How Charlottesville and Gamergate are Completely Related
James Damore who wrote the google memo saying women are biologically worse at engineering
Guest Post by Xennial-in-Chief
Breathe. This is for your own good.
James Damore said, “I do not support the alt-right.” He said this in response to the revelation that alt-right groups supported him after his firing from Google for writing and posting a 10-page memo on the company’s discussion board. In the memo he reasoned that — and I’m paraphrasing — female workers are not prevalent in the tech industry because they possess vaginas.
We know he was fired. We know that he cried foul about ill-treatment by a “politically correct monoculture,” intolerant of freedom of thought. The no-longer-hooded alt-right white knights came to his rescue despite his protest of them doing so, and now he’s the latest poster child for poor victims of the intolerant left’s thought police.
Being told that the left is intolerant because Google fired a guy who claims science proves women are biologically unable to succeed in the male-dominated tech industry is gut-bustingly laughable. After he said this, there was a great wave of can’t even, and a thunderous rolling of eyes. Right up until Charlottesville snatched away the nation’s attention. Videos and images showed white men, drawing inspiration from the toxic swamp in our nation’s capital, marching in outrage while oozing hatred and violent intentions. A woman died that day.
The alt-right media immediately went on the attack, desperately trying to form a narrative where murdering protestors was acceptable. They insulted the dead woman for the audacity of dying under the wheels of a Nazi sympathizer. For them, none of this could be the White Supremacists’ fault. They’re just victims of the intolerant left.
Damore and other professed victims of the intolerant left insist that they don’t support the Alt-Right/White Supremacists. This is consistent with the old American tradition of saying we’re “not racist/misogynist” by measuring ourselves against groups for whom hatred is a lifestyle choice. A low bar of cultural decency that could be mostly ignored right up until the advent of the internet.
Pro-tip: What happens on the internet stays on the internet.
Remember Gamergate?
Remember when, after becoming outraged when a female journalist wrote that gaming culture was dying because it comprised, in part, a collection of angry young white men? Those young white men in the gaming community not surprisingly became angry, and took to social media, engaging in a cyberbullying attack, targeting a number of women who had the audacity to speak out. It was an attack so debasing and brutal that at least one of the women targeted had to permanently change residences due to the number of death and rape threats made against them. Threats the women had to take seriously, because the angry collective had doxxed their addresses.
But now it’s 2017, and right and just white men, with newfound smug sarcasm, confidently blurt out, in loud, obnoxious voices, “It’s almost like they didn’t like others defining them by their race/gender.” They mentally do a victory lap, high-fiving the rest of the self-congratulatory would-be allies in their heads because they think one snarky progressive notion makes them “woke.”
Thinking they’re on the side of the fence toward which they believe the arc of history is bending, they conspicuously make their presence known, but in actuality they’ve done little to nothing.
And this is our sin.
It’s not the overdramatized clutching of pearls by Gamergaters nor the glaring hypocrisy of going from offended to offender in spectacular fashion. No. It’s the fact that another memo, another rally, another doxxing, another death, another rushing to the defense of bigots and misogynists by white men who “aren’t racist or misogynist, but,” and another outrage-induced semi-reaction to all this is a foregone conclusion. This is going to happen again. Nothing will change because, although we think we’ve changed enough, we haven’t.
Power is intoxicating. Lincoln said, “If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” Gordon Gecko said, “Greed is good.” One, a great president in American history, and the other, a character who seemingly sums up the driving force behind the current president. White men in this country are adept at being outraged and, worse, organizing in response to it. Except when they’re the antagonists. I’m confident that there are a number of white men in this country that may not agree with White Supremacists. Yet, Damore and his defenders are eager to share the alt-right rationale and, worse, use their playbook.
Time’s expired on rationalizing misogynistic attacks perpetrated during Gamergate, on events in Charlottesville designed in support of racists, and on the naively thin-veiled sexism of pseudo-scientific data to support gender inequality. It expired when America got a bead on where the arc of history was bending.
That arc is bending away from a white male-dominated society. Justice is moving away from a white male-dominated society.
And everything before the “but” is bullshit…
