By David Futrelle

On Sunday, the Australian “Fortnite” streamer known as MrDeadMoth was arrested after inadvertently broadcasting an argument with his wife that ended with him — just off camera — allegedly hitting her in the face while one of their children screamed in the background.

Naturally, some of the internet’s worst people are defending him and blaming his wife for “provoking” him into hitting her.

“MrDeadMoth didn’t do anything Wrong,” declared someone calling himself Burrito6920 on Reddit’s UnpopularOpinion subreddit.

Let’s say he did hit her. Guess what, she fucking deserves it. She’s a loud, shitty wife. She throws shit at him and acts like she’s more important than him. If your man tells you to leave him the fuck alone, you leave him the fuck alone. … If he hit her it can be justified as self defense from her verbal and physical harassment. And even if it’s not legally justifiable, she’s a fucking bitch. Just because she’s pregnant doesn’t make her better than or special over anybody else. … [A]ny person that’s that much of a c*nt needs to be taught not to be such a c*nt.

While this opinion has indeed proven to be an unpopular one on r/UnpopularOpinion, with other Redditors voting the post down to zero, similar arguments have been getting a much more welcoming reception on KotakuInAction, Reddit’s main forum for reactionary gamers, a subreddit that still officially describes itself as “the main hub for GamerGate on Reddit.”

“She was abusing and violent towards him,” someone called Gathrax asserted in a comment in a KotakuInACtion discussion of the incident.

Everything she did was to make it sound as bad as possible on stream. This was classic female vindictive abuse. They both suck but I am sick of people saying it was his fault when all he did was a simple Sean Connery to get her to stop abusing him and maybe even abusing the kid.

This comment got 77 upvotes from fellow KotakuInAction readers.

“I don’t want to say she’s ‘asking for it’ but she’s basically asking for it,” another commenter called tosi-ebin opined.

A classic case of “how long can my man take abuse and try and de-escalate the situation before he loses his shit”. The “crying” stops real quick and she comes back for more each time.

Tosi-ebin got 38 upvotes for this, er, wisdom.

“Ladies, at this point, can we all just admit that an ass whoopin’ just doesn’t fall out of the goddamn sky?” wrote yet another KotakuInAction commenter called astonwave.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re both horrible fucking people for putting their child in this situation, but she essentially instigated this by throwing shit at him, and people are surprised he’d had enough and retaliated?

A commenter called spliffcitycanada joked “Save yourselves, go mgtow.”

All of these comments also got upvoted by the KotakuInAction gang.

Meanwhile, over on the internet Nazi tip sheet the Daily Stormer, one of the site’s regular contributors offered a strikingly similar, if somewhat more colorfully worded, defense of the alleged wife beater — then worked some anti-Semitism into the mix.

“Twitch Streamer MrDeadMoth Arrested for Defending Self Against Hysterical Aggressive Fronthole” the headline blared.

In the article itself, the Daily Stormer’s “Luis Castillo” attacked the wife for not being properly appreciative of her husband.

“This man apparently gave this woman a place to live and have kids, and bought her some food for her to cook for him, which she cooked as a service to him,” he wrote.

Then she went full aggro on him for not eating the food she made for him. … Women will do any sort of shit they can get away with. This used to not even be a problem, because our grandfathers used to not let them get away with stupid shit. This continues to not be a problem outside of the West, because non-Westerners continue to not let their women get away with stupid shit. This is only a problem in the West, now, because the Jews created Feminism and pushed it on us through their control of our cultural institutions and legal system.

Most of the Daily Stormers commenters agreed.

“This is the perfect example of a psycho wife using psychological assault,” declared a commenter called ashenone.

“The pimp-slap heard aroud the world” someone calling himself Xbowjoe1 joked.

“He should have fucking punched her in the mouth and locked her in a room and told her to think about what she did,” declared bossn*gger.

But not every Daily Stormer commenter was quite so impressed with MrDeadMoth. Someone called Alt-Reich attacked him as a “f*ggot” — not for beating his wife, but for playing video games in the first place.

That guys is a fucking f*g and a disgrace as a dad, how many hours has he been playing that game … [A]re you seriously defending this f*ggot! A lot of men seem to know all there is about how fucked up women are now (they are), but they need to take a good look in the mirror, because they too have become absolute disgraces as Men… Jews own most guys now, they have fucked up the men as much as the women … .

It shouldn’t be much of a shock to see commenters on Reddit’s “main hub for GamerGate” in close agreement with Daily Stormer Nazis — that last anti-gamer comment notwithstanding.

The Daily Stormer’s Andrew Anglin cut his political teeth — and learned how to troll — in the fetid misogynistic and anti-Semitic swamp that is 4chan’s /pol/ board. 4chan also helped to birth the GamerGate movement and the reactionary gamer culture left in its wake; GamerGate was steeped in fascist (and often blatantly antisemitic) imagery even before the resurgence of the far-right in 2015 and 2016.

Of course, during the heyday of GamerGate, commenters on KotakuInAction at least generally tried to pretend that they weren’t raging misogynists. They don’t seem to feel the need to bother any more.

You can see the whole incident these lovely people are arguing about here.

H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @0utofBeta for tipping me off about this.

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