The Third Law of SJW: VidCon 2017 and Anita Sarkeesian’s Paranoid Projection

Posted on | July 12, 2017 | 1 Comment

 

Anita Sarkeesian (@femfreq on Twitter) is a feminist who made herself notorious by her attempts to destroy the videogame industry with dubious charges of sexism, and who has since made a career of victimhood, claiming to be a target of criminal harassment.

Who is “harassing” whom? The reality is that Sarkeesian and her “social justice warrior” (SJW) allies are engaged in a dishonest effort to silence their critics. In February 2016, Twitter named Sarkeesian to its “Trust and Safety Council”; two weeks later, I was banned from Twitter.

Not surprisingly, Sarkeesian claimed that suspicions about her role in the totalitarian suppression of online dissent were “a manifestation of misogyny, borne out of a deep distrust and hatred of women.” This was disingenuous, as I wrote at the time:

What Ms. Sarkeesian failed to do, of course, was to explain why she is so hated in particular (Answer: Because she lies) or whether the suspension of my account was prompted by a complaint from her or one of her allies.

To this day, Twitter has never offered any specific justification for suspending my @rsmccain account, and this is a textbook lesson in what feminists do: Fabricate accusations, deny the accused a fair opportunity to respond, and pretend that the outcome is “social justice.”

 

Carl Benjamin is an erudite Englishman who has frequently criticized Ms. Sarkeesian on his popular YouTube channel “Sargon of Akkad,” which has more than 600,000 subscribers. At last month’s VidCon 2017 in Los Angeles, Benjamin and some of his colleagues attended a panel at which Ms. Sarkeesian was speaking. This caused her to freak completely out:

Feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian is facing a barrage of criticism since her unprovoked outburst at popular YouTuber Carl “Sargon of Akkad” Benjamin at Vidcon 2017 [June 22].
The feminist berated Benjamin before an audience, calling him a “garbage human” for criticizing her work on YouTube. Since then, Sarkeesian has been claiming victimhood — describing Benjamin’s presence at her panel as an act of intimidation in a blog post, and in an interview on Polygon where she called for the creation of a blacklist for those who “harass” her.

Merely being in the same room with someone who disagrees with her is enough to cause Anita Sarkeesian to claim she is a victim of “intimidation,” and to declare her critics guilty of wrongdoing:

They will no doubt plead innocent and act shocked at what they characterize as the outrageousness of such allegations. This, too, is part of their strategy: gaslighting, acting in a way intended to encourage me and their other targets to doubt ourselves and to wonder if all of this isn’t just in our heads. But to anyone who examines their patterns of behavior with clear eyes, the intentions of their actions are undeniably apparent.

This is feminism’s kafkatrapping tactic — once accused of “misogyny,” the targeted enemy can do nothing to disprove the accusation, and everything the enemy says or does is interpreted as proof of guilt. The feminist can never acknowledge that her critics may be motivated by good faith. To disagree with Ms. Sarkeesian is to be guilty of “hatred of women.” A persistent (and successful) critic like Carl Benjamin cannot even be permitted to attend forums like VidCon without being accused of wrongfully attempting to “intimidate” Ms. Sarkeesian.

Ms. Sarkeesian’s June 26 column about this incident is an extraordinary example of feminist propaganda tactics, especially her conclusion:

Now, [Benjamin] and his followers are acting as if me publicly calling him a “garbage human” is the equivalent to what he has done to me. In truth, he and his followers cannot begin to imagine what it is to have to constantly beg for and fight for your basic humanity in a culture that fundamentally refuses to acknowledge it. He cannot imagine what it is to spend years and years being the target of floods of harassment and hate, and then to still go out there and keep fighting. The companion of his who made that apology video I referenced earlier also tweeted that women are “powerful” enough to “deal with things like workplace harassment to rape.” As if power is in accepting a culture in which women are second-class citizens, in which misogyny and workplace harassment and rape are the norm. F–k that. I’ll never settle for that. You’re damn right I’m powerful. After everything I’ve been put through by Carl and other men just like him, I’m still powerful enough to go out there and try to change it.

Notice the two highlighted passages — Ms. Sarkeesian’s claim that she, and all other women, live “in a culture that fundamentally refuses to acknowledge” their humanity,” in which all woman are “second-class citizens,” and “harassment and rape are the norm.” This assertion, that women are victims of universal oppression, is the essential feminist doctrine which I have called The Patriarchal Thesis:

[W]hen your worldview begins with the assumption that normal human life is a system of injustice in which all women (collectively) are victimized by all men (collectively), then it is possible to justify almost anything you do as part of your effort to overthrow this oppressive system. Smash Patriarchy!
The Patriarchal Thesis absolves feminists of any obligation to meet the ordinary requirements of intelligent discourse. Logic is unnecessary and, as for facts, they are (a) whatever feminists say they are or (b) irrelevant if they do not confirm the Patriarchal Thesis.

Many people assume that this style of feminist discourse is a recent development, that so-called “Third Wave” feminists are less logical and more intolerant than their predecessors. However, Ms. Sarkeesian’s claims are merely a restatement of assertions made nearly 50 years ago by the leading spokeswomen for the radical feminist movement.

“Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. . . .
“We identify the agents of our oppression as men. . . . All men receive economic, sexual, and psychological benefits from male supremacy. All men have oppressed women.”
— Redstockings, “Manifesto,” 1969

Feminist doctrine rests upon this claim of women’s universal oppression, and its obverse claim of the universal guilt of men as perpetrators and beneficiaries of an unjust system of “male supremacy,” otherwise known as patriarchy. This is a formula for paranoia, with males as the demonized scapegoat whose oppressive power justifies the feminist’s constant vigilance against the patriarchal menace.

In comments to the left-wing anti-#GamerGate site Polygon, Sarkeesian accused her critics who attended VidCon of using “the power they have under patriarchy to try to keep women in their place, to try to intimidate or silence women who dare to speak out and assert their humanity and their right to exist as full human beings in these spaces. . . . This is harassment, pure and simple, with the goal of trying to scare and silence women who speak out against sexism in our culture.”

Again, who is trying to “silence” whom? Sarkeesian has sought to “no-platform” her critics, to blacklist and exclude from the videogame industry anyone who opposes her agenda of cultural Marxism, and to classify as sexist “harassment” all public criticism of her work.

Here, it may be helpful to observe how Ms. Sarkeesian’s behavior perfectly conforms to Vox Day’s “Three Laws of SJW”:

1. SJWs always lie.
2. SJWs always double down.
3. SJWs always project.

Anita Sarkeesian’s attack on Carl Benjamin illustrates all three of these laws, especially the third. It was she, and not Benjamin, who engaged in harassment at VidCon 2017, and in doing so, it was Ms. Sarkeesian, not the man she insulted as a “garbage human” from the VidCon 2017 stage, who was seeking to “intimidate and silence” others.

In 2014, when my friend Beth Haper encouraged me to talk to Adam Baldwin about #GamerGate, Adam urged me to cover it. More than a controversy about the videogame industry, he assured me, #GamerGate was deeply connected to the larger cultural issues that had been our late friend Andrew Breitbart’s obsession. “Andrew would have loved this story,” Baldwin told me, and after I began digging into #GamerGate, I realized how true this was, and why “mainstream” conservative journalists were wrong to ignore this story as either irrelevant to politics or too complex to understand. Also, I realized one reason many conservatives were unwilling to take #GamerGate seriously was that they were hesitant to get involved with what seemed to be an uncouth mob of obscure (and often anonymous) personalities whose political loyalties were unclear. But to quote Andrew Breitbart: WAR!

“In war, your allies are whoever is fighting your enemies, and the motives of your allies matter far less than their skill in battle. Say what you will about #GamerGate, they are skilled and determined fighters.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, July 2015

That line got quoted by Vox Day on page 99 of his bestselling book, SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, and if you haven’t read it yet, you really need to buy it now. As the controversy over VidCon shows, the issues raised by #GamerGate continue to remain highly relevant to the larger culture war in our society. And the paranoid projection at the heart of Anita Sarkeesian’s claims of “harassment” is essential to understanding how the Social Justice Warriors operate.

Victimhood is the raison d’être of their movement, the sine qua non of their ideology. Claiming to be oppressed by pervasive misogyny (from Greek roots, the word means literally, “hatred of women”), feminists like Anita Sarkeesian view everything through this prism of victimhood. Therefore, according to feminists, anyone who disputes their claims or criticizes their arguments is on the side of the patriarchal oppressor.

The warped worldview of identity politics produces a paranoid hostility toward those perceived as enemies. Carl Benjamin and his friends are not even allowed to attend a conference without being accused by Anita Sarkeesian of “harassment” and “intimidation.” What she is demanding, in effect, is the unilateral authority to banish anyone she dislikes, all the while insisting that they are attempting to “silence” her.

At his Sargon of Akkad channel, Carl Benjamin has an hour-long video entitled, “What Happened at #VidConUS 2017?”

 

That video already has more than 800,000 views, which is about 30 times as many people as reportedly attended the conference. Benjamin points out that the organizers of VidCon are, by their own admission, ignorant of what Benjamin and his fellow anti-SJW video producers actually do on their channels. In other words, anti-SJW content creators serve a thriving community online, but because the VidCon organizers are all progressives, sheltered within a cocoon of ideological conformity, they can’t be bothered to pay attention to those who disagree with them. Therefore, it would never occur to them to invite Carl Benjamin (or any other YouTube creator who is not a leftist) to be a panelist at VidCon.

Hello, “epistemic closure.”

VidCon has become a one-sided partisan political operation, from which dissenting voices are deliberately excluded and where, evidently, those who don’t toe the party line are not welcome to attend. A conservative attending VidCon is like a Jew at a Hezbollah rally, basically.

So when Anita Sarkeesian has a meltdown onstage and begins shouting insults at audience members, the VidCon organizers are unable to make the obvious conclusion: Anita Sarkeesian is the problem.

She is emotionally disturbed and morally corrupt, a dishonest fanatic who has spent years cashing in on her persecution complex by convincing gullible liberals that the greatest threat to women in the 21st century is people saying mean things in YouTube comments. She refuses to debate her critics, and instead seeks to silence opponents by labeling them “misogynists,” accusing them of “harassment,” and thereby justifying their exclusion — “no-platforming.” By similar methods, universities have excluded conservatives from employment on the faculty, thus turning campuses into left-wing indoctrination centers where dissent from the progressive ideology is effectively prohibited.

Having obtained hegemonic authority within academia, the Left now seeks to extend its Thought Police regime throughout society, banishing opposition by labeling dissenting opinions as “hate speech.” Anyone who thinks the VidCon controversy was silly or trivial is not paying attention to the evidence that our society is steadily drifting toward totalitarianism, as the Left destroys freedom and calls the result “social justice.”

 

 

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