The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead: The Broke Wokeness of Anita Sarkeesian

Posted on | June 23, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

Remember when the name “Anita Sarkeesian” was influential? When the feminist commissar was named to Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Council”? The anti-male hatemonger rose to fame from 2012 to 2016 by demonizing men in the videogame industry and claiming to be a victim of sexist harassment. In 2014, the year of the #GamerGate controversy, Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency project raised more than $400,000 and, over a five-year-period, her organization raised nearly $1.6 million. Yet as Brad Glasgow explains in a remarkable YouTube video, Sarkeesian’s non-profit is now essentially bankrupt, having begun the year with a balance of barely $30,000 and laying off its employees:

 

John Sexton at Hot Air calls attention to a recent profile of Sarkeesian at the videogame blog Polygon, which is interesting in terms of confirming pretty much everything you’d expect about her, for example that she has always hated America. She was 15 when her immigrant family moved from Canada to Orange County, California, and instead of being happy — sunshine! beaches! palm trees! — Sarkeesian was miserable and angry:

“I went hard into counterculture. . . . I liked anything that was angry. I didn’t like anything that was normal.”

The teenage misfit never grew up, extending her adolescent tantrums into adulthood by protesting against the Iraq War in college:

“There were rooms where the Anarchists would meet across the hall from where the Marxists would meet and they didn’t get along,” she says. “I didn’t know any of the philosophy or politics behind any of this stuff, so I started reading a lot more political theory.”
“I learned about public speaking and audience analysis and understanding what gets people emotionally engaged,” she adds. “I ended up doing a lot of organizing; spending time in horribly ventilated back-rooms, having meetings and discussions.” . . .
Sarkeesian gained a bachelor’s degree in communications studies at California State. Her work was increasingly focused on economic theory and alternatives to modern capitalism.
She then moved to New York, where she once again joined forces with political action groups, while working various jobs.
“I got really interested in performance and guerrilla theater as a mode of activism,” she says. “I supported nonviolent direct actions. . . .
“We would figure out how to send out press releases, and how to get the media to cover this. He worked on crafting our message. I was interested in getting the message out there.”
Sarkeesian did not want the protestors’ actions to go unnoticed. “You can do a die-in in front of the [military] recruiter’s office, but it doesn’t matter if only three people see it. You need to get more people to see it.” . ..
Sarkeesian recalls attending workshops and group meetings and speeches by activists like Noam Chomsky. “I had already been politicized but I realized then that this is a life of work that people commit themselves to doing,” she says.
She began to focus more on feminist ideas. “I had done all this work on economic theory but I literally had no idea about identity politics. So I started learning about feminism.” She linked up with women who had been activists since the Vietnam era, who had experienced hostility and marginalization from male protest leaders. She listened to the stories of how women had to force their way into the conversation, sometimes storming the stage.
“The thing about the activist’s life is there are a lot of meetings,” she says. “You’re sitting on these conference calls with a hundred people. There’s all this sectarian politics and all this strife. It’s just the same bulls–t that is everywhere else. I was watching these young people reproduce the same systems as white, male-dominated spaces.”

So, she hates males, she hates white people, she hates the military, she hates capitalism — why would you give money to such a person? And of course, the money she raised was squandered to no good purpose, concluding with the same misfit attitude she began with:

But she knows that the job of educating game-makers about representation is far from over. “There is progress being made, but I struggle with how to talk about it. It’s like a pendulum swinging: This one thing is great, and then, oh, this other thing is shitty.
“When we talk about, oh, we solved the problem, we’re moving forward … no, we haven’t even begun to solve the problem. We’re just taking the next step to the greater vision. I’m always trying to remind people to look at the vision of what we’re fighting for. Understanding that helps influence how we work. It influences how we tell our stories and what stories we want to tell. It influences students coming out of school and the careers and jobs that they want.”
Part of the problem is that many of those who are willing to be persuaded have been persuaded. And those who are not will never come around. “They’re either not paying attention to the conversation or they are, and they’re on the other side of it. And I don’t like talking about it as a ‘sides’ thing. Because you either care about the humanity of people or you don’t. That’s the side you’re on.”

Despite wasting $1.6 million, Sarkeesian “hasn’t even begun to solve the problem,” and if you disagree with her, that’s because you don’t “care about the humanity of people.” Is anyone really surprised that sane people don’t want to support this fanatical ideologue?

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)



 

Category: Sex Trouble

Comments

2 Responses to “Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead: The Broke Wokeness of Anita Sarkeesian”

  1. Daybook. – Dark Brightness
    June 24th, 2019 @ 5:58 am

    […] The anti-male hatemonger rose to fame from 2012 to 2016 by demonizing men in the videogame industry and claiming to be a victim of sexist harassment. In 2014, the year of the #GamerGate controversy, Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency project raised more than $400,000 and, over a five-year-period, her organization raised nearly $1.6 million. Yet as Brad Glasgow explains in a remarkable YouTube video, Sarkeesian’s non-profit is now essentially bankrupt, having begun the year with a balance of barely $30,000 and laying off its employees […]

  2. Saturday Links | 357 Magnum
    June 29th, 2019 @ 10:01 am

    […] Again from The Other McCain – Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead: The Broke Wokeness of Anita Sarkeesian. […]