On this episode of Thick & Thin, host John Rachael Blumberg sits down with writer and internet personality Milo Yiannopoulos to discuss his new book, Gamergasm, a book that takes a look at the phenomenon known as and tries to make sense of it.
00:00:00.000Yes, this interview is awesome, but what's even more awesome if you click this box is the extended 45-minute uncensored uncut portion of the interview that never ran on terrestrial radio or on this channel.
00:01:40.000Well, I mean, Quebec is full of French people, so nothing could be worse than that.
00:01:43.000But no, I think the north of England is probably more like Detroit, maybe, or I don't know, somewhere really barren and hopeless and just sort of...
00:02:59.000No, I mean, the interesting thing about the Gamergate controversy, the reason I think it's significant, the reason I think it matters to people who don't play video games and who don't care about video games, is that the gamers have been the first fandom, the first community, not only to fight back against the language police, the social justice warriors, the feminists, the censors, the trendy metropolitan liberal bloggers on the East and West Coast, they've not only been the first community to fight back, they've been the first community to win.
00:03:26.000They are winning those battles, the Bloggers concerned have had to give sort of grudging admissions of their conflicts of interest.
00:03:32.000The feminists now are sort of running with their tails between their legs, admitting that maybe they got it wrong, and oh, they're sorry for being so decisive.
00:03:50.000That not only did gamers take them on, but gamers won.
00:03:54.000And they provided a really interesting template for other fandoms and for other sorts of people to fight back.
00:04:01.000And basically what it teaches us is what I think we've known all along, which is if you don't give in, if you don't budge, if you don't give in, if you don't say, oh, God, we're sorry.
00:04:08.000We did this poster with a sexy woman on it.
00:04:14.000Your consumers, your customers will reward you for it.
00:04:17.000And the potential benefits are not just financial but also reputational.
00:04:20.000The only thing you can do wrong in the face of the sort of feminism, social justice warrior incursion, the only thing you can do wrong is give in.
00:04:29.000And gamers have demonstrated this with sort of fortitude and thoroughness and extraordinary meticulous attention to detail in their campaigns and all the rest of it, like we've never seen before.
00:04:39.000And it's been a remarkable thing to watch.
00:04:41.000Video games is an $87 billion industry, bigger than Hollywood.
00:04:44.000It is going to be a very significant part of the way that people communicate, the way people enjoy themselves, the way they relate to other human beings.
00:04:50.000It's a very significant and very important.
00:04:54.000It's a very important cultural movement and people of my children's generation.
00:05:01.000will communicate with one another and will come to find out about the world in large part through gaming of some kind, video games of some kind, and to sort of nip in the bud this poisonous ideology which is so thoroughly and completely and effectively infected literature, comic books, and to sort of nip in the bud this poisonous ideology which is so thoroughly and completely and effectively infected literature, comic books, sci-fi, fantasy, to stand up to
00:05:25.000It's based on tired, discredited 70s identity politics and ridiculous ideology that fill out a fashion in academia decades ago.
00:05:42.000For the first time, it's starting to work and I think gamers deserve some credit for that and as somebody who's interested in the culture wars and is interested in battlegrounds of this type, the Gamergate controversy has been by far the most interesting one that I've encountered in the last eight, ten years.
00:05:59.000You know, it's fascinating you talk about that because you have two different sort of factions – People saying, well, don't bring it to the feminist issue.
00:06:11.000Andrew Breitbart was a big part in revealing it.
00:06:14.000So I know that the two kind of intersect, but I think people miss that bigger point.
00:06:18.000And I think it's because a lot of gamers aren't inherently conservative like I am.
00:06:21.000And I think conservatives maybe have a disconnect there.
00:06:23.000They're starting off from a platform of life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
00:06:27.000And I think gamers are experiencing the wrath of sort of this politically correct monster that many of them don't even realize they've helped create.
00:06:37.000Well, what's interesting about gamers is gaming as a medium, I think, is a naturally libertarian medium.
00:06:44.000It's mostly about personal agency and the consequences of one's own actions.
00:07:44.000I think gamers think of themselves as a reflexively left wing and I think they're right to.
00:07:47.000Certainly all the surveys they do show that they're left wing on most social and many economic issues.
00:07:52.000The gap for me, the interesting gap, and I think it's one that's opening up throughout society, is between authoritarianism and libertarianism.
00:07:59.000I think it's between people who want to dictate how others live and people who simply want to be left alone.
00:08:03.000Now, gamers very firmly fall into that second box of people who want to be left alone.
00:08:06.000That's why, in many cases, they're playing games in the first place.
00:08:09.000So they've reacted very strongly against people who want to tell them what's acceptable and what's not in their games.
00:08:16.000And I don't think it really matters where those points of view come from.
00:08:20.000What's interesting about the social justice warriors like Anita Sarkeesian is just how much they have in common with the old religious right.
00:08:26.000Almost indistinguishable, for example, from Jack Thompson, who said that video games are very violent.
00:08:45.000And so I think the most important distinction is really between people who just want to be left alone to enjoy their hobby, consumers and fans of an entertainment medium.
00:08:54.000And, you know, these broken middle class white train wrecks who have decided that the world is broken and they're the only people who can fix it.
00:09:02.000Well, let me back it up a little bit because you talk about social justice warriors and sort of, I guess, I know Paul Joseph Watson uses the term third wave feminism.
00:09:26.000So understand where this has all come from.
00:09:29.000You have to understand first that gaming grew very quickly and as a result you had a trade press, a press that was really just catering to the industry.
00:09:38.000It suddenly found itself almost overnight becoming a consumer press and these sites that had very low quality journalism and very poor ethical standards and were uniformly very left wing and they signed up to that third wave feminist sort of authoritarian microaggression safe space man slamming kind of nonsense and they Almost uniformly signed up to that.
00:10:02.000Suddenly found themselves the gaming press establishment, and it happened almost overnight.
00:10:06.000Now these people, almost without exception, have bought in entirely to the Anita Sarkeesian view of the world, which is that video games can make you sexist in the real world.
00:10:19.000The question that needs to be answered that nobody has satisfactorily given evidence for is this claim.
00:10:25.000Video games can somehow make you worse than the real world.
00:10:28.000Now the press, which had done a really good job of defending video games against charges of violence, did a really bad job against charges of sexism.
00:10:45.000There's no scientific study that shows that.
00:10:48.000And what feminists did, as they've done so many times before, is embarked on this campaign of misdirection, where they started to gin up and then...
00:10:57.000And make a fuss about supposed threats of, you know, rape threats, death threats, you name it.
00:11:03.000This is a classic strategy from the feminist playbook.
00:11:05.000And what it does is it shifts the sympathy and attention onto the abuse claims and sort of draws the eye away from asking whether any of the claims that those feminists are making in their critiques are actually true or not.
00:11:18.000So this sort of waved through almost without criticism of attention.
00:11:22.000I mean this is a microcosm of a problem at large, particularly in the United States.
00:11:27.000I don't want to speak for the UK. You can speak more effectively to that.
00:11:30.000But have you been staying up to date on Mattress Girl?
00:11:34.000I read the complaint and it's horrifying.
00:11:38.000But this is a classic thing that feminists do.
00:11:40.000They claim abuse, they claim harassment, they claim persecution, they claim anything it takes to draw attention away from the original set of claims they were making.
00:11:48.000Because what they've learned is that by doing that, they no longer have to really justify the original points of view.
00:11:53.000People accept them as given because they think, well, if you're being persecuted and abused and threatened because of this, there must be something in it.
00:12:06.000The Gamergate critics have no validity whatsoever in any of the arguments that they possibly have.
00:12:10.000Well, they pivoted with Mattress Girl.
00:12:12.000We just wrote about that at the website where basically the burden of proof is entirely on the man to prove he's innocent in these sort of, I guess, mock college trials.
00:12:21.000Like, okay, are we going to go forward with these charges?
00:12:44.000It's still a good thing because it brought awareness to a really big problem.
00:12:48.000We don't have the numbers in the problem, mind you, but the really big problem of campus rape.
00:12:52.000I mean, honestly, one in four women, you would believe that just people, I mean, anyone with a penis, you and I are just going out and just raping women by the throngs on campus to hear it from the media.
00:13:02.000Well, you know, these things don't even survive a common sense test.
00:13:07.000They particularly don't survive any kind of critical or academic inquiry.
00:13:10.000So, you know, you look at people like Kristina of Summers at the American Enterprise Institute who very effectively and completely demolished most of these claims, whether it's the gender wage gap, which does not exist, whether it's the rape crisis of rape culture on campus, which does not exist.
00:13:26.000You know, this stuff is posited and then immediately you'll notice in every case that There's a misdirection applied to it.
00:13:33.000It does exist if you count all drunken intercourse as rape.
00:14:22.000And what you notice is the architecture of these events where you can always tell the cons.
00:14:26.000First of all, because the initial claims are just too good to be true.
00:14:30.000Like Sabrina Erdely from Rolling Stone went, by her own admission, so-called rape shopping.
00:14:35.000She went looking for the most outrageous and extraordinary rape she could find.
00:14:39.000Something that would really, as I think the Daily Caller put it, a rape that would pop.
00:14:44.000And of course what happened is she found a liar.
00:14:46.000And a liar who would tell her whatever she wanted.
00:14:49.000And then of course the story became about how the university tried to cover it up and everybody was being so mean to her.
00:14:54.000And the original fact of the rape took quite a while to come out.
00:14:57.000It took a while to realize that that was true.
00:15:00.000Similarly with Mattress Girl, you know, this ridiculous art stunt, this attention seeking, turning herself into a liberal hero on the basis of a lie, was done to distract us from finding out whether or not the original claims were true at all.
00:15:15.000Now, the reason this is relevant to Gamergate is that, yes, it is primarily, firstly and foremostly, about press ethics because all of this stuff is played out in an uncritical press that takes the side of the feminists against reason, against fact, against common sense, and against their own audiences.
00:15:32.000The sorts of people who are upset about this stuff don't play video games.
00:15:38.000The sorts of people who talk about this stuff are interested in winning culture wars.
00:15:41.000And what the journalists are now beginning to realise is that their audiences have almost entirely abandoned them.
00:15:46.000And that's where the journalistic ethics come in.
00:15:48.000I think that these two issues are inextricably linked because the driving motivation behind ethical failures in video games journalism is social justice ideology.
00:15:59.000That's why they do it, because they believe, like Rolling Stone believed, that the narrative, as you suggested, the narrative is more important than the fact.
00:16:06.000And the one thing that I do hope that gamers who may not – who may have been entirely closed off to I guess sort of what they see as libertarian or more right-wing conservative ideology, whatever you want to call it.
00:16:17.000You know, Larry King, we just pulled this from an interview from a podcast where he said, you know, I don't think the cable is as effective as it used to be.
00:16:24.000The media can no longer elect presidents.
00:16:26.000And he said it condemning media as though they should have that ability.
00:16:29.000What I hope people see is that the same Republicans and the conservatives or whatever you call them in the UK, you guys are changing the terminology all the time.
00:16:39.000Whatever they want to call them, who they vilified.
00:16:41.000These are the same people who've been fighting out against the press for decades saying, hey, listen, there is only one voice, one point of view in the press, and that is the voice of the politically correct authoritarian.
00:16:57.000It's the voice of the establishment here in the United States, and we've been fighting against it for a long time, and I hope people are waking up to the fact that it really is an issue.
00:17:04.000It's not the boy who cried liberal bias.
00:17:06.000Well, I have some good news for you on that front.
00:17:09.000I think for a long time it was possible to ordinary, reasonable, relatively apolitical people to laugh at conservatives when they said, you know, as the great Lady Thatcher says, you know, reality has a well-known conservative bias.
00:17:24.000She said the facts of life are conservative.
00:17:28.000It was possible to laugh at conservatives for a long time for these things.
00:17:31.000Fandoms like Gamergate are discovering just what happens when you start to buy into the authoritarian establishment view.
00:17:38.000And what I've seen, whatever your view on various right-wing outlets, whether it's Daily Caller or Breitbart or Fox News or whatever, what I've noticed extraordinarily happening is that You know, there's that thing in the men's rights world, red-pilling.
00:17:55.000You know, you sort of take the red pill and suddenly your eyes are open to the realities of the relationships between men and women and how they should both behave and all the rest of it.
00:18:02.000I've noticed a similar sort of effect in gamers where they suddenly realise, well, actually, wait.
00:18:06.000I think it was yesterday I saw a tweet.
00:18:08.000Somebody said, I just watched Fox News and for the first time in my life it's starting to make sense to me.
00:18:14.000You know, and of course, a lot of them have been coming to Breitbart to read my stuff, and I think there's obviously an inevitable bleed into elsewhere in the site, and they're starting to realise, well, these guys are not what I was always told they were.
00:18:26.000Now, gamers, of course, are and will remain reflexively left-wing people, I think, as a function of the sorts of person who gets into video games.
00:18:33.000I don't think there's very much you can do to change that, but what I think is really interesting, and I think, again, one of the reasons Gamergate's so interesting, so important, is that Gamers have had an open mind about this.
00:18:43.000They've combined a sort of ruthless, meticulous thoroughness in the way they've conducted their letter-writing campaigns with an open-mindedness and a sort of Socratic humility about knowledge and about politics that I haven't seen happen anywhere else.
00:18:57.000They haven't just thrown themselves into a particular bucket or into a particular tribe, as we all want to do.
00:19:02.000And they've gone out and found out for themselves what the facts of life and the facts of the situation are and found liberal media desperately and terribly wanting.
00:19:11.000And, you know, I think it's something that we've all known for quite a long time.
00:21:07.000I flew to Berlin to buy her last album because it wasn't available in the UK. It cost me $1,200, $1,500 or something because I wanted to be the first person to have the CD, but I'm pretty sure it's just a status thing.
00:21:49.000No, as for the hair, well, you know, you guys get Harleys in your 40s.
00:21:54.000We, expecting to die earlier, get bleached hair in our 30s, so, you know.
00:21:59.000It's just our version of a midlife crisis.
00:22:01.000Okay, well, I hate Harleys, and I've gotten a lot of flack for it.
00:22:04.000As a matter of fact, that was the least conservative thing Reagan ever did, was put tariffs on Japanese bikes, because in the 80s, the Japanese were making great motorcycles, and Harley...
00:24:50.000So far has been that it is a horrible psychiatric disorder that affects people to be better treated with therapy and drugs rather than surgery.
00:24:59.000Everyone who has surgery seems to regret it afterwards or the suicide rates don't improve.
00:25:05.000Some studies say they get worse after the surgery.
00:25:07.000We're getting to the stage now where we've been doing it for long enough that we know that almost everybody that has the surgery starts to have doubts about it.
00:25:15.000And if you look at the behavior of some transsexual campaigners and look at the other things they present with when they show up at the doctors, it very often comes as part of a cluster of disorders, including narcissistic personality disorder and bipolar disorder.
00:25:29.000It looks very much like another one of those personality or identity disorders that ought to be treated with therapy and drugs.
00:25:36.000We don't cut off the arms of people who wake up one day and say, this arm doesn't belong to me, so we shouldn't warp reality to conform to delusion.
00:25:44.000We should instead try to help that person reconcile their body with their mind.
00:25:50.000And as a result, I got really irritated and upset with, again, with the media who decided to present what is a medical argument in which the jury is still very much out as the next civil rights struggle.
00:26:04.000And they did this for a number of reasons.
00:26:05.000They did this because by associating it with gays and lesbians, it provides a ready-made pathway as to what we should do about it.
00:26:14.000Obviously they should be given this, obviously they should be given that.
00:26:16.000The trouble with transgenderism is actually it has nothing in common with gays and lesbians whatsoever.
00:26:29.000Otherwise, there's no justification for state funding for surgery.
00:26:32.000So it's a very complex and very difficult position for them to be in a very horrible disorder.
00:26:37.000Where I'm encouraged to move on this is that, in fact, it is possible to be born with the wrong disease.
00:26:44.000That there are plenty of very high-functioning and perfectly happy people who have this condition.
00:26:52.000And the interesting thing about it, the thing that obviously appeals to me, it's not the basis on which to make a decision, but obviously something that appeals to me as a...
00:27:00.000As a right-wing polemicist, is that if you accept, as the left insists that we now do, that you can be born with the wrong gendered brain, that blows out of the water gender as a social construct.
00:27:11.000And gender as a social construct has been the central linchpin of the majority of left-wing sexual thinking for the last 40 years.
00:27:17.000If you throw out the idea that gender is a social construct, you throw out the idea that all gender roles are just performative and learned behavior, and you accept gender That somebody can be born with the wrong brain.
00:27:28.000A man can be born with a woman's brain.
00:27:31.000That upsets the apple cart for the left more than I can really explain to you in the confines of this program.
00:27:37.000Because what it does, it suggests that all of the wars they've been fighting, all of the sexism stuff they've been talking about, all of the sort of, don't tell me I can't behave like X because I'm a woman, is rubbish.
00:27:46.000What was the head movement with your impression?
00:28:04.000What it does is suggest that everything they've been arguing for the last 30 years is total hokum.
00:28:08.000So the left has got to pick one because you can't hold both of these positions simultaneously.
00:28:11.000You cannot say there is such a thing as a female brain and at the same time say that all female behavior is learned and is social and therefore we should stop complaining about women who don't want to be feminine and we should say it's okay for men to be metrosexuals and all the rest of it.
00:28:32.000I mean that point blows the wage gap out of the water as they go, well, yes, you're right.
00:28:35.000It is because women choose different professional positions because they have different priorities.
00:28:42.000But that's because of societal construction.
00:28:44.000And if it's true, if what they tell us about transsexuals, transgender sufferers, is true, if they tell us that there is a female brain and a male brain and there are – the scary specter of biological determinism raises its head again.
00:29:02.000That women choose – make different career choices and therefore willingly earn less money when you average that out across the whole of society, which is what dissident feminists and right-wing critics have been saying for decades.
00:29:14.000Well, let me ask you this to be devil's advocate here.
00:29:17.000Would you then have to be more open-minded to what is not a hateful conservative view but a view on complementarianism, that inherently a mom can provide something to a family unit – I absolutely believe that.
00:29:37.000It's why I don't support gay parenting.
00:29:39.000I mean, aside from the gigantic volumes of domestic violence in lesbian relationships, they're all kicking the crap out of each other all day long.
00:32:10.000We have to have you back and we have to have you debate Fundip because Fundip thinks he's being open-minded in the transsexualism argument.
00:33:37.000And the reason is that, of course, with the death penalty, the passive, not to get into too much icky detail, but the passive gay partners have sex changes, so they present as women, and So they don't get murdered, so that they're not strung up and hung from cranes.
00:33:52.000Which suggests to you that there can be some quite...
00:33:55.000There can be social factors that influence what you would imagine to be quite a big surgical life decision.
00:34:02.000So it's a very complex issue, and we don't know everything about it.
00:34:05.000We're told by the establishment media that we do know everything about it.
00:34:11.000It's a very interesting conversation to have that nobody's really allowed to have in the mainstream media.
00:34:14.000I would love to talk to your producer about it because I'd be interested to, as somebody sort of a junkie on the science of this stuff, I'd be interested to hear what he finds attractive or not and in which direction.
00:34:26.000Because it's just an endlessly fascinating subject that tells us so much about ourselves and so much about the world around us, so much about human sexuality, yet we're not allowed to have any of those really interesting discussions.
00:34:35.000We're not allowed to talk about the science.
00:34:36.000We're not allowed to talk about what this might say about human relationships or society or anything else.
00:34:42.000Because the left has decided that this, you know, it is a civil rights issue.
00:34:50.000If I can, you know, if there's anything, if there's any overarching theme in my work, the gamergate stuff, the transgender stuff, it's my primary objection to authoritarian left is that it is profoundly anti-intellectual.
00:35:03.000It is profoundly and determinately purposefully stupid.
00:35:07.000It does not permit discussion and debate of the most interesting and important things in human life, the most important philosophy, the most important politics, the most important stuff that defines us and that helps us to relate to the world around us.
00:35:35.000I try and avoid the whole MP2, you know, that kind of bullcrap.
00:35:39.000And it's sort of an anti-sensationalist show.
00:35:42.000And people said this isn't going to play on radio.
00:35:44.000Lo and behold, the people who approached us about syndication wanted to start controlling guests and stuff.
00:35:49.000And we said, no, you know, we're just going to run this as a podcast, have a couple stations that carry us, and no one else has any control.
00:35:54.000But they love the sensationalist story.
00:35:56.000And they were always going, you know, Obama's evil.
00:35:59.000I said, listen, I don't believe that most people are evil.
00:36:01.000I think most people generally probably think they're doing good.
00:36:06.000But we've hit a point here, and you just touched on this. .
00:36:09.000You're talking about profound stupidity.
00:36:12.000I'm getting to the point where I believe there is proactive orchestration and manipulation because when you have Barack Obama get up and he says, you know, women are paid 77 cents on the dollar.
00:36:22.000Am I supposed to believe that his advisors don't have Google?
00:36:25.000I have to disabuse you of this actually and I think that it's even worse than you think.
00:36:32.000To recoil in horror from anything that sounds remotely like a conspiracy theory, which is sort of journalistic instincts I've developed, normally because it is a conspiracy theory.
00:36:42.000I think that what you're identifying, you've correctly identified a phenomenon, but I think you're reaching for the most obvious cause, which is collusion, which is what Gamergate supposed about games journalists.
00:36:54.000Why did all these articles come out on the same day saying gamers are dead, attacking them?
00:37:01.000collusion, although collusion was going on and there was a private list and they were walking in lockstep and there was pressure from one publication to another to remove forum content that did not fit the approved list of discussion topics.