by Vox Day
Indeed, the lack of a #GamerGate leader on whom they could focus their malicious attention greatly frustrated the SJWs, who, lacking any specific identity of their own, gradually became known as Anti-GamerGate, GamerGhazi, or AGGros. Various concern trolls repeatedly explained why #GamerGate needed a leader and how #GamerGate would never accomplish anything or be respected without a leader, concerns that were generally blown off with multiple GamerGaters declaring that they were the leader of #GamerGate or denouncing the concern troll as a shill, which is GG parlance for an individual who is not to be trusted. Within a month, the basic strategy of an entirely decentralized approach had come together; #GamerGate had unwittingly reinvented a highly effective military strategy known as 4th Generation Warfare that has been driving professional warplanners mad since Vietnam.
Following are some selections from a highly influential document written by an anonymous GamerGater that effectively summarizes #GamerGate's successful anti-SJW approach. It was conceived as a comprehensive rebuttal to help GamerGaters address a specific type of shill known as The Changer.
All of the following are counterproductive and damage ourselves ONLY:
No objectives, no goals, no demands, no philosophies, no lists.
It screws up the framing of the issue by forcing us to focus on specific issues.
We do not need clear end points. If people are discouraged by a perceived lack of progress, take a break. This is an extended and long-term approach and you must take breaks. If you need specific goals for yourself, participate 2 or 3 days a week. Phrase it in those terms. Creating goals is not necessary.
No narrative changing.
As we are a consumer revolt and not a political movement, we do not need a narrative.
Narratives are for PR. PR is the journo's game. Not ours.
We let the opposition change the narrative for themselves as they've done time and again for the last month.
We are about facts, logic, and reason. A narrative is a way of spinning these. We have no spin. Only truth.
No leaders.
This is a 100% shill idea put forward by the opposition to make it easy to play the identity game. This is their bread and butter and they will co-opt or ruin anything that they can get their hands on.
There are currently no weak points to attack.
As attacks against individuals intensify it's clear that giving them heads that are more important than others is a bad idea.
Other shills to watch out for included The Fear Monger, The Defeatist, The Dismissive, The False Flag, The Politico, The Discreditor, The Misdirector, The Uncertain, The Slider, and The Self-Shiller; the document recommended specific responses to deal with each of them. This may strike you as paranoid, but I personally witnessed multiple shills of each of these types, as SJWs repeatedly tried to infiltrate and redirect what, despite outsiders' best efforts to categorize it as a hate group, a terrorist group, and a Twitter-based charade, remained a consumer revolt primarily against the corrupt games media.
The first #GamerGate ops were defensive in nature. #NotYourShield was the first big one and was designed to defang the SJW-pushed Narrative that #GamerGate was a collection of racist, sexist white males who were motivated by their hatred of women and minorities. The hashtag meant that the individual non-white, non-male GamerGater was refusing to grant Anti-GamerGate permission to use them as a shield to attack the white male members. The message was straight to the point: “The gaming community is diverse and strong. And we are #NotYourShield for the narrative you're creating.” Thousands of GamerGaters, including Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at American Enterprise Institute, Hispanic porn star Mercedes Carrera, black ex-game journalist Oliver Campbell, and yours truly, a Native American-Mexican game developer, utilized the hashtag and successfully destroyed that particular Narrative.
As A Girl in Vermilion succinctly put it, “We're all a motley crew of typically awesome people united by a common corruption.” To demonstrate its lack of hostility to women, #GamerGate raised $10,000 for a female friend of a GamerGater who had been raped, $30,000 for the Honey Badger Brigade's legal fund after they were kicked out of the Calgary Comics Expo for publicly supporting #GamerGate, $17,000 for bullying prevention, $6,000 for suicide prevention and $70,000 for a program designed to help women get into game development.
The SJWs, of course, clung stubbornly to their Narrative that #GamerGate hated women, despite the fact that most of the $133,000 raised was going directly to benefit human beings of the female persuasion and that the average male gamer has always been extremely enthusiastic about women who express even a modicum of interest in his hobby. All together now: SJWs always lie! The truth is that #GamerGate has always been a broad-based movement with three distinct aspects to it, as graphically demonstrated by an Italian GamerGater, Dr. Ethics.
While it was the most-tweeted op, #NotYourShield was not the most effective of the various #GamerGate operations. Far and away the most successful was—is—Operation Disrespectful Nod. Unlike many of the other operations, it was a mailing campaign, not a hashtag or a fund-raising event, and also unlike most of the others, it was purely offensive in nature. Its purpose was to drain the financial lifeblood out of the gaming media sites that had declared war on gamers and #GamerGate. The initial targets were Polygon, Gamasutra, Kotaku, Ars Technica, The Escapist, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Neogaf; The Escapist was soon dropped from the list, however, as its editors covered #GamerGate much more fairly than the other sites and subsequently proceeded to disemploy a number of openly anti-#GamerGate contributors.
By the end of October 2014, Disrespectful Nod had already achieved enough success that the Washington Post wrote an article entitled “Inside Gamergate’s (successful) attack on the media”.
Here, for the record, is how Gamergate does it — paraphrased from their own five-step war plans.
Step 1: Consult Gamergate’s compiled list of media organizations and reporters that have somehow wronged the movement. Once you have chosen the organization you would like to target, head over to the list of companies that advertise with that Web site and select one of them.
Step 2: Consider the instance of “media malpractice” you plan to complain about. Other members of the movement have helpfully gathered examples already, as part of “Operation Dig Dig Dig”: You might like to try the fact, for instance, that a gaming site reported on the harassment of game developer Zoe Quinn without acknowledging the remote possibility that Quinn may have made the whole thing up. Or you might flag the egregious “conflict of interest” between Quinn and the volunteer moderator of Reddit’s gaming forum: said moderator is a friend of a co-worker of Quinn.
Step 3: Choose an article on your targeted site to complain about or allege offense to. If no articles seem sufficiently offensive, comb through reporters’ tweets for more material.
Step 4: Plug all of your choices into one of the many form e-mails that leaders of Disrespectful Nod have helpfully written already.
Step 5: Keep it up, even when you get no response, and be — to quote the operation’s guide! — “an annoying little s—.” A representative for a high-profile communications company that advertises on Polygon confirmed that he’d received “dozens” of e-mails from Gamergate supporters over a period of several weeks.
Operation Disrespectful Nod also encourages Gamergaters to reach out to the bosses and managers of journalists who have written “negative” stories, demanding the reporter in question be fired or asked to resign. Topping their most-wanted list, at present, is Gawker Media’s Biddle.
Two months later, Sam Biddle was forced to publicly apologize after Gawker lost more than one million dollars in advertising revenue due to Disrespectful Nod, and Gawker founder Nick Denton announced a management change. The Disrespectful Nod continued, and on July 20, 2015, both Tommy Craggs, the executive editor of Gawker Media, and Max Read, the editor-in-chief of Gawker.com, announced their resignations for reasons they claimed were related to their inab
ility to “guarantee Gawker's editorial integrity”. Before the month had ended, five other Gawker employees followed them out the door, including features editor Leah Finnegan and senior editor Caity Weaver. And while Biddle is still there, the game journalist who claimed “nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission” and called to “Bring Back Bullying” was shamed himself by hackers after he was exposed as having registered an account with the Ashley Madison adultery site.
As the owners of SJW-controlled media centers Kotaku, Jezebel, and io9, Gawker was #GamerGate's chief media target. But it was far from the only one. Joystiq was shut down in January 2015. In a textbook research operation, GamerGaters sleepax, Thurin, and br00ke27 took down an inept InfoSec contributor named Kim Crawley who wrote an error-filled article without bothering to do any research, relying instead on nothing but openly anti-GamerGate sources. Polygon's Ben Kuchera announced that he was “taking a break from gaming” that just happened to correspond with Emily Gera being let go at the same time while Movie Bob, who had angrily denounced #GamerGate as being the spiritual descendants of a group known for “violence, threats against children and racist rhetoric”, was fired from The Escapist. Leigh Alexander, who helped launch the original “Gamers are Dead” attack, just happened to decide to leave Gamasutra to pursue exciting new opportunities around the same time.
No one knows exactly how much money #GamerGate has cost the game media that declared war on its own customers, or precisely how many SJWs in the game journalist community are no longer with their previous employers as a result of Operation Disrespectful Nod. Both the journalism sites and the journalists themselves were desperate to avoid giving #GamerGate any readily confirmable trophies. But with the one-year anniversary of #GamerGate approaching, no one would deny that #GamerGate has become a feared social media force, invoked in whispered tones at media companies, PR agencies, and publishing circles, and capable of taking over opposition hashtags and destroying SJW narratives at will. 43 GGinX meetups have already taken place, from London and Paris to Sydney and Tel Aviv to Dallas, Los Angeles, and Washington DC. Vivian James, the GamerGate mascot, is now a recognizable symbol around the world, and Vivian's striking green-and-purple ensemble has become a popular cosplayer costume at comic conventions.
#GamerGate is not going away anytime soon, and if anything, its numbers and its cultural influence are growing. Game devs, from small indie projects to giant AAA games, from unknowns to big names, are making it clear that they side with the gamers, and not with the SJW game journos trying to thought-police them.
Game devs actually owe a tremendous debt to GamerGate, in my humble opinion. If GamerGate had not risen up, our creative freedom would be severely limited now. It's true. Gamers are the only ones who stopped SJWs and their crazy culture assault. Gamers conquer Dragons and fight Gods for a hobby.
—Mark Kern, CEO, MEK Entertainment
The point at which it became obvious that #GamerGate had completely destroyed the SJW narrative was eleven months after Adam Baldwin gave it a name, when American conservatives suddenly began to develop a strange new respect for the very gamers that cultural conservatives had been periodically condemning since the Dungeons & Dragons scare of the Eighties. Conservative commentator Robert Stacy McCain wrote, “In war, your allies are whoever is fighting your enemies, and the motives of your allies matter far less than their skill in battle. Say what you will about #GamerGate, they are skilled and determined fighters. Operation Disrespectful Nod is making believers of anyone who ever made the mistake of underestimating them. Just ask Max Read.”
Not only that, but outsiders began accusing both GamerGaters and high-profile #GamerGate allies such as Daryush Valizadeh and Mike Cernovich of “jumping on the #GamerGate bandwagon” in order to promote themselves. But ask yourself this: how stupid would a successful, self-promoting narcissist have to be in order to knowingly jump on the bandwagon of a much-vilified hate group of sexist, racist terrorists whose prime objective was to harass women and minorities? The combination of these two surprising developments made it evident to everyone that despite rolling out all the big guns of the cultural high ground they'd successfully infiltrated over the years, the SJW attempt to dictate a false Narrative about #GamerGate had failed.
Of course, this failure of the Narrative doesn't mean the media has given up gamedropping the dread hashtag at every opportunity. As per the Second Law, SJWs in the media continue to double down, again and again, and even after an entire year of spreading futile lies, they don't hesitate to make ever more nonsensical statements about the darkly exciting nemesis that stalks their vivid imaginations.
GamerGate makes a political movement out of threatening with rape any woman who has the temerity to offer an opinion about a videogame.
—Amy Wallace, Wired, 23 August 2015
Less than one year after Adam Baldwin coined the hashtag, #GamerGate had proven that a group of determined individuals could resist SJW attempts to enforce their thought policing in the game industry and even strike back at SJWs and SJW institutions to devastating effect. But could the lessons they'd learned be applied elsewhere, outside the game industry?
CHAPTER FIVE: RELEASE THE HOUNDS
Brad, Larry, Vox—congratulations. You’ve spoiled the party. Not just mine, but everyone’s. I waited nearly a half century to get here, and when I do get here, there’s ashes. It hurts. Not just me. Everyone.
—David Gerrold, science fiction author and SJW
In 2013, New York Times bestselling author Larry Correia was vexed. His Monster Hunter International books were a hit, the books from his Grimnoir series were well-regarded and selling nicely, but he was often taunted by SJWs in science fiction for not being a real author. Although he'd been nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2011, upon finding out that he was a conservative who wrote unabashed pulp fiction, the self-declared science fiction literati reacted rather like aristocrats discovering that a smelly peasant had been admitted to the ball. A European reviewer went so far as to declare, “If Larry Correia wins the Campbell, it will END LITERATURE FOREVER.”
Furthermore, ever since the turn of the century, the works that had been winning the Hugo and Nebula awards were observably not the sort of works that had made the science fiction awards prestigious in the first place. In the place of Dune (Chilton), books like The Quantum Rose, Book 6 in The Saga of the Skolian Empire (Tor Books) were winning the Nebula. In the place of books like Starship Troopers (F&SF) and A Canticle for Leibowitz (J.B. Lippencott), we saw Among Others (Tor Books) and Redshirts (Tor Books) win the Hugo. Mediocre Tor-affiliated figures such as John Scalzi, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Charles Stross were collecting literally incredible numbers of nominations, more than legends of science fiction such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke ever did throughout their entire lifetimes. (As of 2015, the current count is 39 nominations for the three Torlocks mentioned versus 31 for the three deceased SF legends.) It had become obvious to even the most casual observer that the once-prestigious science fiction awards had become little more than a popularity contest dominated by a small group of writers, most of whom were affiliated with science fiction's largest publisher, Tor Books, the home of the very SF literati that sneered at Larry Correia.
The extent to which the SJW-run Tor Books has dominated the science fiction awards for the last three decades can hardly be exaggerated. Tor has won the Locus Award for Best Publisher for the last 27 years in a row. Since 1986, 46 of the 190 novels nominated for Hugo Awards and 38 of the 156 novels nominated for the Nebula Award have been published by Tor. Nor is it an coincidence that the number of award-winning books that the science fiction public does not read has also increased dramatically during this time. The average current Amazon rank for the three pre-Tor award-winners, the newest having won in 1966, is 3,685. The average Amazon rank for the three most recent Tor award-winners, the oldest having won in 2002, is 665,597.
It is worth noting that
there is a clear connection between this recent domination of the awards by SJWs and the politics of the writers. Hugo Awards historian Mike Glynn estimates that in the last 20 years, across all the various categories, conservative SF authors and editors have won a grand total of 19 out of a possible 266 Hugo Awards.
Not only that, but the dominance of Tor Books came about at the same time as the infestation of the editorial positions at the major science fiction publishers by SJWs, most of them female, who promptly began an aggressive gatekeeping campaign to publish more diverse and female authors while systematically eradicating what they considered to be the offensive and problematic elements rife within classic science fiction and fantasy. One SJW aptly expressed their collective hatred for the very literary genre they had taken over when she wrote about reading National Public Radio's list of the 100 greatest science fiction and fantasy novels.
I devoured science fiction and fantasy when I was younger—the idea that I was also devouring patriarchal and sexist ideas made me deeply uncomfortable…The fact that these were all supposed to be the best of the genre, was even more shocking. I can understand how many of the books on the list may have once been groundbreaking but that doesn’t mean that they are now the best examples of the genre. They have been supplanted, hundreds of times over, by other authors that took similar themes but made them better and more inclusive.