Man Who Attacked Paul Pelosi Says He Was Radicalized by Gamergate
Man Who Attacked Paul Pelosi Says He Was Radicalized by Gamergate
The man told jurors he spent hours listening to far-right podcasts before breaking into the Pelosi home and attacking the then-Speaker’s husband with a hammer.
The dumbest possible thing to be radicalized by.
Right? Gamergate is something I've never understood at all. Like... People try to summarize the whole thing for me and after two sentences I just blank out entirely because it's all so weird, convoluted and dumb.
A gigantic "he-said-she-said" that somehow devolved into tons of harassment, death threats, violence and "calling someone's boss so they'd get fired because they weren't nice enough online" or something...
Your 1-sentence answer to understanding Gamergate has less to do with any of the people involved or a timeline of events. Gamergate, more than anything else, was an opportunity. A springboard to indoctrinate people into far right politics by playing to people's fear of the Other, mistrust in media, and stoking anger at a perceived scandal.
If it never happened, if it wasn't video games, it would just as well be something else. It would be music or sports or anything that people are passionate about. Right wingers were running out of steam with the Tea Party, and Gamergate was in the right place at the right time.
EDIT: Some contemporary discussion on GG actually, prophetically, supports this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/2k0bpi/whygamergateisarightwingmovement/
https://www.reddit.com/r/AgainstGamerGate/comments/2km45o/afewdaysagoisaidthatgamergatewasaright/
As someone on another forum said, the GG movement is primed to be the next young Republican demographic, and all of the pieces have been put into place to subvert the Authoritarian revolt into a rabid conservative base. So next year when all of the GGers (who remain) go from moderate liberals to Tea Party advocates, you can say you were at ground zero.
https://www.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/comments/l3fq6t/theteapartyandgamergatewerethingsiwas/
That got me thinking about my Q/MAGA following father and how both being indoctrinated into Tea Party politics as a teenage boy on top of Evangelical Christianity as well as being sucked into Gamergate and Sargon of Akkad's whole "classical liberalism" grift for a while. I see a lot of that same outrage and ingroup-outgroup clashing being taken advantage of by Q and MAGA.
Gamergate started with the premise that professional game reviewers were being biased by publishers due to being granted preferential treatment and access.
All the same stuff people are saying now about Clarence Thomas, which is TRUE, they were saying about video game reviewers back then.
I was actually a game reviewer back then, and, yeah, I got review codes for games and backstage access at Pax... it didn't influence my reviews though and I never had pressure from publishers or editorial to give good reviews for access.
My experience may not have been the norm though:
https://www.gamezone.com/originals/the-fallout-of-the-kane-lynch-debacle/
People are already teetering on the edge. Mental health treatment and awareness in this country is replaced by toxic masculinity and the idea that taking care of your head is for cucks.
Was he radicalized for it, or is it what finally set him over? These are two very different things, even if they may immediately appear “the same”.
How actually historically relevant it is is just mindboggling. It is literally the codification and beginning of the alt-right. Britebart news guy and eventual Presidential advisor Steve Bannon and a massive swack of the early alt talking heads right got their start with Gamergate. It's essentially the proving ground of the model of engagement and the networking that brought the scum together.
I suggest Ian Danskin's talk on "A Case Study of Digital Radicalization " https://youtu.be/lLYWHpgIoIw?si=WD8gi7XXFVrIKg-n
It is one of the best breakdowns of Gamergate I have ever heard while keeping sight of just how bloody insane the whole thing is. It's a really long video yes but it really has some interesting takes on digital Radicalization and a key part of the modern history of how we got where we are.
It's incredibly fucking stupid.
I was even on /v/ at the time and it still doesn't make sense to me.
Just shows how seriously people can take their dumb niches and conflate them to be representative of the whole world.
Idiots.
Ian Miles Cheong got his start with Gamergate. That sholud tell you everything you need to know about what it was.
Game journos got real chummy with indie devs and everybody was fucking everybody. All objectivity was lost and it was full of corruption. Look up the gamejournopros group.
Wasn't gamergate like a fucking decade ago?
It is still going strong on places like reddit, where the official gamergate subreddit kotakuinaction still exists (personally unblocked by spez himself because it contributed "valuable discussion").
But I thought spez was a woke radical communist
/s
Lol wait, I'm genuinely confused whether that's meant to be "kotaku in action" or "kotaku inaction". Was it meant to be that way as a joke or is it genuinely just that bad a name?
He didn't say he was radicalised today
Yeah, but it was the start of the cesspool the right has become.
Btw he's remorseless, he's only sorry that he didn't find Nancy
I'll bet. This coward was out to attack a frail old woman with a weapon. When he was instead met with a frail old naked man, he was out matched.
Whatever the fuck that means.
Gamergate was something Steve Bannon had his gross fingers all over. He's one of the most disgusting, infuriating propagandists out there... If I remember correctly he got his "start" with political manipulation in the gaming world. He recognized that you can radicalize "rootless" men who were lost in life and just playing video games to escape so he chose that vector to propagndize and create an army of gravy seals.
He literally did a fascist tour of Europe during the Trump years to push countries already flirting with far right policies to go further.
He's one of a few people that really deserve a one way trip to the sun.
TIL. Really, I wasn't aware of any of that. Now it makes sense lol
It was Steve Bannon himself engaged in a proof of concept that gamers were a ripe plumb of dissatisfied idle white men just ready to be radicalized by the right wing.
He learned this from his background and how he got rich in the first place: building World of Warcraft gold farms (seriously).
Holy. Fucking. Shit. Thanks for the rabbit hole, I didn't know any of that (not American).
"It's not my fault. Please don't send me to jail for as long as I deserve for beating a sleeping old man with a hammer."
I guess this fear media is like a drug. Makes people go cyber psycho.
I remember when it was dungeons and dragons that was making people eat babies and stuff.
Yeps I remember the tail end of that. Being warned that I would disappear into steam tunnels from playing dungeons and dragons. Just about everything was Satanic. Men wearing an earring, a bandanna used as a sweatband, Halloween, cans of pop ring necklaces...
Yes kids the theists were always like this.
This is not comparable at all. Radicalisation through the media you consume is a known and proven phenomenon. None of the comics, d&d, heavy metal makes you satanic and violent claims have ever been proven.
Ahh, those were the days😋
"cyber psycho" really sounds like straight from a cyberpunk apocalyptic scenario
It kind of is. It’s from the game Cyberpunk. Less apocalyptic, more dystopian.
Man blames voices for decision he made. News at 11.
Cool story, bro. Tell it to your buddies in prison.
Shocked! Shocked I tell ya. Who but everyone could have seen this coming.
I am mostly surprised that this shit had such a long breath.
Can't tell if guy needs a mental health evaluation or is going for one after the trial to reduce/alter sentencing. He doesn't seem competent. Pleading not guilty and then openly admitting to stuff on the stand makes it seem like he doesn't understand the situation he's in.
Zoe Quinn deserves to be told "you were right" by every person on the planet who ever meets them from now on.
He probably also drank Gamergirl Water.
He was radicalized by Gamergate, now he will get to be spooned by Tyrone.
Sounds like made up bullshit. Either way he either needs to be in an asylum or a prison.
What the fuck does videogame journalist corruption have to do with Nancy fucking Polosi?
Try reading the article.
And that’s not what gamergate was about, no matter what you tell yourself. It was a misogynistic hate campaign.
No it wasn’t. At all. Like Occupy Wallstreet, it was co-opted by people that had no interest in reality.
I was there at the beginning when kotakuinaction sprung up, when the accusations of pay for reviews was levied, and then consequently when the right wing found it and co-opted it.
You can try to revise history all you’d like, but that’s not what happened. It did not start as a hate campaign just as OWS did not start as a bunch of hippies and drug users asking for free money.
It's what the vast majority of those who followed it cared about. And it's about a decade late to have anything to do with this dude.
I still think it was a lovers spat gone wrong.
His next big video game challenge? Keeping the soap in his inventory.
Yeah, not a big fan of prison rape jokes, sorry.
