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I've been tiptoeing around the issue of GamerGate. A few of my past editorials touch on some issues related to it, but I've been reluctant to dive straight in. The reason I feel compelled to write about it is that there has been yet another case of Social Justice Warrior (SJW) hypocrisy. The recent incident at the Calgary Expo was covered by Georgina Young here, and I encourage you to read it for more details on the incident. The general idea is that a group women, who were part of a group called the Honey Badger Brigade, were kicked out of Calgary Expo and given a lifetime ban for expressing an opinion the SJW twitter mob did not approve of. Right now a tiny intolerant mob is trying its best to drive women out of conventions in the name of protecting women from harassment.

When GamerGate started I didn't have much interest in it. People were concerned that an indie developer was trading sexual favors for positive press. Since I didn't visit the site in question, or really care about game journalism in general at the time, it was hard to get too worked up about it, but people who visit the sites and make purchasing decisions based on their coverage can certainly complain if they want. The moment I really got interested in GamerGate was when I was made aware the narrative that it was supposedly a misogynistic and racist hate campaign run by white male gamers.

I did a little search and found this. If you click the link you can see some of the women and minorities who support GamerGate. And this just barely scratches the surface. This was sort of the moment where it dawned on me, the story being told by journalists was complete crap. There are, at least, thousands of women and minorities who support GamerGate, including actual female indie developers like Jennifer Dawe. Another really odd thing I found while investigating GamerGate is that it sure does support a lot of female developers, writers, and content creators for a movement supposedly dedicated to terrorizing women out of the industry.

So who are the SJWs that GamerGate has made such a big deal of fighting? Well they are primarily left-wing, most of the less important ones will have blogs or YouTube channels, while the more important ones are actual journalists. Interestingly enough much of the opposition to SJWs comes from within in the left. The Honey Badgers, for example, believe in gay rights, trans rights and various other causes that are associated with the left. Another critic of SJWs for years before GamerGate even existed is the Amazing Atheist, who also has serious criticism of right-wing politicians on his YouTube channel and, like the Honey Badgers, has stated many left-wing positions. As shown in this multi-part political analysis of GamerGate there is a pretty large coalition of different political groups within GamerGate, but it broadly leans to the left.

In my previous editorial about self-appointed gatekeepers, I talked about SJWs already, but not by name. In that article I covered some of their goals, like eliminating art and speech they find offensive, as well as tactics like twitter mobs and petitions. A really interesting thing about SJWs is that despite their outward obsession with diversity in race and gender, they are almost entirely white and male. A few years ago people criticized the Tea Party, and later the Republican National Convention, for being primarily white men. Some people thought it was fair and some didn't, but for the people who did think it was fair, it would be absolutely hypocritical to not accept the same criticism when it's directed at SJWs. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

On the left we have a crowd of SJWs at the XOXO Festival, which included such illustrious speakers as Anita Sarkessian, famous for her propaganda videos which cloak Jack Thompson-esque arguments under a paint job of feminism. The crowd is entirely white, and almost entirely male. While on the right we have a fighting game tournament which includes a diverse crowd of different races and genders. If SJWs believed anything they said about diversity they would be embarrassed that the community they are trying to change is more diverse than they are.

If you want more proof you can visit some of the sites that are criticizing GamerGate, like Kotaku and Polygon, and see who is on the staff. You'll see they are mostly white men, very few women or minorities are employed at any of these sites. You can go up a level and look at the parent companies, Gawker and Vox, who have also been critical of GamerGate, and you find more white men. And we find that despite the claims that they are standing up for women and minorities, the main people who benefit from the SJW agenda are themselves, primarily white men.

Consider Nathan Grayson, the journalist who was at the heart of the scandal that started GamerGate. While most of the media coverage focused on the female indie dev Zoe Quinn, in an attempt to paint GamerGate as some sort of misogynist hate campaign, Grayson slinked off into the shadows. To this day, people are still calling for Grayson to be fired or at least face some kind of consequences, but SJWs protect their own. Despite numerous other incidents of corruption and collusion that have been uncovered since then, there has been basically no punishment for anyone involved.

For SJWs, mutual promotion of the in-group is the highest principle – which means that mostly white men will benefit. A few women will also benefit by virtue of their membership in the group, and they will make a big deal out of it in the rare cases that it happens. The thing is, promoting a woman who happens to be part of your social circle is not in any way comparable to promoting the welfare of women in general. The really ugly thing about all this is trying to pass off cronyism as some noble cause to advance the rights of women.

And for women who are not part of the in-group, they can expect the same fate as the Honey Badgers, banned for not having the correct ideology. Or they might be treated like Dawe, who had an organized campaign try, and fail, to keep her game off of Steam. This article wouldn't be complete without a mention of Liana K, who wrote some devastating criticism of Anita Sarkeesian's ideas and her video series. SJWs are ignoring Liana and a very large number of women who disagree with Sarkeesian, in an attempt to portray Sarkeesian as speaking on behalf of all female gamers.

And then we have the #NotYourShield hashtag that was started on Twitter, by female and minority GamerGate supporters who didn't want the rich white men in the media to speak on their behalf. They wanted their own voices to be heard. The response to NotYourShield has been very indicative of what SJWs really think of diversity. Instead of listening to these voices, there was a quick response to have them silenced. We had the narrative being pushed that it was all white men using sock puppet accounts. In response to that, the NotYourShield supporters made numerous videos and posted countless photos to prove their identities. Now the media rarely mentions NotYourShield at all, because it's just too inconvenient to their narrative. The one thing they didn't do was reach out to women and minorities to find out why they supported this movement, because they don't actually care as much about women and minorities as they want you to believe.

Now another incident I have to mention is when the game developer Tim Schafer spoke at the GDC. He used a straw man argument to make fun of the women and minority supporters of NotYourShield. And I know someone on staff who repeatedly says that GamerGate made too big a deal out of it, and it was just a stupid joke. In some sense I agree, it is a pretty minor thing, but I think the main reason that people got so upset is because hypocrisy is always distasteful, and this is emblematic of SJW hypocrisy.

We have a wealthy white man, the absolute pinnacle of privilege according to SJWs, who will use his public platform at a game developer conference to mock women and minorities. It's not just the joke, it's the fact that all the empty words he said in the past about diversity are revealed to be lies. His SJW friends can pat him on the back and say he's a hero for diversity, but it will never be true. Not for him. Not for any of them.

Now it might seem strange that a bunch of rich white men who openly admit to being privileged would claim to speak on behalf of women and minorities. What possible justification do they have? Well its pretty simple, all they have to do is declare themselves to be "male feminist allies" and that gives them the right to speak on behalf of other groups. Jonathan McIntosh is a great example of this. He has identified himself as a "Senior Feminist". Now it might seem a bit strange to give that title to a guy in his thirties who has done little else but produce and co-write a series of videos complaining about sexism in video games because the characters don't meet his ideal of what a woman should be. You might think the women who were fighting for civil rights decades before McIntosh was born would be more deserving of the title senior feminist.

McIntosh also claimed that disagreement with trained feminists like himself is, "the height of misogynistic harassment." If I was cynical, I might say that he is using women as a shield to hide from criticism of his many ridiculous ideas. At one time misogyny meant hatred of women, now it means disagreeing with a white man. Or perhaps more accurately, misogynist is what SJWs use to refer to any member of the out-group.

I feel I would be remiss if I didn't mention Gawker. Pretty early on in GamerGate, there were email campaigns to get advertisement pulled from Gawker. And SJWs came out of the woodwork to defend Gawker, making the frankly unhinged declaration that any company who pulled advertisements because of GamerGate is misogynistic. It's just so amazing that a group which made a very big deal when nude pictures of female celebrities were leaked online would support Gawker. Gawker posted a clip from a leaked Hulk Hogan sex tape, and kept it up in defiance of a court order.

One argument put forth by people is that SJWs just don't care about men and only care about women, so it might be sexist against men to tolerate the Hulk Hogan sex tape, it's not necessarily inconsistent with their stated beliefs. The obvious answer to that is that Hulk Hogan is having sex with a woman, so clearly her privacy rights were violated as well. There's just no way to get around it, SJWs who support Gawker or write at the site and its subsidiaries are legitimizing privacy violations to drive page views. SJWs never criticize Gawker, because promotion of the in-group takes priority over all other concerns.

Before I'm done I really should talk about this concept of "listen and believe" which is a phrase that comes from a talk that Anita Sarkeesian gave at the XOXO festival. Now this phrase has received a lot of criticism from within GamerGate, and I understand it, but for the purpose of this article I will interpret "listen and believe" as charitably as I can, based on a few comments I read from people who I consider fairly reasonable.

So from what I can gather, the purpose of "listen and believe" is to listen to voices you might otherwise ignore. The believe part is not something I can really get behind, because it leads to things like the UVA rape hoax, but I can completely endorse listening to people outside your social group whose suffering you might otherwise ignore. I only wish SJWs would take their own idea seriously. Their treatment of NotYourShield supporters exposes them as massive hypocrites who won't listen, never mind believe, people who are outside their own group, even if it's the women and minorities they claim to be helping.

I think its time to stop taking SJWs at their word, and stop pretending that they actually care about women. There are a very small number of women in their social group that they promote, and the rest are ignored. Although SJWs try to outdo each other by making loud public pronouncements that show off how "enlightened" and "progressive" they are, their actions couldn't be further from their statements. So when we get to the question of why a movement concerned about ethical media is so worried about SJWs, the answer is: SJWs are an inherently corrupt group. Cronyism is the absolute core of the SJW movement.