by Vox Day
#GamerGate tactics are also beginning to be adopted by other groups for unrelated purposes, as there is a distinctly GG tone to the anti-Planned Parenthood memes that have been cropping up on Twitter ever since The Center for Medical Progress began releasing its sting-videos that showed Planned Parenthood employees openly discussing the sale of human organs taken from the infants it aborts. American immigration opponents have also successfully tarred some of the leading Republican candidates as well as their media supporters with the #cuckservative hashtag, much to the dismay of both the G.O.P. elite and The New York Times alike. It is therefore little wonder that SJWs are terrified of #GamerGate and see it as their most fearsome enemy. Increasingly paranoid SJWs are beginning to see #GamerGate lurking under their beds, and it should come as no surprise that #GamerGate would, in its wry and ruthless manner, mercilessly mock their fears.
I'm now starting to see #gamergate show up in completely unrelated places as an all purpose boogieman for every SJW gripe imaginable.—Literally Jamie
That time they took American currency off the gold standard? Totally #GamerGate—Mingo
Remember that meteor that made the dinosaurs extinct? That was #GamerGate—Reptilian Hunter
That time you lost your car keys... Guess what, we did it. Muhahahahah #GamerGate—Mr.Airconditioning
#GamerGate cancelled Firefly—ASaltMineNamedZilla
Damn you, #GamerGate! Is there no evil to which you will not stoop?
But the success of GamerGate notwithstanding, to date the anti-SJW campaign has been predominantly reactive in nature. And while it is certainly encouraging to see battles being won against SJWs in various industries, to see SJW advances turned back, and to see the anti-SJW resistance grow and spread, one cannot win a cultural war while remaining on the defensive and always conceding the initative to the enemy. That is why it is important to step back from the ongoing battles and consider the anti-SJW war from a more strategic perspective.
Strategic Principle #1: Know the SJW and know yourself.
It is perhaps helpful to remember that war is a form of politics. Or, to put it as one of the great strategists of history, Carl von Clausewitz phrased it, “War is merely the continuation of politics by other means.” This is not a metaphor, for as Clausewitz also wrote, “War therefore is an act of violence to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” Cultural war of the sort in which the SJWs are engaged is an act of social pressure to compel their opponents to fulfill their will. So, while the means are different, the same strategies, and in some cases, even the same tactics, will apply to both war and cultural war alike.
This observation is not unique to me. The influential military strategist, William S. Lind, is well-known in military circles around the world for his development of the concept of 4th Generation War. Being his editor and publisher, I have the distinct honor and privilege of speaking with him on a regular basis, and it was intriguing to hear him observe, after reading about #GamerGate in his local newspaper, that it was an obvious application of 4GW principles to the cultural war. The #GamerGate philosophy of decentralization, independent action, open enrollment, and media-focused activity is an effective recreation of highly effective insurgencies that are well known to every military historian.
And since there is a direct connection between military strategy and cultural war strategy, that means a strategy to strike back at the SJWs should begin in the same place that effective military strategy begins, which is to say Sun Tzu. While most of his advice concerning spies and troop movements are not applicable to cultural war, there is one foundational concept that is as applicable to the anti-SJW resistance today as it was to the battles of the Warring States period in ancient China.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
—The Art of War, Sun Tzu
Sun Tzu's maxim illustrates the key advantage that every anti-SJW possesses over his SJW enemies. Remember, SJWs always lie! And the first person to whom they lie is always themselves. The SJW doesn't know himself because he can't bear to admit the truth to himself; it is his denial of objective reality that is the foundation of his SJWism. Nor does the SJW know his opponent, because making the effort to understand exactly who and what his opponent is will almost always contradict the SJW Narrative.
For example, SJWs have regularly called me a white supremacist, a fascist, a neo-Nazi, and a Nazi because it suited their rhetorical needs, not because they knew anything about me. Once I made the fact that I am an American Indian known, many of them had the sense to quickly drop the “white supremacist” claims, but some, like Jeet Heer of The New Republic, have not, simply because they did not want to admit that I had the ability to play the Red card against them. In like manner, the SJWs in science fiction have tried to claim that despite being married to a black woman, Sad Puppies 3 leader Brad Torgersen is a racist.
Even when an SJW knows the truth about his enemy, he cannot admit it, accept it, or take it into account so long as it contradicts the current Narrative. As per Sun Tzu's advice, this means that the anti-SJW will always have a powerful advantage as long as he is honest about himself and honest about them. And in truth, this lack of knowledge about themselves and others is one reason why the SJWs are so readily defeated by their opponents whenever those opponents bother to actually show up and fight.
The way this tends to work out in a practical sense is that SJWs are all attack and no defense. If you can survive the attack and counterattack, you will often be surprised to learn how easy it is to send them reeling in disarray.
Strategic Principle #2: Secure your base.
The second step in striking back is SJW-proofing your organization. The core SJW strategy is to invade and take over any institution or organization that can advance their cause, but to retain their attachment to the cause rather than to the institution. That is why they will not hesitate to destroy it rather than see it used for any purposes besides their own. Due to their entryist tactics, most institutions never realize they have been invaded until it is too late and their institutional high ground has already been taken over. At the universities, it is the administration. In corporations, it is the personnel and human resources departments. In local government, it is the school boards and the employment unions. In open-source software, it is the community management positions.
Jerry Pournelle was one of the first to recognize the way SJW entryism functions in his Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which states: In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. In all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.
In every case, the first SJW's primary objective is to bring more SJWs inside the organization. To give one example, consider the role-playing game publisher Modiphius, which is in the process of producing a new Conan RPG called Robert E. Howard’s CONAN Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of. In addition to twenty highly experienced men, they hired a woman by the name of Monica Valentinelli who has solid credentials in the RPG field, having been the lead developer and writer for the Firefly RPG. And yet, what was Valentinelli's first order of business? To fire off this tweet.
“I am looking for female freelance writers to work on the Conan RPG. If you are interested, hit me up at monica AT mlvwrites DOT com.”
Never mind that the writing team already consisted of “long time TSR stalwart Thomas M Reid (Dragon Mountain, Tales of the Comet, Forgotten Realms, Planescape, Ravenloft, Temple of Elemental Evil novel), Kevin Ross (Masks of Nyarlathotep, Cthulhu by Gaslight, Colonial Lovecraft Country, Down Darker Trails), Lou Agresta (Snows Of An Early Winter, Slave Pits of Absalom, Freebooters Guide to the Raz
or Coast) and Scott Oden (Best-selling author of the historical fiction novels Men of Bronze, Memnon, and The Lion of Cairo)”, Valentinelli's priority was to find “female freelance writers”. After all, what would Robert E. Howard's CONAN Adventures be without the female touch?
For the SJW, the cause is always more important than the task at hand or his employer's interests.
SJWs don't see anything wrong with this behavior. Consider one science fiction SJW, who blithely announced on File 770, “One of our librarians is a NESFA member, which I think is at least partially responsible for us having a particularly good SF selection (including many NESFA Press books).” Imagine that. A librarian who belongs to a certain group making sure that his library purchases many books that just happened to be published by that group. And yet, if you asked him about his actions, he would swear up and down that he is only making his selections on the basis of merit, not personal bias. This behavior is absolutely standard practice for SJWs.
Just as J.S. Mill advocated long ago, many institutions, from the Anglican Church to the Boy Scouts of America, have fallen to SJW entryism. That is why it is absolutely vital to not only build structural defenses against their invasions, but to periodically sweep your organization to make sure that it remains SJW-free. It may seem a little ironic to have to police your organization yourself in order to prevent it from being thought-policed, but the sad historical fact is that you have to choose between one and the other. Some practical ideas for SJW-proofing your organization will be addressed in the next chapter.
Strategic Principle #3: Focus primarily on morale.
Two of the authors I have the privilege to publish, Martin van Creveld and William S. Lind, have spent decades studying the art and history of war. Both van Creveld, a military historian, and Lind, a political and military strategist, very heavily stress the signal importance of morale, particularly when it comes to long-term conflict. Lind follows Col. John Boyd's lead in considering the moral level of war (which is the primary factor that determines the morale of the soldiers) to be the highest and most significant level of war, more important than the mental and physical levels on which strategy, operations, and tactics are usually discussed.
Nor are Boyd and Lind alone in this. In his highly influential book, The Transformation of War, Israeli historian van Creveld considers practically every counterinsurgency around the world from the Maccabees to the Second Palestinian Intifada before concluding that nothing, not even repeated victories on the battlefield, is as important as maintaining a high level of morale and discipline throughout the fighting forces. And he draws particularly on the experience of the British in Ireland to conclude that this is every bit as important for the stronger side as for the weaker one.
A small, weak force confronting a large, strong one will need very high fighting spirit to make up for its deficiencies in other fields. Still, since survival itself counts as no mean feat, that fighting spirit will feed on every victory, however minor. Conversely, a strong force fighting a weak one for any length of time is almost certain to suffer from a drop in morale, the reason being that nothing is more futile than a string of victories endlessly repeated.
—Martin van Creveld, The Transformation of War, 1991
Do these military principles translate to the cultural war? Absolutely. One of the most noteworthy things about participating in #GamerGate was the very high level of importance that was placed on maintaining the morale of the GamerGaters participating in the various ops. Despite the massive imbalance of power, with literally the entire gaming and mainstream medias attacking an extraordinarily ragtag group of gaming freaks who span the political spectrum and had virtually nothing in common with each other except their support for ethics in game journalism, the constant barrage of positive memes being produced by #GamerGate artists and spread over social media, combined with the daily messages of encouragement from other GamerGaters, kept people's spirits up.
Some, like Daddy Warpig in particular, were tireless, tweeting dozens of times a day. Others whose enthusiasm flagged were not criticized, but encouraged to take a break for a month or two, after which they came back refreshed, motivated, and ready to send emails. Images that mimicked old World War II recruitment posters were created, and the #GamerGate mascot Vivian James appeared everywhere from Kukuruyo's excellent GamerGate Life cartoon to the meetups that took place everywhere from Texas to Tel Aviv.
#GamerGate also directly targeted the morale of its enemies. In addition to subjecting the journalists and their advertisers to an unending deluge of email, we took over enemy hashtags, produced memes that mocked and parodied their memes, and so effectively drove them from social media that anti-GamerGater Randi Harper resorted to creating a blockbot that would permit anti-GamerGaters to mass-block tens of thousands of #GamerGate accounts on Twitter, including mine, in order to shield their delicate psyches from #GamerGate's non-stop intellectual artillery.
@voxday is on the ggAutoblocker's blocklist.
@voxday is on The Block Bot's blocklist (Level 2).
Below is one image that I created based on a popular gamer meme from the 1991 Sega game Zero Wing, in response to the Calgary Expo kicking out the pro-GG Honey Badger Brigade for the sartorial crime of wearing #GamerGate shirts. Accompanied by the message “Dear #CalgaryExpo. Love, #GamerGate”, it was retweeted and favorited hundreds of times, and was only one of thousands of similar graphic memes that simultaneously boosted our morale while lowering that of our enemies.
You should be aware that you have a very important strategic advantage vis-a-vis the SJWs with regards to morale. A large percentage of SJWs are prone to various forms of mental illness; being competitive with regards to their victimhood, it is not at all uncommon for them to openly brag about being on various antidepressants and other psychiatric medications. I have been told by observers that the majority of commenters on several SJW sites have publicly made reference to their being prescribed such medications. Because so many of them are miserable and depressed, the strategy of repeatedly hammering SJW morale with dark messages of inevitable failure, doom, and defeat tends to be considerably more effective than it is when aimed at normal, happy, self-confident individuals.
Remember, morale is more important than objectives, more important than leaders, more important than organization, and is even more important than victories. In World War II, the German Wehrmacht made highly effective use of rapidly counterattacking after losing a position, a policy known as the Doctrine of the Stabilized Front. Their objective was to destroy the advancing enemy before he could consolidate his gains, moreover, as van Creveld noted, there are few things that demoralize a successful enemy more than the evidence that his hard-won victory has accomplished nothing. Although it may sound counterintuitive, there are few things that demoralize an organization more than meeting with futile success after futile success.
As long as your morale remains high, you cannot lose and the SJWs cannot win. Consider, for example, how the SJWs are are already visibly demoralized. They genuinely thought they'd won the cultural war once and for all, only to discover that the long bitter war has barely even begun.
I’m so WEARY of these assholes. This is supposed to be FUN. It isn’t supposed to be a long, bitter war. I hope the Puppies are fucking trounced in disgrace at the Hugo’s. I hope “no award” wins for most of the categories they flooded. As wonderful as that will be it will just make them more bloodthirsty, bigoted and pigheaded. This drama won’t end with the Hugo’s. I am so fucking tired of my favorite things being overshadowed by the looming, gross specter of these fragile idiots. Gaming, science fiction and fantasy have always involved women, POC and the LGBTQ community. The fact that this is suddenly a shocking newsflash terrible enough for them to take up metaphorical arms against us in 2015 is cause for despair.
—Eldritch, io9
He's absolutely right to despair, because we're not only going to gain an inch, we're going to drive them completely from the field. Just as #GamerGate h
as gone from strength to strength in the face of intense media opposition, the number of both Rabid Puppies and Vile Faceless Minions have increased as a direct result of the repeated media hit pieces.
Strategic Principle #4: Research, dig, and document.
Remember the First Law. SJWs always lie! That means there is, without question, the gold of truth hidden somewhere in the hills of whatever Narrative the SJWs are attempting to defend. It's there, you only have to find it. The Third Law can be of use here, because if an SJW is accusing you of something dishonest, there is a very good chance that he is engaging in that very activity himself.
As I mentioned before with regards to documentation, take nothing at face value. Check to see that every i is dotted, every t is crossed, and every number is correct. One thing I've noticed is that SJWs tend to be somewhat innumerate, so they frequently fail to realize how absurd their assertions are whenever numbers are involved. Another favored tactic of the SJW is the definitional switcheroo, so always be careful to check precisely how they are defining words since you can often catch them substituting bizarre definitions of their own concoction in order to slip things past an insufficiently careful reader. SJWs absolutely hate dictionary definitions because having an objective limit on their ability to claim X is really Y significantly reduces their opportunity to play word games.