The left is always asking why they’re unable to appeal to Trump supporters and conservatives. The conclusions they always arrive at seem, somehow, to revolve around the vague concept of toxic masculinity.
Win or Die Trying
Of course, it couldn’t be that their own policies are unattractive to the vast majority of people who oppose them. Trump would not have won the election in 2016 if the left’s notions of progressivism were as compelling as they believe.
Instead of taking a long, hard look at the ideas they attempt to forward, the journalists tasked with examining current events, who are ostensibly knowledgeable of human nature given the nature of their jobs, have landed on a host of bogeymen to explain why conservatives think as they do, and why the populism of Donald Trump is attractive to so many.
Crucially, some journalists have honed in on the topic of GamerGate, an arguably niche controversy that wracked the video game industry more than half a decade ago.
The topic is one of two dueling narratives. For gamers, GamerGate represents a populist movement (of gamers) against the encroachment of social justice, but for mainstream journalists and their counterparts in the game industry, GamerGate is representative of toxic masculinity — boys struggling to maintain their boys’ club in the face of 21st-century progressivism.
As journalists would explain it, GamerGate was a controversy that was insufficiently addressed by the game industry too worried about its bottom line. Too unwilling to speak out against the community that pays its bills, the industry allowed for the proliferation of toxic attitudes that ultimately transcended the gaming community, breaking out into the “real world,” as it were, and became part of the national discourse.
Trump, they claim, is a result of those attitudes.
In reality, GamerGate — a term coined by Firefly actor Adam Baldwin — was a response to the rise of increasing censoriousness, hypersensitivity to social taboos, social justice and other leftist causes within the video game industry and the community that surrounds it.
It is no longer kosher to use sex to sell video games. With a community largely made up of young adult men, it’s understandable why sex would sell — and why they’d be pissed off if the enthusiast media chose to stop representing their hobby and instead opted to demonize them for enjoying it.
Simply put: Sex sells.
And the woke press and social media influencers who have appointed themselves the arbiters of decency proved themselves to be anything but chaste, coming off as hypocrites with their promotion of “queer” sexuality in video games, of OnlyFans accounts on social media, and other actions that contradict their crusade against masculinity in the gaming community.
The populist response against this form of social tyranny was dubbed GamerGate. It’s an attitude that has arisen widely as a natural response to the same social tyranny imposed upon the general public by the press at large, whose efforts to convince people that conservatism is bigotry, that caring about one’s national sovereignty and maintaining national borders is akin to racism, and that rejecting the trans rights (that is, privileges) of men who identify as women to use women’s bathrooms is violence.
Rather than examine why people might reject such notions of progressivism, the left opts to attack anyone for their individual beliefs and shut down the discourse. If only conservatives were suppressed harder, they wouldn’t be able to fight back.
Much like the events of GamerGate, suppressing freedom of speech has the opposite effect; it motivates the populist right into fighting back.
It is, after all, why Trump was elected.
But the rise of the populist right has led to an acceleration of tyrannical attitudes on the progressive left. At this point, it’s a race to see which side can prevail — and much like a video game, it’s up to the protagonist to win or die trying.
Gamers are among the most persistent in the world. They enjoy a challenge.
The left picked on the wrong opponent.
We feel a need to include a link to the definitive — in our (almost never) humble opinion — explanation of GamerGate in general at this point. Penthouse covers “Gaming” every month, although somehow a much more editorial slant seems to have invaded the section in this case. Should you wish a return to the more fake violence — y’know, as compared to the activist (right and left) kind — feel free to hit our Contact Page. We will be sure that the editors hear from you. We’ll sneak all of the comments into an email with a subject line of “Free Krispy Kremes!” or something. That will work.
