There are some who see the seemingly unlikely ideological romance between anti-bullying-activist-turned-bully-ally Candace Owens and Gamergate as a bit of a con-job.

In this view, the gullible Owens is being manipulated by cynical GGers and assorted far-right ideologues who’ve descended upon her en masse to assure her that her paranoid fantasies are true — particularly when they involve the very women that Gamergate has harassed most relentlessly. It’s a sort of cultic love-bombing, ironically based around hate.

There’s certainly an element of truth to this theory — and you can find plenty of examples of Owens’ gullibility in my previous posts on L’affaire Owens, or just by taking a look at her Twitter feed.

But Owens isn’t the only one here with starry eyes. Just as Owens has been seduced by GGers telling her exactly what she wants to hear, so GG’s True Believers have been seduced by her conspiracy theories. This isn’t, in other words, just a case of exploitation; it is also something of a folie a deux.

“This is probably THE BIG ONE!” an enthusiastic GGer called darkpowrjd gushed in a heavily-upvoted comment on the Kotaku in Action subreddit, the main GG hub on Reddit, several days ago.

Candace Owens, for all her faults, could be [the person] who vindicated GG for two YEARS of what they have been accused of doing en masse.

You’ll have to excuse darkpowrjd’s somewhat tangled language; they’re a little excited.

Yeah, this could be one of the most elaborate traps ever set up for GG to fall into, and I wouldn’t put it past any of the LWs to have THAT elaborate of a plan set up, but I don’t think Owens would seriously be that willing to be the cog in that plan.

With that little bit of butt-covering out the way, darkpowrjd explains why Owens is truly the woman of Gamergate’s dreams.

I’m still cautious, but I’m starting to think more and more that this is really a thing that’s going on, and this was the one person that we’ve been waiting for that has the pull, power, and connections to blow the entire lid off of what we have already known.

She HAS THE POWER

As darkpowrjd sees it, the evil anti-GG conspiracy has

more or less been doing this to the GG movement as a damn WHOLE for two years now. Never being opposed, always getting a free pass, and always getting sympathy by playing the feminist card. No one dared to question them because of how many people they ended up getting on their side.

But now …

Ok, ok, I’ll try to restrain myself.

But they ran into someone that they couldn’t influence, buy out, or convince that easily. They ran into someone that had connections, but also was smart enough to pick up on some things, and put two and two together when things happened that seemed too coincidental to be just a coincidence.

Forget what I just said about restraining myself.

The fact that media outlets tended to react to Gamergate with skepticism, if not outright hostility, couldn’t possibly be that it was obviously a hate crusade pushing perhaps the stupidest conspiracy theory the world has ever known. No, it must have been the fault of … the people Gamergate hates the most!

Now, think about this: how many media outlets do you think this team of Signal, Quinn, and Harper did this too? How many got this treatment, and were too scared (or just willing to play along or even agree with them on everything) to do anything or say anything? … Think about how LONG this might have been going on, or how many more people were caught up in this web, and how far along does this conspiracy actually go? How far down did this rabbit hole go?

I’m pretty sure the only holes that GGers have explored have been entirely self-dug.

All the “neutral = pro” comments, anyone who did so much as to try to get both sides of GG getting bitched at, the NeoGAF bannings that didn’t make any sense … everything that had ever happened that GG got blamed for because they EXISTED!

Or perhaps GG got blamed for a lot of things because it’s a movement made up largely of harassers and trolls that routinely does a lot of pretty awful things?

darkpowrjd accuses evil anti-GG “Journos” of an assortment of terrible misdeeds, including “continu[ing] to poke the bear every chance they got” and “gamedropping,” which Urban Dictionary defines as the sinister SJW “practice of dropping a #GamerGate mention into a totally unrelated article in an attempt to drive clicks and controversy.”

It is hard indeed to imagine a crime more horrific than the journalistic practice of occasionally paying attention to Gamergate.

ALL of that (and THEN some) could be exposed with one single person who might’ve not have even been aware of what she was about to do.

And quite the exposer Owens has been. So far her longest and most passionate “expose” involved a Washington Post story that never ran but that Owens was sure would have been full of libels against her.

Owens is saying that she isn’t a conspiracy theorist. But every theorist might be thinking they hit the damn jackpot when reading this and knowing how this has probably been going on for 2 plus years now.

In the sense that, yes, Gamergate has been energetically spinning conspiracies out of nothing for “2 plus years now” and Owens is now doing the same.

The reason Zoe’s group is running to try to get things under control is because Owens hit all 7’s here, and she wants to cash out.

Well, no. Quinn was concerned that Owens’ proposed bully-doxxing site could be easily abused by bullies.

Ironically, Gamergaters themselves were making very similar criticisms, at least until Owens started attacking some of Gamergate’s most-hated (and most-harassed) enemies.

It could be the beginning of the end for blaming Gamergate for everything.

And there’s Gamergate in a nutshell.

From the very start, even before it had a name, Gamergate has been a “movement” of gamers against criticism of games and gamers — and ultimately, of Gamergate as well.

Oh, sure, most Gamergaters don’t mind games criticism based on game mechanics, or whether or not a game is “fun” to play. But they don’t like any criticism that might in any way reflect badly on them. That’s why Anita Sarkeesian sent so many gamers into hysterics simply for noting that, yes, a lot of games are really pretty sexist — because by extension, this suggests that the gamers buying and playing these games in record numbers might just be an eensy weensy bit sexist themselves.

And that’s why the now infamous “gamers are dead” articles inspired such fury, transforming what had been a harassment campaign against “uppity” women in video games into a putative campaign for “ethics in games journalism” — with the main “ethical” failure of games journalists implicitly defined as “saying anything bad about us.”

The repellent fantasy author and sometime game developer Vox Day let the not-so-cute cat out of the bag in an interview with internet talk show host David Pakman last year, declaring that

what Gamergate is fundamentally about is the right of people to design, develop and play games that they want to design, develop and play without being criticized for it.

Vox later walked this back a little, saying he didn’t really mean that gamers and game developers should be immune from criticism. But you don’t need to be a Freudian to suspect that Vox’s slip revealed what he actually thinks.

Owens is also easily offended by criticism, and seems to think so highly of her own opinions that she assumes anyone critical of them cannot possibly be sincere, and therefore must be part of some terrible conspiracy.

It’s no wonder she and Gamergate get along so well.

H/T — r/BestOfOutrageCulture

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