The Grift Right’s paymasters must be desperate to distract normies from some brewing enormity. Because they’ve got their controlled opposition mouthpieces out in force stirring up controversy.
First it was Hollywood creature Ben Shapiro arguing for people to work till they drop dead.
Now his Gen Y crony Matt Walsh is trying to jump the GamerGate parade.
Related: Parade Jumping
To catch folks up, iconic game dev Mark Kern, @Grummz on X, has been at the forefront of gamers exposing Sweet Baby Inc, a Canadian outfit that strongarms game studios into embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion dogma.
Mark’s crusade caught the attention of X owner Elon Musk, which many are declaring the start of GamerGate 2 (yeah, I know this is like the ninth time).
Related: SBI BTFO by Brazilian Vidya Curator
One of Mark’s appearances was clipped by Walsh, who made the bizarre claim that the woke invasion of the game industry has largely gone unnoticed by the mainstream. I can think of at least one consumer revolt against DIE-driven unethical conduct in gaming – games journalism in particular – that achieved mainstream notoriety. They even made a Law and Order episode about it.
Anyway, here’s Matt’s segment on woke-ism in gaming:
Mark’s reaction to the Walsh segment was qualified, wary appreciation.
Which, as Walsh’s previous comments show, is a prudent stance.
Gamers who’ve been paying attention for the past decade were even more blunt.
Now, you could say that Matt Walsh is being unfairly dogpiled. You could argue that him giving the SBI debacle exposure on Daily Wire is a net positive, since no press is bad press.
And I would refer you to Daily Wire’s response to Mark Kern:
It’s hard to see how Gregg Re’s not out of line there.
He works for a company that Ben Shapiro just said does $200 million worth of business a year. By contrast, Matt Walsh says in the clip above that the video game industry brings in over $100 billion more per year than the music and movie businesses combined.
“So here’s a statistic that, at least if you were born at any point prior to the 1990s, might be hard to believe: By revenue, the gaming industry is bigger than both the movie industry and the music industry combined. And for the past several years, it hasn’t been especially close. The difference is consistently more than a hundred billion dollar per year.”
-Matt Walsh
In light of that vast disparity in cultural influence, it takes more than a little hubris for a guy working in large-but-niche media sector, for a company started by a Hollywood producer, no less, to throw shade at one of the key people behind Starcraft, Diablo II, and World of Warcraft.
Related: Conservative NPCs
The takeaway is that whether Liberal or Conservative, journos are journos.
Their whole profession has been defined by an inflated sense of self-importance since J schools stopped teaching how to report the news and started filling students’ heads with nonsense about changing the world.
Get it right, Daily Wire. Mark Kern changed the world. It’s an inarguable fact due to his involvement in World of Warcraft alone.
Guys like Matt Walsh and Gregg Re, on the other hand, don’t create. They springboard off of cultural achievements by guys like Mark.
And right now, where they’re trying to jump is in front of the GamerGate 2 parade.
The only reason Con Inc operatives hijack grassroots revolts is to fly them into cliffs. Remember what happened with the Tea Party, the MAGA movement, and woke product boycotts.
Don’t pay attention to people who disdain you. Support independent makers of culture who want to entertain you.
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You can always rely on the boot strap conservatives to project victimhood onto others when they feel threatened.
Over the span of a few years, I’ve been in the unique position to make the acquaintance of some cool people on both sides of the aisle. Our uniting interest? Art. It may sound petty to others, but someone’s opinion on art has become a litmus test of whether or not I can get along with them.
At least with the left wingers I know, I’m fond of, because we can speak about the deep and spiritual aspects of art along with how metaphysical the experience of making art is. The irony of conservatives still clinging to the “religious Right” tag, is that they are so blind to the concept of beauty and art which comes from the divine. Making political commentary in any medium is not making culture, but mainstream RW ideology says that it does. Smh.
We speak of the left being NPCs, but the right is just as bad. You have this class of publicized mouthpieces who try so hard to act “alpha” which comes off so fake and even if they are indeed alpha, they preach priorities for stuff which aren’t important (usually some form of materialism or hedonism).
This is why I disagree with yours and JD’s take on normieism. Normies don’t shill for corporate cancer like Nerds (TM) do, but the mainstream appeal that they bring to a hobby inevitably baits the Death Cult and the Grift Right.
I think you have merit with your statement. It seems like the average person (normie) spends their life working, then going home to consume entertainment with only a surface level interaction of it. Nerds/fans interaction (relationship may also be a good word to use here) runs much deeper. There’s more of a sense of personal investment in it.
I’m not sure if either of you around for the first GamerGate when “nerd” and “geek culture” channels en masse threw the term “gamer” under the bus because they didn’t want to be associated with harassers and racists, but that did happen. They did the same to Sad Puppies and ComicsGate, too. They were not any more inoculated against this than normal people are. I shouldn’t even have to remind anyone of them running defense for the likes of Neil Druckmann and Anita Sarkeesian, something you can easily still find today.
This isn’t exclusively a normie problem. You can’t expect normal people to care about this stuff when your hobby is still run by self-hating geeks and nerds who hate your hobby and the people who partake in it as much as they hate the Current Thing the media told them to hate.
I know it’s also popular to call those people “normies” and “not true fans” but I think that’s always been dishonest framing.
Breadtubers and the like spend days making overlong essays on old Nickelodeon shows and how Disney isn’t woke actually about as much as the Real™ Geeks spend on videos on their own subjects. They are true fans, even if their beliefs are backwards, and I think it’s time to stop coping about them doing it wrong as an excuse to Out-Group them and pass the blame to an unrelated group.
They were always here, I knew many of them before they turned into what they are today. You can find footage of the world before 2014 and these people lived in it, they didn’t pop out of thin air as outsiders randomly wanting to infiltrate an industry. Most of the people who want to destroy the industry now were virulent Jack Thompson opposition. These same people were the ones who allowed Sarkeesian, Quinn, and Macintosh in, and they are the same ones defending Sweet Baby to own the Chuds. You can kick out all the Sweet Baby Incs you want, but nothing will change because these people aren’t going anywhere and will keep letting them back in, because they are Death Cult members now.
They are enemies in your own hobby, and they’ve always been here. Deal with them accordingly.
I don’t defend nerds; I instead defend the “appreciators.” They’re the people who engage with their hobby on a deeper level than the normies, but they don’t buy the Funko Pops or release video essays about the politics. They’re the people who quietly engage with the embers after the nerds and the Death Cultists smother the flames for the normies.
Take yours and Brian’s hobby for reading, for example. The bulk of your patrons probably aren’t the normies, given American illiteracy and the American high school English experience, but people who are just eclectic enough to engage with you about the mechanics and history of fiction on social media.
What all of you guys – and in fairness, most people – are missing is that we do not live in a free market. It’s not a question of whether nerds or normies are doing [Hobby X] wrong. It’s that 80% of both are NPCs who will do as the guys holding the megaphone tell them.
To borrow a metaphor, normie is like a boulder half-buried in the yard. Too many of our guys waste time and energy attacking the rock instead of the dirt around it.
I was around for GG 1.0, I just didn’t pay much mind to it; I was just graduating college then. I’ve been disconnected from the majority of the cultural/political sphere for many years now. I keep up with stuff in passing -mainly through others I know bc they post about it – and I’ve stopped being a “down in the trenches” level of keeping up with stuff.
My opinions are based on my own observations to the best of my understanding on things.
Don’t forget his walrus book that was created solely to “own the SJWs” and fleece money out of people instead of supporting any actual counter-culture to the mainstream they supposedly hate. All these grifters are the same, whether online “geek culture” parasites or online political wonks. Every single one of them is looking for clout and riches at the expense of making any real change, hoping to cash in on decline. Disgusting.
We live in a culture of vice first, and nothing will change until we finally decide to change our priorities.
Great callback. I almost used a walrus pic as today’s header image.
What made me dismiss Matt Walsh for good was seeing him mock various conservative artists for requesting him to signal boost their crowdfunding projects. The idea was that conservatives should be rugged individualists, etc., and so we should not waste time crowdfunding. This happened immediately after he ran a crowdfunding project to raise money for AOC’s grandmother. (And for the icing on the cake, he later admitted that he knew that the money from the crowdfunding project would not be accepted.)
It’s those passive-aggressive effeminate stunts that give the lie to these posers’ fleek beard-and-flannel masculinity branding.
Mr. Walsh is nominally a Catholic. Having grown in my own faith over the years, it’s hard for me to him particularly seriously on many levels. Walsh should not be parroting the views of the average Boomer Protestant who is the core of Mr. Shapiro’s audience.
In other words: Let’s all expend all our emotional energy on… GAMES. Be offended everybody. Get riled up. Attack this red cape and ignore the sword.
Meanwhile, Nobody under fifty can buy a house, actual inflation is 30%/year, millions of illegals are flooding the country without so much as a background check, and you don’t get a say in any of it, peon.
But hey, outrage porn! Games!
Games are what the people who can’t afford houses can afford and often grew up on. People are upset because they are getting what little they have for leisure stomped on.
The Daily Wire is nothing but Skinwalkers.
Sort of. Skinwalkers are depraved witches from American Indian lore repackaged by extremely online Millennials into lame creepypasta fodder. Daily Wire are Xers and Ys repackaging 1998 Liberalism as American Conservative principles, so they’re more like deconstructionist Wes Craven slasher parodies.
You are the cryptid man.
Noted and accepted.
You know, I really like your writing when you bring the knives out. This was pretty epic.
Thanks for the feedback.
I do remember what became of the Tea Party. Watching it succumb to K street and Con, Inc. and then fizzle out was actually a blessing, in retrospect, though quite frustrating at the time. I was too invested in it and in politics in general – to the point of idolatry, frankly – so seeing it, and other related movements, fail helped me understand the point you’ve made. The Tea Party was different for a while, but still committed to solving the wrong problem in the wrong way. No amount of incremental change can fix a system designed to co-opt every “Mr Smith” who “Goes To Washington.” (Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart didn’t do us any favors with that one.) No amount of incremental change can fix a system built on false premises. If as you assert, liberalism is false in any form – even classical liberalism – so that a reset to 1994 or 1985 or 1965 would be pointless, a reset to government as configured in 1912, or 1877, or 1793 would be equally pointless.
The Daily Wire is The National Review for the younger generations, and just as useful. Thank you for helping me see through the “Conservative” veneer to the Con men behind it. I still have to remind myself from time to time to ignore them, because a fair number of conservatives still take them seriously.
Now I wonder what is coming down the pike that the hucksters have chosen this issue at this moment to gin up outrage, and whether they’re trying to induce outrage fatigue before some much larger issue or scandal comes to light.
If I were a betting man, I’d lay my money on them running interference for the bill forcing the sale of TikTok to regime cronies, the WWIII funding package, or both.