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The Media Assassination of #GamerGate

In 2009, one James O'Keefe descended on a California ACORN office. He and an associate (Hannah Giles) proceeded to represent themselves (falsely) as a young couple looking for advice and secretly recorded their multiple meetings. These tapes were later released on YouTube and spawned a scandal that ultimately destroyed ACORN as an organization; They lost millions in private funding, the US Congress cut all government funding, and by the end of 2010, they died a death via Chapter 10 liquidation. But it's not s bad, right? After all, they were criminals advising people on how to evade taxes and conduct prostitution rings!



Except this was not the case. Not even a little. Numerous independent Attorney Generals and experts studied the raw tapes, compared them to the YouTube videos, and all came to the same conclusion: The videos that caused the uproar had been heavily and deceptively edited. O'Keefe and Co. patched together select segments of video that dishonestly portrayed the taped employees in a disgraceful light. In fact, O'Keefe, as part of a settlement agreement with one of the unfairly terminated employees, made a public apology and paid the individual--a man by the name of Juan Carlos Vera--a sum of $100,000 and issued a formal public apology.



But it was all way too little, far too late. ACORN was defunct. Congress' actions--which were challenged in court--were judged hasty at best and irresponsible at worst. An organization had been assassinated by a political "muckraker" (O'Keefe's own self-description) out to "make a point." The great irony? A "muckraker" is a type of journalist. It's a derogatory term that accurately describes what he did. O'Keefe lied and misrepresented evidence to score political points against an organization because they supported a party that he opposed. To call his actions disgusting and unethical would both be profound understatements. But despite all this, O'Keefe wants to contend that he is a journalist to this very day. Remember this.



In October of 2014, an indie game developer by the name of Brianna Wu was harassed and given death threats by an anonymous Twitter user over a game she had made. The person spouted vile remarks at her for weeks before threatening to kill her and her family in their home. It should be noted that police advice and protocol in these instances is to NOT sensationalize a situation as serious as this one. Police Officers take reported death threats seriously; they are a legally defined variety of hate speech when proven credible and are considered a criminal offense.



However, Brianna decided at this point in time to take to Twitter, probably attempting to look brave in the wake of what, in reality, amounted to empty words vomited onto the internet. But this was not good enough for Ms. Wu. In addition to sensationalizing--and therefore demeaning--this incident, she also decided to wrap the individual who targeted her in with the #GamerGate movement as a whole. This assertion was made despite the fact that the now-dead account in question never mentioned the #GamerGate hashtag in any single tweet from the individual. There was no evidence of the alleged connection whatsoever, but the now demagoguing Wu was not done yet.



In a further move that can objectively be called inadvisable at best, Wu decided to stoke the flames of this manufactured controversy, insulting and demeaning #GamerGate members through a forced meme she had made by utilizing an image of an autistic child. How this was born from the violent threats of an anonymous psychopath is confounding and unclear. However, what can be stated objectively is that when one goes from fleeing their home in fear to countering such a perceived serious threat with juvenile internet memes, the issue is clearly dead. You don't send lolcat pictures to someone who has kidnapped your child and you don't post insulting pictures of someone who is stalking you. You get a restraining order. If you genuinely fear for your life, that is.



Then, without warning, the entire disaster was nuked from space. Ms. Wu appeared on MSNBC's The Reid Report, publicly blaming #GamerGate for the death threats and uniting with a fellow guest to vilify the entire movement as being of the same ilk as the individual that threatened her. This assertion was allowed to pass unchallenged despite the fact that there was still no evidence whatsoever--nor any investigation--of any such affiliation. The staggering levels of empty outrage heaped upon people who had done nothing through what amounted to a one-sided bully pulpit was not only given passive endorsement by Reid herself, but has since suffered absolutely zero media scrutiny in any media circle as public as MSNBC's primetime show.



In the wake of O'Keefe's fall from grace, many journalists expressed profound, genuine regret over not scrutinizing his work more thoroughly. Many asserted that instead of dog piling on the issue, they should have INVESTIGATED the matter more thoroughly to find the truth; they should have been journalists instead of sensationalists. So how long will it take for the today's reporters to realize that they are committing the same mistakes now?



George Santayana once said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." So why have so many mainstream journalists consigned themselves to committing the same mistakes they themselves denounced the last time such an event occurred? Why is it necessary for innocent people to be falsely crucified in the public square because someone yells long and loud about them? Why does the political climate so thoroughly bury the relevance of truth time and time again? And why does no one seem to care?



It's in such a time of cold indifference and ignorantly practiced cultural assumptions about misogyny, sexism that I'm reminded of Atticus Finch. For those who aren't aware--for whatever the reason--Atticus Finch, in the literary classic To Kill A Mockingbird, was saddled with the unenviable task of defending a black man accused of murder in the early 1900s deep south. After utilizing the facts at his disposal, poking holes in the witnesses' testimony, and exposing the liars and colluders for what they were, he gave an emboldened, righteous closing statement, which I will share with you now in its entirety. I encourage you to read and think on it:



"To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. The State has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place. It has relied instead upon the testimony of two witnesses whose evidence has not only been called into serious question on cross examination, but has been flatly contradicted by the defendant. Now there is circumstantial evidence to indicate that Mayella Ewell was beaten savagely by someone who led, almost exclusively, with his left [hand]. And Tom Robinson now sits before you, having taken "The Oath" with the only good hand he possesses -- his right.



I have nothing but pity in my heart for the Chief Witness for the State. She is the victim of cruel poverty and ignorance. But, my pity does not extend so far as to her putting a man's life at stake, which she has done in an effort to get rid of her own guilt. Now I say "guilt," gentlemen, because it was guilt that motivated her. She's committed no crime. She has merely broken a rigid and time-honored code of our society, a code so severe that whoever breaks it is hounded from our midst as unfit to live with. She must destroy the evidence of her offense. But, what was the evidence of her offense? Tom Robinson, a human being. She must put Tom Robinson away from her. Tom Robinson was to her a daily reminder of what she did.



Now what did she do? She tempted a negro. She was white and she tempted a negro. She did something that in our society is unspeakable: She kissed a black man. Not an old uncle, but a strong, young negro man. No code mattered to her before she broke it, but it came crashing down on her afterwards.



The witnesses for the State, with the exception of the sheriff of Lincoln County, have presented themselves to you gentlemen -- to this Court -- in the cynical confidence that their testimony would not be doubted; confident that you gentlemen would go along with them on the assumption, the evil assumption, that all negroes lie; all negroes are basically immoral beings; all negro men are not to be trusted around our women, an assumption that one associates with minds of their caliber, and which is in itself, gentlemen, a lie -- which I do not need to point out to you.



And so, a quiet, humble, respectable negro, who has had the unmitigated TEMERITY to feel sorry for a white woman, has had to put his word against two white peoples. The defendant is not guilty. But somebody in this courtroom is.



Now, gentlemen, in this country our courts are the great levelers. In our courts, all men are created equal. I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and of our jury system. That's no ideal to me. That is a living, working reality!



Now I am confident that you gentlemen will review without passion the evidence that you have heard, come to a decision, and restore this man to his family.



In the name of God, do your duty. In the name of God, believe Tom Robinson."



To say that the spirit of Finch's impassioned argument holds peerless power in this matter would be putting it lightly. However, the sad fact remains that despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the exposed liars on the stand, Tom Robinson was found guilty. Not of murder, though. Tom Robinson was found guilty of being black. Just as the members of #GamerGate have now been convicted of being gamers. To the Brianna Wus of this world, to be a gamer at this point is to be a harasser; it means that you hate women; it means that you are desperately clutching to your "old boy's club," as the exposed, disgraced bully Leigh Alexander put it. See, it doesn't matter if you "stand for ethics in journalism" anymore; it matters even less if you "just want to play games" in the same fashion that Tom Robinson's innocence didn't matter. And it especially doesn't matter if all these irresponsible muckrakers come out in a few months and wring their hands at how blind they all were. The damage will have been done and there will be no repairing it.



However, I will tell you what does matter. One doesn't have control over the lies and hate people so strongly desire to heap on him or her, but what every person does have is control over what they do. The Bible says that when you respond to your enemies with kindness, doing so "heaps hot coals on their heads." Now, I don't know if anyone reading this is an atheist or not, but I ask that you simply view this as good advice. When people call you awful, hateful things, do your best to not do the same. If you don't make a bad example of yourself, they can't make one out of you either. Despite that, the matter is a double-edged sword, because it is, after all, up to everyone individually. We're only human. It's easy to get carried away in the heat of the moment. And you're going to fail. You may as well accept it now.



Ultimately though, it is up to you, #GamerGate how you come out of this. The plight of ACORN is not well analogous to the current climate of this situation. A more exacting analogy would be for the patrons of ACORN to stop scheduling appointments because they disagreed with their business practices. ACORN would respond to this by publicly denouncing these individuals as irresponsible, ignorant, and cowardly. Then, in order for that to be complete, the patrons angered by those sentiments would have to contact the government and the private supporters and convince them to pull their support. But you should notice something important about how the analogy has changed: There is no means with which to denounce THE PEOPLE. There is no funding to pull; no support to undermine. Truly, it is up to those people and how they conduct themselves that will lead to their success or failure.



The book of Acts recounts such a story about the Apostles in the wake of Jesus' death when the twelve men were being hounded by a Jewish political group called the Saducees. After the men were dragged into a kangaroo court and sentenced to death for speaking in the public square about things the leaders didn't like, one of the Saducees spoke privately to the others. He pointed out that if their message was frivolous, then it would eventually dissipate; they would fall away as many religious movements had before them. But, he argued, if they had the truth (in this instance, God) behind them, then there was nothing they could do to keep this truth silenced. So ask yourself this: Who are the demagogues attempting to sentence us to a metaphorical death and who is it that has the truth on their side? The early Christian church was FAR from perfect and so is #GamerGate. But that doesn't discount the truth behind the people that compose its body. Continue to cast off the unseemly, awful individuals that want to drag the movement down into the gutter by harassing the opposition and giving them more gasoline for their now-waning fire.



When this story is recounted in the future, your actions will decide how it is remembered; how you carry yourself will dictate the history. So what's it gonna be? Do you want to be remembered as revolutionaries; the ones that succeeded in journalism reform where all others had failed? Or do you want #GamerGate to go down as yet another tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? The choice is yours.

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