The Other McCain

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

Spring Means It’s Time for the Joyous Return of the Big Yellow Button

Posted on | April 28, 2022 | Comments Off on Spring Means It’s Time for the Joyous Return of the Big Yellow Button

 

MORROW COUNTY, OHIO
As every regular reader of this blog knows, the yellow “donate” button takes you to my PayPal account, where you can contribute dollars, pounds, Euros, shekels, pesos or whatever to support the blog. (We used to accept rubles, but Putin ruined that recently.)

My wife and I are in Ohio en route to Michigan, where our 19-year-old daughter is a college freshman and wants us to meet her new boyfriend. We spent Thursday night at my mother-in-law’s home here in the rustic woodland where I saw bunnies playing in the backyard this morning. While we were driving through Youngstown, I dialed up my old friend Dave Weigel, who’s here in Ohio covering the GOP primary campaign. Weigel, like pretty much every other observer of this campaign, thinks J.D. Vance is the likely winner of Tuesday’s primary.

Trump’s endorsement has Vance attracting capacity crowds in his final campaign stops. There is a weird report today from Rolling Stone that Tucker Carlson swayed Trump toward Vance by repeating some kind of sexual gossip about “David McIntosh, the president of the conservative Club for Growth and a top backer of Vance’s rival Josh Mandel.” The report is deliberately vague about what McIntosh is accused of, and I don’t know why this would be relevant to the Ohio GOP primary. It’s unfortunate this primary has become so contentious. Both Vance and Mandel are Marine Corps veterans, and I think it’s very encouraging for Republicans to be attracting young military veterans as candidates.

That’s my Army son and me at the awards ceremony for the Best Ranger Competition earlier this month at Fort Benning. Everyone on Facebook has made their comments on that photo, and I thought blog commenters might want to have their say. That road trip and this one have disrupted my work schedule this month, and you don’t even want to know about the finances (but just hit the tip jar). What aggravates me about road trips like this is spending hours away from my laptop, so I kill the time as a passenger by scrolling news on my phone, and yesterday I found something that brings me to this unpleasant topic:

Have we all forgotten about notorious grifter Brianna Wu? She inserted herself into #GamerGate as a competitor in the Harassment Victimhood Derby, ultimately seizing the prize from contenders Anita Sarkeesian and the Tattoo-Covered, Mentally Ill Ex-Stripper Whose Real Name Is Chelsea Van Valkenburg. Oh, what a feminist heroine “Brianna” is!

John Walker Flynt as a failed male (left) and after becoming ‘Brianna Wu’ (right).

Of course, Brianna’s transgender identity was never a secret — I mentioned it here in December 2014 — but one of the accusations against Milo Yiannopoulos was that he subjected John/“Brianna” to harassment by writing a February 2015 article “exposing” this status. How do you “expose” something that is already well-known? Never mind that, how about this: Where is the evidence that “Brianna” was harassed? This was one of the things that #GamerGate supporters kept pointing out during the drama of 2014, namely that while “Brianna” claimed to be the victim of terrorizing death threats, not once was a suspect ever identified or arrested by law enforcement. Sure, there were plenty of people on Twitter who said rude things about “Brianna,” but mean tweets are not a crime, or else everyone who ever said mean things about me would be in prison.

The Heroic Victimhood Narrative at the heart of the liberal media’s coverage of #GamerGate could be seen, objectively, as a warm-up for how the media portrayed Hillary Clinton as a heroic victim during and after the 2016 presidential campaign. The idea that it is “unsafe” to be a woman on the Internet — that all women suffer humiliating or terroristic abuse from men in their online interactions — is quite a popular theme among young feminists. Actually, I could tell you some stories about how women online suffer abuse from other women, but I am not at liberty to discuss that time enraged Harry Styles fans on TikTok went beserk after a certain teenage girl mentioned the singer’s receding hairline.

Crazy People Are Dangerous, as I have often reminded you, and there are obviously some kooks out there who need to be banned from the Internet completely, but why bring up Bill Schmalfeldt at this late date? The prevailing narrative is that women and members of “marginalized communities” have a monopoly of victimhood in terms of online harassment. Grifters gotta grift, and the grifter known as “Brianna Wu” parlayed her victimhood into two failed congressional campaigns in the 8th District of Massachusetts. In 2018, she got about 17,000 votes in a primary challenge to incumbent Democrat Rep. Stephen Lynch, then was trying again two years later, but quit in April 2020, blaming COVID-19.

That was so disappointing to me. Nothing would have made me happier than seeing a moderate Democrat like Lynch lose a primary to this kooky fringe candidate, which might actually make it possible for a Republican to win that otherwise safely blue district, but alas, grifters gotta grift and failures gotta fail and, as her critics have pointed out, “Brianna Wu” has always failed at everything, except grifting. If you know anything about Wu, you have to know this, that her claim to be a “game developer” rests entirely on “Revolution 60,” which was the subject of a lot of pre-release hype and subsequent fawning reviews from the “games journalism” community whose biases were the original cause of #GamerGate. To put it bluntly, “Revolution 60” sucked, and there was never any possibility of it becoming popular. The only reason anyone (other than the readers of Kotaku) ever heard of “Revolution 60″ was because Brianna Wu got a certain level of notoriety by piggybacking onto #GamerGate as an alleged victim of harassment. He/“she” was a failure as a game developer, just like he/“she” was a failure as a congressional candidate, and yet the media continue to pretend that he/“she” is a legitimate spokesperson, a credible source on the subject of online harassment.

Yes, NBC News cites Brianna Wu as a credible source, and Wu is also cited as a source in an incredibly one-sided Associated Press story about Elon Musk’s buyout of Twitter. This is why, incidentally, I was on the phone with Dave Weigel yesterday. Whatever his faults, Dave is an actual reporter — someone who goes out on the road and writes about what he personally witnesses, rather than just blabbering on Twitter all day, as so many young “journalists” now do — and I wanted to see how much he remembered about Wu’s #GamerGate drama. He has clear memories of the infamous “Wu-pocalypse” incident, where a comedian pretended to be a psychopath obsessed with Wu, an absurd “threat” that Wu took seriously. Dave’s busy covering the Ohio primary campaign now, but he might get around to taking a look at the whole Twitter “harassment” saga later. In the meantime, I’ve got to pack up and get back on the road for Michigan, to meet my daughter’s new boyfriend, but I might also spend some time this weekend working on an American Spectator column on the subject of “Brianna Wu,” whose KiwiFarms file is more than 3,000 pages long. Lots of research to be done there, IYKWIMAITYD.

Well, on the road again, and with gas over $4 a gallon, I urge readers to recall the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Shoe Leather Fund

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