As a publishing house founded to counteract the baleful influence of the cultural Marxists who successfully invaded and took over the science fiction and fantasy publishing industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Castalia House has followed the developments of #GamerGate with more than a little interest. It is clear to us, as it may not be clear to many of the participants on either side, that the intrepid gamers of #GamerGate are now engaged in the same struggle that the science fiction writers of America lost before they’d even realized it was upon them. Clark at PopeHat describes the process, which he describes as entryism:

The entryism is of the usual type: people with blue/pink ideals join red / gray groups and try to achieve social status with in those groups, then use that social status to push for the admission of – and promotion of – more blue/pink members. Once the blue/pink members achieve a majority they then change the rules of admission to create a lock on their new conquest (in the case of academia, for example, even blue researchers in the Netherlands of all places, were shocked by how blatant the process was). The status shaming is also of the usual type: high status blue / pinks follow Alinksy’s battle plan. First, they pick a low-status target (rule 12). This target is usually a pale, bespectacled Aspergers-ish nerd) for a transgression against the norms they wish to universalize. The high social status pinks paint themselves as victims of a power imbalance, then they use their superior popularity to out-speak the target and push their version of the narrative. Pink allies in the media join in to keep the pressure on (rule 8). This is easy to do, because the act of social shaming is not only fun, but it’s click-bait, so everyone involved not only has lolz, they has cheeseburger (rule 6). The toxic nature of the allegations is usually sufficient to make sure that the target of the attack does not get much, if any, sympathetic press (rule 12, again: “Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions”.) In computer gaming the attempt at entry came by first establishing a few pinks inside the community (not a problem, because the world of gamer development did not think of itself as politicized), and then using these pink resources to promote, give good reviews to, and bestow awards on pink developers and pink games, even when the games in question are not “games” by the normal definition.

We are very pleased to see that the gaming community, players and professionals, men and women, young and middle-aged, Left and Right, has banded together to reject this latest entryist offensive by the cultural Marxists. One of our authors, the brilliant American military theorist William S. Lind, has observed that “the greatest threat to freedom in America is the left’s ideology of cultural Marxism.” What #GamerGate is doing, whether its members realize it or not, is fighting for freedom.

#GamerGate is not fundamentally about promiscuity, betrayal, misogyny, sexual harassment, online threats, journalistic corruption, doxxing, bullying, hatred, or anything that most of its opponents and even some of its supporters say it is about. It is about men and women across the ideological spectrum retaining their freedom to design, develop, and play the games they wish to design, develop, and play without being subject to a hyper-politicized Game Police or being forced to answer to anyone for anything.

What #GamerGate is fighting in the game world is exactly what Castalia House was founded to oppose in the SF/F publishing world: an extreme subset of the political Left attempting to dictate and control content. And that is precisely why we support it.

UPDATE: Since there has been some debate about our usage of the term “cultural Marxists”, it may be useful for those involved in the debate to reference this post, which cites the relevant portions of an essay by Castalia House author William S. Lind. Lind clarifies the matter by tracing the historic roots of political correctness to the works of two 20th-century Marxist theoreticians, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary.