With that little anecdote out of the way, I can get to the point. For years now, as the rabid ideologues of the left went further down the rabbit hole, and they started looking less like a political movement and more like a religious one, their arguments got debunked to the end of the Earth, and they became the target of mockery. Either unable or unwilling to challenge their ideological opponents with arguments, they started the buzzword game, branding people who thought different to them with derogatory labels, just as I was branded a homophobe for making a joke. If you challenged feminism, you were challenging the idea of gender equality, and you hated women and thought they deserved fewer freedoms and rights, you were sexist, you were misogynistic. If you challenged the idea of diversity in movies and games, then you were challenging the push for a more inclusive industry, and trying to keep minorities down and push them away, you were racist, you were homophobic, you were transphobic. This is where we get to a significant event; Gamergate, depending on who you ask, it's either a movement for more ethical journalism, or a misogynistic harassment campaign against women. It's very difficult to get facts about Gamergate, even the Wikipedia article on it is a complete piece of shit, but from what I understand, it began with a dev called Zoe Quinn and a game called Depression Quest, what blossomed shortly there after was Quinn's infidelity, having affairs with multiple people while dating her boyfriend, including a Kotaku writer, which raised a lot of eye brows. The extent of the collusion was revealed in the GameJounroPros leak, which exposed a private messaging group of numerous journalists, including the Kotaku writer Quinn was banging, what followed was a cyber war between game journalists and Gamers, who the gaming press had dismissed and degraded as 'dead' and all just basement dwelling losers. This blew up in their faces however when a bunch of advertisers started pulling out of the big sites, not wanting to be associated with them. They picked a fight with gamers, branding them all misogynistic man children, when gaming is in fact an industry that's massive all over the globe, and is enjoyed by millions of people of all races, and of both genders, they thought they could win, and they got crushed. Anita Sarkeesian is another good example of this labelling; her feminist 'criticisms' of games were nonsensical, but when her arguments were roundly and rightly shredded, she became a poor woman who was being targeted by evil sexist trolls, and when her massively over funded project 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games' never reached completion, her legitimacy and motives were brought into question, but again, it was all just sexism. Similar accusations were thrown at people who were critical of Ghostbusters, and this vindictive and abusive marketing tactic resulted in a miserable failure at the box office. Buzzwords are so easy, aren't they, if you're a journalist who's secretly emailing a bunch of other journalists and colluding with them to craft narratives, and this gets exposed, or you're a director or studio making a naff product, rather than being honest and taking responsibility, you can just dismiss the people calling you out, because they hate women, and society at large hates people who hate women, you know this no matter how much you ramble about the patriarchy, and hopefully no one will listen to evil misogynists when they're calling you out for your shitty actions.
It's such an easy way to explain all of the world's problems, it's so simple and black and white, people critical of you aren't people with opinions and arguments, they're bogeymen who hide under the bed, they're bad people. Brexit and the 2016 Election are two hilariously stupid examples of why the buzzword game failed. For so long people had been called sexists and racists and misogynists, and these once powerful words eventually lost all of their meaning, becoming toothless and petty, and the final cry of an ideologue's desperate efforts to escape those mean, critical poo poo heads. So when the Brexit vote rolled around, and people began expressing concern at the lack of accountability in the EU's unelected bureaucrats, and the insane open borders policy that is literally killing (and raping) people on the continent, these were not seen by the elite and the inteligencia as serious or legitimate grievances, the people who held them were just racists, they were islamophobic small minded little Englanders who just hated immigrants, rather than normal people concerned by the massive crime wave hitting Europe and the prospect of that coming to Britain, and seeing their wages being strangled by an influx of cheap labourers, since mummy and daddy don't pay for their University educations. As the vote came closer and the prospect of a leave victory got more real, Project Fear starting stepping up its game, a vote to leave became a vote for racism, for sexism, for fascism, and Britain would die a painful death if it voted leave, and if that wasn't enough, there was always Jo Cox to exploit. The vote comes around, and evidently all the fear mongering and branding people racists and sexists failed, as the leave side were a million votes up. When calling leave voters racists and sexists failed to sway them, you'd think people would realise that the buzzword game is now over, smearing people with buzzwords doesn't work, but no, Britain was seeing a fascist uprising, a racist, nationalistic revolt had robbed Britain of a glorious future in the EU, I saw a few people blame it on backwards thinking racist old people, and saying they shouldn't be allowed to vote, key words there are shouldn't, be, allowed, to, and vote. A strikingly similar situation played out in the Presidential election, the race was between a brilliant, wonderful, honest, healthy, trust worthy woman, and an evil, racist, sexist, rapey, homophobic, islamophobic, transphobic, fascist Nazi. You'd think that after the Brexit vote, they'd realise that calling people poo poo heads isn't an argument any more. You might also notice that since Sarkeesian and Gamergate, the buzzword game has become harsher, it went from sexist and racist, to fascist and Nazi, and later to White Supremacist, when their old weapons became blunt, they switched to new, sharper ones, and, not able to learn from their mistakes, immediately got to work making them blunt too. But while the words had changed, the game itself hadn't, and even these harsher accusations became pathetic and pointless, and when the big day came, and Donald Trump won, they still didn't learn.
Even I was amazed by the result of the election, despite all of the shit surrounding Hillary Clinton, all the scandals, all the corruption, all the lies, I still thought she'd win, but instead Trump won, which makes me happy. Just like Brexit however, when the side that was labelled all the isms in the book still won, it wasn't seen as a wakeup call to all the ideologues that calling people names doesn't work, it was seen as a cold and frightening reminder that the nations of the west were still deeply plagued by misogyny, white supremacy, racism and islamophobia, and the rise of Trump to the White House was a sign that the white supremacist Nazis were powerful and dangerous. Here's where we get Mr Richard Spencer, according to the left, he's a neo Nazi, I don't know if that's true, I know very little about him, but sadly, I'm not going to believe he's a neo Nazi until I see proof, because everyone who isn't a advocate of social justice is apparently a Nazi, so I'll reserve my judgement. Spencer was at Trumps inauguration doing an in interview when a member of the communist black bloc came up and sucker punched him, this is bad enough on it's own if you ask me, Spencer was targeted by this attacker because he's supposedly a Nazi, even though he wasn't doing anything, he wasn't attacking anyone, he wasn't even spouting Nazi talk, he was just doing an interview, doing nothing wrong, and he got punched for it. A Winston Churchill quote springs to mind, as the AntiFa movement call themselves anti fascists, while using blatantly fascist tactics to shut up their opposition, attacking them in the street for expressing an opinion, to try and scare them into staying quite. It's also something I saw in the Chicago Kidnapping I ranted about in Bring on the Meteor, what the victim was is the reason he was targeted, he was white, and white is evil, and he was mentally disabled, which made him an easy target, I can't help but see it that way, the four kidnappers may not have been motivated entirely by race, but it was undeniably a part. When in the video they yell "fuck white people" they aren't saying fuck him specifically, they're saying fuck his race, because white people and cops aren't individuals, they're just a thing, a group of people that can be lumped together on their skin colour or their badge, and be treated and judged according to your bigotries towards that group. I see the same thing in Spencer, he's a Nazi, he's not deserving of dignity or respect, because he's just a Nazi, and Nazi's are, to these people at least, less than human. This is something you could see very clearly in the youtube feminist and social justice community, as highlighted by youtubers like Bearing, Richard Spencer is a Nazi, and he has terrible ideas, and therefore he deserves to be attacked in the street, for having an opinion that you don't like. I will still believe my favourite Milo Yiannopoulos quote on this matter, that sunlight is the best disinfectant, the best way to kill bad ideas is to give them a platform, let people who think them make their case, and let people make up their own minds. Speaking of Milo, we saw yet more violence directed at a so called Nazi, this time it was Milo Yiannopoulos, speaking at UC Berkeley, but while they usually just protest, or smear themselves with fake blood, pull fire alarms, that kind of thing, this time that wasn't enough. People were beaten with flap poles, at least one person from what I saw was knocked unconscious, people were pepper sprayed in the face, windows were smashed, and things were set on fire, it wasn't a protest, it was a riot. While I know barely anything about Spencer, I know a fair bit about Milo, more than enough to know he's no fascist, but the ideologues have already proved, again and again, that facts will have no effect on them.
This, in a lot of ways, is a natural evolution of tactics, they tried arguing, that failed, so they tried to smear and suppress the opposition with buzzwords, and that worked for a while, until the buzzwords lost their power, getting desperate, they switched to harsher words, but that failed, and the more revolutionary of their number, members of movements like AntiFa and BLM, started getting violent. With massive defeats like Brexit and President Trump, instead of realising why they failed, they doubled down with their buzzwords. And a larger number of them became violent, which is what we saw at the inauguration, and what we saw at UC Berkeley. These people are so entrenched in their belief that they've become zealots, opposing Trump and Milo not because of their actions or their ideas, but simply because they exist, and because they're evil. But what they always fail to realise is why Trump and Brexit happened, why right wing parties are rising in popularity across Europe, because people are tired of their shit, their buzzword politics is annoying, and they never address problems honestly, like they didn't with the Orlando shooting, the Cologne rapes, the Nice and Berlin truck attacks, BLM riots, the Dallas shooting, the Chicago kidnapping, and so on and so on. And now that talking isn't getting them anywhere, they're switching to fists and pepper sprays, and in the process, revealing who the real fascists are. But violence will not work, and this is where things get really dangerous, on both sides of the political spectrum are unhinged ideologues, on the left it's Marxists and communists, and on the right it's Fascists and White Supremacists, but while they preach about stopping the far right from coming to power, they ignore the simple fact that it isn't the far right attacking people, it's them. In a morbid way, this is great publicity for the far right, who can frame all this far left violence as justification for their brand of authoritarianism, and if the left wing violence doesn't stop, in the words of JFK, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable." It's only a matter of time before the most unhinged ideologues of the far right get tired of being victimised by the far left, and will start retaliating with violence. Italy saw this in the 'years of Lead', and it's only a matter of time before it happens again. While it may be a natural evolution when calling people names stops working, it's an even worse tactic, and the problem stops being the bad ideas that were discarded, and becomes the people who are so desperate to push their treasured ideas that they can justify terrorism. An idea is just an idea, it's existence hurts no one, regardless of how terrible it is, and while it does have the right to exist, the belief that this idea should be silenced and suppressed by any means necessary is something I can never and will never get behind, I have no right to dictate what people are and aren't allowed to think, and there isn't a single human being in the world that should have that power. Controlling and restricting what people are allowed to think is oppression, and these ideologues apparently hate oppression, but they don't hate hypocrisy it seems. Changing and diluting words while trying to keep their connotations is the aim of the Buzzword game, a misogynist is someone who disagrees with a feminist, but misogynist is also someone who hates women, same word, different definition, but with the same connotation, that person hates women. But like a sore loser, when they lose the ability to shut people up with mean words, they switch to more vicious bully tactics, not seeing how this will inevitably make them the targets of retaliation in the future. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel, that is another belief I hold; as cynical as I am, I do enjoy a bit of hope, and I hope that things will calm down, but only time will tell, and with how things are going, I have my doubts.
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