Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Weapons of Culture Warriors

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Feb. 22, 2017 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

25:33

The Weapons of Culture Warriors

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	In this video, I will be talking about two recent smear campaigns against two very different public figures.
	The first one is provocative journalist Milo Yiannopoulos, and the second one is the largest YouTuber in the world called Felix Schellberg, otherwise known as PewDiePie.
	I won't be editorialising about the rights and wrongs of the content of each smearpiece.
	Whether you find these things morally objectionable or not is up to you, and I'm not really interested in going through it again, because for the last few days, it's all the internet has spoken about.
	On the 20th of February 2017, this post appeared on 4chan's notorious board poll.
	FYI.
	The MSM has a huge fucking media onslaught that is set to go live Monday to scorch Earth Milo and destroy him via the paedophile label.
	I'm part of a mailing list, not giving my real name or the name of the list for the sake of protecting my ass from retaliation, but they have been sitting on the story for a while because they thought Milo was small fries and wanted to wait until he got big enough for a thread to go nuclear on.
	Journalists are pissed the fuck off Ma put him on air and more so, pissed off his book deal had not been revoked, and some are pissed that Milo got a book deal from the same publisher who dropped Zoe Quinn's book, along with a larger signing bonus than most of the publisher's social justice authors.
	There are also those who want to hurt him simply as a proxy to hurt Steve Bannon and Breitbart, since their attempts to attack Bannon have largely failed.
	Not to mention people on the left being pissed off that most people sided with Milo over the rioters, rioters that were paid by Soros through a variety of fronts and lauded through companies that can't be traced back to him.
	Expect a steady drumbeat of Milo as a paedophile, and Milo must be dropped from the Conservative Political Action Conference where he is due to speak.
	The latter is especially important in terms of the divide and conquer long game the press is playing.
	The press wants a civil war with the McCain-Graham wing of the GOP and Trump-Ryan wing, so as to weaken the Republicans in 2018.
	The overall plan is to make the Republicans fear social shaming from the media and the left more than they do their actual constituents who love Trump, in hopes of regaining the House and enough Senate seats to pull off an impeachment of Trump.
	This post was clearly written by some kind of insider, and as predicted, like clockwork, later that day the articles began rolling out.
	Video shared ahead of CPAC shows Milo Yiannopoulos appearing to speak fondly of relationships between men and young boys.
	Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos appears to defend paedophilia.
	Breitbart's Milo Yiannopoulos defends paedophilia, praises priest sex with boys.
	These are just three of the earliest ones.
	There were of course dozens and dozens and dozens of other ones printed that were basically the same.
	This campaign of character assassination had the intended effect.
	Within hours the CPAC had dropped Milo as a speaker.
	His book deal had been cancelled and his job was on the line, from which he would subsequently resign.
	Needless to say the internet was aflame with people on both the left and the right outraged, just outraged at Milo Yiannopoulos, and how this was shocking that a provocator who says provocative things would say something unorthodox and, dare say, provocative.
	Everyone and their dogs stood in stark condemnation of this total moral failure of Milo Yiannopoulos.
	How could anyone say anything like this?
	This was disgraceful.
	He should be scalped.
	And rightly so.
	It's just a coincidence that all of the people saying that were prior enemies of Milo Yiannopoulos, and appeared to be coming together in their mutual condemnation of him to ruin his career.
	What's important about this is that Milo Yiannopoulos has done nothing extraordinary.
	He is not a paedophile.
	He has not molested anyone, and he is not even accused of molesting anyone.
	He is in fact the victim of a pedophile.
	And in my personal opinion, I said I wouldn't editorialise, but I may as well give it here since it's relevant.
	I think that his views on pederasty, which is what he's referring to, not pedophilia, are coloured by his own personal experiences and victimization at the hands of a Catholic priest.
	This is my opinion, and I can't say that I know that this is the case for sure and take it for what it's worth.
	But the interesting thing is how people reacted.
	This is not out of concern of these issues.
	This is out of hatred for Milo himself.
	For example, the video showing Milo Yiannopoulos appearing to speak fondly of relationships between men and young boys is precisely the opinion that Star Trek's George Takai has when he spoke glowingly about being molested as a young teen by an older man.
	The sound of silence is deafening.
	That nobody cares about this.
	Why should they?
	George Takei is not their political enemy, therefore they will not try to use this against him, because there is no victory to be had there.
	At least, not a partisan victory.
	You could always have a moral victory about pushing back the acceptance and normalization of paedophilia, but that is simply not the concern of these activists.
	The left particularly cannot claim to be even vaguely concerned about the fear of normalising pedophilia when they have been doing it so much themselves.
	Both Vice and Salon.com have post pro-pedophilia articles which were mysteriously removed at an indetermined point before the launch of this assault on Milo's character.
	Needless to say, there was no great furor over the left posting these articles and left-wing activists did not find themselves metaphorically up in arms over them.
	So the left has no grounds on which to complain about the normalization of paedophilia, given that they have been engaging in it so much themselves.
	Milo is a well-known provocateur and characterizes himself as a free speech warrior.
	So needless to say, it's expected that he would say things that push the bounds.
	But one major source of contention from opponents of Yiannopoulos has come from this clip.
	Do you think that's what's going on with that guy who directed X-Men?
	Brian Singer?
	Yeah, a bunch of 14-year-old predators going after that poor man.
	I'm not sure it's the case with him.
	No.
	That's a guy.
	You know, I lived in Hollywood a while ago.
	Did you speak briefly?
	Did you go to one of his parties?
	I went to other people who I won't name of a similar stature in Hollywood.
	I went to their boat parties and to their house parties and things, and some of the things I have seen have beggared belief.
	Yeah.
	Can you give us like a...
	Well, just, I can't, I don't want to be indiscreet about specific people.
	Right, you know, because I think it's going to dance around the facts.
	Yeah, dangerous, but I can tell you the truth without dropping anyone in it.
	Okay.
	Some of the boys there were very young.
	Very young.
	And necessarily reasonable.
	I don't remember.
	No, no, like, I don't know, eight years ago.
	I don't remember.
	Natural limitations.
	I don't remember whether I ever met Brian Singer or whether I even knew who he was then.
	But I knew other people of similar stature, as I say, and there were some very young boys around at that time.
	There was a lot of drugs and a lot of twinks taking drugs and having unsafe sex with older men, and some of these boys were very young.
	As you can see by the text overlaid in that video, the accusation is that Milo is defending paedophiles by refusing to name them.
	And if interpreted charitably, in the most abstract sense, that is true.
	It is technically a defense of a paedophile if you refuse to expose them as a paedophile, even if you are not acting with the intention to defend the paedophile.
	But in a far more politically pragmatic and realistic sense, there is simply no way Milo could have gone onto a massive podcast like Joe Rogan's and started slinging out names of people that he had seen at a party in 2008 who he thought were paedophiles.
	It's highly unlikely that Milo is in possession of any evidence to back up those statements, and this is why he didn't name the people.
	They would undoubtedly have been able to file a lawsuit for defamation against him that he would have lost because he cannot prove this.
	He is just letting you know something that other people have let you know.
	And again, this is how we know that the people making this accusation do not care about the subject to which he is speaking.
	Not only was his appearance on Joe Rogan's podcast over a year old and well viewed, this is a sentiment that has been echoed by mainstream Hollywood actors, warning people that there is a large paedophile network in Hollywood and nobody has been paying attention.
	Last year, Elijah Wood said that one of the great problems in Hollywood is paedophilia, and revelations about how convicted paedophiles are working openly in Hollywood and the deep relief that he had when he escaped unscathed, thanks mainly to his mother who protected him from these people.
	And before Elijah Wood had done it, previous Hollywood child actors had done it as well, with Corey Hayman and Corey Feldman both coming out and saying, look, we were molested and groomed by paedophiles.
	I can tell you that the number one problem in Hollywood was and is and always will be pedophilia.
	That's the biggest problem for children in this industry.
	The casting couch even applies to children.
	Oh yeah.
	Not in the same way.
	It's all done under the radar.
	Nobody talks about pedophilia.
	It's the big secret.
	Anyone who is morally grandstanding about this issue without having done so to Corey Feldman and Elijah Wood does not actually care about this issue.
	They only care about this issue now that Milo Yiannopoulos, their political opponent, has found himself under the spotlight.
	These people will claim to you that they are being principled, but it is self-evident that they are not.
	They are using this out of political expediency.
	Because this was a salvo in the culture wars, all parties involved in it find themselves taking a position on it.
	The more reputable left-wing outlets like The Independent, all the way through to the BuzzFeed-style mashables of the internet, all posted reasonably sympathetic pieces towards Milo, characterizing him not now as the alt-right,
	sexist, racist, misogynist that they were calling him previously, but an Anglo-Greek agitator or provocateur, and saying that he's had a rather bad day, and presenting, and I'm not joking, you should take the time to read this article, objective, factual reporting, relatively free of their usual political bias, which permeates almost everything else they do.
	And this is how you can identify if something is a key factor in a culture war.
	There is a signal, and then there is a counter-signal.
	I believe the origin of this attack on Milo, and if not the origin, certainly a strong supporter and publication that was heavily involved in disseminating this information, was a relatively obscure conservative outlet called the Reagan Battalion.
	The Reagan Battalion presents itself to be a news organisation along the lines of something like the Daily Wire or The Blaze, but it has a remarkably light social media presence and internet presence in general.
	They're very vocal about this being a part of the culture war.
	They state that this is a win for conservative values and principles when Milo was declined to speak at the CPAC.
	The people operating their Twitter accounts seem to reflect the views of the blog as far as I can see it, and they are very traditionally conservative but not openly homophobic.
	And they even seem to confirm that there was a vast amount of money, in this case apparently $250,000, spent on opposition research on Milo.
	The Reagan Battalion is openly opposed to Donald Trump, and this attack on Milo appears to be a consequence of that.
	The group that accused Milo Yiannopoulos of defending paedophilia is funded by an anti-Trump pro-McMullen pack that once tweeted, We Hate White Children.
	The Reagan Battalion posted to Facebook several anti-Trump and pro-Evan McMullen videos, pictures, links, and even a poem.
	The McMullen site also contains a page stating, The Reagan Battalion is with us.
	Are you?
	Evan McMullen retweeted a tweet bragging about his involvement in taking down Yiannopoulos, calling Milo a Nazi punk, but not directly confirming that he was involved in any supposed hit job.
	The Reagan Battalion stated on Facebook that they supported McMullen's candidacy, but were never affiliated with his campaign.
	And it's very interesting to note that the Reagan Battalion appears to have ties to Democratic activists.
	The Reagan Battalion were funded by an anti-Trump PAC called Stop Trump, and the treasurer of this PAC is a man called Nathan Lerner.
	He's no longer the Treasurer and is now the executive director of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, previously known as the Keep America Great PAC.
	Founded by Lerner and Scott Dworkin, the Keep America Great PAC aimed to raise $20 million to mobilise voters who are not pleased with either Trump or Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
	As the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, the group now exists to hold the Trump White House accountable.
	And an archive donation page, which appears to be exactly the same as the hidden donation page on the current Reagan Battalion website, suggests that the site was managed and paid for by an official PAC registered with the FEC under Stop Trump PAC.
	The Democrats have funded the right-wing Reagan Battalion in order to attack Trump and his supporters, Milo, Breitbart, and Bannon.
	I don't know what Evan McMullen's actual involvement in this was, but I find any involvement at all highly ironic.
	I find it rather amusing that he would consider himself to be a principled, true conservative, because I think that a principled person doesn't take money from their enemies in order to defame a victim of a paedophile for their own political gain in the current culture war that they are on the losing end of.
	And I can tell you that this is exactly what he is doing.
	After McMullen lost the 2016 election, he said that he would start a new conservative movement, reaching out to non-traditional conservative voters who feel disaffective.
	It might, he said, form a new political party.
	This is McMullen's declaration that he is participating in the culture war, and his attack on Milo was the first salvos.
	He and his supporters like to portray themselves as the true principled conservatives, but they seem to have forgotten the very first principle, which is your own personal conduct.
	Principled people do not engage in smear campaigns.
	And let's be clear, that's exactly what this was.
	At no point has Milo been accused of a crime.
	At no point is anyone even saying that he's really done anything wrong.
	They are saying that he has said something they do not like and they would like him de-platformed for it.
	This is completely in keeping with his history as a free speech warrior.
	It is simply a continuation of this.
	This is simply coming from a different political faction and one with which Milo was, at least previously, trying to appeal.
	McMullen is an ex-CIA operative, so I probably shouldn't be surprised that the entry into the culture war from the traditional conservatives, trying to regain all of this lost ground and strike back for conservative, true conservative principles, would start on such a low note.
	Accusing someone of being a paedophile when the nuance of the situation is far more complicated than that is the lowest possible form of attack.
	because it's one of the worst possible things you could accuse a person of.
	And honestly, this has just really coloured my perception of the moral character of Evan McMullen, regardless of what he claims to be fighting for.
	And I only mention that because all of this is predicated on moral arguments.
	This is the traditional style moral outrage machine at work, and we have to be aware of it and resist it wherever we see it, because this is a case of people having done nothing wrong.
	There are many people in disagreement with Milo's opinion on what happened to him when he was young and how that coloured his perceptions of the events.
	And I am one of those people.
	I don't agree with what his position is on this.
	But that doesn't mean that he is a criminal, because we do not punish people for their crimes of thought, and I want to rescind the laws so we don't even punish them for their crimes of speech.
	People should be free to say and think exactly as they choose.
	The crime, the wrongdoing, enters in with action.
	And Milo has done nothing that is illegal.
	He's done nothing, at least in this case, that is immoral.
	He in fact was the victim.
	I think if you would think about this in the wider context of Milo's behaviour, suddenly it makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?
	That was the anatomy of a right-wing smear piece, and the sort of person who does it and why they do it, and who they coordinate with to get it done.
	This is the anatomy of the left-wing one.
	Now, we'll be looking in detail about the recent smear pieces that were published about PewDiePie, Felix Schellberg, and him being a, quote, anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser and whatnot.
	I've covered this in a previous video, I'll link it in the description.
	But it began with this article in the Wall Street Journal.
	Disney Servers ties with YouTube star PewDiePie after anti-Semitic posts.
	This article was authored by Rolf Winkler, Jack Nisius, and Ben Fritz, and it's Ben Fritz that we're going to talk about.
	So who is Ben Fritz?
	Well, back in 2008-2009, he was involved in video games journalism.
	He's very much one of the insiders of the journalistic cliques that found themselves at odds with the regular gamer and spawned the Gamergate controversy.
	In fact, he's appeared on a panel with Leigh Alexander, where they are both listed as thinkers, although I think a more accurate term would be thought leaders.
	And he's been part of the wider games journalist community for some time, engaging in the same way that we do in the skeptic community here.
	I use these terms in air quotes, and I realise that people are going to get triggered by that.
	I really think it's important to highlight just how influential Ben Fritz is with key players in the Gamergate scandal.
	For example, in this question and answer article with Le Alexander, the journalist who started the Gamers Are Dead articles and really kicked Gamergate off into high gear, when asked, do you have any favourite journalists, anyone in particular you admire, she lists Ben Fritz alongside Tom Chick, Stephen Totello, Kieran Gillen, and Brandon Boyer.
	Now, there are going to be a lot of people who don't know any of those names because they weren't following me during Gamergate, but if you ask in the comments, there will be people who can help you out on this.
	In fact, I'll leave a link in the description to a playlist of Gamergate videos that I did.
	I think I did about 60, in fact, over the course of the sort of year and a half that Gamergate went on for.
	That's how big a deal this was in the gaming community.
	And I'm going to play you a very short clip of Le Alexander to show you exactly the kind of journalist that she is.
	In addition to regularly writing and speaking about feminism, I reject as much as possible conventional models for video games writing.
	You know, you can't be a female columnist or like a woman who writes her opinions without people making referendums on your personality or speculating about your motives or even your mental health.
	So I just double down on doing personal work.
	Whether I'm doing interviews, criticism, anything.
	No pretense of being unbiased.
	I write about the things I'm interested in, the creators I care about, and the trends that I want to see succeed.
	Sorry, that's the conspiracy.
	That's the sort of thing we have to deal with in the video game industry.
	And the people in the video game industry know people outside of it.
	They have contacts in the mainstream media.
	Ben Fritz himself had left the video game industry by 2011 and was working at the LA Times.
	And that's relevant because we know that there is a crossover because of a leaked email from The Guardian.
	Somehow an internal email from The Guardian was leaked regarding the Gamergate campaign.
	This is the text of it.
	Again, please do not respond to this idiotic campaign.
	Lei, as in Lei Alexander, will be coming in in the morning conference to talk about Gamergate soon.
	She now works at The Guardian.
	She has left the video game industry and is now a columnist for The Guardian.
	She is wildly corrupt, wildly incompetent as a journalist, and utterly ideological.
	And of course, she is to this day still friends with Ben Fritz.
	It really shouldn't have come as a surprise to me when I found a connection between Ben Fritz and Leia Alexander, because they are both operating from the same playbook.
	To give you a brief summary, Lei Alexander on the 28th of October 2014, a date that is burned into my memory at this point, wrote the first of the Gamers Are Over articles, to come to be known as the Gamers Are Dead articles.
	And this was a cascade of over a dozen articles written by the gaming media, the left-wing progressive gaming media, against the gamers themselves, her very audience, or at least presumably.
	And this is what really kicked Gamergate off into a big consumer revolt.
	And the numerous slander pieces against PewDiePie all have very much the same hallmarks.
	And for those who really do remember Gamergate, you'll remember Critical Distance.
	And it turns out that Ben Fritz was involved with them as well, giving speeches and talking at roundtables and whatnot.
	I think there may well have been a critical distance presentation by him on their YouTube channel, but they have deleted it, as in they deleted their entire channel.
	So unfortunately, I can't go back and check.
	I think it's very interesting and very telling that the New York Times decided to write an article about his wedding to his wife, Alicia Kirk.
	They say that the Bride 29 is keeping her name, she's a staff writer for the CBS show Without a Trace, and she wrote the animated feature film Bambi 2 for Walt Disney Pictures.
	And just so we're all clear, Ben Fritz is a journalist covering the film business, Disney, and more for the Wall Street Journal.
	Which he of course does on a regular basis, often involving him travelling to China, such as this example of him having a QA with Bob Iger as we walk around the Shanghai Disneyland, ride Tron and have lunch.
	Oh, the perks.
	And I really think that this post from his Facebook page shows exactly what you need to see about these people.
	He says, Who's coming with me when Disney opened first theme park in mainland China in June, which, as you saw from the previous screenshot, he visited?
	I particularly like the comment that he's left on this.
	Coming up with story ideas now to make it critically important that the Wall Street Journal send me in June.
	To which Scott Gillies has said, there's so many things.
	Cultural differences of Disneyland there versus the US, language choices, first Disney Park designed with Chinese first, construction and political issues of making a Disney park in China, the many different Disney employees who have had to live in China for the past two, three years, etc.
	I think you're covered.
	I think so too, but I also think it's very interesting how he wrote an article called Disney Severs Ties with YouTube star PewDiePie after anti-Semitic posts after Ben went through PewDiePie's videos and cherry-picked anti-Semitic quote-unquote jokes and then sent them to Disney, his wife's former employer, in order to influence them to get them to drop PewDiePie, which they did.
	That's weird, coming from someone who enjoys jokes about black people, or jokes about Nazis, or jokes about Jews.
	By Ben Fritz's own standards, he is an anti-Semite at the same level as PewDiePie because they are both guilty of making anti-Semitic jokes, and he is the person who covers Disney for the Wall Street Journal.
	As with Milo, Ben created his smear piece against Felix Schelberg not out of any concern for the Jews or because Nazism is being normalized or any other racist concerns, because he does all of those same things himself.
	He did this as a political attack because he is a culture warrior.
	And last bit of information, but I'm not going to reveal the source of this because I wouldn't want to be accused of doxing.
	And of course, no analysis of this would be complete without a Marxist class analysis.
	So I thought I'd look it up, and yes, it turns out that Ben Fritz owns a house that's worth almost a million dollars in an area with a median income of $90,000 that is over 97% white and Asian.
	I guess that explains why Ben is such a good progressive, because he can afford to be.
	Seriously, though, smear pieces are a cancer, and they are absolutely polluting the dialogue.
	Anyone who is a culture warrior and decides out of the blue to create a smearpiece to attack someone else's character is not doing it out of concern for what the person has done.
	Because as you can see from the people being targeted by these smear pieces in this video, these people have not actually done anything wrong.

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