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April 18, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
02:26:30
A Conversation with Milo Yiannopoulos about #GamerGate
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Hello, everyone.
I am having a conversation with Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos.
Some of you may know who he is.
So, how's it going, Milo?
Hi, how are you?
Thanks for having me so much.
My pleasure.
A lot's been happening recently, hasn't it?
I didn't mean thanks for having me so much.
I meant thanks so much for having me.
Thanks for having me so much means something different.
Yeah, the rumour mill is just going to.
Well, you see, we're both in Britain, which Americans probably think is about the size of a postage stamp.
So, you know, we just wander across the room and bump into each other.
It doesn't really work.
I have met more than one American who thinks that most people in Britain know each other.
It's that old thing from school, isn't it?
Oh, you're gay, you must know my brother.
Absolutely.
It's exactly that.
A lot's been happening, hasn't it?
I suppose, really, we should talk about Calgary.
We should talk about.
Yes, I'm excited about that.
What's your take on it?
I tell you what's really interesting.
People like to say that Gamergate and the sort of Gamergate allies, some of whom don't necessarily always use the hashtag, own this period of diminishing returns now, where this sort of natural, what do you call it, sort of an erosion of the core sort of the number of people who are active every day.
We've seen, I think, with the Calgary Expo, that's really not the case.
What's actually happened is that there's a sort of online watchdog, if you like, that leaps into action when it sees, if you like, injustice perpetrated or whatever, that is prepared to stick up for liberal values in the sort of robust and widespread way that previously was almost entirely the domain of social justice warriors.
I mean, social media used to be where the authoritarian left lived, and they thought they owned it.
And one of the things that got upset about Gamergate and atheism once before that is that they started to get the impression that not only did they not any longer own social media, but they might in fact be in the minority.
And that's exactly the case.
That's exactly what's happened.
What's really interesting about the Calgary thing is there now comes with every illiberal act of censorship from a conference, from a convention, or even from a publication, there comes a cost attached.
They know they're being watched.
They know that they're being looked at.
They know that people are waiting for unfair, illiberal acts of censorship to call them out on it.
I think it's been a disaster for Calgary.
It has shaped, it has completely dominated everyone's impressions of the entire convention.
All of their hard work has basically been for nothing because they made a mistake.
The mistake they made was to be illiberal and to throw people out for no good reason to satisfy a few tumbleriness.
And the consequence of that is that all anybody will ever remember from this year of the Calgary Expo is that they threw somebody out and 40,000 people took to Twitter, or at least 40,000 tweets rather, but many thousand people took to Twitter to complain about censorship.
And this is a convention that is in favour of the arts.
It should be above all other people.
The irony of that is that they actually had like, we are anti-censorship on the booth as well, didn't they?
And yeah, as you say, I've just checked the numbers.
It's 37,000.
And it's exactly as you say, you know, like that, 15, 16,000 a day.
And then suddenly it jumps up to 17,000 just because of this one event.
It is exactly as you described.
Sorry, Go.
What's interesting is if you look at the sort of the guys that these conferences treat as heroes, the Neil Gaimans and whatever, they all somewhere have sort of quietly done these blog posts about why you probably guys should take it easy if you're telling People with other opinions, they should be silenced and clamping down on free speech and all the rest of it because you're not going to like where this leads.
And almost all of these sort of great fantasy and sci-fi fiction authors, the sorts of people who are deities to organize and go to Calgary Expo, they've all sort of quietly slid out these blog posts in the last couple of years as they've seen this stuff start to happen.
Because they know that once you start, once you establish censorship as an acceptable means of discourse, inevitably the people who win are those with larger numbers and greater influence.
And though the authoritarian left certainly has more of a stranglehold on the media, there's no question about who has the larger numbers.
So they're definitely not going to like where it leads if they keep doing it.
Absolutely.
My concern as well is more that it's for political reasons.
It's not for any good reason.
It's about political affiliation.
That's the only reason.
Oh, Gamergate.
It wasn't they hadn't done anything wrong.
They hadn't offended anyone.
They hadn't, you know, there was no hate speech.
There was no violence, threats, or anything like that.
It was just the name that they heard.
Oh, this is a political affiliation that we disagree with because we're corrupt.
And we have to shut it down.
And like you said, if they had just done nothing, then probably wouldn't have been a blip on anyone's radar.
No, well, because I think the sorts of people who make complaints about these things know that Gamergate is, you know, that anybody who is brave enough after all the lies that have been told about it to go out in public and identify themselves as a Gamergate supporter is going to be on best behavior.
So they know that these people aren't actually going to do anything.
The only response therefore is to get them banned and get them thrown out before they don't do anything, before they not do anything.
Because otherwise, you know, the public at large might suddenly start to question this narrative about, you know, misogynistic, hateful, you know, terrible white male neckbeards.
If it's actually women with a stall, you know, are just simply asking for their views not to be censored.
That's quite dangerous to have in a sort of authoritarian environment, right?
I mean, I do kind of admire these guys, the honey badger radio girls.
I mean, they're sort of like insurgents into this into dangerous territory.
I do admire them.
I think they did great.
I do.
I'm surprised they've got the balls to do it.
I don't think I would, to be honest.
I don't think I'd do.
I don't think I would.
Honestly, I'd be worried about a mob forming.
I don't think they're going to E3.
So, I mean, I should get my affairs in order.
I should have my will sorted out.
I should really have all my shit together before I get on a plane to Los Angeles because I ain't coming back.
Well, you know, we joke, but didn't a radical feminist shoot Andy Warhol?
Yes, yeah, Valerie Solanas.
That was it.
That was the woman who wrote the scum manifesto, wasn't it?
For those who don't know, the scum manifesto is a society for cutting up men.
Now, people like Valerie Solanas are the, I mean, I hesitate to use the word intellectual, but they're the theoretical grounding for the sort of kill all men hashtag stuff, right?
That sort of ridiculous, over-the-top lesbianic misandry comes from radical feminists of the 60s, 70s, 80s.
And Valerie Solanas is one of them.
And yeah, she wrote the Scum Manifesto, which is all of the things you would imagine it would be.
It's quite a good read.
It's quite a good read, actually.
It's quite a fun.
It is awful as a manifesto.
Of course, of course, but it's hard to describe.
It's just no, I don't, it's not an endorsement.
Clear.
I do not endorse Valerie's.
But it's a good, fun read.
And yes, she did.
She didn't kill him, but she shot him.
I think he died later from something else, but she did shoot Andy War.
But this is what happens.
This is what happens.
It's the people who are whining about intolerance who are the most intolerant.
The people who are claiming diversity who actually want uniformity of opinion.
And the people who claim that they're being attacked and bullied and discriminated against who are the ones that eventually end up doing awful things.
And, you know, I just, I hate to make this all about me all the time.
As your listeners will know, I hate attention.
I keep coming back to this, and I have put this in my book because I think it's really important.
Imagine, just imagine what would have happened if any Sarkeesian had received a syringe in the post, you know?
Just this sort of, I mean, just the meltdown of the world that would have occurred.
You should have made a lot more money.
Well, maybe.
I mean, you know, I'm surprised Brianna Wu hasn't claimed that she's had stuff like that through the mail because she seems every time people stop tweeting about it, she seems to invent some new imaginary freedom.
But imagine if Sarah Quinn had had a dead animal or whatever.
My point is simply not, I don't give a toss one way or the other, as I think most of your listeners will know, but imagine it the other way around and just think to yourself, well, you're saying that there's all this abuse and all the rest of it, and it's really just sort of nasty tweets on the internet.
The people who actually take it a step further, the people who do bad things in the real world, always come from one side.
And that's the case of Valerie Solanas.
And I think it's the case with the Calgary Expo, where peaceful, in effect, free speech protesters were ejected from a conference because people could not run the risk that they might start persuading people that censorship was a bad thing.
I mean, cautionary times, don't we?
No, no, I completely agree with you.
This is one of the things that really worries me about the extreme authoritarian left.
I mean, I consider myself to be a leftist.
And yet, it's like I'm in a fucking Bizarro world, where the only people who will listen to what I'm saying are right-wing.
And I'm not even against wrong.
And that's the thing.
And just by saying right-wing is now a reason, a grounds for dismissal.
Oh, they're right-wing.
They're right-wing.
So, well, that doesn't mean they eat babies.
What the fuck?
You know, it just means they're conservative, doesn't it?
I think what's happened is that the left has always understood, as Andrew Breibart used to say, that politics is downstream from culture.
They've always understood that if you control what people enjoy in their free time, how they speak, where they live, you'll begin to shape their political attitudes.
And they've very successfully pretty much taken over academia, the arts, books, literature, you know, what you name it.
Publishing, journalism, certainly.
You can look at the statistics for yourself, a number of journalists who vote Democratic.
Absolutely.
Republican.
They've very successfully taken over all of that stuff.
And so they've managed over the last sort of 30 years to establish this association in public imagination that right-wing automatically means that there's something morally deficient there, rather than somebody who simply has a different view of how the world ought to be organized and a different view about how to make life better for everybody, because that's ultimately what politics is about.
How we organize society and how we make life better and more prosperous and happier for everybody.
But one side of that debate has been quite successfully characterized as the sort of mean, selfish, sociopathic, morally defective side of the argument.
The side of the equation, which if you distance yourself from, is this sort of Social signaling that you're the right kind of person, that you are, um, so you know, that you that you are a compassionate and it's very definitely a club, it's it's very definitely um this is what I was trying to explain to people actually.
They operate as an organized group, and I know they're not.
You know, I don't even think that the gamers are dead articles was part of a coordinated effort, it doesn't need to be.
That's the scary thing about them.
It's as soon as a figurehead like Leigh Alexander or whoever makes a declaration, then everyone else falls into line.
And they just, I mean, if you look at the Kotaku article, they're literally just saying, Hey, Lei Alexander says that gamers are over.
We might be witnessing the death of an identity.
Like, they and they even apologize to gamers in the article, saying, We don't mean all gamers, just the bad ones that Leigh Alexander doesn't like.
You know, just the ones who started that we don't like, which is which is most of the ways.
Exactly.
Um, exactly.
I think you're right about this.
I mean, in the early days, people were going on about collusion and about sort of coordination behind the scenes.
And I think it's actually worse than that.
It's such ideological uniformity that you don't even need to email your, as you've just said, you don't even need to email around Game Journal Pros and say, Hey, guys, why don't we all on Tuesday and Wednesday publish these terrible articles about gamers being dead?
Just let's really stick the knife in.
You don't need to.
All you've got to do is hit publish on one and you can watch it spread by wildfire.
That's the sort of laid-back behavior of an elite that knows it's unchallenged, that knows it has total authority to speak with impunity about a group that it hates and that it can treat with contempt with no consequence.
That's why I like Gamergate.
That's as a movement, that's why I'm writing the book.
That's why I admire you guys because you saw that and said, Actually, we've put out this for long enough.
You're not going to be able to do it in impunity anymore.
And yeah, as a movement, which I controversially believe has already won.
I know that's not an analysis that everybody shares, but I think Gamergate has achieved all of its objectives, if not more.
I think it's a terrific accomplishment.
And I think it was a brave thing to do.
And I also think it's something that serves wider society because you can now start to see it spreading into other fandoms.
I don't think, for example, there would be the same sort of attention and wind beneath the wings of sad puppies in the Hugo Awards, the sci-fi thing that's just happened if it weren't for the successes of Gamergate.
I think Gamergate has given fandoms in other, sorry, has been given the public in other fandoms a newly energized sense of purpose in fighting back against this sort of uniform, oppressive, authoritarian kind of establishment status quo.
I think it's been fantastic.
And I think it's one of the most important consumer movements of the last couple of decades.
Honestly, I don't want to just sit here and agree with everything you're saying, but I really do actually agree with that.
I really think that Gamergate has proven to people you can fight back against these people.
It doesn't matter what they say.
If you just fight them, eventually the things they say, the lies they tell, are revealed to be lies.
If you want to update Olimsky's rules for radicals, which is an idea I'm thinking about for the book after this, you can update it.
There's only really one rule you need to add, which is there is an ultimate super weapon on the internet against which nobody can fight.
And that is the truth.
And sooner or later, you might be bullied and derided and ridiculed in the mainstream press, but if your arguments are sound, there's really nothing.
There's really no answer to that.
There's no.
Exactly.
It's not impossible to fight a war on the basis of lies and on the basis of propaganda, on the basis of nonsense.
It went when people weren't connected, when the internet wasn't putting everybody in touch with each other instantly, when a claim could not be rebutted in seconds.
It was possible to fight a war on the basis of misinformation.
It isn't now.
And however unpopular they might make you, because they hold all of the cards as far as sort of establishment power goes and media reach goes, the ultimate super weapon is the truth.
And you can't fight it.
And Gamergate is on the side of the truth.
And what I think is even more important is that Gamergate is very clearly a grassroots movement.
And this is one of the things that really annoys me when they were trying to claim that it wasn't.
It's like, look at the numbers.
You know, it is tens of thousands of people who are all organizing and coordinating on social media, just like you do, except there are so many more.
And the only advantage you guys have is the fact that you occupy positions in the press.
Without that, they would be nothing, absolutely nothing.
That is the very source, the root and spring of their power.
The interesting thing, too, is that despite these platforms and despite all of the agreement they may get from their sort of associated circles of feminist demon in other worlds, they have vanishingly little influence on video games.
So the ESA Entertainment Software Association report that came out last week, beginning of this week, what are we Saturday, yeah, this week, said that just 3% of people consider magazines and websites the most important factor in their purchasing decisions.
Nobody cares what they think.
Nobody believes them when they say a game is good or bad anymore.
Nobody cares about their opinions, which is really interesting because if you look at the sort of all the support that floods out from people like Anita Sarkis and it has come from people who don't play video games and never will.
But their actual, their market power is vanishingly small compared to their power in the media.
And this is one of the reasons why if you really look at what the objectives of a consumer movement ought to be, they don't involve in that list of like, what are the victory conditions?
Nowhere in this list is people have to like us.
Nowhere in this list is avoid being called names by Kotaku.
Who cares?
It's not in the list of conditions for victory.
The conditions of victory involve things like removed from their pedestals, hateful, irresponsible people doing damage to our industry.
Lee Alexander is now in a greatly, vastly diminished world.
I can't tell you how much I enjoy that.
He is in a hub.
He's like a Greek tragedy.
Well, yes.
Ben Kuchira, similarly, has been effectively removed from the video game to be.
He's sort of been humiliatingly dumped on TV and comic books.
There's nothing humiliating about either fandom, but there's obviously not stuff he's really interested in.
Humiliating for him.
Now trying to sort of pump out these basic, I mean, the tragedy of him is he's not even as funny as, for example, the Mary Sue, which is a webcast that has awful, ghastly opinions, but they are quite funny.
I mean, they're quite witty.
I do quite enjoy, just as a writing style, that sort of sarcastic, dismissive, yeah, okay, guys, kind of tone that they go for.
I mean, obviously, they're awful people.
And, you know, obviously they should be put on the backs of carriages and dragged through the streets.
But I quite like, they're quite funny, which is something that Ben Kachira can't claim because he's too earnest and too serious.
And he's been effectively stripped of his responsibilities commissioning and writing about video games.
I mean, I don't know if that's not a victory.
I'm not sure what a victory is.
I mean, all these sites now have ethics policies.
If they don't adhere to them, they hear about it.
And one thing I can tell listeners, you know, that will just give them a bit more confidence, and I think is that I speak all the time to people that I can't share with you very senior positions in the video games industry.
So, not an industry I know very well.
Still, I've only been in it for whatever, six, eight months, however long it's been.
But I have been approached by a lot of very senior people in the industry as they get sort of comfortable enough to approach me and they're sure that I'm not going to share anything they say without permission or the rest of it.
Because it's understandable that given of course, you've got to be able to keep confidentiality if you want to.
I'm also, you know, I'm a sort of shit-talking insurgent, so I understand that there's a little bit of like, talk to the uniform server, but you know, I haven't yet, and as well, you know, and I don't intend to, as words spreads with that, I think people get more brave about saying, Look, can't go on the record, but you're actually wrong.
And I've, you know, I think pretty much every major game publisher, I've had a senior person contact me and say that now.
From all of the big games that you guys love and play all day, every day.
You know, they all say, look, we can't associate with that particular hashtag and we can't say anything in public, at least not for a long time, but you're not wrong.
And I, you know, I think this is, you know, there's a lot of silent applause from very senior people, what's been happening in Gamergate, which I think a lot of people suspected, but haven't necessarily had any evidence for.
But I can confirm that to you.
And yeah, I mean, if you look at the victories, if you look at what's actually happening, if you look at, you know, just the fact that Ben Cuchera has to be, you know, dragged, kicking, and screaming into admitting who he supports on Patreon on his author page on, you know, this is sort of like ritual humiliation for these people who have ritually humiliated you.
Absolutely.
Leia Alexander, when she had to blah, blah, okay, here's my ethics disclosure.
It's like, oh, I can feel the bitterness.
Jesus.
Yeah, I guess some people want a disclosure, blah, blah, blah.
I'll take it.
Sarcasm, no sarcasm, because she knows she's got to do it now.
And I don't know what this is a movement against sort of corruption and journalism and rejecting fake attention-seeking critiques of video games.
I don't know what else the victory looks like.
No, this is literally why I did a video the other day about it.
I was like, look, what exactly more are we looking for?
Because I think we've done it.
And people were kind of getting downhearted because things weren't happening all the time.
And it's like, yeah, but what do we expect to happen?
We've kind of like kicked the doors in, beaten up the people we wanted to beat up, and now they're all doing as we say.
So, you know, yeah, I mean, I think the thing is, like, I suffer from this as well.
I don't know whether this is a boy thing, but I kind of, you know, when you always want something new happening all the time.
Yeah, yeah, no.
I think that's not, I think it's new developments and happenings every day, or the movement's somehow dying.
And it isn't.
And I think that's what's happened with the Calgary Expo.
It's just like, just remind yourselves, like, you're all still there.
You all still believe the same things.
As and when you are called on by, you know, higher goals and missions, you all mobilize in the most terrifyingly efficient way I've ever seen.
And the system works.
And if they're not going to look, you know, if they're not going to watch themselves, then Gamergate and associated allies are watching them.
And there are now plenty of people who, you know, what's interesting is people who maybe in December wouldn't have been able to say this, but like Mark Kern will now come out and say, well, I looked, I thought about it, and here's what I came up with.
It opens the floodgates.
And I've been contacted just in the last three weeks by people who have previously tried to remain as neutral as possible.
Some entertainment people and some video game industry people saying we're just working out how we can't ever use that hashtag because of the media shit.
We agree with all of this.
We're happy about all the things that have been achieved, and we're just working out how we can come out and agree, like Mark Kern did when he said when he said very diplomatically that the press has a responsibility, excuse me, a responsibility for making the video games industry a healthy and happy, welcoming place to be, or whatever the wording he was used.
I mean, the subtext of that was: Polygon and Kotako have been hateful and divisive, stop it.
And they got the message.
They knew.
And I think more and more people all the time are going to start about that.
I mean, in a way, I think this stream should be a sort of ticker tape victory parade for Gamergate, because frankly, I think you guys have won.
And now we get into the sort of business of, like I say, the sort of watchdog era of Gamergate, where you remind people that there is a cost attached to being illiberal and to censoring peaceful, valid, intellectually coherent, unobjectionable points of view.
Absolutely.
And like with the Sand Puppies thing, I know that Sam Puppies was going three years ago or so, and it started then, but I really think the point that Gamergate has given it sort of a much needed visibility push because it's like Gamergate has become an ideal in the minds of the social justice warriors.
You know, they were convinced that Sam Puppies was Gamergate's doing.
And I have no idea what this is about.
You know, I would have thought that someone would inform me if it was something to do with Gamergate.
So, you know, I had no idea, but to them, it looks so similar that they're, well, I must be Gamergate, you know.
They can't tell the difference, so they just assume Gamergate is responsible for everything.
Gamergate has become this sort of specter, like a boogeyman, you know, that's become Hannibal at the gate.
Well, you know, sort of like, you know, Amanda Marcotte and Anisha Keith sort of check under the bed for before they can go to sleep.
I think it's great because it gives it, you know, perhaps more power than it really does have in real life.
Who knows?
But the thing is, it's become objecting to Gamergate has become a signal of moral prestige and of moral uprightness, of being an upstanding member of the liberal establishment, you know, the liberal establishment, the press and the bloggers, and certain sorts of, you know, certain think tanks and general authoritarian consensus that, you know, we should ban things that upset people.
You know, that sort of student, you know, of the sorts of people who picket Christina offsummer's talks.
Yeah, absolutely.
I know exactly the sort of people you're talking about.
No, I know you do, yeah.
The Safe Space Brigade, it's become a way to advertise your own moral virtue to criticise or to or to mock Gamergate.
And in that respect, it's sort of become part of the cultural fabric of political voice in America and in Europe.
You know, it's a way that people, it's a little bit like if you buy a political biography, there's some evidence to suggest that the sorts of people who buy a Sarah Palin autobiography or a Bill O'Reilly book or an Ann Courter book or any of their equivalents on the left, there's some evidence to suggest those sort of big hardback books that are very popular in America and sort of dominate the New York Times.
Very few people read much of what's in there or past the first chapter or whatever.
People buy them to have them.
They buy them to put them on the coffee table.
And it's a sort of real-world equivalent of tweeting hashtags.
It's just there to indicate to others what sort of a person you are and to suggest to them the sorts of opinions you may have about things and the cluster to which you belong.
It's like clothing, you know, it's social signaling.
And the fact that Gamergate has so successfully and so powerfully established itself in that system of social signaling that it's now invoked, even when it's not relevant or responsible, I think is itself another terrific victory because so long as they're hating some abstract hashtag, people who support the principles that stand behind that can get on with their job of holding people to account.
So long may it continue, in fact.
It's a good thing for people to be hung up on this, on the evils of this hashtag, because what's happening is a sort of large coalition of people sympathetic to the ideals and philosophies behind Gamergate, and a bunch of other people who see it going on other fandoms, and a bunch of other people who are there, you know, who already believed this beforehand.
And all of these people now in this vast loose coalition direct their energies to injustices and offenses as they see them, you know, one by one, in a, you know, in an enormously effective way.
And in a sense, it's quite good that the press is sort of lingering on Gamergate because it distracts them from what's really happening.
Well, they can't.
So I'm getting a bit of coming back from your mic.
Oh, are you?
Yeah, have you changed the place on?
No, I didn't, but I can put some things on.
If you give me a second, yeah, not a problem.
Carry on, then I'll be back.
I can't really.
I can't really, because I'm telling myself.
It strikes me, it strikes me.
Sorry for this interruption in your scheduled programming, ladies and gentlemen.
How does this work?
Yes, there we go.
I'm trying to have a Skype call these days.
It's unbearable.
Indeed.
Right.
How's that?
Okay, that's much better.
I don't know what happened there.
Everything.
I didn't change any settings on my head.
No, okay.
Well, we'll get through it.
Now I have cans on my head.
Yes, it's very interesting that this Calgary thing, I read the Kotaku article because I'm a sucker for punishment.
You are.
I'm always surprised you're not Catholic.
I've never been religious.
And it's interesting how almost everyone in Kotaku who is either implicated in some sort of ethical violations or has been generally involved with Gamergate in some way has commented on this thing.
And I mean, there's some really interesting ones.
There's one from Jason Schreier that I thought was just very, very telling.
He's like, if Gamergate were a movement that solely said, hey, you guys didn't disclose this, this, and this, this, called out journalists and they did shitty things, we'd be living in a different world entirely.
The actual, more tangible Gamergate is in actuality an amalgamation of hardcore libertarian and conservative voices who want to fight progressive voices in whatever way possible.
Gamers who are afraid that feminist and progressive criticism will lead to censorship in games and game culture.
And to some extent, lonely people who use the hashtag MS Boards to find belonging for a wider audience.
And I can't.
Isn't it interesting that they think that's a criticism?
Isn't it interesting that they think that there's something wrong with any of those things?
That's my point.
I'm really finding myself taking exception to any of this.
I mean, for a start, yes, all of these people are interested in games journalism.
They're all concerned about corruption within the industry.
That is the thread that binds them all together.
Otherwise, they'd have nothing to talk about.
I mean, maybe they would, but these are all people, multifaceted people.
That's the thing.
They have to reduce people to one-dimensional sentences.
Oh, this is a conservative libertarian who wants to fight progressives.
This is a person who has no friends.
But isn't it interesting?
I find it fascinating.
Well, they are.
And everybody, I think, is in movements for different reasons and has slightly different objectives.
And when enough people coalesce together with similar enough views, then sometimes it gets a name.
But isn't it fascinating that not only do we see that sort of bullying tendency creep out yet again in that third point?
You know, oh, these are just lonely people.
Because, of course, who wants to be associated with lonely people?
You know, who wants to stick up for the lonely guy?
Isn't it interesting how, after everything, they still can't help themselves and they still let this sort of bullying mean girls' tendency creep out even now.
Even now.
Oh, they can't help themselves.
They just cannot help themselves.
And in addition, in their reductions down to the three types of persons involved in Gamergay, I can't find, I can't for the life of me work out what's objectionable about any of them.
No, not at all.
I mean, this is well, the eternal thing.
I mean, I can't, it's like the Liberal Democrat woman who on Twitter was excessively, that's the one, kill all men.
And just, I mean, what kind of mindset do you have to be in?
Well, is the answer to that one, which I didn't realize to begin with.
But I think what she believes because she's a lesbian, she has protected status to say anything she wants about men, not because being hateful is okay, but because she can be a misendrist, but her victimhood and minority status as a lesbian elevates her above criticism.
Unfortunately, she's wrong.
Yeah, no, I think they also think that being minorities means that they have no power.
And they think that men, because David Cameron is prime minister, I in some way have some sort of power as just some individual sat in my home or something like that.
And I think they definitely justify it in that way.
I'm a bit more skeptical about that.
I don't, I mean, I know that they say that minorities have no power, but I think these people are well aware that they have all the power.
I think they know that it's easy to bully straight white men.
I think they know it's easy to play identity politics.
They may speak the language of victimhood, but I don't think they consider themselves victims.
Well, now, this is actually this.
I disagree, right?
I disagree because of a few reasons.
The first one is I'm actually at the point now where I'm kind of just going to start believing people when they tell me what their motivations are, because I'm really kind of tired of having my motivations for things questioned, especially when I'm giving my honest motivation.
And I think that they can bring themselves to believe it.
I'm just going to get an article up by Mattie Bryce saying I was reading this the other day and basically the article is about trying to figure out who is actually a victim.
Because I think in their minds, being a victim is an important thing.
Obviously, if you're not a victim, then you don't have power.
And I agree that I think they think that it's the apex goal.
They definitely, I mean, there are definitely more cynical actors like Randy Harper, who are who just see money changing hands and Brianna Wu probably and think, well, I wanted to get on that train.
But I also think that there are people who are probably deeply entrenched in the ideology, who genuinely believe that victimhood is something bad, but desirable.
Yeah, I'm familiar with this, like, how to describe it.
It's just something I've been kicking around in my head the past few days, actually.
I can understand why you may have this view, being sick of people second-guessing your motives, but I think that the flaw in your model is that there are people living in good faith and people acting in bad faith.
And I think if you accept, as I do, that most of the people on the other side are acting in bad faith, it's easier to.
I know that's very self-serving and very convenient, but you know, I think there are demonstrably more bad actors acting in bad faith on the side of authoritarian, sort of oppressive, censorious activists.
I think that their creed requires it.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with being tired of having people second guess your motives, but I can't accept that the vast majority don't believe exactly what they're up to.
I think they leverage it as a weapon.
I don't think any of them has experienced any discrimination whatsoever at any point in their lives.
I don't think any of them knows what hardship or victimization is, but I think they use it as a political tool to get what they want.
And I think that that is the case up and down the food chain, whether it's some random trans activist on Twitter bullying a drag queen.
Absurdly.
See, now the flaw I think in your thesis is that that requires a level of self-awareness that I don't think many of you have.
No, I don't think you're being mean.
No, I don't think that's it.
You're saying they're all stupid.
I don't think they are stupid.
I think they're evil.
I don't think they're stupid.
I think that they are narcissistic.
And so honestly, I thought the same as you.
I honestly thought that they were evil.
I mean, they look evil.
I think, and I mean, I'm absolutely like you said.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's probably.
Yeah, it is.
It absolutely is.
And there are definitely certain people who are.
I mean, if you've probably never played Dungeons and Dragons, but I fucking have because I'm a giant nerd.
And in Dungeons and Dragons, you've got like an alignment scale.
And if I were to place people on the alignment scale, you'd get like you'd get people like Leigh Alexander who are just evil.
They are actually evil.
And, you know, they're just selfish, manipulative.
They are just egotistical.
Yeah, but people say that stuff about me.
It's just that people like me because I'm on the right side of the battle.
I don't have a problem with any of her methods.
I just don't like the fact that she's, I mean, she's just wrong about everything.
I don't mind bitchy, manipulative, opportunistic bastards, as long as they're on the right side of the battle.
As long as they're fighting on my side, and they're, you know, they're waging, as long as they're waging virtuous war, I don't care how bad and sleevy people are, really.
I mean, you know, if you're if you're waging a war against journalistic, if you're waging a war and you're on the sort of beleaguered side of journalists being accused of being unethical, then you have to be ethical to win the argument.
And if they're not, that's just bad tactics.
That's bad strategy.
They just lose, they're, you know, they're losing on the basic fundamental principles of what the war is about.
But I don't know, I don't intrinsically have a problem with her methods.
I just think she's a deeply unpleasant person fighting in the wrong direction.
Well, I mean, that's, I guess, where we disagree.
I think inappropriate.
And, you know, I see some criticizing you in the future.
All I'm saying is, I'm a bastard, but I'm your bastard, you know?
So you give me a pass.
Well, kind of.
I haven't really seen you do anything that I object to, to be honest.
You know, I mean, absolutely politicking, but that's just politics.
No, I think obviously I'm mostly joking.
I know, I know.
Self-deprecations is something I'm working on.
No, I'm mostly kidding.
Obviously, I don't think I behave in the sort of sociopathic and miserable and awful ways that I think Ben Kacher and Lee Alexander have demonstrated over the last few years.
No, but I was being a bit facetious and silly.
We'll come back to biting you in the ass, you know.
Here's hoping.
Promises, promises.
Just finish what I was saying.
I agree that the end result is and the I agree that what they do is, as you say, they are evil, they are manipulative, and I think they know that they are manipulating, but I don't know how much of that they actually articulate in their own heads, you know, how conscious they are of that.
I mean, the results are exactly that, but I don't think they think that's what they're doing, or at least some of them.
I mean, like, so with Randy Harper, for example, we've got like from 2010 or something, a video of her saying, I'm not oppressed at all.
What are you talking about?
Everything's great being a woman because I'm a woman.
And then suddenly, oh my God, she's oppressed and Patreon.
It's interesting if you've read any of the stuff that purports to be from her previous colleagues.
I suppose you've maybe encountered something.
I actually haven't.
Only that video.
Right.
Well, she's not really that much.
I don't really.
No, but she's quite good fun.
She is.
So look, sometimes you've just got to be honest.
You know, it's nice seeing bad guys fail.
You know, and it's nice seeing odious people who deserve to have the same sorts of unpleasantness they visit on everyone else, visited on them.
It's sometimes nice to see them get a kick in the teeth.
And I'm not going to apologise for taking pleasure in that, which is sort of what I meant earlier when I said I'm a bastard, but you're bastards.
You know, I'm just never going to feel sorry for bad people failing.
No, no, I wouldn't expect that.
My human compassion line is much higher than that.
Maybe, I don't know, I'm sorry.
But anyway, no, well, maybe you're right, maybe you're wrong.
I don't know.
I think in Randy Harper's case, we all know what the drill is.
But yes.
I mean, there are definitely ones who are exactly as you say.
They are just sociopathic manipulators.
But I think that they are fueled by those people who are genuinely considering themselves victims and buy into the ideology.
I mean, people are very cynical about Jonathan McIntosh, but I'll tell you, man, I read through all of his blogs from 2001 when he claims to have seen the World Trade Center attack, 9-11.
And I think he has died in the wool ideologue.
I don't think there is any cynicism in him.
Yeah, you might be right.
You might be right.
And for a lot of these people, you know, isn't his dad like an arms dealer or something?
Oh, no, no, that's Lifshitz, is that?
Oh, Lifshitz.
Yeah, I mean, all these people have.
He's a cynical motherfucker.
Yeah, but all of these people have wealthy families.
Rich Republican dads.
And I think that's the problem.
I think that's the problem for most of them.
It's the rich Republican dads that are creating all of these lunatic children who don't grow out of it after they graduate.
For some reason, they've still got their student union politics.
And some of them are approaching 50.
They're still clinging on to these sort of sophomoric student union debating tactics and sort of lame, tired, discredited 70s ideology and ridiculous, ridiculous personalities and dress sense and all the rest of it.
And it's like they never graduated.
They got stuck at age 20.
And in a way, I sort of envy them because I'd like to have been stuck at age 20.
It would have been lovely, yeah.
Oh, I wasn't, but I wasn't as ridiculous as this.
You know, I was ridiculous, but I wasn't this ridiculous.
Do you know what gets me with them, right?
It's the bragging on Twitter.
I just can't understand it.
Branna Wu is standing there having a photo shoot in front of her brand new motorcycle.
Zoe Quinn and Alex Lifshitz are taking selfies outside of Congress.
Anita Sarkeesian is tweeting articles about how she's one of the most influential people in the world, according to Time magazine.
It's like, yeah, you can't really persuade me that you're a victim.
This is our galaxy of victims who need protection against mean tweets on the internet.
Exactly.
It's just like, you seem rather privileged.
No, I mean, you look privileged.
I'm just saying because my parents come from a council estate in Wood and Bassett, you know, and my dad come from Yoga.
You know, we're not a rich family.
So I'm looking at you guys thinking, yeah, you look kind of well off, you know.
Yeah.
Well, this is the problem with the middle classes.
This is, you know, it's a middle class problem, sort of hand-wringing social justice things.
A uniquely middle-class phenomenon.
I don't see it in the upper or the working classes at all.
It's a uniquely middle-class phenomenon.
Middle classes are responsible for everything that's wrong in society.
But no, it's just a sport brat thing, you know.
Yeah, no, no.
The thing is, every year, more of these students are being brainwashed in universities and pumped out into the wider world.
And I don't think it's going to stop.
Well, it's interesting.
can you see so christina hoff summers this week um she's been on a bit of a lecture tour um and she's had posters put up outside of her talks things like uh you know this is a triggering environment um if you need to retreat to a safe space because this woman yeah well these are things And you know what's really hilarious?
She's a little old woman.
She's a little old woman.
She is a lovely.
I mean, I hope she doesn't find this disrespectful.
She's a lovely old lady.
And she's, you know, she's a feminist.
She's a registered Democrat.
She's a scholar at a think tank.
And these people think they need protection from her.
You know, I don't know.
Okay.
So you know what was brilliant?
What did you say to that?
You know what the best thing was?
I can't make that more ludicrous.
Let me tell you what the best thing was.
Do you know where the safe space was in the lecture?
I hope I'm reading the tweet right.
Like the safe space in the lecture hall wasn't a different place.
It was just the back robe.
Shit, it's on me.
I hope I read the tweet right.
I hope I read the tweet right.
But it was like, if you don't agree and you'll be traumatized by the fact that this woman, you know, this lovely scholar from some think tank in Washington, if you disagree with her and that's causing you so much trauma that you need a safe space, you can move to the back row of the lecture theaters.
Jesus Christ.
You can't parody that.
That's the thing.
You can't parody that.
It's like jazz hands.
You can't parody that.
I did try.
I did try.
And I think I did the best that you know that could be expected.
But, you know, I do a little satire from time to time.
I did the best that I could, but really, nothing about that video was as funny as the tweet in the first place saying, can we use jazz hands?
Because applause is going to trigger people's anxiety.
Nothing in that video was as funny.
I just really want people to.
I'm looking forward to seeing an actual photograph of an entire audience of feminists giving the feminist jazz hands as a show of appreciation.
It's got to happen, isn't it?
It must be somewhere.
It must be somewhere.
Someone at university, please go down to one.
I know it's going to suck, but I'm going to all of you.
I need you to take one for the team.
You guys who are listening, I'm appealing directly to you.
I'm going to look in the camera like politicians do in the debates.
I'm appealing to you.
We need this from you.
If you're near a university, particularly an old polytechnic, because they seem to have all any course that ends in studies, if you have a high proportion of those in your university, I need you to go to the feminist society and I need you to camp out and wait for them to express approval at something.
And I need, we need the photo of the feminist jazz hands because I think it will basically make my life.
Yeah, I think you may well break the internet with it.
Come on, I can foresee like an amazing vine of just you know, some speaker, uh, speaker drawing to a rhetorical climax, you know, using employed every method of sort of um Greek rhetorical technique, and he's coming to the crescendo of his speech.
And he finally says, and that's why, ladies and gentlemen, I believe such and such.
Thank you, and then a sort of cut to the audience, which is honestly, I we have to see this, we have to see this.
I can't believe this is real life.
I can't believe this is actually something that's happened.
My favorite meme that I've picked up is this real life.
I love it.
I love it.
It's my favorite one.
I just, I remember when I was at university, and it was like, you know, you'd go in and do work and it would just be normal.
Everything was normal.
It was like being somewhere else in the world.
It was just normal.
And you know, 20 years ago now.
Yeah.
You know, I did that social justice or a dictionary, like a lexicon of social justice a while ago.
And what's it trigger warnings?
I think I defined it as how students get how students avoid homework these days.
And it's like, psychic bitch, I know you ain't triggered by this.
You just want to go out and smoke weed and like have a party and you don't want to do your homework.
So you're going to claim you're triggered by the text.
I was a student.
I know how this shit works.
But for some reason, the press is taking it seriously.
And it just amazing.
It's ridiculous.
It's, I just, and it's encouraged.
It's fucking encouraged.
And I mean, I saw an article about a law professor who was having trouble teaching his law class because obviously it would include laws on rape and just the mention of the word rape was triggering students.
And it's just like, I mean, I just, I can't believe it's fucking true.
Oh my God, it's ridiculous.
It's just Russians must just be like, yes, yes, devour yourself.
Imagine Putin sitting in the Kremlin, you know, the intellectual cream of the West.
You know, it's a bit like, it's a bit like sort of Silicon Valley, right?
You know, the finest engineering minds of a generation are working out how to make people click on ads on Twitter and Facebook rather than giving us hoverboards or getting us to space or any of the other things we would do.
Jetpacks.
Jetpacks is the one I always wanted.
You know, sort of speed up the commute home.
You know, the greatest minds of our generation are fixated on making people click on ads and getting people trapped into Facebook.
And it just makes you think, you know, somebody like Putin or whoever, you know, Russia or China or whatever.
City of sort of the intellectual cream of the West.
The highest, most brilliant, most privileged sort of minds of tomorrow in Harvard and Oxford spend their free time writing about safe spaces and trigger warnings on essential canonical works of literature.
It is mind-blowing.
I just can't imagine, I mean, imagine like Vladimir Putin.
He's invited to come and visit Britain for whatever diplomatic reasons.
It's like, why don't you go to Cambridge, Cambridge University, give a speech, you know, try and just reach out to the best minds of the next generation.
And before he has the speech, he has to be warned not to use certain words because the students you can see him sort of defending the invasion of Crimea and the Ukraine, which is fine, provided you're not transphobic.
Exactly.
Don't mention homosexuals.
And just.
Let's just be not looking.
So why would you be saying this to me?
He probably doesn't know the vast pyramid of crap that led up to this point that he stood on.
And so he's just like, I have no reaction to this.
Justify sort of military aggression and human rights would be kind of like the feminists who just are totally silent on the subject of the Middle East, you know?
Oh, God.
Because they aren't sure where in the pyramid.
I mean, we're skipping from subject to subject in this stream, but I think we're sort of in general talking about comical hypocrisy.
And I think it's because I don't think it's cruelty or sociopathy.
I think it's just anxiety and confusion because my impression is they don't know where in the oppression Olympics in the scale of victimhood you put Muslims versus women.
I just don't think they're sure.
And so they're not really sure.
That's a very interesting thing.
I don't think they're sure which way around it goes.
So they just are sort of paralyzed into indecision.
If they could make up their minds, they'd either go for the Islamists or, as perhaps is more likely given the crazy state of modern feminism, they'd go after the women for being, they'd find some way to say that the woman in the booker is in the wrong.
Actually, that's an interesting thing.
They've got something called the Kiriarchy now, where they consider...
See, I'm an expert on feminism.
I can tell you.
I know you are an expert on feminism.
Tell me about the Kyriarchy.
Okay, the Kyriarchy is an interlocking series of oppressions, right?
And so you've got patriarchy, which is sexist oppression.
It's oppression of women by men.
And then you've got white supremacy, which is oppression of people of color by white people.
Then you've got cissexism, which is oppression of non-binary people by cisgendered people.
You've got heteronormativity, which is oppression of non-heterosexual people.
And all of these things interlace.
So if someone is a gay, transsexual black woman, they are oppressed by everything.
They're absolutely oppressed by everything.
But cisgender straight white men.
Yeah, yeah.
This is basically a system to ensure that no matter who you are, you can feel aggrieved about something.
Exactly.
and in their minds, this, this system was designed specifically to justify how someone can be privileged and oppressed at the same time, because a feminist is not, in other words, every middle class feminist.
Yeah.
exactly you know they need a way to be oppressed despite all their privileges which are manifest you Everyone can learn their languages.
So they need to figure out an intellectual loophole because otherwise, they're fucked.
I love ceilings, by the way.
You know about ceilings.
I love finding out about all the different kinds of ceiling.
I know about the glass ceiling.
There's a glass ceiling.
There's the bamboo ceiling.
Do you know about the bamboo ceiling?
I don't know.
The bamboo ceiling is Asians being oppressed, particularly Asian women who just racist.
Who don't get high.
It's called the bamboo ceiling.
Actually, it's interesting because a glass ceiling would be much easier to break through than a bamboo ceiling.
I mean, I don't know if you've ever seen a sheet of glass versus like a bamboo wall at a Chinese restaurant.
I wouldn't want to punch through the bamboo, you know?
So I don't know if there's any coding going on in there.
Do you know what the cotton ceiling is?
The what ceiling, sorry?
The cotton ceiling.
Oh, it's got to be a black one.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
The cotton ceiling.
Oh, sorry, I assumed they were being racist.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
I don't actually know what the no, I'm just becoming a connoisseur of ceilings, really, from about four days ago.
So I've been googling them, but I haven't come across that one.
What's the concept?
So it is transphobic not to be sexually attracted to a transgender person and not to sleep with them because they're not a cisgendered woman and that they're only a new woman.
If you don't sleep with them, they think it's because they're not a real woman or you don't think they're a real woman, and that's transphobic.
And it's called the cotton ceiling because it's really grotesque.
So transgender people can't get into the pants of the people they want to sleep with.
I mean, it's an interesting image.
I think that makes a lot of people transphobic, doesn't it?
People will, I think it makes everybody transphobic.
It's the ultimate, it's the ultimate thing, really, because it enables you to say you're privileged by everyone.
The theory is that it's fine to have Laverne Cox on the cover of Time magazine and to celebrate the contributions of transgender people and to present it as a civil rights struggle.
And I think that's an issue that was outside the scope of the current stream.
But if you don't actually also want to have sex with them, you're transphobic.
And that's the cotton ceiling.
Because there are so many people I don't want to have sex with.
Cotton.
No, I know.
But if you don't want to have sex with a transgender woman, you are transphobic and you are perpetuating the cotton ceiling.
Well, I am an awful, awful person.
I can't believe that all this time I've been transphobic because I didn't want to have sex with someone who was born a man.
Yeah, I mean, I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing that this extends to sort of pre-op, ladies and gentlemen, as well.
So, but you're sort of it's transphobic if you don't want to.
So, I mean, I've seen it on one blog anyway.
So, if you know, whether or not we've experienced transition yet, you know, the cotton ceiling is a real thing we need to address.
Yeah.
I've seen plenty of stuff.
I mean, I've seen them say not all women have vaginas and not all men have penises.
This is a new thing, isn't it?
So, you can't sorry.
Some women have penises and some men have vaginas.
It's like, no, I'm sorry.
I know that that's how you want it to work, but I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way.
It's interesting that you know that some people disagree with women at all.
They don't like women.
They want to use people with vaginas.
Jesus.
Yeah, well, this is what I always say about sort of wandering way off topic, but this is why some people say that feminism has accelerated the objectification of women.
You know, when you make women inaccessible and men don't want to approach them, and men are terrified about going anywhere near them.
And so, so eventually, a man's interactions with women become simply about sex.
And so they either go to prostitution or they just see women as something to bang because they don't want to get involved in all that crazy.
And this similarly, you get so this feminist language, this sort of very bodily graphic feminist language is so objectifying.
I mean, it's just at a simple, obvious level.
You know, we don't call them women anymore.
We call them people with vaginas.
It's insane, isn't it?
I just, again, like, everything they fucking do is projection.
Everything they say is projection.
You want to objectify women?
Excuse me while I objectify a woman.
You know, just these fucking people.
Honestly, I mean, if you ever get time, go on social justice wiki.
Oh, no, I like it there.
I like it there.
I think I've been on that one.
Yeah.
No, it's great.
I'm going to do a video on it at some point because it's just one of those things where, I mean, they start from a ludicrous premise and build on it.
I also wonder whether it's a way sometimes of recasting, for example, racism as race positivity.
I mean, for example, I've, before I what returns.
I was wondering whether it's a way of enabling you to be racist and pretending you're not, pretending you're, I don't know.
If I'd said like 20 years ago that I thought I was trans black, that I thought that I should have been, that I should have been born black because like I love Usher and like, you know, and whatever.
I'm not going to continue that because I'll get myself into trouble.
But, you know, all of these things, like Justin Bieber, you know, I should have been born black.
And I would like to go to the NHS for transition surgery to make me black because I am trans black.
If I'd said that 20 years ago, I mean, I would never have written again.
My career would be over.
But these days, people aren't quite sure.
Well, it's a new that's coming in, isn't it?
You know, they're not quite sure.
I mean, if, and I suppose the argument would be, I wrote about this a little while ago, the argument would be if you can announce that you are in fact a different sex, why can't you announce you're a different race?
Why can't you announce that you're a different species?
Why can't you renounce your anything?
And that's sort of the...
But it becomes self-defeating.
This is the remote of the joke that got Boing Boing into trouble yesterday.
You may have just, they tweeted a picture of a cat and said something like, actually, I identify as a Labrador or something like that.
You know, this cute little cat who actually identifies as a Labrador.
Sorry, I retweeted it.
Right.
And of course, they got hounded, you know, live by the sword, die by the sword.
They got hounded by all of their sort of right-on followers for being transphobic.
And all they were really, the way that joke functions, what it's doing is questioning the assumptions behind being able to announce your identity and force other people against the evidence of their senses and medical science to treat you as though it were true.
And it's really interesting how that's starting to happen now with race.
And I've begun to notice people.
Godfrey Elwick, the great satirist who punked the BBC this week, he punked the BBC this week.
He went on a show and said that Star Wars was deeply problematic, it reeked of misogyny.
The lead character, Dark Raider, or whatever it is, was a black guy who listened to rap music and ate watermelons and all this kind of, I mean, you know, amazing.
He did actually see the Waterman line on BBC, but he said it, they put it on Twitter.
But the reason it's so funny is that we're all starting to see this stuff pop up now.
And I wonder how long it will be.
I wonder how long it will be before somebody, before the first person says, I want race transition surgery and I want the state to pay for it.
It seems to me a logical endpoint of identity politics.
If everything is wrapped up in identity and the only way you can change your standing in a discussion isn't through your ideas.
It's not through what you believe or what you've read or your ability to reason.
It's simply about who you are.
Then logically, if people want to get the advantage in the public square, if people want to increase their intellectual standing, if people want to have the right to speak more and speak more loudly, then they will start changing things about their identity because you can't do it with reason.
You can't do it with logic.
You can't do it with anything people actually change about themselves.
And they don't see the irony of discriminating against people on the basis of sex and skin colour, of course.
But if you, if you, yeah, I mean, that's the logical endpoint, isn't it?
If I'm not oppressed enough, I'll make myself more oppressed.
I want race transition surgery on the NHS.
It's going to happen.
I just wonder how long.
Two, 10, 20 years.
Honestly, I don't think there is necessarily a bottom to this anymore.
Long ago, I decided that I wasn't even going to try and predict where this ends because I have no fucking idea what they're going to come out with tomorrow.
You know, I mean, the Boyn Boyn thing, it's a mirror.
That was the problem.
Like, it was exactly as you said.
You can't just say, oh, you know, despite all appearances, this cat is actually a dog, and now you're going to have to treat this cat as a dog.
It's ridiculous, and that's what's funny.
Exactly.
And it's ridiculous, and that's what's funny about it.
And suddenly, that's what they were staring in the face was their own ridiculousness.
And so obviously, it had to come down.
Boying boy can't apologize.
Yeah, and it's particularly humiliating because I think it's a, I think that I don't know whoever posted that is now in a position where it was a funny joke.
That's why we posted it.
But my God, look what we've created.
Look at the monster we've created.
And that's what I meant by live by the sword and die by the sword.
And it's the rejection of that sort of humorlessness and policing of humor and speech and idea that is at the heart of Gamergate.
It's at the heart of this thing that everyone's been fighting for eight months or whatever.
And it's precisely that.
It's the sort of people who love for Brits, Frankie Boyle, for Americans, Joan Rivers.
The sort of people who want to be scandalized because they understand that humor and being challenged is part of what makes us better and makes us greater, enables us to flourish, enables us to examine our prejudices and in some cases rethink how we live and what we believe about things versus the people who do not want to be under any circumstances challenged about anything, who simply want to live in a bubble and live in a safe space, live in a world in which no one is ever going to test their prejudices.
And it is simply a set of prejudices that they don't want challenged.
They don't want some well-imagined intellectual architecture that they have formed over decades to be challenged.
They just don't want their own set of prejudices to be challenged.
And this is why I think the best, most useful, most meaningful distinction between people these days is not between left and right.
I mean, most Gamergaters, for example, instinctively think of themselves as left-wing.
They're probably right because they're very socially liberal sorts of people.
I think by far, and I'm sure you're going to agree with me on this, by far the most interesting and meaningful distinction between people is between authoritarians and libertarians.
It's between people who believe that they should be left in freedom to live their lives as they please and the people who, by and large, enjoy humor, enjoy being challenged, enjoy learning new things, experiencing new things, and having their preconceptions and prejudices tested, versus the people who cannot bear to be criticized or ridiculed or challenged.
What I would like to see us do, I think, is rather than being quite so furious all the time with them, is to treat them with, as Gamergate has done, and there's another reason I love this movement so much, is treat them with the ridicule and contempt they deserve because that's the thing that annoys them more than anything else.
It's, you know, the sort of mean screenshots and photoshops and jokes and little sort of little perpetual ridicules that spin out into internet memes.
It is so clever psychologically and so brilliant the way that functions in sort of humiliating people who frankly deserve to be humiliated.
It's a brilliant thing.
And only really Gamergate can I think it's only in Gamergate that I can think of a movement that has used ridicule and used humor to get through their own pain, but also to shed light on, to illustrate, to illuminate the hypocrisies and absurdities of the other side.
I think it's massively effective.
And it's so effective and so hurtful and so humiliating and so brilliant a strategy that there was only one possible response to it, which is, you know, to cry bigot, which is what they did.
But at that point, and this is what Gamergate supporters always forget, by that point, the battle's already been won.
If they have to do that to you in the press, you've already won.
Yeah, well, that's it, it just smacks of desperation.
And one of the things, I mean, just I had a point about the identity politics was just I just wanted to get out.
It's like, look, if you can literally turn around and say, well, I'm a black woman or I'm a white man or whatever, why don't you just all become white men and then you're not oppressed at all?
Because being oppressed is outrageous.
You know, that's why, you know, you could just say, no, I'm a white man and everyone, oh, God, I've got to treat them as a white man.
And there's something, you know, I can't even imagine the kind of mindset that thinks, you know what?
I could listen to criticism.
I could hear what people have to say.
I could honestly do some reflecting and okay, yeah, maybe I'm not perfect.
Maybe I could change a few things.
Or I could spend my life getting together with other people who can't bear to do any kind of introspection and desperately trying to change the entire world instead of changing myself.
I mean, yes.
I mean, that's that's I can't understand why you wouldn't just be like, you know what, I'll just take it.
I'll just take the joke.
Yeah, I know.
I kind of look, I kind of look silly.
You know, and you laugh it off.
The next day, you feel fine.
But no, it's a life fucking work for these people, isn't it?
Yeah, no, it is.
It's extraordinary the way in which we're at this sort of, I don't know, I don't want to get too crazy blogosphere about it, but in this sort of weird, in this weird, yeah, we can, we can push the envelope on this one.
In this weird bit of this weird stage in our culture and our society and history where people can create entire careers from posing as victims, from fighting for these sort of perceived grievances and injustices.
So effectively, fundamentally useless is everybody economically now that people can, you know, people can effectively check out of useful professions and make entire careers for themselves.
It's sort of a weird function of late capitalism, isn't it?
Where, you know, everything is everything is connected to the point where there are subsidies available for anything and for everything.
And you can make a career for yourself out of almost anything.
And we have this extraordinary spectacle of people dropping out.
I mean, some of these women, for example, claim that they were developers.
I don't know how effective developers ever really were.
But yeah, sort of Randy and whatever.
But they've effectively checked out of that apparently constructive profession to become professional victims.
And it's extraordinary that we're at a point where that's a feasible and profitable career choice.
Well, no, that's an interesting thing because it's absolutely a profitable career choice.
But the thing is, it's not that profitable.
I mean, $3,000 to $4,000 a month.
I mean, that's probably quite a lot for Zoe Quinn or, you know, Brenna Wu or Randy Harper.
But I mean, a lot of people wouldn't be happy with that wage.
You know, that's not a great wage.
No, but you've got to understand, these are people with no marketable skills.
These are people who instead of going into a profession where they would have to learn something and to learn a discipline, learn a craft, learn a trade, whether 200 years ago it would have been being a carpenter or a chicken farmer or whatever.
These days it might be something like a designer or a developer or whatever, rather than do the hard work of learning that trade, they've decided to check out into a profession in which all you really need to do is talk.
Now, you may say that's a bit rich coming from somebody who shitposts for a living.
And I have a degree of sympathy.
But I too, you know, It's what I do for a living, you know.
But isn't it interesting that we can get away with it?
No, I'm kidding.
But the thing about it is that if you look at who's giving the money, it's just white men.
It's all straight white men.
And it's just like I'm amazed that they have managed to find such an efficient method of milking all of these guys for money each month.
I believe, I still believe, that white guilt is at the root of all of these problems.
And it's, as I say, it's just a sort of societal cultural problem.
It's given, made the space for these awful, awful campaigners and authoritarians and whatever.
The sort of this strand of guilt about success and some sort of regret about achievement.
And it's interesting, it's very interesting to me that America and the UK seem to be in lockstep with the sort of authoritarian social justice movement.
But it's so much more, it's grown so much more rapidly and it's taken root so much more strongly in Britain, where I think the UK, because I think the UK has this, it's part of the national character, the sort of deference, the feeling as though patriotism is a little bit naff, the unwillingness to talk about our success and our triumphs, and even inability in some cases to define what even Britishness means.
Although I think we all know.
And it's really weird and interesting how, I mean, I suppose it's logical that this sort of white guilt is such a huge part of British national life.
And it's becoming a bigger part of American national life.
But I think, given that country's affection for success and tolerance of failure and the whole American dream, I think it's more difficult to sell in the States.
And we sometimes forget that I think ordinary people in America don't know much of what's happening on Jezebel and Vox.
The reason people like us fight these wars is so they never get to, they never have to, you know?
Yeah.
So it never reaches them.
No, that's the reason you and I are doing this.
But it's weird that America's been sort of insulated from that for quite some time.
Well, now there are some interesting things that this has kicked up in my head.
I was watching just TV the other day and Sky have been having, I think, Cassette Boy do political remix songs for the adverts for political debates.
And all it is, is making a mockery of every politician up there.
You know, it's just making them say silly things.
And there is not one politician in this country anyone fucking respects.
Not one.
The entire political class are a fucking joke.
And everyone knows it.
There was a billboard sign a few years back where it was just a picture of Nick Claig.
I can't remember, you know, the three major leaders.
And it's like, do any of these people represent you?
Yeah, this feeds into it.
You're right.
You're right.
Because there is a greater deference to authority.
And, for example, Americans have this great respect for the office of the president.
And you'll quite often hear people who are very rude about the current occupant of that office, who I'm not a fan of either, nonetheless say, don't agree with him, but show him some respect.
He is the president.
And we don't have that here.
And I think it's much easier for it's the same reason that we don't have a White House correspondence dinner in this country because there's no way Cameron would walk into that bear pit.
We have a much more, you know, it's just no way in hell.
And I think it's part of the problem: the press in America is part of the establishment.
So and the liberal establishment in America, the you know, MSNBC and CNN, and you know, on the periphery, these blogs that we all hate, the Kotakus and the Polygons, see themselves as part of an establishment.
And it's the reason they get so horrified when anyone contradicts them, because they don't see it.
They genuinely don't see it coming.
They believe that they are issuing edicts to the great unwashed man.
They absolutely do.
And in the UK, we don't really have that.
We have a much more robust sort of scepticism and cynicism about authority.
The press is its own entity, definitely.
Right.
But then again, the flip side of that is, you know, it's a different set of problems.
The flip side of that is that insurgents who want to pull down the system have a much easier time of it and get more of a hearing here because the Brits are naturally sceptical about authority and establishment.
So people like Owen Jones as a guardian columnist to tear the system down.
They get more of a hearing here.
In America, I think they get laughed at.
They get ridiculed.
It's a slightly different configuration that gives rise to some of the same problems, I think.
There is, I mean, there's a remarkable for a monarchy.
We are surprisingly anti-authoritarian in Britain.
I think we have a healthy disrespect for authority, you know?
Absolutely.
I mean, and I mean, just the average person on the street, you go up to them and you ask them who they're going to vote for, and they kind of give you a look like you've just shoved a lemon in their mouth or something.
You know, oh, God, I guess I'll be voting Tory because my dad voted Tory.
You know, I'm from the North, so I'm voting Labour.
Isn't that the only reason you're voting Labour?
Is it?
Well, yeah, I don't like Margaret Thatcher.
And yeah, it's an absolute complete disrespect for authority in most ways.
And so what would the press gain from becoming part of the establishment in Britain?
They just get the disrespect of their readership.
Yeah, they've got that for other reasons.
They don't need to have it for extra.
They don't need to ice that cake any more than it's already dripping in sticky white fluid.
Yeah, no, I think that's probably true.
Where have we got to?
We've done a wonderful, I feel like we've taken listeners on a sort of scenic tour of crazy.
I like it.
We've taken in safe spaces.
We've done the cotton ceiling.
We've talked a little bit about the ridiculousness of Calgary Expo.
What have we got left to talk about?
What's been happening to me?
Now, the well, I want to talk about the white guilt.
And could you define it?
Just so I know exactly how you mean it.
Yeah, I mean, I could talk about it from the point of view of a British person, I suppose, which is that sort of naturally shy awkwardness about acknowledging and sticking up for your success and your achievements and a sort of sneaking suspicion that somehow you didn't quite deserve it.
You didn't quite deserve what you've accomplished.
And I think that progressive campaigners capitalise on this.
They zoom in on it and seek to ferment it by suggesting, and I think this is the root really of oppression and patriarchy and all the sort of structural things we're always told are the fault of the white man.
I think this sort of capitalising on this little psychological chink that many wealthy people have, you know, like it could all be taken away because I don't really deserve it.
I got a bit lucky.
And they sort of forget how hard they've worked for all of that.
What progressive campaigners and feminists seek to do is to provide them with a ready-made explanation for this niggling feeling they've always had, which is that, well, you're right, you don't deserve it.
And you're right, you did get lucky.
And the reason you got lucky is patriarchy.
It's the sort of white supremacist structural oppression of minorities.
And you have only got there by trampling on other people.
And what we would now like you to do is give back.
And we would like you to start Over-promoting certain groups of people or giving some people privileged access to the public square and silence yourself because ultimately you don't have anything interesting to say.
You've made it, you won society, you're fine.
The problem with, and all of that is a relatively plausible line of argument.
It's not a terrible thesis, it has problems, it's not a terrible thesis.
The issue with it is that the people who are considered to be privileged, that group has enlarged with each successive generation of progressive campaigner to encompass now most of society.
If you are a man, you're guilty.
If you are white, you're guilty.
Yeah, let me just jump.
That's very, very interesting you say because I think white guilt is kind of the wrong way to put it, but I think it's actually a terrible thesis.
I think that it doesn't stand up to scrutiny in any way.
And I think that the I wasn't saying I agree with it, just to be clear.
No, no, no, no, I mean, I know, I know.
It's a sort of internally consistent argument.
That's what I'm saying.
Yeah, no, no, absolutely.
It is.
No, no, that's that is the key.
It is an internally consistent argument, again, to a degree.
But I think that if it was coming from anyone other than women, men wouldn't accept it.
If, for example, gay men were saying, well, I'm just oppressed because everyone was saying, I just want to know, shut up.
Exactly.
Fuck off.
I don't care.
If anyone else was saying it other than white women, no one would listen.
No one would fucking listen.
And there's a gentleman called Dr. Random, Mike, on YouTube.
He's fantastic.
And in one of his videos, he's responding to a white female feminist and he's saying, Look, I think you're the most privileged people who have ever lived.
And I know that you're the most privileged people who have ever lived because of the look on your fucking faces when I tell you that.
You say that to him, and then he says, Oh, oh, well, yeah, I am doing rather well.
I mean, you know, and we saw this BBC show I did a while back, which I think some of your listeners will have seen that.
I did a video on it, so I'm sure.
I did very kindly.
Well, in which case, all of your viewers will have seen it because, of course, they watch everything that you publish, as I do.
I do actually.
You don't have to.
No, no, no, I do.
I do.
You are one of my favorites.
Yeah, no, I saw that.
There was that sort of look on their faces, man.
You know, that's not a bad approximation.
No, no, no, no, that's quite good.
No, but it was that sort of, you know, like, how could you even countenance the thought?
And it was, you know, really interesting because you had that from the one end from the slightly more germane feminist on the end.
And then the sort of screeching outrage from that harpy, the underage hair, Kate Smirthway.
Just the look on her face, just the fucking look.
I was just staggered.
Just the insolence is that was what her opinion is.
Well, it's interesting.
And it's interesting you should say that word.
It's interesting you should use that word, insolence, because that's precisely what it was because they see themselves as in positions of moral authority.
And if that's not privilege, I don't know what it is.
You know, they see themselves as being what's interesting, insolence, because they are school momish, aren't they?
And yeah, and it was like sort of some naughty boy.
Exactly, of course, what's happening in American schools, but it's an entirely different subject.
But yeah, no, it was funny.
The reason I did it, I mean, I know a lot of people said, you know, it's a bit childish and all the rest of it.
The reason I did it was to demonstrate the absurdity of this reasoning that only group X are allowed to talk about group X.
A good friend of mine and a great guy, Vivek Wadwa, who is a scientist and a researcher, who's been an advocate for women in tech.
Now, I have some problems with the basis of that mission that I think is unnecessary.
But he's been one of the most powerful and effective advocates for women in technology, particularly in Silicon Valley and that bit of the technology industry rather than gaming, was rounded on by one of Shanley Kane's co-founders last month and the month before, basically for being, what did they, they didn't call him patriarchal.
They called him oh, it was something else.
It was a sort of patronizing or parental or something.
You know, the fact that he would dare to speak for women, this old guy.
And they use these slimy, awful tactics like calling him creepy, saying that, oh, he DM'd me and said, come and see me in my office.
You know, and you just go, what he actually transpired was he said, because he's a university professor, I don't want all this playing out on social media.
Why don't you come and have a chat with me at some time?
Yeah, exactly.
I'll put you in touch with my assistant.
Like, I'd like to continue this debate.
I'm interested in your view on this.
And they sort of turned it into, well, he took it off a line and DM'd me and said, come to my office.
Horrific.
I'm wandering off track now.
No, no, no, no, no.
That's actually, I think, a valuable point.
I mean, like, the Calgary thing and they're like, the honey badgers infiltrated the thing.
No, it was public.
They applied for it.
They went.
But it's interesting that they had to infiltrate, which implies that, you know, they're not the establishment.
Well, yeah.
You don't have to infiltrate things if you own them.
You know, if you are the sort of privileged ruling class, you don't have to sneak in under false pretenses.
That's the whole fucking point.
And they can't help but brag about their own power, can they?
No, it's and it's really interesting.
And I wonder, it's funny because it's not, I can understand, and I probably fall into this category myself.
And it's one of the reasons that I think that they hate me so much is I don't come from like a sort of old money family or whatever, but I work hard and I enjoy spending the money that I have.
And I don't make any secret of that.
You know, I like to show off and buy nice things.
And I'm, so I'm like, I'm very nouveau in that sense, right?
And it's a bit sort of de classé, it's a bit non-you, it's a bit trashy, but I'm like, who cares about being trashy?
You know, I have this wonderful, amazing life and I'm really happy and I'm, you know, I'm not grateful in the way that they say it, but I, you know, I'm just pleased that I've worked hard and I've got to a certain position and I have a nice life now.
There's no reason you should feel guilty about that.
That's the point.
Right.
And I don't.
And I don't.
And the truth is, I don't live any more or less of a luxurious life than some of these activists and some of these sort of feminist critics, but they deny it and they hide it and they like to plead poverty.
And they show up, you know, as sort of claiming victimhood and oppressive status and all this rest of it.
But they parade their victories around in a way that's well, the reason I was bringing up it is a sort of classless thing to do.
You know, it's a bit cringe, you know, to sort of show off.
And I, and it's weird because so many of them come from nice backgrounds.
It's not like, for example, maybe like me who didn't have everything growing up, it was a nice life, but not a brilliant life growing up.
It's now got a much better standard of living than I ever had as a kid.
They still have the same high standard of living that I now have.
And they always did have it.
Yet they still feel the need to crow and they still feel the need to show off about it, which I find very weird.
I'm going to be back in two seconds.
I need to plug this machine in.
Yeah, not a problem.
I will chat with the chat for a minute.
So I haven't looked at the chat at all.
How's it going, everyone?
Milo, we want a darling.
Yeah, I'll get on that when he gets back.
you know it's an interesting thing um i i actually and i imagine that like when alex lift left home he probably did have a knock to his quality I'm not going to Alex Lifshitz, but Zoe Quinn, you know, these people, they probably did have a knock to their life.
And then you contrast it with, say, Randy Harper, who I think has probably always come from a, I don't know, a working class background.
That she has very clearly worked very hard to achieve the victim status she has.
It's kind of weird, isn't it?
Anyway, I'm actually reading.
I am a Jew.
I'm unfortunately not a Jew.
I'd probably be a lot wealthier if I was.
I'm Jew.
Yes, yeah.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
I think we can...
I'm an apologist.
I really don't think anyone could actually characterize me in any way as an apologist for Harriet Harmon.
I'm probably going to lose all of my support from HN.
I'm sort of Jew-ish.
No, I am.
So strictly speaking, matrilineally speaking, my mum's mum is Jewish, so I'm Jewish.
But obviously I was raised Catholic.
So I don't.
Yeah, if you didn't know, you wouldn't know.
You wouldn't even know after sleeping with me.
So I'm only Jewish.
But yeah, no, I think we can probably skip over those stereotypes.
I'll be back in a second as well.
No, fine.
I'm going to read some comments in your absence.
Yeah, dude, do.
Okay.
Oh, God, it's going so quick for you.
I'm basically like an really old person.
Off for a wank.
Okay, thanks.
Good.
Enjoy it.
Stop objectifying these menu misindresses.
I don't know, I feel people objectifying me.
How big is, nevermind.
There are some swastikas.
There's a tits.
There are some more swastikas.
Sargon, are you going to give Milo a Pearl necklace?
No, there's only one YouTuber that I was ever going to let me give a Pearl Necklace, and I never got it.
Never received it.
Let's have a look.
What else have we got?
More swastikas, Jews.
Milo's hair triggers me.
Talk about Hillary Clinton.
Oh, we should talk about Hillary Flinton.
I'd love to talk about Hillary Clinton.
I will wait for Sargon to come back and we will definitely talk about Hillary Clinton.
Yes, there's lots of oyves.
Shut it down and burn, burn, burn.
Love.
Okay.
Good.
Show me the shekels.
I've got lots of shekels, but they're not here.
I've only got books here.
Okay.
All right.
I'm going to wait for Sargon for a while.
We should definitely talk about Hillary Clinton.
It's extraordinary that the American public would be considering putting her back in the White House.
I find it absolutely amazing that they would want this sort of family of crooks back in the White House.
But I'll wait and see what Sargon thinks about that one.
You can send questions while we're waiting.
Why don't you put some questions in the comment box?
And I shall try to answer them.
Milo, would you say that being an altar boy made you gay?
No, but I will say this.
If it hadn't been for Father Michael, I wouldn't give nearly such good head now.
And, you know, it's doubled my earning potential in my 20s.
I'm kidding.
But there's a serious point here.
I do find it weird when people bang on endlessly about the horrors of, for example, the sort of student-professor relationships, which is wrapped up in the sort of social justice warrior politics we've been talking about.
And there's some good stuff on this.
I will put it on my Twitter.
They never did me any harm, sort of having relationships with older men in positions of authority.
In fact, it was enormously exciting.
And most of the time I was, sorry, you've been gone.
I took over.
Now talking about fucking priests?
Okay um, you know you can't leave.
Tell me how exciting it was.
This will teach you to leave children unattended.
Um, we're now talking about priests.
No, I mean, I have sex with white.
I'm not an English teacher.
Um, you know, and frankly like, this is why I went on NEWS Night the other day and I said I don't think that teachers should come out to their students, partly because, for the teacher's sake, because I know in that relationship I was definitely the sexual predator.
Um, I was definitely the one pursuing him.
So no, it didn't do me any harm.
I, you know people, people sort of allow the trauma to ruin their whole lives and you know who cares.
Um but no, being an alter boy did not turn me gay although, as I say, father Michael did show me a few things.
Um well, you're back now, so I think we should talk about Hillary Clinton.
Wow let's yes okay um yeah no that's, that's a very, that's a very good topic.
Yeah Americans, please don't vote for her.
I'm so glad you agree with me.
i mean it's a family of criminals i mean white water there was whitewater where she drafted a document that defrauded the federal government out of millions of dollars You have liability insurance for this youtube channel, right?
Uh, you know, this is all in Ann Quilters book, so blame Announced.
Uh, you know, for example um, what was I going to say?
Yes, I mean the White House.
You know where Bill Clinton basically sold the Lincoln Bedroom.
Uh, and that the astonishing I mean you say about Republicans are all tied up with big oil and all the rest of it, and to some degree, that that that may be true.
What's remarkable about Democrats, and particularly remarkable about the Clintons, is how trivial and pathetic their frauds are and it just makes you feel sorry for them.
They're like petty crooks from Arkansas.
You know um, at least Republicans, when they get into government, they do proper like proper big corrupt shit, like invade places.
You know they have wars and armies at their disposal.
Democrats get into government and sort of sell access to the White House for a hundred thousand dollars a time.
So if you're a big Democratic donor, you can sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.
I mean, how pathetic.
You're the leader of the free world, you know, commander in chief of the United States Of America, you know and, and yet you get keep getting caught out in these petty sleazy, pointless scandals.
You know getting sucked off in the Oval Office, you know, letting someone sleep in the Lincoln bedroom because they don't donate to the Democratic Party, defrauding the federal government, not even for proper money, for about two or three million pounds altogether, this document that Hillary drafted.
I mean, these are like for the president of the United States.
These are, you know disgraceful humiliating demeaning uh, crimes to be involved in.
I mean, you know, at least Republicans do proper stuff.
Honestly I, that's actually that.
That is exactly how I feel about our politicians, you know, it's like oh, it's like, is that?
It is that all you claim for?
Is that all you claim for people?
Because they claim, like 15 grand, who cares?
Oh, my god, we just gave hundreds of billions to the banks.
It's like you bought a duck house okay, and where's the scandal here?
Exactly because I just don't care.
It's so petty Jesus, I mean we should just pay them 200 Grand, do away with expenses and let them do whatever the hell they want.
But this sort of like manufactured scandal, and this is this is why people lose faith in politics.
I kind of believe that if you want to get away with really bad behavior, you know, you've got to go all in.
Like, it's you know, you've got to go rag loads of other people in with you.
Go big or go home, you know, invade Iraq.
Uh, don't get caught being sucked off in the oval office.
I mean, that's demeaning, it's pathetic, it's pathetic.
Sleazy old, you know, sexual harasser in the White House, who, you know, there was, um, I mean, what is it now, five, six women on the record who say that he, you know, sort of he put his hand on, you know, he'd grab their hand and put their hand on his cock and all the rest of it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, all that kind of stuff.
It's just so demeaning to the office of the president.
And there's a good book, actually.
Many of you will hate her politics.
And I love Anne Colta.
And she's this sort of typical, as you would probably put it, batshit, right-wing Fox News person, but she's thin and blonde and hot, so she's all right.
And her books are much more measured and very funny and very waspish and very sarcastic.
And I love, I love her books.
And her book on Bill Clinton, High Crimes and Misdemeanours, is absolutely awesome.
It's a wonderful read.
And I would say, if you are one of the 2368 people, oh, awesome, watching us.
Now, I would very strongly urge you, if you're thinking of putting the Clintons back in the White House, to read this book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors.
Because it just, I wouldn't mind if I don't, I almost don't mind another Bush because at least they've got ambition, but at least they've got a sense of scale about things.
I quite like W, but never mind.
But the Clintons are just like petty, petty thieves and criminals.
I mean, they're not thieves, just for the lawyers watching.
But they're just sort of petty crooks.
And that's the demeanor they have, and the way that they just debase and humiliate the office of the president, which is, I'm not even American, and I think it should stand for something.
So do not vote for Hillary Clinton.
And she hates video games.
She hates video games.
She does.
In 95, she was petitioning against them, wasn't she?
She was.
But one thing that annoys me is that with Hillary Clinton, there is just scandal after scandal, like the fucking Benghazi investigation.
This recent emails thing, literally, like the past few weeks.
And it's just because they're secretive and they're slimy and sleazy.
Exactly.
Scandal follows them everywhere they go.
Exactly.
And they, I mean, I, I just, she seems to be the creature of other powers in the US government.
That's my issue.
She, I, there's a video, I watch a lot of conspiracy documentaries because I fucking love them.
For me, they're like the best science fiction, except they're kind of getting scarily close to reality.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Um, and there's a video that is commonly bandied about of Hillary Clinton saying how she's just moved her office.
So she's just down the road of the trilateral commission.
So they can tell her what to do.
And it's just I think people are ready to believe anything about Hillary because nobody knows what Hillary believes.
And yeah, that's the problem.
And after a quarter of a century in public life, she's learned to pursue, I think, like the Liberal Democrats in the UK, she's learned to pursue power for its own sake rather than perhaps being an engine for any sort of change.
What worries me, though, is the sorts of stuff she says about women.
I feel as though, and I think we should talk a little bit actually about Rolling Stone and Sabrina.
I think you and I should talk about Rolling Stone for a little bit.
I have a feeling that she would be very much sympathetic to the sort of facts, the feelings over facts, listen and believe strand of feminism.
I think she would come down hard on video games, for example, that somebody once has called sexist, whether it's a cherry-picked YouTube series by an irritating Armenian in hoop earrings and a plaid shirt, or whether it's a sort of bonkers, pseudo-academic report from Daigra.
Don't know, but I do sort of think she'd be very sympathetic to those kinds of arguments.
and it worries me and i think it's more no offense but more important than video games um really because if we look at what happens a lot of things are more important than video games Yes, they are.
Actually, I've never spoken to a Game Gate person who's got genuinely offended when I said that.
It is a hobby, after all.
It's just a hobby that's important to a lot of people.
And it's an art form that commands huge economic power.
PWC said 87 billion last year.
It's bigger than Hollywood.
It is an enormously economically powerful engine.
And there may indeed be ways in which video games do affect people.
I don't believe that video games and the science suggests that I'm right.
Video games can make people violent or sexist, but you can't deny they must shape something.
We don't know what.
But, you know, as Andrew Brightwight used to say, politics is downstream from culture.
And if video games are the new culture, then I think we want to have a healthy debate around it.
And we want that culture to be free and open and ready to experiment.
But the point I was going to make earlier is that I could sort of see I can sort of see her buying into the listen and believe school of feminism.
I can sort of see her being a problem in the White House in that regard.
Obama hasn't really done anything for anyone, really, least of all for black people.
But I sort of think that Hillary might go on a bit of a female crusade.
And I think it would be damaging not because I don't believe in the equality of women, because of course I do.
Any sensible person does.
But because I think that brand of feminism, which is on the ascendant in the American media and American academic establishment, is dangerous.
It's wrong.
And it is ultimately, at its heart, misandrist.
And the fact that the Rolling Stone thing was allowed to happen at all, that this woman, Sabrina...
As for you.
Yeah, UVA, yeah.
Oh, UVA.
Has been getting away with it.
Unbelievable.
This author, this journalist, has been getting away with this stuff for years.
She's did it before.
There's, I think, I forget the site, but I'll tweet it later.
You know, she's done this before about other people.
I'm not surprised anyway by that because all of these people, all of them, are fucking reprehensible.
I just want to make it right.
I spent a lot of time listening to podcasts with like Le Alexander, fucking, you know, all of these people.
And this is why I have such a distaste for these people because, I mean, like Bob Chipman, fucking, I literally went through so many of his videos.
And then one of his videos is like, yeah, well, I used to be some guy on Xbox Live calling people all manner of names.
And I'm thinking, well, I didn't, Bob, you know, and I know that a lot of people didn't.
And Le Alexander was like, yeah, I used to, I used to be the sort of person who'd sign up for a Twitter account and some people threats and stuff.
And I'm thinking, well, I fucking didn't.
But this is a redemptive.
This helps also to explain why they're like they are now.
It's a redemptive personal journey for them.
It's a way for them to cleanse themselves.
And this is like the social signaling thing I was talking about earlier.
Coming out as a critic of Gamergate is a way to cleanse yourself in the public imagination.
And it's interesting if you're a sort of obsessive person as I am and you can't help but get caught up in the details like me.
Then if you look at all of the people who have been involved in petty 4chan or anonymous or internet scandals, all the people who have been damaged, people on the internet who are damaged goods have all flooded out to criticize Gamergate because they see it, they see the potential of becoming a critic of Gamergate as a sort of redemptive cleansing experience, like a wiping the slate clean.
Like if they too come out and criticize Gamergate, then maybe they'll be accepted again.
And this is one of the great successes of Gamergate: it's managed to unite all of the worst people in the world against it.
And there's, you know, there are three groups of people in the world.
There are Gamergate supporters who, by and large, are fab.
There are, you know, there's everybody else, some of whom are quiet supporters and all the rest of it.
And then there are all of the worst people in the world.
People are in that Upper left quadrant of the sort of left-wing authoritarian, they're there.
All of the very worst people on the planet, every single one of them, is a critic of Gamergate.
And it is the best filter in the world.
You know, if you think you're going to a dinner party or something, just scan the Twitter feed for Gamergate mentions.
It's a, you know, it is the best, it has become, it's entered the language and it has become the best indicator that somebody predicates feelings over fact that they would rather express what a good person they are rather than live as one.
And this is a perfect example.
Lee Alexander, I used to be the sort of person who did this stuff.
You still are the sort of person who does this stuff.
You just don't specifically do that thing anymore.
Instead, you write columns and you bully people under your own name now, Lee Alexander.
100 years ago, you'd be talking about black people, Leigh.
Exactly.
And I also think 50 years ago, you would have been a member of a church.
Now, I am a member of a church, and I don't mean this to demean or bully or belittle religion.
It's not my intention here.
But I do think that there's a certain, there is a strand of people who go into organized religion just because they want to hurt people and they want to bully people.
And they can bully people without consequence from a pulpit.
This is why we have the expression bully pulpit.
Well, these days, if you want to be a bully, if you want to hurt and demean people with impunity, you become a social justice warrior.
You are given the same sort of bully pulpit by the media establishment and by Twitter to do exactly what hateful preachers 50 years ago did.
And it's remarkable how similar the strategies are, how similar what they ask for is the same.
They don't like the same things.
The methods they use to criticize people and what they want, the censorship, the banning, the moral panics, the parallels between the old religious right and new social justice are astonishing.
It's scary.
Lee Alexander, 50 years ago, would have been an evangelical preacher in the deep south.
100 years ago, it would have been a Democrat in the KKK.
Maybe I should tell that back.
I think she absolutely fucking.
She's a perfect example of a sociopathic bully who, you know, who used to, as she says, use anonymous accounts to bully and slander people and says that she used to be that kind of person.
She still is that kind of person.
She just now is empowered by the establishment to do it under her own name.
And I won't apologize for taking huge delight in seeing her brought low and seeing her humiliated to, you know, and stuck in charge of this ludicrous, this ludicrous little offshoot of boing boing.
Begging for money on Twitter.
Begging for money on Twitter.
And you know what?
Pathetic.
It just makes me want to crack one out.
She reaps what she's sewn, you know.
She has.
I mean, it's a justice in action.
And thank you, Gamergate.
You know, so Christina Hoffsoman says this.
She says, I've been waiting for a group like this who are unbeatable and relentless and good-natured and insistent and aren't going to take it lying down anymore and all that kind of stuff.
She's been waiting for allies like this her entire professional career and it's been the gamers that are it for her.
You know, she, like me, was not interested, you know, was not a big gaming champion, to put it mildly in my case, initially.
But when we saw like this coalition of people who, you know, were not the bad guys and saw how relentless and effective and brilliant and funny, so funny, so funny, that they were, I think we both feel the same way.
We've been sort of waiting for allies like this our whole professional lives.
And, you know, I'm going to get all cheerful, but I love you guys.
No, no, honestly, it's one of the most proud things.
I've never been more proud of anything I've done in my fucking life.
I swear to God.
You know, I've actually been fighting the good fight, you know, and I really feel that way.
Good feeling.
I mean, do you know what?
Do you know, this was something else in Jason Schreier's post on Kotaki, right?
He says they're saying how he looks on Kotaku in action and he sees conservative values.
And I'm just thinking, you are a supporter of Anita Sarkeesian.
You're a supporter of a woman who's desperately trying to get sexualized imagery of women pulled out of media.
And you want to talk about conservative values because what he thinks conservative values are are objectivity, fairness, decency, you know, personal responsibility.
This is what he considers conservative values, I think.
And unironically, he thinks that they're conservative.
It's just liberal, for fuck's sake.
Classically liberal, yes, sir.
No, it's classical liberalism.
It is sort of classica muscular liberalism of the JS Mill school, you know, that believes in free exchange of ideas and all the rest of it.
They don't understand what conservative means.
They just use it, like we're talking about Gamergate being used as a sort of dog whistle to indicate what kind of person you are when you're a morally upstanding and virtuous person.
They use right-wing as a term of abuse.
And it's an extraordinary thing.
It's an extraordinary thing.
It's easy, always easy, to criticize socially conservative people.
Very easy.
They tend to be older.
They tend to not want things to change.
So they're automatically in conflict with the younger generation solely by virtue of being their parents.
Easy to criticise and take the piss out of right-wingers.
It is, you know, the cheapest, the most low-rent debate tactic you can imagine because basically all you're doing is going, fuck you, dad.
Well, brilliant, you know, marvelous.
Well, good for you.
But using it as a term of abuse just demonstrates the paucity of their thinking.
And you'll notice, and I really like this guy, you'll notice that David Auerbach at Slate, who I know has written about Gamergate.
I do like David Auerbach.
I don't always agree with a lot of what he writes.
I don't particularly agree with a lot of what he tweets, where I think he's a little bit more robust.
Fundamentally is a liberal in the best sense of the word.
But he doesn't do that.
And you'll notice that as the further up the food chain you get, fewer and fewer people do it.
In the mainstream, anyway, on the left, they still do it.
But fewer and fewer people are so stupid and think that their readers are so stupid, treat their readers with such contempt and disregard that they believe that you can say right-wing and people automatically go, you know, I think most people are smarter than that.
And it's just extraordinary to me how they can use it as a dog whistle to mean a bad person.
And the fact that, as we said earlier, those three things from either, who was it, was it Jason Schreier who sort of said the three different types of people in Gamergate?
And I thought it was a perfectly accurate anatomy of the movement.
The difference between me and Jason is I think there is no shame and much pride to be found in all three of those positions.
Whereas he seems to think that there is something intrinsically wrong with, for example, being lonely, which strikes me as a sort of weird sociopathic position to take.
And it just reminds me of nothing so much as a playground bully.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
They constantly talk about empathy.
And the least qualified people to speak about empathy and absolutely that I can imagine because they don't know they're born.
They don't realize their own, dare I say it, privilege.
They don't realize, and they particularly don't realize that what they think is empathy is, or what they, you know, they use the language of empathy, but in their actions, they show themselves to be cruel and sociopathic.
It's opportunism.
Yeah, and sort of I'm having a brain fart.
What's the word for hating everybody?
People who live in hubs.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, people who live in public who hate everyone.
Someone helping me out.
A misanthrope.
Yes, that one.
Yeah, it's quite.
Sorry.
Sorry.
It's Saturday.
Leave me alone.
No, it's intensely misanthropic.
And I think it's, you know, they exist in a tiny world of fellow sociopaths who don't have much contact with real ordinary people.
And I wonder at what point, you know, if you sort of deride and ridicule and demean the majority of the population, you know, all gamers and everyone who doesn't agree with me, and the people who agree with you represent an ever-diminishing circle.
At what point are you just a misanthrope who hates other people?
Well, that was actually something I was going to bring up.
Is one of the great things about sad puppies is that the social justice warriors, I think if you were to look at this like, I don't know, a tactical map or something, you would see them becoming enrounded by enemies because they just keep pissing people off wherever they go.
They are just so unpleasant.
And so many other people, because of social media, can now talk to each other and say, hey, you're having a problem with these people.
That's interesting.
We're having a problem with these people.
And I think eventually they will find themselves so isolated that I think that the dream of being openly social justice might actually happen.
Well, the yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So we were talking about this earlier, in case that you didn't pick that up, viewers.
I long for the world in which social justice warrior is as loathed a term in the mainstream as Gamergate is to the liberal establishment.
So people have to sort of proudly come out and say they're openly SJW.
It's sort of like being openly gay.
The tabloids use openly gay to mean, you know, sort of like, well, he's gay, but he doesn't mind admitting it as if there's something sort of intrinsically whatever.
Yeah, I long for the day in which people start declaring themselves openly SJW because it will show that they've been so marginalized that they're an extra layer of intimate for them.
We're giving them what they want, you know, we're giving them what they want.
They're going to consider themselves ever more beaten up and victorious.
I want it to be like being openly BNP, you know, being because that's you could either openly racist or at the other end of the scale, you're openly SJW.
Which is openly racist.
Which is a political donut, isn't it?
It absolutely is.
They are the most racist motherfucking people I have ever seen in my life.
I can't imagine judging people purely based on their skin colour and sex.
And it's remarkable too.
And the hypocrisy too of it, you know, you see this sort of lecturing, busybodying, hectoring nonsense from that polygon, you know, about sort of diversity and all the rest of it.
I went to their masthead and I looked at their masthead and out of whatever 16, 20 people, there are two ethnic minorities and four women.
It's like, you know, get your own house in order before you presume to lecture others, most of whom are in a far better position than you.
And this is classic of the Gamergate movement.
This is a typical thing that's happened right from the end of the one of the most diverse and politically diverse, racially diverse, sexually diverse movements on the internet, probably in its history.
It's probably the least white bloke movement, ironically, ever on the internet.
You know, sort of anonymous, I can imagine.
I can imagine, like, I'm speculating, but I can imagine pretty much every member of Anonymous is a straight white male.
But Gamergate isn't, and yet it's being, you know, called these ridiculous names by people who've never employed a black person in their life.
Well, back in the early stages of Gamergate, I sort of put out a call on Twitter for people for women to send me a selfie with Gamergate on it.
And I must have got about 100 replies.
And that was when I had hardly any followers.
It was at the very beginning of all this.
And I must have got easily 100 replies of women saying, you know, of various ethnicities.
And it pisses me off.
I have to say that.
I don't give a fuck about someone's ethnicity, but it's a relevant point because we're dealing with such fucking racists.
But yeah, just, you know, the diversity of the movement was just evident from the beginning.
Well, you can read about all of this in my book.
Yeah, the work has been done by other people on this, not me.
I think it was Oliver Campbell, wasn't it, who did the video, the YouTube video, which is a sort of endless procession of gay, lesbian, trans, black, you know, all the rest of it.
And you're just, you sit there, and about halfway through the video, your eyes glaze over, and you suddenly are like, yeah, yeah, it's just ridiculous.
I believe it's just ridiculous, isn't it?
I mean, it's just plainly fucking stupid.
Like, how can anybody even say it?
This is why we're having a Gamergate meetup in DC, Washington, D.C., on the 1st of May.
Everybody's welcome.
And this guy from NPR, which is like the American BBC, and who I think their default position would be one of hostility to Gamergate.
And I'm just like, dude, just come down and meet people, and you will realize the absurdity of calling this a hate group or saying these people hate anyone.
I mean, just come down and see.
And I don't know whether he will or not.
I hope he does.
But I've done this to other people in the past.
I've just said, come down and watch.
And they've always backed out of it.
I think because they don't want to have their prejudices overturned.
They don't want to think it's dangerous.
Yeah, they don't want the evidence of their senses to contradict their assumptions and to contradict their prejudices about people.
They don't want to come down and see a room full of women and blacks and gays having a good time who don't want their hobby censored by lunatic lefties.
That's the reality of the position.
That's the real situation.
They don't want corrupt journalists and bonkers feminists in cahoots to slander, insult gamers and censor video games.
It's that simple.
It's a perfectly respectable and heroic mission, given how much power these people have.
And they don't want to see that for what it is.
But what's the point?
I mean, it means who have you been taking your marching orders from?
Well, yeah, I mean, it just shows the uniformity of opinion in the media.
It's just that we all trust each other by default without ever really engaging in any skepticism or critical thinking, which is, I certainly wouldn't want to be a journalist or whoever, you know, anyone who's told about a group of people and then went down to see them to find that I had been lied to, you know, categorically in the most harsh ways, you know, just vile, vile lies.
And I had gone along with it.
I had, you know, written my articles about how gaming is hate movement, all that sort of thing.
To go down and then have the scales fall from your eyes, it's not just that you're wrong, it's that you are the porn of vile people.
People always talk about journalists and other sort of professions being unrepresentative, like they need more diversity, they need more this, that, and the other.
And journalism is in need of diversity.
It's in need of libertarian and right-wing opinions in it.
Because if you think, and it's remarkable, there's dozens of news channels and dozens of cable channels, and only one really that's right-wing and they're not even libertarian, it's just Fox News, and how popular Fox News is compared to the others, which gives you some indication of where normal people's real opinions lie.
And that's Fox.
And nobody, I would imagine, watching the stream is a fan of Fox because they come from a different bit of the right that is probably unsympathetic to games.
And gamers are probably unsympathetic to them, and that's fine.
But there's really...
I think they're the more authoritarian right.
Yeah, they are.
They are.
There's no doubt about it.
And I have some sympathies with that end of the thing, but not totally.
But there's nothing really out there for sort of what we would call old muscular libertarian sort of free thinking.
Yeah, classical liberals, sort of free thinkers.
And it's only ever really in sort of little blogs and places like this that free thinking lives and survives.
And that's quite a scary thing when you consider that we are sort of mature rich democracy and we ought to have a free press that reflects these opinions.
And it really doesn't at all.
And it's interestingly, new media is on the rise.
People like me, we're doing surprisingly well.
Well, I do take heart from that because although the sort of established new media, the media that's getting sort of venture funding, Voxes and BuzzFeeds and whatever, very hard left authoritarian types that buy into all of this shit, that's fine, but there is a real world outside of the media.
News doesn't make money.
None of these media companies make money.
They rise and they fall because there's no money.
I saw a thing about Huffington.
Right.
And sometimes you get lucky and you sell out to a big, a larger company because they think they can do something with you later, which is what happened with AOL and HuffPo.
But these places don't make any money.
Their money's in entertainment.
And the biggest entertainment vertical on the planet right now is video games.
And I think that it's worth remembering that only 3% of people, fewer than 1 in 20, consider reviews from anywhere, whether it's magazines or websites, to be the most important factor in their purchasing decisions.
Most of them go with word of mouth, most of them go with YouTubers and other sorts of influence.
And I think if you look at the viciousness and the spitefulness of a lot of the press throughout Gamergate, I think it becomes easier to understand.
And I don't want to give you too much reason to be sympathetic to them or to feel sorry for them, although I don't think that's too much of a risk.
I think it's easier to understand if you put it in the context of a sort of dying animal lashing out.
This dying dog in the corner is that it's most dangerous just before death because it's got nothing left to lose.
And it just sort of wants to take an eye out before it goes.
I think that treatment of Portal Biscuit exemplifies that completely.
I believe that's right.
I think that's exactly right.
And I think that he's been very brave.
And I admire him so much to because, you know, I don't care one way or the other.
I've got nothing to lose.
If this all goes tits up, I could, in theory, write about something else.
But he's really risked his whole reputation and his income, his career and his life, what he is, the brand that he's built, to tell the truth.
And I know that people, it can sometimes feel a bit conspiratorial to share that old or well quote, but is it, oh, well, I don't know.
They're sort of telling the truth in revolutionary times or whatever.
That's true.
That's one of the things.
But it does feel that, yeah, no, the reason people share it is because it's how they feel.
And I admire him so much for doing what he's done.
And the fact that people like him are now infinitely more influential when it comes to where people actually spend their money, I think is a good sign.
And the games press is going to continue to decline and die.
And there'll be a few establishment outlets that are basically owned and operated by the publishers in all but name, which is almost where we are already, I think.
But these are some new power centers enabled by things like YouTube, I think are a really good thing.
And if you look out at the landscape, if you put the media to one side and you look out on the landscape of YouTubers and bloggers and tweeters and chans and Redditors and all that kind of stuff, and you look at the sort of general consensus, you begin to understand why the publishers perhaps don't care too much about what's going on in Kotaku and Polygon, because Grand Theft Auto V is always going to still break records because people are always going to want to love to play it.
They know who their customers are.
They know what the demographics are.
They know that they know and they agree with most of the arguments being made on the Gamergate side, even if they can't publicly associate themselves with a hashtag.
So I think we should take heart from the fact that the press, the games press in particular, is a sort of dying wounded animal and is lashing out in its final days and is less relevant and less powerful than it has ever been.
One of the things that I find very interesting about these hard left outlets is that they're almost I can't think of one that is extremely left that doesn't use clickbait that doesn't try to trick people into reading it because that's the thing.
I mean, I, I, on my, on my videos, for example, I, I generally put something that's kind of opaque, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily, I don't think draw you in.
I don't even know why anyone clicks on any of my videos.
They call it being thirsty, don't they?
Like clickbait.
It's like, bitch, why are you so thirsty?
You know, they're sort of desperate for attention and they will drag you in by any means possible.
They'll give you half a sentence.
It's like, you won't believe what this person did.
And I'm just like, oh, I don't care.
It is a characteristic of the left, yeah.
And I think it's because they can't sell their opinions to you without lying to you in some way.
Because if they were to be honest about what they believe and give you the option of reading it or not, you wouldn't.
Exactly.
It's unpalatable, generally.
And I think the general public looks at it and goes, well, I'm not really into that.
Exactly.
Most people are just like, oh, it seems a bit kind of kooky.
It's a really interesting theory, isn't it?
So basically what we're saying is that the rise of clickbait is a response to the fact the media is consolidating around left-wing positions.
And the only way that they can fool people into clicking on and reading and watching this sort of hard left stuff is by manipulating them with the use of clickbait headlines.
So clickbait basically isn't just a function of the rise in competitiveness in a crowded online media landscape, but it's also a function of the fact that media has been consolidated around sort of opinions that nobody really believes in.
It's a small group of people writing stuff that no one else believes.
It's absolutely like that.
And it's very interesting how all of these people have got, they do communication courses in universities.
And in these communication courses, they teach Sololinsky and Edward Bernays propagandists.
You know, unbelievable propagandists.
And it's all very, very extreme left.
And that's basically the sort of person who has been produced to write for these blogging sites.
And yeah, they are masters of clickbait.
You know, you can't take that away from them.
They're very good at getting the clicks.
It's remarkable how quickly they fold when you challenge them.
So when you say, well, as the BBC debate thing, you know, it was a bit childish, but the reason I called that woman darling was to illustrate the absurdity of their views that, you know, you can only...
I'm just recapitulating for anyone who didn't see that earlier.
If only women can talk about women, then when it's time to talk about men's problems, maybe you should pipe down, darling, you know?
And they're horrified by all of that.
it's amazing how quickly despite you know if you look at the desperation tactics you look at how they need to use clickbait headlines they need to spend ever more money on glossy look at the verge these days you know Every article has got things popping out, bells and whistles as you scroll down.
It's exhausting to read it.
Covering up to the fact that it doesn't really have very much of substance at all.
And the fact that when you challenge them, they crumble so quickly and so hard.
It sort of makes me wonder why anyone bothers reading them at all.
And of course, they don't.
They're watching you and they're watching Total Biscuit and they're watching these new powers and taking their opinions and making their posting decisions on the basis of stuff totally outside of the media.
It's good because it means that if the media is consolidating around wacky opinions that no one shares and if the media is falling ever more out of touch with ordinary people like politicians have been that well we have an advantage with the media I say we I mean you An advantage.
Well, I mean, one of the reasons I write for Breitbart is it's kind of like an insurgent itself in the media.
You know, it touches the stories nobody else will cover.
It gives writers like it gave me free reign to just pursue this Gamergate thing for six months.
They know what the hell it is.
But I think interestingly, having Alan Bakari, he's a liberal, isn't he?
He's a Liberal Democrat, unfortunately.
Yeah.
Exactly.
Horrifyingly, but we're very happy to have him because all we care about is people who believe in freedom and free ideas.
And, you know, that's a strength that I think Breitbart has.
Well, look at me, for example.
You know, it's a right-wing American news site, and they have this crazy, flamboyant, bitchy homosexual.
I mean, look at that.
Can you imagine any other right-wing website tolerating the way I behave on Twitter?
No.
I can't imagine you at Fox News.
No, exactly.
I mean, Fox News wouldn't put up with me.
They wouldn't put me on.
They wouldn't have me writing for them.
They wouldn't have me on, you know, on, I don't suppose, at least in my current sort of form.
Maybe in future forms.
But it's to Breitbart's enormous credit.
And I know that people always bang on about this.
They hate Breitbart, blah, blah, blah.
But they have been nothing but wonderful to me.
They have been very much on the side of the angels.
I love them.
And I can only just appeal to you to treat every story and writer on its own terms because I've seen nothing in my time there that worries me.
And I would just say they have been so indulgent and brilliant in letting me just pursue this story wherever it leads and so great in just hiring me in the first place.
Because I've got right-wing opinions, but I look and dress and sound like a liberal.
And it's quite difficult to fit into any sort of conservative publication.
But they took it and they did it.
And I think it's because they too are sort of these insurgents against the media.
It's the reason I said we is because I think everyone at Breitbart sort of feels that they're fighting the same battle, if you like.
No, no, I agree with that.
I think that the issue really is that you're not towing a party line.
That's what makes you different.
And that's why people hate us.
That's why people hate me because they can't put me in a box because I am a sort of flamboyant, ridiculous homosexual who likes Marai Carrie and RuPaul's drag race, but at the same time, I believe in low taxes and keeping our nuclear deterrent.
So I've never understood why the fact that I like Koch should affect what I believe about tax policy.
It's that sort of cluster of opinions where if you step outside the established acceptable liberal consensus, then you are blacklisted that is the problem in American media.
And ordinary people see it and hate it and ultimately have given up investing in it emotionally, which is why that media that exhibits that most strongly, like the games media, has totally lost confidence with its audience and has lost the power to influence and affect its audience.
Nobody believes what they say anymore.
Nobody likes them.
Nobody enjoys their company, if you like, on the page.
And nobody believes anything they say.
And that's just, I mean, it's a good thing because they're bad people, but it's an extraordinarily humiliating and unnecessary position for them to have got themselves into.
Well, now, this comes, I think, nicely to the UVA thing that I think is definitely worth discussing in a little bit of depth, actually, if you've got time.
Sorry, yes, that was my phone, but I'm ignoring it for you.
That phone.
I'm sorry, yeah, no, no, no.
The lack of trust in the press.
Now, what was the name of the woman who wrote the art school?
Sabrina Eardley.
Sabrina Eardley.
She isn't active on Twitter, is she?
Well, not anymore.
Yeah, she isn't.
No, I can't believe that she's not going to be fired.
Well, no, actually, that's not true.
I can absolutely believe it.
And that's what pisses me off more than not being able to believe it, I think.
Because I think a lot of people who are on the outside of this sort of culture clash are looking at it going, well, they're probably in the position I would have been like, why isn't she being fired?
I can't understand how she fired, don't you?
I know why.
She's part of the bloody establishment.
She is no, no, no, no.
This is not that.
I mean, they probably didn't want to fire her for that reason, but the reason that they've taken no action is legal liability because they are convinced that they're going to be sued by the fraternity and the fraternity should sue them.
The fraternity, which is, I think, even still on suspension, despite the fact that the story has been exposed, is total bunk.
Right, okay.
They are worried that the fraternity is going to sue them for a lot of money and that some individuals may sue them for a lot of money and that the university may sue them for a lot of UVA may sue them.
And any kind of firing or admission of guilt or wrongdoing could be seen as an admission of liability.
So if you're worried about being sued for reckless negligence or even for sort of malicious libel or anything like that, the last thing you do is admit liability by firing people because if you're firing people, you're admitting that you did you did get it wrong.
So my hunch is that it's got nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the situation and that in fact Sabrina Edley will probably be quietly shelved and not used very much anymore, if at all.
Her career is basically over, as it should be, but I don't think they're going to make any sort of official admissions of that, which is why the apology was so bad from her.
And, you know, did you read that awful apology about how it's affected me?
Her apology was like, this has been the worst year of my life.
It's like, fuck you.
I don't give a fuck about your love.
Jesus.
What about these poor guys that had fucking people protesting them?
Right.
But the reason it was worded that way is to avoid any admissions of liability.
Of course.
I'm not a journalist, so I don't think about these things.
But yeah, no, no, absolutely.
But the thing is, I just, I mean, she got sent there to fight a story about rape, didn't she?
It wasn't that it came up.
She was sent there to look for one, wasn't she?
Well, no, what she actually did was she went rape shopping.
She went around campuses looking for the most extraordinary, exciting, remarkable rape story she could find.
And so she went, she went rape.
She went rape shopping.
And of course, if you go rape shopping, you're going to attract liars and fantasists with stories about getting raped on broken glass coffee tables and all that.
And you think, ooh, this is good.
In a particularly sociopathic way that she must have in order, I know I keep using this word, but there's really no other word for it.
And there was an amazing headline, I think it was in the Daily Caller, again, a right-wing publication because they're the only ones who tell the truth about this.
It was something like, is your rape sexy?
Does it pop?
You know, and it was satire.
And what they were doing is sort of mocking her for going rape shopping and finding the most attention-grabbing, journalistically irresistible rape possible.
Does it pop?
But that's exactly what she did.
So, yeah, I mean, it's worse even than sort of wandering around a campus and asking, you know, has anyone been raped and can I write about it?
I'll print whatever you tell me.
Whatever you tell me, I'll just run it.
And literally, she did, you know.
She did.
But it was worse than that.
She trawled the US for the sexiest, most irresistible rape story possible to push a narrative that was feelings before acts, of course.
And this was the entirely predictable result.
That is, honestly, I wish I was shocked by it.
That's the thing.
And no fact-checking, it turns out the entire story is complete bollocks.
And then you've got Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marco, all those sort of people saying, well, it doesn't mean she wasn't raped.
And it's like, no, that's the only conclusion we can take from it.
The only conclusion we can take from it is that she wasn't raped because nothing she has said can be corroborated.
It's just the most elementary logic.
Well, and it's interesting, even the police chief didn't feel able to say this didn't happen.
He said, we don't have evidence that this has happened.
It doesn't mean something goes through something awful.
I can't remember the wording, but what he did not say is that this has been proven false.
Yes.
And that was because of the feminist bully brigade.
Right.
And the fact it was a rape hoax.
You know, she made it up.
She made it up like the Duke La Crosse rape hoax was a rape hoax.
We were talking about race earlier.
Again, Ann Coulter has a wonderful book, I should be on the payroll, called Mugged, which is racial politics in the age of Obama or something like that, where she goes through exactly the same thing with, so we have these sort of feminist agitators.
They have a bit of a sort of a shakedown thing where, you know, pay us or we'll say you're awful.
And this is what Al Sharpton does with race.
You know, sort of pay us or I'll send people to protest outside your factory and tell them you're all racist.
And she goes through all of these fake race attacks in the history of American campuses and all of these famous cases that the media reported on endlessly in a blitz for weeks.
And then suddenly it all unravels.
And actually she was lying and she put us, you know, she painted that on the wall herself.
And the New York Times goes silent.
And then they put it in page 17, one paragraph a week later.
Just like, oh yeah, it turns out whatever.
By which point, everyone in America has been persuaded, everyone in America has been persuaded that it's exactly what's going on with Gamergate, exactly what's going on with this myth of rape culture on campus, which is, you know, to anybody with a modicum of common sense, just obviously untrue.
And it does bear no scrutiny.
It does not bear scrutiny, as Christina Hoff Summers has proven repeatedly.
It's exactly what's happening with Gamergate and with rape culture as well.
You go huge on this scandal.
And when it turns out that things weren't actually as described, blanket silence isn't extreme.
Notice how the whole objective is to make a white woman the center of attention.
Sorry.
Every fucking time.
It's a white woman who has to be the center of attention.
It's like, okay.
Yeah, I mean, well, you're not wrong.
I know I'm not.
And the thing is, I only noticed this because in my travels through the feminist internet, I found various videos of black feminists going, you know, I kind of hate feminism, but I have to be a feminist because I'm a black woman.
This is a great problem in American politics, isn't it?
They're starting to feel that it's white women trying to oppress everyone using feminism.
Right.
And there's a problem for the American left because, for example, black people don't support abortion on the whole.
They don't really believe in abortion.
And they are often very religious and often very socially conservative.
It's a sort of quirk of history that black people vote Democrat.
There's no reason for them to vote Democrat.
are natural conservatives and in most respect.
Wasn't Lincoln a Republican?
Well, the history of, yeah, I mean, the history of race in America, the KKK is a Democratic thing.
The Democrats are the party of the KKK.
The Democrats are the party of segregation.
The Democrats, all of the segregation laws that were held up and voted against in the Senate, whatever, were all held up by Democrats.
Now, history is a little complex and there was some sort of switching going on and It's a complicated history, but it simply isn't true, clear-cut and simple, that the Republicans are all racist and the Democrats are lovely people who will give handouts and make excuses for minorities.
It's just not how history has worked, it's not how history works, and it's not how America's history did work.
The truth is that the black Americans, in my view, are sort of quite instinctive natural conservatives.
And so, particularly on the abortion debate, it's very difficult because black people see the damage done to their communities by excusing black people for murders, that more kids get shot, get killed, when it's not policed toughly enough.
They see the damage done to their communities by abortion culture and whatever.
And this is why the abortion debate is very racially charged because most of the kids aborted in America are black, not white.
And yeah, it's just another example of a sort of remarkable hypocrisy and awkwardness for the left.
They just can't wrap their head around all of this stuff and can't have the debate in a serious and strictly coherent way.
It's remarkable that they sort of remarkable they've got any support at all.
It is, it is.
But you know, when you appeal to feelings over facts, you're already onto a winner because most people don't want to invest in the time it takes to find out what's really going on.
They would rather be, as I said earlier about the New York Times, they'd rather be swept away in the injustice and outrage and fury of a great story.
There's a reason we call them stories, right, on the front page of the paper.
It's the reason that it's not an encyclopedia entry, it's called a story for a reason.
And people like to get swept up in there, and they don't necessarily always want to know the facts.
And you read these books sometimes by great economists who say that confirmation bias and all that stuff works because people don't really want to know what's going on.
They don't really want to know the truth.
They want stuff that solidifies existing positions and makes them feel good.
And if you're playing to the dopamine centers in the brain and you're making people feel good and virtuous and telling them all they ever really need to do is feel the right way rather than investing in learning or discipline or finding out the facts about anything or being in the right.
You never have to bother being in the right provided you feel in the correct direction.
You're sort of onto a winner.
You know, it's difficult.
I suppose that's the explanation for your question of why anyone supports them because it's easy.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think you're absolutely right.
And I think it's a lot of the time people want to dip into it and get like the Channel 4 nightly news.
You know, they sit there half an hour of news for the day and so on their lunch break, they'll eat their sandwich, they'll read a paper and be like, okay, got it.
You know, I'm vaguely aware that something is happening and they don't really want to go any deeper into it because it's just probably just not interesting for a lot of people.
So, you know, the whole feels over facts is, I can imagine, very, very tempting for a lot of people.
You know, they say, oh, this will make you feel good.
Oh, great.
I'd like to feel good.
You know, that seems, oh, that was all seems above board.
You know, anti-racism, women, you know, women's rights and all that sort of thing.
Yeah, let's buy into it or climb the sinker.
I don't have to think about it.
I'm going to go watch TV or whatever.
No, it's very true.
But the thing is, this is what I'm actually quite enjoying watching these people discover feminism.
The chivalry issue was just perfect the other day when loads of articles in the Telegraph, multiple articles in the Telegraph with journalists arguing with each other via article about whether chivalry is sexist or not.
Because these American feminists have decided, no, it actually is sexist.
And it probably fucking is.
People differently on the basis of the basis of their sex.
We need to reclaim sex.
I'm sorry.
I'm not going to let you get away with gender on the basis of their sexuality.
Sorry, I should.
I should say that.
Gender is a destruction by crazy people.
Yes, I think that's true.
The good thing is, I saw in the Daily Mail today serialized a book about manhood and how great it is to be a man, once again written by a homosexual, because it seems like we're the only people who can get away with it and not get fired.
You're oppressed, aren't you?
We're in this extraordinary position where if you say so, I'm not the one who invented the progressive status.
No, I'm just like sitting at home counting my shackles and saying, oh, I'm oppressed, am I?
That's awesome.
If you say so, if you insist, if you insist, I'll take it.
I think that if you really insist I'm oppressed, then fine.
No, I said some good news.
I'm probably going to have to wrap up relatively soon.
Yeah, I actually did as well.
But all I would say is some good news is that there are some signs of sense.
For example, Serializing the Daily Mail in the UK today, there's a new book about how great it is to be a man.
I do think it's weird, and I do think it's sad that we've got to the stage where lesbians and gays are basically the people having a discussion about how men and women should interact.
But there are at least, and there is now at least space for men to talk about these things.
And you should follow, if you're interested in, I don't want to get to men's variety, but if you are interested in sort of the wars of the sexes and in the way the way in which men are starting to sort of push back a little bit, and I hope that I'm contributing to that, because I think it's a worthwhile fight to have.
You should follow Martin Daubney, who I love, who's very great, very good.
Yeah, he's the former longest-standing editor of Loaded, which was a sort of lads magi makes it.
His performance on that thing, excellent.
He's very, very good.
He's a bit more genteel and a bit more respectable, a bit more family-friendly than I am, which is why he'll write for the sort of Sunday Times and be on Sky News, and I'll be sort of being outrageous and places like this.
So I just sort of choose to forego that in favour of going balls out.
But he is a great ally, so you should all definitely look him up and follow him on.
You'll probably see me interact with him anyway.
Yeah, no, he's great.
But I think there's definitely a bit of a pushback now.
I think ordinary women, ordinary women, are seeing this and realizing they don't want to be represented by these crazy women, which is why fewer than one in five women identifies as a feminist, which I think is a good and healthy thing.
That's why women against feminism even exists.
Women against feminism.
I mean, what a failure of feminism that such a thing could even exist.
And it could be popular.
And you could have huge support.
It's extraordinary.
It's not even just a failure.
It is a stab in the back for the feminists.
I've heard feminists use the phrase, you don't bite the hand that feeds you, as if they have de facto overlordship over women.
And it's just, and you know, any women who are going to are apostates.
It's like, you know, that is fucking slimy.
But what's good, and I think that Gamergate should take this.
If I sort of give Jerry Springer star final word, go ahead.
Look after yourselves and each other.
I think that Gamergate should take heart from that, the fact that most women are now rejecting this sort of crazy feminist crap.
Most women are deeply uncomfortable being represented by people like that.
And those women are in the majority.
And you, as free thinkers and funny, interesting people who like to be challenged and like to play games unencumbered by feminist nonsense and uninsulted by and left alone by crazy journalists, you too are in the majority.
And you are in the polite, insistent, funny, but take no prisoners, majority.
And you have a unique position to inspire other fandoms, I think, to do what you've done.
And it's already happening.
And the way in which you can sort of appear, as happened with the Calgary Expo, and act as a watchdog and show people that there is a cost attached to being illiberal and a cost attached to censorship, I think is the most valuable civic service.
I think you are basically performing under the functions of journalism, which is holding the powerful to account.
It's almost like a new fourth of state.
You know, this level of consumer power and consumer sort of activism is an extraordinarily beneficial thing when it's available to everybody.
Previously, this sort of stuff was only available to the left, so all of this stuff flowed in one direction.
All the boycotts were women getting upset about this, you know, black people getting upset about whatever.
It was mostly white people complaining on Black Horse Bath, but whatever.
Now everybody has access to the tools of activism and making their voice heard and can mobilize, and nobody's better at mobilizing than Gamergate.
Now I think it's going to be a phenomenally powerful force for the future.
And I'm very happy to have it come out of the womb.
And now I'm sure it will continue to inspire future generations and other fandoms.
But I think it's an extraordinary thing.
Okay, well, thank you very much for joining me.
It's been an honor.
Thank you so much.
No, I'm so grateful to you for having me.
Thank you so much.
Not a problem.
And thanks for everyone for listening.
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