Why #GamerGate Should Be Showing Solidarity with #FreeChuck

This Sunday, I asked /r/KotakuInAction what we should do about the Chuck C. Johnson affair. I was expecting a lukewarm response, and the end result was exactly that. A few people discussed how great Johnson was at trolling SJWs and how they loved him for it, a few others said his methods were too extreme, and Nicky Nyberg even graced us with his presence to complain about Johnson’s work in tracking down the mysterious “Jackie” from the UVA hoax. The overwhelming majority, of course, said something along the lines of “it’s not our problem.” Fair enough, I suppose. Except now, it actually has become our problem.

For those of you don’t know, Chuck C. Johnson is a journalist who runs his own site, GotNews.com. Johnson’s work has been, well, provocative to say the least. Most of it is investigative work, blowing the lid off of stories that most of the mainstream media doesn’t want to touch. I had first heard of Johnson when he filed suit in Ferguson to obtain Michael Brown’s arrest records. I had a great laugh when he exposed the two reporters responsible for leaking Darren Wilson’s home address. He made national news during the aforementioned UVA controversy- he was one of the first reporters to reveal that the Rolling Stone story was a hoax, and put a great deal of effort into finding out who this “Jackie” that Rolling Stone cited was. He made a lot of enemies, and Gawker started a vile, scatological smear campaign against him. Having made enemies with Gawker, he reached out to #GamerGate. Of course, since he had nothing of value to offer, #GamerGate obviously refused to be his personal army.

Most recently, Johnson made a tweet asking fans of GotNews to donate to him, promising he’d go after Ferguson/Baltimore agitator Deray McKesson. In particular, Johnson said he was going to “take out” Deray. Hoping to protect one of their own, twitter SJWs immediately rallied to mass-report the post as a “death threat,” with Deray’s encouragement. Caving to mass pressure, Twitter suspended Johnson. That was when I came to KiA, asking what we should do.

Since then, the situation has only gotten worse. Upon discovering his suspension would be permanent, Johnson made an alternate account. That’s standard procedure. I’ve done it plenty of times- I’m on my second account for my blogging and on a second account for personal use (the third actually got perma’d, but I discovered the second was only temporarily suspended). However, twitter banned this alt fairly quickly, much to my surprise. Still, I suppose it was reasonable, given how he admitted it was an alt to ban-evade, and the angry mob was still angry. It wasn’t too feasible to believe that he was targeted for mass-reporting again.

Then things finally got weird. The twitter account for GotNews suddenly vanished. Obviously, Chuck C. Johnson runs the account. But seeing someone’s legitimately professional twitter account gone like that? I can’t ever recall a precedent for it. I’m not alone, either- folks like Milo Yiannopoulos and the Popehat team even noted that this was a bit bizarre and over the line, along with twitter’s steadfast refusal to reinstate Johnson despite the offending tweet being obviously misunderstood.

But that was only the tip of the iceberg: in an interview with Milo yesterday, Johnson claimed that he had been ip-banned from twitter. For those not in the know, an ip ban is the most severe sanction twitter has to offer- normally reserved for dealing with automated spam systems, twitter’s own FAQ makes it a point to say that they don’t ip ban people. On top of that, prolific hacktivist weev, who was supposedly working with Johnson on understanding the AdultFriendFinder leaks, received a mysterious e-mail from twitter support claiming that he was encouraging his followers to harass people. I’ve never seen this sort of e-mail before, and you’d think with roughly 9 months of #GamerGate I would have. All I can think of is that weev was one of the first people to start the #FreeChuck and #GingerRevolution tags, along with twitter user @Jokeocracy, AKA Duck Enlightenment.

More and more, we’re seeing signs that twitter is engaging in blatant censorship*. It doesn’t matter who Johnson is, or what he’s done in the past, this just is flat-out not okay. If we let twitter get away with this, then there’s a good chance that they’ll come for us next. We all know twitter is compromised, or “pozzed” as I like to say. But so far, they’ve done very little to stop us. Rogue is still here, I’m still here, almost everyone from day one who wants to stay is still here. We need to make it clear that twitter can’t expect to do this to anyone without there being blowback of the highest level.

So what is there to be done? Well, most of the organizing is going on in the two twitter hashtags I mentioned earlier: #FreeChuck and #GingerRevolution. #JeSuisChuckJohnson was also tried, but it’s too long. If we could really boost those hashtags, that would be a great start. Hell, getting them trending with #GamerGate support would be a great show of force. Second, you could change your avatar to this picture right here. If we flood twitter in a sea of orange, they’d feel even more pressure. Remember- the more vocal and persistent we are, the more pressure we put on twitter leadership. I’d also encourage you to read GotNews and help share GotNews links, if not just to spite the people who want it to go away.

This isn’t about spiting SJWs, though. This is about standing up against censorship and silencing. If we’ve been receptive to Ian Miles Cheong despite his past, we can do the same with Chuck C. Johnson. We need to keep twitter open and keep the web free for everyone, even the people we don’t like. This is a chance to show the world what we stand for.

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*For those of you who are going to say “BUT ONLY THE GOVERNMENT CAN CENSOR PEOPLE, NOT A PRIVATE PLATFORM!” allow me to present you with a three point rebuttal:

1. Given that the primary target of weev and Johnson’s collaborative work on the AFF leaks is to find government employees using the service, there is more than enough reason to believe that the government is in on this. We all know that they aren’t too fond of leakers making them look bad.
2. Privately-owned services are essentially sovereign entities. While they are legally allowed to silence individual voices in their sphere of influence, it is for all intents and purposes censorship on a much smaller scale. Since the english language doesn’t have a word for this, “censorship” fits my purpose.
3. Blow me.

GDC, DiGRA, and the Delusions of Academia

One thing I’m glad #GamerGate has done is helped spread awareness of what’s going on in the gaming industry. Before all of this, I had never even HEARD of DiGRA. Honestly, now I’m starting to wish I hadn’t, because the sheer degeneracy on display makes me physically ill. I’m not even sure why I’m so shocked- when I was in college I witnessed first hand how genuinely awful academia was. But DiGRA manages to take things to a new level, that just astounds me.

To begin with, let’s talk about why academia is so awful. If you want a primer on why I generally disdain higher education, you can start here. The goal of academia can generally be summarized as advancing society through research. Unfortunately, for the most part that’s almost entirely redundant in a capitalist society. The largest innovations in technology and science in recent years have almost always come from the private sector. After all, private sector research inevitably leads to a new commercial product, which leads to more jobs in production, and more goods for sale, which is good for the overall economy of the nation. Of course, not all fields are created equal. If the private sector takes all the hot fields where progress is in high demand, that leaves academia with, well, everything else.

If you’re familiar with the alternative right or even the right at all, you’re well aware of the rest of the picture. If not, let me explain this. Almost all of academia is overwhelmingly liberal and progressive. All the work is run through a liberal filter. For instance, if you were to bring up the transformation of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, it would be dismissed as irrelevant due to the authoritarian, legalistic, anti-egalitarian policies of the government. Somehow, the discomfort of a few natives under apartheid invalidates the miraculous success of colonial states like Rhodesia or South Africa. The era of Manifest Destiny and western expansion is somehow treated as a shameful period in American History rather than an ideal time. It’s a complete degenerate cesspit with the most skewed priorities imaginable. Rather than actually advancing society and civilization, a higher priority is put on the feelings of utterly unimportant individuals.

So obviously, this carries over to DiGRA. Let’s compare DiGRA to the GDC for a moment. For all intents and purposes, the GDC is the private sector equivalent of DiGRA. At GDC, you’ll see talks mostly oriented towards the business side of things. For better or worse, DiGRA are professionals. Everything they do is dictated by the industry and the profit motive. As I’ve noted before, you are going to find periodic worthwhile discussions at GDC where real talk can happen. Even the pozzed portion of GDC is still kept in line by capitalism. The feminist talks are given with the intent of gaining and retaining female customers. Hardly ideal, but there could be worse.

And that worse usually finds itself in DiGRA. I browsed the #DiGRA2015 tag today on twitter and was appalled by the sheer nonsense of what I was reading. Most of it was absolutely meaningless- comparisons of Mario to Nichetze, rambling about tabletop game mechanics, and other pretentious nonsense that has no impact on making games that sell. Because DiGRA isn’t for professionals who make games and rely on those games making money- it’s for academics who need grants to justify whatever asinine research they want. None of this is actually beneficial or important to the games industry- it won’t make anyone any money.

As I mentioned in a twitter rant, as a history student, most of this DiGRA nonsense reminds me of Weimar Germany’s “culture” in the sense that it’s totally vapid. Back in the post-war era, Germany was rife with rampant inflation, socialist/anarchist/communist terrorism, and plenty of other problems. However, the intellectual and cultural “elite” of Germany, the artists, filmmakers, and writers, were all more obsessed with making movies about women and gays and the deconstruction of traditional values than they were actually fixing Germany. For all of Hitler’s faults, at the very least he was initially acting for the good of the nation.

The most irritating thing in all of this is that despite their complete lack of worth, DiGRA still has relevance. As Sargon of Akkad has shown, DiGRA writing still finds its way into the gaming press. So as much as I’d love to ignore this little gathering of utterly worthless people, I have to begrudgingly realize that it is a very real problem that exists. Make no mistake- it is for the good of the industry, perhaps even society as a whole, that DiGRA and their degenerate nonsense about “queer mechanics” and such be removed from gaming. They have nothing of value to offer us as gamers. They have nothing of value to offer developers and publishers. They have nothing of value to offer to us at all. They are nothing but a toxic drain upon the community.

So yeah, vitriol and all aside, it should be the goal of #GamerGate to forcibly remove DiGRA from the industry and the culture around it. There should be no quarter for their utterly useless, irrelevant, and outright degenerate nonsense. We must make it overwhelmingly clear that this is our territory, and that they are not welcome.

Time to take the gloves off, #GamerGate

So if you haven’t noticed, my last two posts have been using more and more increasingly extreme rhetoric. I’ve been encouraging #GamerGate to go on the offensive, and mobilize to, for all intents and purposes, thoroughly exterminate SJWs from geek culture. I get that it sounds caustic, and almost like what an SJW would say. Let me explain why I feel the way I do.

Most of #GamerGate are rational, open-minded individuals who are generally benevolent and good-natured. The average #GamerGate member wouldn’t hurt a fly. While that’s fine and good, that often comes with a crippling flaw: the mistaken belief that everyone is as logical and benevolent as you are. The  Much like a freshman discussing foreign policy, they assume all people are rational actors. (Nick B. Steves and I had a conversation on this topic Wednesday.) There remains the foolish notion in #GamerGate that the enemies can be reasoned with and eventually converted to our side. That is blatantly, obviously untrue.

Let me explain recent events to you: SJW complaining prompted Gratipay to order two of my personal idols, weev and Hotwheels, to close their accounts. Likewise, Patreon forcibly removed Encyclopedia Dramatica’s accounts. The aim here is simple: SJWs hope that if they deprive men like weev and Hotwheels of a platform to do business, they will be forced to close up shop and shut down. Their goal is to drive both men out of tech, for the crime of opposing them. They refuse to “coexist”. For them, this is a black-and-white issue: they either most dominate the field, or not participate in it at all.

Likewise, there is the very recent event at the Calgary Expo, where a group of pro-#GamerGate women were forcibly asked to leave, because their booth sold #GamerGate merchandise. It doesn’t matter if they’re a threat or not: the end goal for SJWs is the complete and utter annihilation of #GamerGate and anyone who supports #GamerGate. From there, they can proceed to push their “convert or perish” doctrine onto gaming unopposed.

These are not rational, reasonable human beings. There is no “negotiations” with them. They demand nothing short of total compliance. They do not want peace, they do not want compromise, they do not want coexistence. They want the systemic silencing and marginalization of everyone who is not on their side. Everything is filtered through their worldview: their compassion and empathy is purposefully crippled in order to maximize their effectiveness. Their perception of events is dictated through ideology. Their reactions to events are only based on dogma. They have surrendered their individuality to the greater good.

Thus, #GamerGate needs to realize that SJWs must be removed entirely from gaming and all of nerd culture. We have to stop acting like these are some misguided folks who need to be shown the light. Instead, we have to be more forceful. Don’t even draw the line, just push them back and don’t stop pushing. We must make it very clear that SJWs are not welcome on social media, or in gaming, or in any other environment. We must create an atmosphere where they do not feel invited or welcome. We have to do to them what they want to do to us- anything less will allow them to continue to push their toxic ideology and hurt people.

This isn’t one of my big long thousand-word posts. This is me making things simple: we have to stop humoring the enemy. We need to treat them like enemies. We have to be more aggressive, more brutal, more vicious. Stop yelling at each other over petty stuff like someone calling @srhbutts a dude- he’s the enemy, he doesn’t matter, whatever helps push him out of the picture is good. Leave your perceptions of “right” and “wrong” at the door. This is a culture WAR, not a culture disagreement. War is an ugly, brutal thing, and we must take an ugly, brutal approach in handling our enemy. We cannot stop until we are entirely certain that fandom will be safe from the SJW menace.

That being said, we should still respect neutrals. My theory is that if we put enough pressure on the SJWs, they’ll lash out randomly and wind up attacking neutrals. Suddenly it goes from “both sides are dicks” to “this side is absolute garbage.” Above all else, the neutrals are who we should hold sacred- we’re doing this to protect them from the SJW threat, even if they don’t think it exists. Ultimately, we need to go to the trenches for our hobby. This is going to get ugly, but our goal is a righteous one.

#GamerGate and the Puppy Coup, Round 2: Breaking Windows and Redefining the Norm

Of course I’m going to keep talking about the Hugos, last week was the first post I ever made that made me any money. But seriously, all jokes aside, there’s a lot more I want to talk about on the matter. Like I said last week, this is a big deal. How could I contain it to just one blog post? This is, along with #GamerGate, a defining moment in the history of geek fandom.

What sparked this second post was a reddit conversation by some liberals discussing the broken window effect. For those of you who don’t know, the best description of the broken window effect and its application comes from Malcom Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” The idea is that small, petty crimes in urban environments like public drinking, vandalism, and toll-jumping contribute to a social atmosphere where larger, more troublesome crimes like robbery, rape, and assault are more likely to happen. If a window is broken and not fixed, it becomes acceptable to break windows. When breaking windows is acceptable, soon other petty crimes become acceptable. When those crimes become acceptable, larger crimes soon become acceptable. One thing leads to another, and soon you get Detroit.

Broken window theory was one of the driving forces behind Rudy Guliani’s policy that effectively turned New York City around. “The Tipping Point” focuses on the Guliani administration’s cleaning graffiti off of subway cars in order to help curb toll-jumping. By keeping the cars cleaner and nicer, it created an atmosphere that favored civilization over crime. Guliani’s administration cleaned up NYC in other ways as well- he rid Times Square of most of the vice that it was famous for, and made it a family destination. He encouraged a more strict NYPD that cracked down harder on petty crime, creating an atmosphere of public order. In Singapore, the great Lee Kuan Yew did the same thing, cracking down on minor transgressions like spitting, littering, and chewing gum in public as to create order.

Nowadays, broken window theory has fallen out of favor. While only a select few question its effectiveness, liberals soon realized that whenever you build your police policy around the broken windows theory, it means that more black people wind up in prison for criminal behavior. In fact, the idea of improving the neighborhood to keep crime rates down often eventually leads to gentrification. In fact, you could argue that the new ideology of “Dinduism” to spring up from the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown incidents was coined in direct response to broken window theory: it doesn’t matter that Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown or Eric Garner were acting in a way that was detrimental to public order- neighborhood watch or even the police keeping tabs on them to enforce said order is just racist!

The greater irony in all of this is that liberals love to use broken window theory. Of course, rather than use it to preserve public order, they use it to create a more “equal” society. The entire reason why liberals get so mad over “micro-aggressions” is because those are their broken windows- minor, seemingly harmless actions that reinforce bad attitudes which create an undesirable society. Thus, to the liberal, every single bold anti-liberal, anti-leftist transgression that goes unpunished helps set the precedent that this sort of wrongthink is okay.

This explains the mass amount of rage over the Puppy Coup. More often than not, the rage comes back to one single target: Vox Day. Most of the Sad Puppies are moderate liberals and moderate right-wingers. To them, the Sad Puppy slate is about restoring balance and neutrality to the Hugo Awards. But Vox Day’s Rabid Puppy slate is even more offensive and more enraging- because it means someone as brazenly, unabashedly anti-liberal as Vox Day can win an award. It means that Vox Day has power and influence. It’s him breaking a window and them being unable to punish him for it. The anti-Puppy old guard is screaming for blood, because they know how the slippery slope works. If Vox Day can participate in Sci-Fi/Fantasy, it means people like Vox Day who agree with Vox Day’s views are also welcome. It means that now, evil right-wing people like myself will start to participate in SFF.

That’s also why the leftist rage against #GamerGate has been so severe. Leftists hate #GamerGate because #GamerGate hurt leftists and continues to hurt them, and no one is getting punished for it. Nero is going to E3. Brandon and Liz now write for the Escapist. Jen Dawe and Rogue both got their games on steam, and TFYC is likely to follow. #GamerGate is not going away, #GamerGate is only becoming more visible and more culturally influential in gaming. #GamerGate has broken so many windows.

And ultimately, we need to break even more windows. We need to find more windows and break them. We need to flood the comments sections of anti-#GamerGate websites and make our presence known. We need to find a way around the block lists so we can make it very clear to the opposition that twitter is our territory. We need to spread our shit-talk of SJWs to the public sphere, and go public. Every time #GamerGate gets to transgress against the SJW norm without consequences, we make transgressing against them more acceptable.

One of my personal idols is weev. I get that it’s kind of weird for a gay sperg to like weev, but the man is simply brilliant. He once said to me that his goal was “to widen the overton window until genocide becomes acceptable”. In a sense, Encyclopedia Dramatica has done just that: it’s become the perfect tool to attack the SJW establishment without consequence. Someone on /r/GamerGhazi was chimping out quite hard because googling “Sarah Nyberg” brought up little Nicky’s page on ED. If anyone wants to look up nick Nyberg’s body of work, the first thing they see is that he’s a sexual deviant and complete waste of flesh. ED helps give a platform for otherwise unspeakable ideas and lets people find them, internalize them, and spread them. Part of what helps keep troll behavior alive is that ED can exist without repercussions. Weev is part of what was the most successful window-breaker in internet history.

And yes, I know weev doesn’t think too highly of #GamerGate. But that doesn’t make him any less brilliant. We need to take a page from his book and be more aggressive and transgressive. Every time we hurt SJWs and get away with it, we de-legitimatize them and make hurting SJWs more acceptable. Every time we take away a safe space, we assert that we’re the norm, not them. Every time an Ellen Pao or Sabrina Erdely gets publicly humiliated, they are forced back into the shadows. At this point the #GamerGate doctrine should be to attack, attack attack.

Think about it this way- the more people publicly shit on Gawker and Vox, the easier it will be to pull away their advertisers through our e-mailing. The more vocally people shit on Anita and friends, the harder it will be for the games press to ignore it or try to rebuke us. The more #GamerGate embeds itself into gaming culture, the harder it’ll be for games press and SJWs to take it over. We need to break all of the windows and graffiti all of the subway cars, and change things so #GamerGate is the norm.

The Hugo Awards, the “Puppy Coup” and #GamerGate

First off, I’d like to wish all my readers a very happy and blessed Easter. I was unfortunately forced to attend church by my parents: it’s not what you think, we’re Episcopalian and both our Interim Rector and Bishop are women. Hopefully all of you out there in the alt-right have better churches to visit. And for my Odinist readers, next time you want to torch a church, consider burning an Episcopal one if you can’t find any Unitarian Universalist ones.

Now then, let’s move on to the big story of the weekend: The Hugo Award nominations. Let’s start by looking over the nominees, shall we? I copy/pasted this from their website, with my own observations:

Some more random thoughts and musings

This week has been pretty hectic, so I’ll just throw out some random stuff. We’re celebrating my dad’s birthday almost all this week, since he’s actually managed to take some time off of work. Hence, things have been pretty slow and plodding.

• I just got back from seeing Kingsmen. Excellent movie, amazing choreography in the action sequences. It deals heavily with class in England, but in a way that reminds me of Justine Tunney’s plans for Occupy: The elite are detached and awful, and must be replaced with a new elite. It’s unapologetic with its chauvinism and political incorrectness, something that’s also quite refreshing. It’s already on its way out of theaters, but I highly advise you see it if you get the chance. Tomorrow we go and see the new Fast and Furious, and I’m a little less than excited for it.

• I’ve been considering switching from Gratipay to Patreon- it seems that Patreon gives you a much wider audience and more potential to make some money. Bryce has been doing fairly well for himself, making a few hundred a month. Obviously, I don’t intend to ever get that degree of cash. I want my crowdfunding to be a bit more like a public tip jar, where people who like my work can consider donating to me. Maybe it’s my chronic humility, but I don’t see the idea of making a living off of the donations of random strangers to be that feasible or secure. Even though right now I’m shit broke, I still intend to start working again, since to me crowdfunding has always been supplementary in nature.

• I recently got mentioned in TRS’s Daily Shoah, and my heart literally skipped a beat. Getting praise from guys like them, Nick B. Steves, Common Filth, and even Nick Land  is worth more than any donations. I know I sound like a huge kiss-ass, but I put all of these guys on a pedestal, and knowing that they like my work really speaks volumes.

• InternetAristocrat is back, now calling himself Mister Metokur. I’d love to chat with him for TheRightDrama (and I’d love for him to go on Between Two Lampshades for TRS) but honestly, what do I have to offer him? Still, best I can do is add him onto my Beginner’s Guide to the Alt-right. I recall him answering a question of mine months ago about him being into strict Constitutionalism, and I’d love to follow up on that. IA/MM/Jim seems to be a really smart guy, and I’m really interested to see what he’ll be doing next.

• Speaking of which, it looks like the guide itself is getting some traffic, which makes me happy. My greatest fear though, is still that I’m enabling entryists. I want to make it clear that my guide, a work in progress, isn’t necessarily for neoreaction. As Dampier reminds us, Neoreaction is not a populist movement. Our strength is in our content, not our numbers. Our goal is not to change the world, but to instead help create the people who will change the world. It’s actually better that TRV, rather than help introduce people to neoreaction, instead diverts and directs them elsewhere.

• I’ve unfortunately relapsed and started playing Minecraft again. Despite the hilariously awful community that the game spawned, I still think Minecraft is genuinely good. It’s extremely satisfying to build yourself a humble little cabin by the river, then expand that cabin into a farm, then slowly improve your farm with brick roads, a dock, and other features. Of course, it’s best when played singleplayer- just one man on his own, braving the elements and even thriving. That in itself is amazingly reactionary: Man makes mother nature his bitch. There’s also another important aspect: you have to work for everything. It’s not like Garry’s Mod where you can just spawn in stuff to play with: everything in Minecraft has to be either built or harvested. It actually builds a really healthy attitude where you learn to work for results.

• I’ve also been playing the shit out of Medieval II: Total War. So far, my Spanish empire has removed kebab from the Iberian peninsula in a glorious Reconquista before also annexing Portugal. Meanwhile, the Knights of Santiago embarked on a successful crusade, seizing Antioch and the surrounding areas of Aleppo and Adana as well as claiming the Holy Lance of Longinus. I had also discovered the Ark of the Covenant in Cairo, but the brave soul who did it tragically perished on the voyage home. At the present, greedy Frenchmen are trying to snatch up Pamplona from me, but the joke’s on them-  We’ve sailed the Mediterranean to take Toulouse right from the little bastards!

• In wrestling news, this happened. It might just be my favorite Wrestlemania moment yet if not just because of how fucking dumb it is. While Triple H’s overgrown ego will hurt the company in the long run, his stupid, overdone Wrestlemania entrances will always be lovable. Seriously, go check this shit out.

• I’ve started reading Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. While I really like them, it feels like a rehash of the stuff I read in the Analects of Confucius. And while I know I’m gonna piss off a LOT of people by saying this, I prefer Confucius at this point. Aurelius focuses heavily on theory, while Confucius tends to take a more practical approach to his version of stoicism and traditionalism. I’ve always preferred to read about practice more than theory, and part of what I intend to do with TRV is to help translate theory into practice.

• Speaking of practice, the tragic passing of Lee Kuan Yew has me considering buying his autobiography. Admittedly, my reading list is quite out of whack- I need to finish Aurelius before jury duty on Monday so I can start reading Evola (Yes, I intend to read Julius Evola while on jury duty). At some point in all of this I need to get back to Moldbug, but I also want to read Spengler too, even though I don’t own anything by him yet. And somehow in the middle of all of this I need to fit Plato in!

So yeah, expect things to be fairly silent for the next few days- tomorrow I spend more family time, then Sunday is Easter and all the festivities that entails, and then after that it’s two days in the county court hoping I get to sit in on something interesting. I’ll plug my gratipay again as well as my paypal– donations will go towards me going somewhere nice to lunch and finally buying myself a new pipe!

Let’s Play The Crab Enoch Text Adventure Bro- Status Signaling Simulator

In order to shamelessly piggyback off of celebrate Nick B. Steves’s appearance on TheRightStuff.biz’s Daily Shoah, I threw together in an hour carefully recorded and produced my first ever let’s play! This is a simple, 15-minute playthrough of TheRightStuff’s “The Crab Enoch Text Adventure Bro- Status Signaling Simulator”, a hilarious little twine game featuring Crab Enoch, a star of the Daily Shoah.

Check it out here!

Pay me here and I might make more videos!

A Quick Guide to Entryists

Since I published A Beginner’s Guide to the Alternative Right, I’ve been worried that my work is encouraging entryists. But then I began to ask myself, “What is an entryist?” So I decided I’d jot down a few notes on what makes an entryist and why entryists are bad for neoreaction. By no means is this a complete list of entryist behaviors, merely a few obvious warning signs that I’ve come to recognize.

• Most entryists are not in neoreaction to learn or study, but rather to preach and spread their own personal agenda to as many people as possible. They are filled with narcissism and unwarranted self-importance. They have no interest in neoreaction as a whole, only what it can do for them and their image. They do not read NRx blogs or NRx books. They instead only care about their own output.

• Entryists have the annoyingly democratic obsession with how many people listen to them rather than who listens to them or what feedback they get. Instead of seeking out the opinions and input of more established NRx writers, they strive to get as many views and shares on their work as possible. Suddenly it ceases to become about quality work and more about who can get the most hits. Neoreaction will cease to be ideological and become as depressingly corporate as the GOP.

• Status signaling is another entryist habit: rather than produce original work, they parrot NRx ideas and slogans endlessly as to feel accepted in the movement. Rather than helping cultivate neoreaction as an intellectual school of thought, they turn it into an echo-chamber of unoriginal yes-men. Even worse is when their status signaling is to groups outside of neoreaction, thus slowly dissolving NRx by integrating it with outsiders.

• It is not uncommon for entryists to cling to other right-wing positions and try to connect them with neoreaction. National socialists are the prime offenders here, who see “NRx” as the new “NSDAP” and ignoring the many differences between the two movements. Neoreaction aims to avoid repeating the failures of twentieth century fascism and national socialism. Some entryists will even endorse the “manosphere” PUA scene, despite it being a degenerate institution that runs contrary to core NRx values.
• Entryists have the annoying tendency to promote democratic activism: rallies, leaflet campaigns, other sorts of mass-media NRx material. I may jokingly refer to neoreaction as the “counter-Illuminati” but the description still fits: we want to be a small, elite group rather than a raging mob. Not only that, but our esoteric nature is our strength- it is much harder for progressive institutions to counter us when they aren’t even aware of us.

• Many entryists have no understanding of social status at all: they simply barge in and treat established NRx writers as their equals. While communication and discussion are healthy, it requires a degree of respectful deference. Otherwise, neoreaction will descend into pure anarchy, as any hope of a core element will be eroded into nothingness.

The main point here is that an entryist is a parasite: he tries to benefit from neoreaction without actually helping or in some cases actually harming it. That is not to say entryists are malicious in nature: most are just stupid, with a few misguided neophytes scattered here and there. It is in the best interest of neoreaction that entryists are marginalized, ignored, and derided. The truly malignant element will be driven out, while the neophytes with genuine potential will hopefully be corrected in their faulty thinking. Neoreaction is not for everyone: it is an anti-democratic movement. We must understand and embrace this if we are to truly come into our own.

Is HP Lovecraft truly Neoreactionary?

It goes without saying that Lovecraft is undoubtedly the most right-leaning author in the sci-fi mainstream. To question his reactionary cred is almost heretical in itself. Nonetheless, even our most core elements deserve rigorous investigation. I’ll start by saying I’ve been a fan of Lovecraft’s work since I was about fifteen, back when I was a bleeding-heart liberal. Back then, I was enraptured by the idea of these freakish monsters and their godlike powers. Indeed, for my sophomore year research paper, I wrote about how Lovecraft’s life directly affected his fiction. Not a bad paper, but being a good little liberal, I failed to see his greater social messages and just dismissed it as archaic, regrettable racism. Having grown up and undergone rampancy, I can look at his work and truly understand his message.

The common sci-fi fan sees Lovecraft’s abominations merely as creative abominations. The more literate of them will assume that such monstrosities are a metaphor for social and cultural decay. However, only the most learned of Lovecraft fans will see that there is no metaphor- indeed, the true horror of Lovecraft’s work is the very real threat of degeneracy and entropy. In The Call of Cthulhu, Cthulhu himself is not the threat to humanity. Indeed, it is never even stated that he is even aware of our existence before his awakening. The true danger is the effect his awakening will have. Mankind will return to his primordial nature: a miserable, primitive, savage existence. Likewise, in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, it is not Dagon and his disciples we are supposed to be wary of, but of a degenerate, savage culture undermining traditional civilization. The Dunwich Horror is about rural decay, and how people will revert to backwards, savage beasts when kept away from culture. Indeed, the real evil in Lovecraft’s story is not the monsters, but is in fact the darker nature of mankind, the destructive side that the monsters simply help bring out. As cliché as the line has become, mankind is the true monster.

Lovecraft’s heroes are quite reactionary: intelligent, learned white men of a socially conservative outlook. They solve their problems through a combination of a carefully honed intellect and a firm sense of virtue. They are not heroic in the sense of being human, but rather in that they are underdogs, merely ordinary men going against impossible odds. Indeed, the fact that Lovecraft often makes a character’s curiosity and fascination with the world outside civilization into a fatal flaw would be unforgivable in modern sci-fi. What’s even more enthralling is how he not only is aware of class difference, but he celebrates it: His heroes are almost always of an upper class, while his villains are either deviant aristocrats or degenerate proles. Any heroic proles are good-natured spirits simply too inept to handle whatever evils are menacing them. And yet, in spite of all of this, Lovecraft’s work is still riddled with liberal ideology.

First and foremost, we need to understand Lovecraft’s background. Howard Phillips Lovecraft is a son of New England. Yes, one of the most conservative authors of the twentieth century is from the home of contemporary liberalism. Lovecraft, however, was raised in a very puritan, conservative part of Rhode Island. This explains why, in spite of his strict belief in human biodiversity (he rejected Hitler and Nazi Germany because he deemed their science to be incorrect) and social tradition, he cannot help but embrace the liberal framework established by his ancestors in Plymouth Bay. Yes, for all of his reactionary posturing, Lovecraft was still part of the Cathedral. His work places a high value on education, especially at the University level. While Lovecraft was primarily interested in the sciences, a division not yet at the whims of progressives, he still never really understood the role that universities play in ongoing social decay. Instead, he buys into the mythology of his puritan ancestors: that the only hope for civilization lies in the enlightened minds of academia. Indeed, while Lovecraft understands the importance of oligarchy in guiding civilization, his taste in oligarchs is somewhat misguided.

There is also a disturbingly luddite trend in Lovecraft’s work. While stories like The Shunned House show mankind triumphing over monsters through science and ingenuity, the vast majority of his stories shun technological advancement. Lovecraft buys into the nonsensical idea that there are some truths mankind is better off not knowing, and some areas that we best left unexplored. In The Mountains Of Madness is essentially one large screed against the human desire to improve and grow. While Lovecraft recognizes the Hobbesian flaws in humanity, he still never really shows any hope that they can be corrected through study and exploration. While not all neoreactionaries share the sentiment that mankind can overcome its flaws, some of Lovecraft’s fiction strongly implies that striving to correct the human condition is a futile and pointless affair. Perhaps most damning of all is Herbert West: Re-Animator, a tale directly lifted from the highly progressive Enlightenment-era novel Frankenstein. The story directly criticizes men for trying to pursue power far beyond their reaches. It’s a very anti-western attitude, criticizing men for their advances in science and technology.

So in the end, can we truly call Lovecraft a neoreactionary? Not quite. While he touches on quite a few key themes and elements of reaction, Lovecraft’s work is still very much within the framework of liberalism. While we can nod our heads in how spot-on his predictions of cultural decay were, we still need to take a more critical viewpoint. His views are very coarse and unrefined in terms of intellectual rigor. They are mere observations and amateur theories rather than actual reactionary content. It would be foolish of me to say that Lovecraft’s work has no place in the alternative right, but we must not venerate him as high as we do the classics. Lovecraft is an entry-level writer, a means of awakening and encouraging individuals to explore the alt-right rather than actually educating already rampant individuals. His work, while entertaining, is hardly genuinely enlightening or interesting.

By no means should we stop reading Lovecraft. In fact, we should encourage people to read his work, and spread interest in it. Lovecraft’s fiction as well as his entire idea of social decay is wonderfully subversive. Stories like True Detective that treat human degeneracy as a disgusting evil are an important part of undermining the Cathedral and liberalism as a whole. As much as his work is hardly serious, high-level literature, it still deserves to stick around for a few more strange aeons, don’t you think?

Thoughts on Altgames, #GamerGate, and the alt-right.

I’m about to do something that will be very, very shocking to my readers, especially the ones that know me: I’m going to endorse an idea of Zoe Quinn’s. Now don’t get me wrong, I still despise Zoe Quinn. She’s an abuser, an adulterer, a liar, and altogether and unpleasant person who doesn’t belong in gaming. But her recent post on the idea of “altgames” is 100% spot on. In it, Quinn describes Alt Games, a spinoff of indie games. Altgames could be defined as DIY games and games criticism made by amateur indie outsiders not as a commercial product to sell, but as a means of expression. In what I think is very spot-on, she compares it to punk rock.

I’ll admit, I’m not well-versed in punk. Most of the pretentious liberal bullshit doesn’t speak to me and makes me roll my eyes. But I do have a history with the genre. When I was an angry kid in my senior year of high school fighting mental illness, I found transgressive punk bands like Anal Cunt and GG Allin And The Murder Junkies. Those bands to me were punk: disaffected dudes who didn’t fit in with the world lashing out in frustration and discontent. It was the same thing that attracted me to black metal: a feeling of general discontent with the world. As I got into college, I forgot about punk. But when I dropped out and started working, I started listening to bands like Blood For Blood and Antiseen: artists who made music for low-class people talking about the lower-class lifestyle. I wasn’t from the white ghettos of Boston or the backwoods of South Carolina, but I was a working man trying to make my way in the world. I felt like an underdog, so I listened to underdog music. It’s helped me really find a sense of contentment with my existence as a prole. So while I’m not 100% punk, I get punk well enough to see what Quinn is going for here with altgames.

If we expand the definition of altgames to include games criticism, then I was altgames before altgames was even given a name. Make no mistake, as much as I’ll shill my gratipay, The Right Vidya (and now The Right Drama!) is a labor of love. It’s my desire to create games writing that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Putting up a new blog post is exhilarating. When Nick Land and Adrian Chmielarz shared my post on Hatred, my heart skipped a beat. To me, getting the attention of a blog like Xenosystems or a dev like Adrian Chmielarz was more valuable than any cash donation. I felt like what I was saying mattered and made a difference. I was helping introduce video games to the alt-right and the alt-right to video games. I was merging the two. I’d like to think that I still am, given how much traffic my posts on KotakuInAction get me.

This is why I’m throwing my support behind the idea of altgames. I get that a lot of people in the alt-right, especially neoreaction, look down on Rachel Haywire for her idea of a punk aesthetic for the right. For most of us, outside decadent skinheads, punk is seen as a degenerate liberal cesspit. I disagree. The key element to punk is that it’s subversive- a word that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the past few weeks. As our alt-right critics will note, there’s a lot of LARPing going on in NRx: too many people talking about what the glorious neoreactionary future will look like and not enough people focusing on the here and now. What we should be doing is focusing on how we can subvert the Cathedral and undermine its reach. I think #GamerGate is a major breakthrough for us: we saw a bunch of young, unassuming enlightenment-friendly types openly challenge their progressive “betters” and manage to keep it going for over six, soon to be seven months so far. Part of the success of #GamerGate lies in the DIY culture that permeates it: you have tons of people making #GamerGate art, starting #GamerGate charity, hosting #GamerGate streams, and even making #GamerGate games. Hell, The Right Vidya was inspired by the DIY culture of #GamerGate. It’s their ability to produce content that has helped them keep going.

But we need to be better than that. What helped turn me on to the alternative right was the work of HP Lovecraft, telling the kind of stories about social decay that no one else told. It helped subvert what I was learning in high school at the time as I realized that Detroit and other urban centers confirmed the predictions in his work. It taught me to look outside the box and embrace esoteric political wisdom. Obviously it wasn’t the only factor: the transgressive punk and black metal that I mentioned before helped me really clarify my distaste for modernity. Neoreaction needs to get on that: we need more media out there that subverts the cathedral and undermines it. And that’s why we need to hop on the altgames train. We need to take advantage of a DIY-centric scene and use it as a means of subversion. Altgames are already pretty big, and they’re only going to get bigger. I think one of the smartest things the alt-right did was to embrace tech, because with the tech boom we grew and prospered. I think when it comes to altgames, this is a boom coming that we could use to our advantage.

As for my brothers and sisters in #GamerGate, the idea of altgames is important to us as well. We all know that the community in the game business is awful: the testimony of guys like Roguestar and the work of the ShortFatOtaku team tells us that much. It’s a closed little circlejerk of industry buddies all working to get each other over, even at the expense of everyone else. Altgames is about realizing that the circlejerk exists and using various platforms like itch.io, twine, Patreon and more to really help break it up. Imagine if the DIY spirit of #GamerGate met with the DIY attitude of altgames? We could build a new, better GDC, a better IGF and Indiecade. We could an alternative to the corrupt, broken industry and build a much better one. The nature of altgames is about trying to empower amateurs and beginners. It’s perfectly in touch with #SolutionSixMonths and #OpRebuild. It’s the perfect platform for #GamerGate to use to help expand our influence and get our message out. We are the real alternative, and we need to make ourselves known.

So in conclusion, I suppose you should think of this post as another call to action. It’s time we stop rolling our eyes at the DIY platforms and start using them to help build the newer, more improved gaming community, whatever that means to you. Now more than ever, it’s become easier to take control and choose where you want to guide a scene. This is perhaps the best chance you’ll get in a long time to make an impact. It’s time you take advantage of it.