You Are What You Beat, From Your Wife to Your Meat
How a poorly-written blog post led to the rise of gay conservatism, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump
August 2014, Boston, Massachusetts. It all started with a blog post — a disgruntled, rambling, six-part exposé accusing a recent ex-girlfriend of, among other things, deception, manipulation, infidelity, and, perhaps worst of all, non-monogamous cuddling.
The ex was emergent video game writer and developer Zoë Quinn; the author, freelance programmer and general washout neckbeard Eron Gjoni. The post itself, originally uploaded to popular forums like Something Awful and Penny Arcade before being swiftly deleted and rehosted on 4chan and Eron’s own WordPress page, eventually came to be known as the Zoe Post. And the fallout that resulted from it led in large part to the first election of Donald Trump, via an online movement it ignited called GamerGate.
Here’s how it happened:
In the early 2010s, YouTube was the summit of the online content world, boasting unparalleled reach and offering enormous financial incentive for its most prevalent creators. One of the trendiest genres at the time, so-called “commentary videos,” served two hardcore, frequently-overlapping audiences: atheists and gamers. Many such videos consisted of a disembodied voice dubbed over frenetic first-person shooter footage, haughtily dismantling Christian propaganda points while the player character massacred scores of digital adversaries in the background.
By the time 2014 rolled around, though, male intellectuals on the internet had already begun to progress from their previous hyper-fixation to a new one: feminists.
Labeled “the new religion,” third-wave feminism became the in vogue target for erudite internet dudebros. Countless male creators in the mid 2010’s — adopting the mantle of “anti-SJW” (i.e., “anti-social justice warrior”) — earned their salt by inventively ridiculing women who dared to harbor opposing views on gender relations. Oft-favored targets included transgender women, female gamers, and various Tumblr subcultures.
“Before long, GamerGate became the hottest topic on YouTube, pounced on by popular creators [including] a young, bleached-blonde firebrand by the name of Milo Yiannopoulos.”
These enlightened men of YouTube were deeply invested in theoretical ethics, moral relativism, and post-hoc rationalization. It should come as no surprise, then, that in their view, every intellectual enemy also happened to be deeply unethical.
Take the Zoe Post, for example. What was clearly a scorned lover’s depraved manifesto — intended to incur public humiliation on his alleged abuser — was instead championed by anti-SJWs as a wide-reaching call to action with respect to ethics in gaming journalism generally. This phenomenon, GamerGate, hinged on a solitary detail buried in Eron’s schizophrenic jumble of footnotes and SMS screenshots: one of Quinn’s alleged affair partners was none other than Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson.
For her part, Zoë — whose game portfolio leaned heavily on themes of mental health and feminism — had already established herself as somewhat of a polarizing figure by the time the Zoe Post was published. In late 2013, she made claims of harassment against an online support group for anonymous male virgins over 30 known as Wizardchan (yes, really). Now, in the wake of the Zoe Post, incels and anti-feminists alike finally had an ostensibly empirical reason to hate Quinn, amid claims that her supposed relationship with Grayson constituted a quid pro quo for favorable coverage of her work. In actuality, the reporter had only written substantively about Quinn once, in March 2014 — before their alleged romantic involvement ever began.
Before long, GamerGate became the hottest topic on YouTube, pounced on by popular creators like Matt Jarbo (“MundaneMatt”), John Bain (“TotalBiscuit”), TJ Kirk (“The Amazing Atheist”), Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”), Jim Sterling (“Internet Aristocrat”), and, last by certainly not least, a young, bleached-blonde firebrand by the name of Milo Yiannopoulos.
Milo would go on to become the subject of a lifelong ban from Twitter and Facebook for blatant racism, publicly defend pedophilic relationships between gay men and boys, serve as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional intern, work with the open white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and consult on Kanye West’s 2024 presidential campaign (confusingly, all in that order). But at the time, in 2014, he was just a writer and pundit for Breitbart News, the far-right, misogynist, racist, and hilariously conspiratorial news outlet led by then-executive chairman Steve Bannon.
Bannon, whose name you should recognize for all the wrong reasons, has always had his little-piggy fingers in far too many pies. Like a dying slug, you can trace the trail of his viscous putrescence through every decrepit corner of the alt-right political underworld. After co-founding Breitbart in 2007, he went on to serve as a V.P. of Cambridge Analytica, the consulting firm that infamously and illegally spied on millions of Facebook users’ data without their consent and sold that data to Donald Trump’s 2016 political campaign. Then, he became the chief executive of that very same campaign, serving as Trump’s consigliere and key strategist, before later providing media relations advice to Jeffrey Epstein leading up to his 2019 arrest and subsequent death.
Bolstered by Bannon’s support, and in great part due to his admittedly quick wit and boyish charm, Milo Yiannopoulos quickly became the most popular and controversial figure in the GamerGate movement. With feminism, social justice, and political correctness serving as the most frequent inhabitants of his crosshairs, he unloaded daily pithy commentary in the form of think pieces, university-campus speeches, and YouTube videos, often employing his own gay identity as ammunition with which to criticize progressivism.
Milo and his ilk expressed open contempt for traditional media, describing it as dishonest, ill-intentioned, and “fake news.” He decried gender ideology, liberals, and progressives as rising social evils and threats to classical liberalism. He coordinated organized harassment campaigns against publications, journalists, and famous women with which he personally disagreed, and constantly made crass and outlandish statements in public (see his Twitter ban, for example). If these patterns of behavior seem familiar to you, that’s because they mirror the greatest hits of the political career of Donald Trump — a man who Milo has continuously and salaciously referred to as “Daddy.”
After all, Yiannopoulos and Trump were both being fed the same strategy, by the same man, to accomplish the same goal: a complete overhaul of the global political landscape by shifting the Overton Window — the mainstream range of socially acceptable beliefs — firmly toward the alt-right. And, as you’re sure to have already realized — it worked!
Although Yiannopoulos’ career as a semi-serious intellectual would fizzle out shortly after Trump was elected, he set the stage for a whole host of bad actors with similarly contemptuous beliefs to follow in his wake. Suddenly, white supremacists, racists, and misogynists were vying for a seat at the table of legitimate online political discourse.
Take, for instance, Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist, best-selling author, Klonopin addict, and cognitively-impaired carnivore whose male fragility and practiced victimhood made him an anti-SJW star in 2016, in part following a now-unlisted viral video in which he hurled verbal abuse at student supporters of Canada’s Bill C-16 (establishing gender identity as a federally protected class) on the University of Toronto campus where he taught; or take failed comedian Steven Crowder, who briefly enjoyed a popular anti-SJW following with his YouTube show, Louder with Crowder, before facing widespread scrutiny for an incident in which he verbally abused his pregnant wife on video — after complaining on air about her legal right to file for divorce without his consent; or the late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, pernicious debater of university students nationwide, and alleged poster boy for fetal alcohol syndrome.
“The men of the alt-right have always existed on the fringes; the all-too-frequent object of polite society’s derision, they’ve only recently crawled out of our sewer drains and into our bathtubs.”
Milo and his antics even helped spawn post-modern white supremacist movements like Nick Fuentes’ Groypers, neo-nazis who depend on plausible deniability to spew hateful nazi rhetoric with an irony-steeped smile (“if I take one hour to cook a batch of cookies and Cookie Monster has 15 ovens working 24 hours a day, every day for five years, how long does it take Cookie Monster to make 6 million batches of cookies?”).
Now, more than a decade later, we are still struggling with the social ramifications of a contemptible WordPress post that got way more attention than it deserved. Behavior of the sort which previously would not have been tolerated in the most toxic of online spaces is now lauded from the South Lawn of the White House. Media has all but completely lost its credibility. The Republican Party has a serious nazi problem (as in, that’s what almost all of them now are), and the Democrats are little more than controlled opposition. All this because the human embodiment of Jabba the Hutt saw an opportunity to capitalize on video games becoming a little too ‘woke.’
The men of the alt-right have always existed on the fringes; the all-too-frequent object of polite society’s derision, they’ve only recently crawled out of our sewer drains and into our bathtubs. Perhaps that’s why they share such a strong mutual identity — one that often fills the gaps left in a life otherwise bereft of meaningful human connection. And perhaps that’s why they exhibited such righteous anger — such wrath — in their onslaught of women and progressives during GamerGate. Maybe, like Jules in Pulp Fiction, they misguidedly saw themselves as protecting a principle worth upholding:
If only — like Jules — they had, at some point, decided to stop being the ‘tyranny of evil men’ and tried a little harder to be the ‘shepherd.’
Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, sports, tech, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed it.
The take on Banon 👌