A Normie's Guide to the Dissident Right - Part 2 - 2014: The Greate Awokening and Its Consequences, GamerGate, Anti-SJWs, Million Dollar Extreme, /pol/
A Normie’s Guide to the Dissident Right
& the Culture War Era
2014: The Current Year Begins
There are a number of dates one could choose for the Trump Era. Although Trump left office in 2021, he has still been a major focal point of throughout the Biden presidency, and may be in office again until 2028. Most would begin in 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy. But I would place the true start of the Trump Revolution was in 2014, when the Dissident Right really began to take form. This is the year when the Internet went from libertarian, nihilistic, and really apathetic to politics, to a true political force. Anyone familiar with the Internet will recognize this as the year when one of the most infamous events in Internet history took place: GamerGate.
"It's about ethics in videogame journalism!"
-- a superchatter watching a city block in Minneapolis being burned to the ground during the 2020 BLM riots on The Killstream with Ethan Ralph livestream
There is a meme on the Internet that we are living in a "post-GamerGate world," ascribing all of "Clown World," including Trump, the 2020 BLM riots, the January 6 capitol riot, etc. to the consequences of GamerGate.
Someone could probably write an entire book about this event alone. But not me. The truth is, I was actually not very interested in GamerGate at the time, having already been somewhat redpilled by /pol/ and Million Dollar Extreme prior to the event. So I was not really surprised that events unfolded as they did, already possessing a jaded view of the media and politics. Still, due to its immense importance, I will give an extremely brief rundown of the events of GamerGate and 2014. But first, we need to go back even further, all the way to the days just after Occupy Wall Street, in 2011. During this time, an even more important phenomenon than GamerGate occurred: The Great Awokening.
The Great Awokening (circa 2011)
In the past five years, white liberals have moved so far to the left on questions of race and racism that they are now, on these issues, to the left of even the typical black voter.
-- vox.com, April 1 2019 ,“The Great Awokening”, (https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020)
Our results document a marked increase in the prevalence of prejudice-denoting words in news media discourse within the 2010-2019 time frame. The trend precedes the emergence of Donald Trump in the political landscape for most of the terms analyzed but appears to accelerate after 2015. The abrupt and dramatic changes in word frequencies suggest the existence of powerful underlying social dynamics at play.
It is noteworthy that prejudice-denoting words are markedly increasing in prevalence alongside long-term decreases in overt expression of prejudice yet recent increases in the perceived prevalence of such prejudice among the general public. It is our hope that the detailed characterization of the phenomena presented here can pave the way for future studies looking in-depth at potential causal factors for the trends described herein as well as the impact of news media rhetoric on public consciousness and the social implications of growing perceptions of prejudice severity among the general population.
– David Rozado, Jul 19, 2021 “Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse” (https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/ppdwnmd)
The Great Awokening was a political shift in the Left Wing in the early 2010s. During the shift, the Left Wing went from a party centered around economic issues and liberalism to the Left that we know today, dominated by “social justice,” often prescribed to the public by militant ideologues (“social justice warriors”) through illiberal means. It is equivalent to what people call “wokeism” today.
It is unknown exactly how and why the Great Awokening started. These social justice ideas had been taught in some far-Left circles in academia for decades, sometimes reaching back all the way to the 1960s or earlier. They also were popular among a small minority of young people in some online communities, such as Tumblr, whose ideas of “fat acceptance,” “white privilege,” “multiple genders” etc. were seen as a fringe Left Wing counterpart to the fringe Right Wing ideas circulating on 4chan’s /pol/. They were also popular on Left Wing independent news publications such as Buzzfeed and Jezebel (which extended into the realm of gaming journalism, a detail that is about to become very important). Some say that the rise of these independent journalists around the same time as Occupy Wall Street caused these issues to enter the public consciousness, and were then picked up by larger publications.
Another popular theory, which has not been definitively proven, is that the Great Awokening was a direct answer to Occupy Wall Street by the establishment. According to this theory, “the powers that be” used their control over mass media to intentionally stoke racial conflict in order to divide the 99% over social and cultural issues, so that they could not unite against the 1% over economic concerns. In a way, this is the opposite of the former theory, claiming a top-down origin due to mass media rather than a bottom-up origin due to the disruptive force of the Internet.
This theory is supported by the convenient timing, and the supposed role of identity politics in helping to disintegrate Occupy Wall Street (as has been attested to by people involved in the movement). However, it could be that the beginnings of “woke” politics were simply already present organically by the time of Occupy Wall Street to a sufficient degree as to cause conflict along identity lines within the movement to occur. It also relies on the assumption that the 1% perceived Occupy Wall Street as a threat, despite it having virtually no effect on public policy in any way. It also assumes that America’s racial and identity divisions are somehow imposed on Americans inorganically by the establishment rather than being innate, something that is not borne out in the long history of organic racial conflict that did not need to be manufactured in this way.
Whatever the explanation, this political realignment occurred first in the media. Starting around the year 2011, the media began to be filled with wokeist narratives, with a pronounced increase of articles dedicated to racism, sexism, white supremacy, anti-Semitism, homophobia and even transphobia (even though transgenderism was a non-mainstream topic in 2011, 4 years before Obergefell).
Figure 4 illustrates the increasing prevalence of words denoting different types of prejudice in two prestigious newspapers in the United States: The New York Times (in blue) and The Washington Post (in red). A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post. The yearly usage of prejudice related words is highly correlated between both outlets as shown by the Pearson correlation coefficient, r, in the upper left corner of each plot.
– David Rozado, Jul 19, 2021, “Prevalence of Prejudice-Denoting Words in News Media Discourse” (https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/ppdwnmd)
This text is not meant to serve as a rigorous study of the Great Awokening. However it is important to note the basic timeline, as in many ways the far-Right is a reaction to this phenomenon, rather than the other way around. As David Rozado (one of the first to popularize this phenomenon) concludes, this uptick in coverage of identity and culture based issues did not coincide with any uptick in racist attitudes. Race relations were fairly stable in the 2000s, with a “colorblind” consensus in both the mainstream Right and Left Wing. America had just finished electing its first black president to his second term in the White House. However, the Great Awokening changed the media’s coverage of what few racially charged events did occur.
“If there had been no Twitter or Facebook,” Columbia University’s John McWhorter, an early and somewhat skeptical observer of the Awokening, tells me, “Trayvon [Martin] and Mike Brown would have had about as much impact on white thought as, say, Amadou Diallo did.”
-- vox.com, April 1 2019, “The Great Awokening”, (https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020)
The Great Awokening represented a shift from the more liberal consensus of “colorblindness” in which Americans were encouraged to judge people as individuals and pretend not to notice race in any way, to “anti-racism” in which white Americans were encouraged to “check their privilege” and explicitly favor non-whites over whites, in order to make up for past discrimination against non-whites. This has also been called “equality of opportunity” (colorblindness) versus “equality of outcome” (anti-racism). Adherents of the new ideology claimed that race had no basis in genetics but was a “social construct,” and that any differences in the material conditions of whites and non-whites must therefore be caused by racism, even if this racism was not explicit, but hidden somewhere beneath the surface. “Colorblindness,” they said, was simply an effort by white people not to confront their “privilege” and combat this hidden racism.
The Great Awokening also resulted in the beginnings of “political correctness” and “cancel culture.”
Cancel culture is a phrase contemporary to the late 2010s and early 2020s used to refer to a cultural phenomenon in which an individual deemed to have acted or spoken in an unacceptable manner is ostracized, boycotted, shunned, fired or assaulted, often aided by social media.
—Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancel_culture)
This is when the shift from “free speech” being Left-coded to being Right-coded occurred. It was this that would set the stage for the conflict between the Great Awokening and the 4chan-influenced, politically incorrect culture of the Internet, which would result in GamerGate.
GamerGate: The New Year 1
“Gamers” — as the videogame enthusiasts called themselves, especially in online communities — were already beginning to chafe against the Great Awokening. This was because of what gamers saw as the unnecessary injection of Left Wing “woke” politics into videogames. Gaming journalism, which had grown into a large industry, was much more female and Left Wing than the gaming audience, which was predominantly white and predominantly male. On top of this, many gaming journalists were seen as not hardcore videogame enthusiasts but rather journalists first and foremost, with videogames simply being a lucrative beat.
Videogames had begun to be attacked and critiqued by Leftists, especially feminists. Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency became popular with Leftist women.
Since mobile, indie and retro inspired games are built on a legacy of inequality in the medium the new wave of 80s and 90s nostalgia has brought with it a resurrection of the worst of the old-school damsel in distress stereotypes. Indeed, many of these new titles essentially function as love letters to the trope as a way of paying homage to classic games of years gone by.
-- Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency, Aug 1, 2013, “Damsel in Distress: Part 3” (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anita_Sarkeesian)
Like many videogames journalists, Anita Sarkeesian was not a videogame enthusiast, but saw videogames as a new, 21st century avenue for her journalistic and social justice aspirations:
For me, the big picture has always been culture change, and pop culture was just a vehicle and a medium through which cultural change can happen or it can be influenced by; so it's not actually about videogames. But it's about videogames, right?
-- Anita Sarkeesian, Fighting for a Cause, June 24, 2016, “VidCon 2016 @34:06” (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Anita_Sarkeesian)
Not only were gaming journalists seen as “not real gamers” who were hostile to videogames and intent on “shoving their politics down people’s throats,” but they were often directly hostile towards gamers themselves. Some of the best example of this can be found in the reactions of gaming journalists to “GamerGate” which exacerbated this hostility and made it more explicit. One example is the infamous “The End of Gamers” blogpost, written by Dan Golding on his Tumblr.
The last few weeks in videogame culture have seen a level of combativeness more marked and bitter than any beforehand.
First, a developer—a woman who makes games who has had so much piled on to her that I don’t want to perpetuate things by naming her—was the target of a harassment campaign that attacked her personal life and friendships. Campaigns of personal harassment aimed at game developers are nothing new. They are dismayingly common among those who happen to be women, or not white straight men, and doubly so if they also happen to make the sort of game that in any way challenges the status quo, even if that challenge is only made through their very existence. The viciousness and ferocity with which this campaign occurred, however, was shocking, and certainly out of the ordinary. This was something more than routine misogyny (and in games, it often is routine, shockingly). It was an ugly spectacle that should haunt and shame those involved for the rest of their lives.
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And lest you think that I’m exaggerating about the irrelevance of the traditionally male dominated gamer identity, recent news confirms this, with adult women outnumbering teenage boys in game-playing demographics in the USA. Similar numbers also often come out of Australian surveys. The predictable ‘what kind of games do they really play, though—are they really gamers?’ response says all you need to know about this ongoing demographic shift. This insinuated criteria for ‘real’ videogames is wholly contingent on identity (i.e. a real gamer shouldn’t play Candy Crush, for instance).
On the evidence of the last few weeks, what we are seeing is the end of gamers, and the viciousness that accompanies the death of an identity. Due to fundamental shifts in the videogame audience, and a move towards progressive attitudes within more traditional areas of videogame culture, the gamer identity has been broken. It has nowhere to call home, and so it reaches out inarticulately at invented problems, such as bias and corruption, which are partly just ways of expressing confusion as to why things the traditional gamer does not understand are successful (that such confusion results in abject heartlessness is an indictment on the character of the male-focused gamer culture to begin with).
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The last few weeks therefore represent the moment that gamers realised their own irrelevance. This is a cold wind that has been a long time coming, and which has framed these increasingly malicious incidents along the way. Videogames have now achieved a purchase on popular culture that is only possible without gamers.
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On some level, the grim individuals who are self-centred and myopic enough to be upset at the prospect of having their medium taken away from them are absolutely right. They have astutely, and correctly identified what is going on here. Their toys are being taken away, and their treehouses are being boarded up. Videogames now live in the world and there is no going back.
I am convinced that this marks the end. We are finished here. From now on, there are no more gamers—only players.
-- Dan Golding, “The End of Gamers” (https://www.tumblr.com/dangolding/95985875943/the-end-of-gamers)
Kotaku, a major videogame publication at the time, echoed these sentiments in the wake of GamerGate:
I've been working at Kotaku for nearly eight years now, and while I've seen some online kerfuffles over various issues in that time, I've never seen anything like the past two weeks.
There has been so much hate. So many angry words, so many accusations, over...what? videogames? Women in videogames? People who write about videogames?
It would be absurd if it hadn't forced people out of their homes for fear of their personal safety.
...
"These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish Internet-arguers — they are not my audience. They don't have to be yours. There is no 'side' to be on, there is no 'debate' to be had."
– Luke Plunkett, “We Might Be Witnessing The 'Death of An Identity'”, Kotaku, August 28, 2014 (https://kotaku.com/we-might-be-witnessing-the-death-of-an-identity-1628203079)
Of course these sentiments did not arise solely as a reaction to GamerGate. Quite the opposite, GamerGate was a backlash by gamers against the contempt that these Left Wing journalists had for their own audience. In many ways, GamerGate was the entire Trump 2016 campaign in miniature. An uprising by predominantly white male conservatives against an establishment and mainstream media that reviled them. Thus the meme that as of 2025, we are living in the 10th year AG (anno GamerGate).
So what was GamerGate and how did it occur? Well, of course, it started on 4chan. 4chan culture and gamer culture were already tied closely together. Since the dawn of the Internet, there was a lot of crossover between fans of videogames, fans of anime, and Internet enthusiasts. /v/ - Video Games was one of the largest and most popular boards on 4chan.
The controversy began with indie developer Zoe Quinn, and a text-based game created by her, Depression Quest. This game was in many ways the epitome of everything that the Left Wing movement, led by gaming journalists, wanted games to be. It was female, focused on narrative and themes rather than gameplay (thus allowing it to be a vessel for Left Wing propaganda), and lacked technical finesse (typical of the Leftist preference for art that is conceptual rather than demonstrating technical skill). Of course this game received rave reviews from mainstream videogame journalists, while being loathed by the “gamer” community on 4chan (much as conservatives often trash other Left Wing art while critics praise it, a la Rotten Tomatoes movies where the critic score is 99% and audience score is 2%).
Meanwhile, a post by Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, was posted on 4chan, “exposing” Zoe Quinn.
On August 16th, 2014, game developer Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni published an online expose detailing their relationship called the Zoe Post. In the expose Gjoni claims Quinn cheated on him with several men in the gaming industry, including Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson. These claims were subsequently refuted by Kotaku editor-in-chief Steve Totilo in a post on the website. In this post he claims that the only time Nathan mentioned Quinn was in a post about a gaming competition known as GameJam. The day following the publication of the Zoe Post, YouTuber MundaneMatt uploaded a video critiquing Quinn's game Depression Quest and commenting on the alleged affairs with men working in the videogame industry. The video was subsequently removed due to a copyright claim allegedly by Quinn for using a still image from the game. On August 18th, YouTuber Internet Aristocrat uploaded the first in a series of videos titled Quinnspiracy Theory, in which he discusses the issue of cronyism in gaming media and the indie game development community.
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As concerns over the alleged integrity of gaming journalists increased, it was discovered that several were actively contributing money to Quinn's Patreon account, including Polygon editor Ben Kuchera who had been donating to Quinn for several weeks prior to writing an article about her game. Kotaku writer Patricia Hernandez subsequently came under scrutiny as well when gamers began investigating her alleged romantic relationships with other videogame developers. Similarly, many criticized sound designer Robin Arnott for having an alleged affair with Quinn while appearing as a judge in the Indiecade game competition, which gave Quinn an award for Depression Quest
– Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate)
Note, again, the role of the medium of 4chan in shaping events, its free speech absolutist policy on /b/ and anonymity making it the perfect platform for leaking information.
While the initial point of contention between game journalists and gamers was “cronyism” — or, as it was commonly phrased “ethics in videogame journalism” — it ignited the other political rifts between the two groups, escalating as it began to touch on more fundamental political divisions. The first of these being censorship. As we have seen throughout this text, the highest virtue of the Wild West Internet was freedom of speech and the greatest sin was censorship. It is amazing to think about now, but censorship was so uncommon on the Internet and yet so feared, that even the appearance of the slightest act that could be perceived as censorship was seen as a capital offense. Thus, the flagging of the initial MundaneMatt video for copyright infringement was treated as a heinous act of Zoe Quinn “suppressing the free speech” of her critics. It was the censorious reaction of the gaming media to these initial complaints, and their wanton contempt for gamers, which became the real focal point of the conflict.
It also led to the birth of an army of anti-SJW YouTubers, which would become mobilized in force throughout 2014-2016, becoming a central part of the Alt Right. Future Alt Right and Alt Lite personalities such as Milo Yiannopoulos, The Internet Aristocrat/Mr. Metokur, Ethan Ralph, Sargon of Akkad (AKA Carl Benjamin), and others gained massive Internet followings during GamerGate, which they would continue to harness throughout the rise of the Alt Right and election of Trump in 2016, before finally being banned, becoming embroiled in endless e-drama with one another, or being forced to moderate or reverse their views during the Censorship Era of 2017-2022.
GamerGate in a way pulled back the curtain to the inner-workings of politics for the first time for a young audience. They saw a coordinated attempt to suppress their voices and slander them by the entire media, and the contempt that the woke had for straight white males. It also exposed the interconnectivity and cronyism between individuals in an industry and their ability to conspire towards common political ends or for personal gain. And they saw any criticism of this system met with allegations of misogyny and bigotry, an attempt to suppress their criticisms rather than address them at face value.
After the Zoe Post, many commentators online, including social justice bloggers, began to condemn the gaming industry, and the culture surrounding it, for being filled with sexism and misogyny. Many news sites began to report on these allegations, many of which saw this alleged harassment as proof of the sexism rooted within gaming culture. Among those who were targeted by this harassment included videogame developer Brianna Wu, and actress/livestreamer Felicia Day.
On October 29th, 2014, videogame critic Anita Sarkessian appeared on Stephen Colbert's late-night news show The Colbert Report to discuss sexism in the gaming industry. The clip of Sarkessian and Colbert's discussion was later uploaded to Comedy Central's YouTube channel (shown below), and was reported on by various sites such as The Verge and The Washington Post.
...
After several articles critical of the "gamer" identity were being posted on gaming news websites, people began speculating that journalists had worked together to promote a narrative against gamers that disagreed with them. On September 17th, Brietbart staff writer Milo Yiannopoulos posted a tweet hinting he had obtained information about a "co-ordinated approach" used by journalists who wrote the articles.
Later that day, Breitbart published and article titled "Exposed: The Secret Mailing List of the Gaming Journalism Elite," revealing a private Google group mailing list titled "GameJournoPros," purportedly used by gaming journalists cooperating to work against GamerGate. The article contained several screenshots taken from the mailing list, which discussed ways to approach the topic of Zoe Quinn and the GamerGate controversy.
-- Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate)
Talk of GamerGate eventually started to become censored outright. First, on Reddit, and later, even on 4chan. On Reddit, Julian Assange even spoke out against censorship of GamerGate:
On September 15th, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange participated in an "ask me anything" thread on the /r/IamA Subreddit to answer about his new book When Google Met WikiLeaks.
After Redditor ShaskaOtselot asked for his opinion censorship of GamerGate discussions on Reddit, Assange replied that it was "pathetic." After another Redditor pointed out that ShaskaOtselot had been shadowbanned, Assange edited the post to point out that a user had been banned for asking him a question about censorship. On the same day, Julian Assange tweeted about this event using the hashtag #gamergate.
-- Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate)
On 4chan, GamerGate threads flooded the boards of /v/, /b/, /pol/, and others. /v/ had practically been transformed into a GamerGate board. Eventually, moot would ban GamerGate, something that came as a surprise to many users and was almost unprecedented.
The decision to remove "GamerGate" threads has been poorly communicated, and that's my fault. Said threads are being deleted primarily because they violate our blanket "no personal information / raids / calls to invasion" rule. Spamming the reports system and creating multiple topics were also a factor, especially given /v/ is one of 4chan's fastest moving boards and has historically struggled with keeping topics limited to actual videogames.
Regarding a perceived lack of free speech/censorship -- many seem to misinterpret my advocating for anonymous communication and highlighting that it allows people to share things they otherwise wouldn't be comfortable with on other platforms as "you can say and do anything on 4chan," which simply isn't the case. We've had rules and moderators since the site was founded 11 years ago, and I've only reinforced this statement over the years, a la: https://archive.moe/q/thread/580080/#580135
To those who actually want to use /v/ to discuss vidya and not a movement that has outgrown 4chan (a la Project Chanology) -- apologies for the inconvenience.
-- moot, Sep 19, 2014
Censorship of GamerGate on 4chan was considered an unforgivable grievance for many oldfags. They migrated to 8chan, a spin-off of 4chan (with the difference being that instead of a small list of fixed boards, users could create their own boards). 8chan started to gain a reputation as the more hardcore version of 4chan, while 4chan, mockingly referred to as “halfchan” by 8chan users, was for normies. moot began to be seen as a “cuck.”
To be totally fair, given the nature of the Internet at the time, it is not inconceivable that some crazed anon could have represented a credible threat and done something crazy to Anita Sarkeesian or Zoe Quinn.
On October 10th, an anonymous user on 8chan posted Wu's address, phone number and email to the /gg/ (GamerGate) board. Several users responded denouncing the post and raising suspicions that it was part of a false flag attack. That evening, Wu tweeted that she was contacting the police after receiving threats from a Twitter account named "Death to Brianna"
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On October 14th, 2014, videogame critic Anita Sarkeesian tweeted that she canceled her talk at Utah State University when her requests were denied for pat downs or metal detectors after receiving death threats
– Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/gamergate) Note: Briana Wu was another female videogame developer targeted by GamerGate
It’s not impossible to believe that the antagonists of GamerGate received “death threats.” But what, in the end, does that mean? Should someone assume that that is a real threat that someone intends to act on, or simply an idle threat that is designed to intimidate? Most likely the latter. On the other hand, 8chan users have also posted their manifesto online before going on mass shootings. So, if I was on the receiving end I would probably play it safe.
While they were certainly trolled, “harassed” and “raided” by anon, I also share the view with most anon that it was played up for effect to feed into their narrative about being poor innocent victims of misogynist bullies. They seemed to revel in the fact that they were being attacked and made it the focal point of why people should empathize with them during interviews on The Colbert Report and in the gaming journals.
In addition to questions about the inner-workings of journalism, the controversy also raised questions about the true nature of women and feminism. Were negative stereotypes about female hypergamy really so incorrect? Were female professionals able to compete on their own merits, or only through manipulating men in power through relationships, sex, and playing the victim?
Eventually, the campaign would run out of steam and gamers would move on. But not before hundreds of thousands of young white males became redpilled for the first time as the result of the fallout from GamerGate.
Vivian James
GamerGate, like the early Alt Right, was still an essentially libertarian movement. It was not interested in challenging the basic assumptions of social justice or even feminism (such as the assumption that “men” and “women” should have similar roles in society). It was more concerned with holding the Left to their own standards of tolerance, liberalism, and not judging others based on immutable characteristics such as race or gender.
Like many Boomer conservatives today, they met accusations of “sexism” and “misogyny” by pleading with their accusers and insisting that they had simply made a mistake, and that they could prove these accusations false. This led to the creation of “Vivian James.”
Vivian James was a female anime character created by /v/ which was supposed to represent their idea of a “female gamer” that they would have no trouble accepting as one of their own. A female gamer that was unconcerned with social justice issues, and simply wanted to play videogames.
Vivian James is a fictional character conceived through a collaboration between 4chan's /v/ (videogames) board and the indie game developer group The Fine Young Capitalists. The character can be viewed as an anthropomorphized avatar of the /v/ board community created in response to Zoe Quinn's purported attack on the second-wave feminist organization The Fine Young Capitalists (TFYC) while they were trying to fund a Game Jam to assist women's projects in gaming development.
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By reaching at least $2000 in donations, 4chan gained the right to have a character of their design be placed in the videogame that would result from TFYC's Game Jam. When /v/ noticed that they had reached the character design reward, multiple threads where created to brainstorm for ideas. This eventually led to the idea and design for what later would become Vivian James
– Know Your Meme (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/vivian-james)
Vivian James was depicted as a lazy, cynical redhead in a green and purple hoodie (green and purple were the official colors of /v/), with a four leaf clover hairpin in her hair (the four leaf clover is the logo of 4chan), and a scowl on her face.
She was often depicted in memes with the caption “Can we just play some videogames?” (https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/962902-vivian-james) or “Shut up and play videogames” (https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/968813-vivian-james) indicating her love of videogames and indifference towards politics. Other memes depict her as scrolling /v/ or participating in the boards culture, indicating her authenticity and acceptance by the community — “fuck, another me thread? Neo-/v/ sucks!” (https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/866890-vivian-james) Another meme bears the caption “I represent over 70k donated by so called ‘misogynists’ to a campaign to encourage women in game development that was blacklisted by so called ‘feminists’” (https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/859342-vivian-james)
Of course, the charitable gesture of Vivian James was in no way reciprocated by the Left, and they had no interest in compromising. They ignored the gamers and continued to accuse them of sexism and misogyny.
Following the creation of Vivian James and the cooperation between 4chan and TFYC, The Fine Young Capitalists received negative feedback on both Twitter and Tumblr from certain feminist groups and supporters, claiming TFYC to be hypocrites, for dealing with 4chan in a friendly manner and accepting money and help from them.
– Know Your Meme(https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/vivian-james)
Vivian James serves as a stark reminder of how trying to offer an olive branch to the Left, rather than submitting passively to their entire worldview, usually works out.
SJWs and Anti-SJWs
GamerGate eventually spawned the “anti-SJW” era of YouTube, one that lasted throughout the 2016 election and until the Wild West Era ended and the Censorship Era began. Most of the channels involved, such as Sargon of Akkad, grew directly out of making GamerGate content. These channels moved from covering GamerGate drama to making more explicitly political content that began to criticize “SJW” hypocrisy concerning feminism, white privilege and other social justice issues. However, until perhaps the rise of “Kekistan” (covered in chapter 3), they did not employ the same fascist-inspired imagery or extreme Right Wing views of the Alt Right, usually taking a classical liberal, “free speech” stance. Sargon of Akkad is a good example of this kind of content, calling himself a “classical liberal” to this day.
What is an “SJW”? SJWs, short for “social justice warriors,” were people who we might use the word “woke” to describe now. They were often depicted as blue haired, fat, easily “triggered” feminists who probably browsed Tumblr and watched Anita Sarkeesian. The word “social justice warrior” was actually meant to be sarcastic initially, in a similar way to the term “keyboard warrior,” to imply that these people did not actually participate in real activism but simply made impotent posts online complaining about social justice issues. While doing nothing of substance in the real world, they viewed themselves as “warriors” saving the world from bigotry and oppression. However, over time, this aspect of the term was lost, especially when the Alt Right truly became popular and caring about “social justice” in the first place finally became “cringe.”
Typical anti-SJW content were longform video essays critiquing social justice warriors, usually from the stance that they contradicted purportedly liberal beliefs. A typical anti-SJW argument would be similar to “affirmative action is bad because it judges people by their skin color, not the content of their character.”
However, other content would be better described as proto-Alt Right or Alt Right content. This content truly questioned the basic assumptions of liberalism, rather than criticizing hypocrisy or contradiction. This included the channels The Alternative Hypothesis (also known as AltHype for short) and Sean Last, who argued for “human biodiversity”(HBD) or “race realism.” This was the belief that there are in fact genetic differences between the races, and this is what was ultimately responsible for racial inequalities, not racism. Rather than being hypocritcal, affirmative action was intentionally anti-white, based on the racial grievances non-whites had against white people. That is why, they argued, Leftists did not care about the contradiction between affirmative action and “colorblindness,” because they did not actually care about “colorblindness” in the first place. They simply supported whatever policy most benefited their non-whites, even if it was unfair or came at the expense of white people.
Other anti-SJW content included the popular “SJW feminist triggered compilation” style of YouTube videos which mocked SJWs. The cool, unbothered, and logical anti-SJW might “trigger” SJWs through over-the-top politically incorrect statements, or through Ben Shapiro-style rhetorical one-liners. The SJW, usually fat and grotesque with bright dyed hair and of ambiguous gender, would then be shown freaking out, crying and screaming hysterically in response.
Million Dollar Extreme
Around the same time, Million Dollar Extreme was growing in popularity on the Internet. Million Dollar Extreme was an underground, Rhode Island-based film and comedy troupe consisting of Sam Hyde, Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. Founded in 2007, they played a similar role to artists of the 1960s counter-culture such as Lenny Bruce, George Carlin and Monty Python. The most well-known member was founder Sam Hyde. Hyde was successfully able to combine surrealist comedy like Adult Swim’s Time and Eric with the underground Internet’s characteristic style of humor such as memes, trolling, meta-irony, political incorrectness and inspiration from videogames and anime.
Sam Hyde was best known for his short “vertical videos” where he would shoot intentionally crappy comedy sketches featuring him recording himself, often in front of the mirror in his mom’s house. These vertical videos featured bizarre impressions and characters, such as “Bowl Cut Tyler” and “Gamer Dude,” dripping with irony.
Just went to a steampunk convention. Flew there in a steam-powered gyrocopter with my musket and my corncob pipe and my monocle and an ascot and a newsie cap and Doc Martens and suspenders. And my character's name is Humperdinck. That's my character Humperdinck. And I'm 32 years old, so I guess he's level 32. And I have a kid with my wife. And my wife...I could have gotten – if you're going to use a rating scale to rate women, which is disgusting. And if you do that you're a disgusting person – but my wife is a 6-point...you know my wife's a five. I could have gotten a 6.5 but I'm a disgusting pig. I'm a slob. I smell. I have bad hygiene. She has the worst hygiene. Which is why I'm comfortable with her. Because I'll take that choice. I will make that compromise. That's my, you know, that's what I'll do. I'll forego a 6.5 in favor of a sloppy five.
– Sam Hyde as “Gamer Dude” (https://youtu.be/z7qTPUj7wVc?si=LtgRpZj9nRtSa3Yj))
Sam Hyde was especially known for incorporating Internet-inspired “meta-irony” in his humor. Most of his “characters” such as Gamer Dude was ironic, and meant to mock the people he was imitating. But Hyde would also imitate characters reminiscent of a typical 4chan user with far-right beliefs. Although done in the same “ironic” style, Hyde would drop subtle hints that in fact the character’s beliefs were not entirely ironic, making it difficult to surmise which part of the character was a joke and which parts reflected Hyde’s true beliefs.
He also filmed IRL trolling campaigns, such as his famous “Paradigm Shift 2070” in 2013 in which he managed to be invited to a TEDx talk at Drexel University as a guest speaker, claiming to be a video journalist and documentary filmmaker from Brooklyn.
“Sam Hyde is a video journalist and documentary filmmaker from Brooklyn, New York. His work spans every continent and has been featured on television and in print (Discover, NatGeo, Vice, and others). He recently returned from Mogadishu, the most dangerous city on earth, where he shadowed the heroic al-Mahamudwomen on their quest to clean up the streets and restore humanity to their war-torn country. In 2014 he will be investigating the methamphetamine trade in Mongolia.”
– TEDx introduces Sam Hyde (https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=4jRoatZizQ0) (https://gothgordongekko.medium.com/sam-hydes-2070-paradigm-shift-f55872e5f77d)
Hyde appeared on stage in a suit of armor resembling that of a gladiator and gave a rambling, incoherent speech full of meaningless buzzwords, much of it making ridiculous predictions about what the future of 2070 would hold, including “state-enforced homosexuality,” and a “trash economy” where people would “use cubes of trash as money”.
I was at a college, a second tier, not an ivy league school, a second choice school, and I was in a class. And there was a student in that class, okay? And the, the teacher, he was spouting some horrible nonsense, about how, it was something about how women’s rights are not legitimate, something that everybody knew was false, but if anybody had spoken up, he would’ve taken extreme joy in failing them. Okay? Nobody spoke up. One person raised his voice. Once person started talking. The teacher couldn’t believe it, the classroom couldn’t believe it either. But in the end, he had logic on his side. And at the end of the day, he proved his point. That student was Albert Einstein. And that same sense of childlike play and innocence that we know from Albert Einstein, I can sense it in this room today.
– Sam Hyde, Paradigm Shift 2070 (https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=4jRoatZizQ0) (https://gothgordongekko.medium.com/sam-hydes-2070-paradigm-shift-f55872e5f77d)
This event would receive coverage from Insider magazine and other outlets, as well as achieving much attention from Reddit. Even Joe Rogan covered the video (Sam Hyde would later spam Joe Rogan for years trying to get on the show).
Million Dollar Extreme also produced more traditional sketch comedy videos, such as Ideas Guy and Moms which they posted to their YouTube channel. These videos featured surreal humor and over-the-top editing reminiscent of Adult Swim’s Tim and Eric, as well as jarring, manic, intricate graphics created by Hyde, who had previously worked professionally in motion graphics.
Some of Sam Hyde or Million Dollar Extreme’s other projects included:
KickstarterTV - a multi-episode series where Sam Hyde would mock other creator’s Kickstarter projects
Samurai Swordplay in a Digital Age - an “IRL troll” much like Paradigm Shift where Sam Hyde was able to become a speaker at an anime convention, posing as “Master Kenchiro Ichiimada” and delivering a speech mocking anime and Japanese culture
Standup comedy where Sam Hyde would troll the mostly liberal audience with increasingly misogynistic, homophobic and anti-Semitic humor
In 2014, Sam Hyde created a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund a “pony dating simulator for Bronies” based on the cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic
Sam Hyde’s videos, especially his vertical videos, circulated on 4chan and gained a cult following among anon. They were staples at the time of the website SynchTube, a site popular with 4channers which allowed users to hang out and watch YouTube videos together. It was clear from his humor, familiarity with chan culture, and /pol/-inspired politics that he himself was anon, and 4chan considered him one of their own.
Sam Hyde also became the subject of another troll campaign, this time not of his own devising. During a school shooting or other tragedy, trolls would call into major news stations claiming the killer had been identified as “Sam Hyde.” The media would then report this information without confirming it, unaware of the joke or who Sam Hyde was. Anon would then clip the news report and post it on 4chan or Twitter, often with the tagline “he can’t keep getting away with it!”
This joke hit its height on February 25 2022, when congressman Adam Kinzinger was duped into tweeting a photo of Sam Hyde’s face photoshopped onto the body of a fighter pilot, which claimed to be the “Ghost of Kyiv”
The #ghostofkyiv has a name, and he has absolutely OWNED the Russian Airforce. Godspeed and more kills, Samuyil!
– Congressman Adam Kinzinger , US House of Representatives for Illinois’s 16th district, tweeting a picture of Sam Hyde (https://twitter.com/BushidoToken/status/1521190811408510979)
In 2016, Million Dollar Extreme would get picked up by Adult Swim, where they created “Million Dollar Extreme: World Peace.” It ran for one season, where it received successful ratings. However, Sam Hyde would become a victim of “cancel culture” due to his high profile support for Donald Trump and financial donation to the Alt Right publication The Daily Stormer. Charls and Sam would have a falling out over the cancellation of the show, Charls blaming its cancellation on Sam’s online antics, and Million Dollar Extreme broke up. They would not be brought back together until 2023.
/pol/
/pol/ by now had evolved into something basically resembling the Alt Right, with a true far-Right ideology. However, it was still very much fused with the “shock humor” of 4chan, and was not a serious political movement, but rather steeped in irony and “troll” culture, making it difficult to determine if its users actually believed what they were posting or if it was simply “for the lulz.” /pol/ was still a small subculture relegated to 4chan. Although there was much crossover given their common enemy of SJWs, the anti-SJW movement was far bigger, and centered around YouTube and other sites like Reddit, rather than 4chan.
It’s hard to say whether the Alt Right truly existed at this point, or whether it was still the proto-Alt Right, continuing to gestate on /pol/. The Alt Right never truly became the Alt Right until it was galvanized by Trump. /pol/ was solely an anarchic, Internet phenomenon. Nobody really thought that it would ever be a serious political movement. Who would they even try to elect? Who would even accept their support? And /pol/ did not even truly have a clear political philosophy. It was still a mishmash of trolls, libertarians, and various other ideologies. The only thing they all had in common was being politically incorrect. Then, out of nowhere, arose Trump: the politically incorrect candidate. “The chaos candidate” as he was called in the press. Much like the chaos that /pol/ wished to unleash on the world.
Even the support for Trump was half-earnest and half-joke. /pol/ did not support him primarily for his politics, but because it would be funny. Mostly, they just wanted to watch the world burn. However, /pol/ culture, or the proto-Alt Right, or the Dissident Right, however you want to think of it, was growing precipitously on the Internet, driven by the larger anti-SJW movement.
A smaller minority were more earnest in their politics. Eventually, the proto-Alt Right, like other movements that began online, started to slowly make their way IRL. Dissident Right podcasts such as The Daily Shoah (a part of the podcast network TRS) began to appear. Anon began to acquaint themselves with far-Right literature such as Julius Evola, or Richard Spencer’s publication The Radix Journal. Some anon even began to form or join white nationalist organizations such as “Identity Europa.” White nationalist propaganda such as the satirical show Murdoch Murdoch (which was a sort of Alt Right version of South Park) and White Rabbit Radio (a series of cartoons such as “anti-Racist Hitler” which explained white demographic replacement using a “woke” version of Hitler who tried to perform a second holocaust by telling Jews to “check their privilege” and replacing them with gentile immigrants) began to circulate alongside Million Dollar Extreme and Sargon of Akkad. Bits of a genuinely far-Right ideology were beginning to form.
However, in the main, the movement was still dominated by edgy libertarians. The Daily Shoah, a racist and anti-Semitic podcast hosted by Mike Enoch, and The Daily Stormer, a far-Right online publication created by Andrew Anglin, both included over-the-top, explicit, intentionally shocking Nazi imagery, but were originally satirical (much in the same vein as Encylopedia Dramatica). It was not until the end of the Alt Right around 2017 that both had become genuinely political, with TRS going so far as to start its own political party, “The National Justice Party,” in 2020.
The majority of anon, even those who lurked /pol/, were only dimly aware of these genuinely fascist and white nationalist developments. I personally did not know of the existence of The Daily Shoah until well after Trump became president in 2017, nor was I aware of Identity Europa until 2019, well after Charlottesville. It would not be until 2017, after Trump miraculously was elected, that the Alt Right was ever a serious political movement. Whatever fascist imagery they may have employed, and however much of the “irony” might have actually been “meta-irony,” the movement would still primarily be focused around two pillars: rejection of political correctness and “burn it all down” anti-establishment sentiment, both embodied in the person of Donald Trump. The fact that there were actual white nationalists like Richard Spencer (one person who anyone in the Alt Right would have recognized due to his high profile mainstream media interviews) amongst the Pepe the Frog-avatared edgy teenagers really just made things funnier. The Alt Right was also a “big tent movement.” True, it may have included Richard Spencer, but it also included just as many classical liberals, or edgy trolls like Sam Hyde. People might accept one or two far-Right beliefs from /pol/, like anti-feminism, but reject others, like anti-Semitism. There was a large spectrum of vaguely Right Wing, vaguely anti-establishment beliefs that any one person’s true beliefs, under the trolling, might fall under.
Until Trump’s inauguration, it was all just for the lulz.