The Alt-left is Real

GamerGate was invented to weaponize misogyny and created the alt-right. The same people are now running the alt-left.

Work in progress.

GamerGate: the ultimate “red pill”

A decade ago, in 2012, the infamously misogynistic and toxic “r/RedPill” was started on Reddit which was focused on “men’s rights” — which is the gender equivalent of “white lives matter.”

At the same time, the biggest “incel” website was started, called WizardChan. Fredrick Brennan joined it immediately and some have said he was a founder. The rules were that you had to be a virgin to be a member. If you were a virgin over 30 years old you were a “Wizard.”

In early 2013, Brennan bought WizardChan and became it’s moderator. He allowed it to grow and metastasize into a rage-filled cesspool of rape and murder fantasies.

In October 2013, Brennan claims to have lost his virginity and had to step down as the administrator of WizardChan. (CW: Misogyny and racism. Brennan is “copypaste” in these WizardChan logs. https://pastebin.com/Gna61cZx)

A few weeks later, in November 2013, “GamerGate” started on WizardChan. It started with just one target to focus on and set about destroying her life. To this day, if you mention her name on Twitter you will get a flood of trolls, left over like background radiation, who will repeat the same lies generated about her nearly a decade ago.

The harassment and trolling moved to 4chan in 2014 and became a dangerous, misogynistic proto-cult that picked women to target and figured out ways to torment them and ruin their lives. When some of this activity became physically dangerous, 4chan banned it. Considering 4chan was the worst website in the world at the time, this is quite remarkable.

It should have stopped there, if not well before, but luckily for GamerGate, Fredrick Brennan created a new website designed to remove all of the restrictions that allowed 4chan to ban dangerous activity. This new website allowed anyone to create a board and put anything they wanted on it.

The new website was, quite literally, just a copy of 4chan, but with most of the rules removed. The GamerGate proto-cult moved there and quickly got larger and more extreme. The website was called “infinitychan.” Many boards were created to target women, which included gangstalking, troll brigades, hacking, exposing personal photos, swatting and the most extreme misogyny imaginable.

When the traffic got too much for him to handle, Brennan sold “infinitychan,” now called “8chan,” to a retired Army Satanist who lived in the Philippines, raised pigs and had money and website infrastructure named Jim Watkins. Watkins also owned (or stole) anime website “2chan,” and hosted a huge amount of pornography — some of which appeared to be illegal.

Brennan moved to the Philippines, and with the help of Jim Watkins and his son Ron, grew 8chan and GamerGate into a massive radicalization engine almost entirely based on the hatred of women.

However, Brennan was unsatisfied with the level of extreme behavior generated by misogyny alone, so at the end of 2014 he workshopped a plan with his followers on 8chan to write a sympathetic piece about himself on the neo-nazi website Daily Stormer. They ultimately decided on a piece promoting eugenics which traded on Brennan’s disability.

This opened the floodgates to the most extreme white supremacists in the world to come to 8chan espousing literal Nazi ideology. It also made Brennan a cult leader — which he freely admitted to at the time.

Simultaneously, Brennan and the Watkins were having legal troubles with 8chan, because it was hosting criminal harassment and child pornography. So Brennan hired neo-nazi “men’s rights activist” Mike Cernovich to be his lawyer, online defender and cheerleader.

At the same time, Brennan connected with “technology writer” Milo Yiannopolous who took GamerGate to the next level by frequently writing about it on Steve Bannon’s right-wing attack website Breitbart. Through 2015, GamerGate grew in intensity and turned 8chan into a hub for some of the most dangerous people on earth. Bannon was not only aware of this, but intentionally promoted and encouraged it across all social media.

During this time the meaning of “redpill” slowly morphed from being about “men’s rights” to being “white men’s rights” as neo-nazi ideology was incorporated into the movement. This group then solidified and metastasized into the right-wing white supremacist cult called the “alt-right” just in time for the ramp up to the 2016 campaign.

HRC: The candidate everyone suddenly hated

When Donald Trump announced for President, he instantly became the hero the alt-right was looking for. He checked all the boxes — womanizing, racist, belligerent, compromised and malleable, the perfect transgressive anti-hero and cult figurehead. The GamerGate forums had morphed into more a more generalized hatred of anyone but white men — and took Trump in from the beginning.

But to radicalize anyone, you need a target, an enemy. When Hillary became the front-runner for the Democratic nomination with Bernie as the runner up and Jill Stein as the spoiler, the machine went into action. On both sides.

My own experience with this was fairly emblematic, I think. In the lead up to the 2016 election and Donald Trump’s ascendancy, it became obvious that there was Russian influence in the campaign. On Facebook I spoke up about it and got trolled for being a conspiracy theorist by people on both sides.

I’m a mainstream liberal who had a few reservations about Hillary, but for the most part I agreed with the entire planet who listed her as the most admired woman for decades. I thought she was the best candidate, although I liked a lot of what Bernie said too.

My more progressive friends were gravitating to Bernie instead of Hillary. And a few to Jill Stein. I was fine with that, until they started actually attacking me if I even brought Hillary’s name up. These are the nicest people I know and they were behaving in a way I didn’t understand. To them she was a “warmonger,” “evil,” “just as bad as Trump” which was simply bullshit. Several of these people left the Democratic Party for good and still live in an angry world where the entire system should get burned down because there’s no hope.

What subsequently became known as “Bernie Bros” were actually victims of a propaganda operation aka a psyop designed to destroy the best candidate and sow rage in the Democratic Party. It worked.

I should note, that the example of a “Big Lie” claiming an election was stolen was tested out on the left when all the Bernie Bros were convinced, and many still are, that Hillary and the DNC stole the nomination from Bernie.

On the right, the DNC and Hillary were also the target of course. Rather than the Russians having hacked the servers, the right wing propagandists were blaming the DNC for hacking themselves. And they were setting Hillary up as a reckless, stumbling, sick criminal in mainstream media and as a child-eating Satanic pedophile on Twitter, Reddit and 8chan.

Misogynistic metacult

The combination of left and right-wing psyops added up to what I’ll call a “metacult” devoted to hating Hillary Clinton.

The anti-HRC metacult is alive and well today, on both sides of course. What it adds up to is what is sometimes called the “third position,” the “red-brown alliance,” the “horseshoe” and a number of other terms of art that mean the extreme left and right cooperating to create a “third” type of political ideology — one which is fundamentally nihilistic.

The essential motto of both parts of the third position created in 2016 was, and is:

“Blame Hillary, not the Russians”

Think about it. The same basic message is promoted by the “dirtbag left” and the entire right-wing. The narrative they enforce is exactly the same if you just change a few words.

Third Position Mad Libs:

“If you think the Russians are involved, you are a [ libtard | shitlib ] conspiracy theorist. You should instead be looking at the [ baby-eater | warmonger ] Hillary Clinton who controls the [ Deep State | DNC ].”

Enforcing the Narrative — Propaganda and Trolling Ops

Chapo Traphouse is a podcast that was formed in March 2016, just in time to affect the election. They instantly became favorites of Bernie Sanders fans because of their far-left politics and quickly became a radicalization hub for the left-wing of the anti-HRC metacult. Their fans hate “shitlibs,”. “Hillary bots,” and especially anyone who blames Russia for anything.

Many of their fans collected on Subreddit “r/ChapoTrapHouse” where they promoted and grew a large, belligerent group of trolls that would coordinate to attack targets on both the right and the left. Four years after they started, the Subreddit was banned in June 2020.

In what was surely meant to show that both sides were getting equal treatment, the right-wing QAnon-friendly “r/The_Donald” was banned at the same time for unmoderated propaganda, harmful trolling and coordinated harassment.

The parallels between these groups are really quite remarkable. They both use the same information warfare tactics to enforce the same basic message — that Hillary Clinton is evil and Russia is actually our friend.

Undue Influence and Propaganda

Most Pizzagate/QAnon+ participants were not originally fascist, racist conspiracy addicts fueled by propaganda, rage and fear to take actions that have harmful consequences to themselves and everyone around them.

The same is true of Bernie Bros, Chapo trolls and “dirtbag leftists” who weren’t originally misogynistic, nihilistic Russia-apologists who spend their days attacking people in the out-group.

These are two components of the same psychological operation. People get drawn into these groups by baiting them with ideological stances they agree with, presented with an immediately welcoming social group, and then bombarded them with propaganda. The propaganda had the same purpose in both groups.

Blame Hillary, not the Russians.