critic From Her Home”, Callie Beusman, Jezebel

  10. “A Disheartening Account Of The Harassment Going On In Gaming Right Now (And How Adam Baldwin Is Involved)”, Victoria McNally, The Mary Sue

  11. “Anita Sarkeesian Threatened with Rape and Murder for Daring to Keep Critiquing Video Games”, Anna Minard, Slog

  12. “Feminist Video Blogger Is Driven From Home by Death Threats”, Jack Smith IV, Betabeat

  13. “Fanboys, White Knights, and the Hairball of Online Misogyny”, Tauriq Moosa, The Daily Beast

  14. “The Death of ‘Gamers’ and the Women Who ‘Killed’ Them”, Casey Johnston, Ars Technica

  15. “The SJW effect – welcome to the end of the world”, Patrick Garratt, VG24/7

  16. “Announcement: Readers who feel threatened by equality no longer welcome”, Tim Colwill, GamesONnet

  17. “There are gamers at the gate, but they may already be dead”, Jonathan Holmes, Destructoid

  18. “This Week in Video Game Criticism: Tropes vs Anita Sarkeesian and the Demise of 'Gamers'”, Kris Ligman, Gamasutra

  19. “How to attack a woman who works in video gaming,” Jenn Frank, The Guardian

  The broad-based gamer response to this media onslaught was not organized in any way, and the tongue-in-cheek slogan “I am the Leader of #GamerGate” beautifully expressed both its insouciance and its intrinsically ad hoc nature. It also reflected an instinctive awareness of the media SJWs' ability to target and destroy any individual who came to the fore; Adam Baldwin was attacked for being a celebrity sympathetic to the movement by a group of SJWs who put together a petition against his appearance as guest of honor to the Supanova Pop Culture Expo in Australia revoked and attempted to get his invitation revoked. They collected 6,305 signatures and an endorsement from Literally Wu, but their petition was declined by the expo's Founder and Event Director, rather more politely than their bullying behavior merited.