The Intellectual Dark Web and Gamergate

Several members of the Intellectual Dark Web are mentioned in two of the four articles published today in the New York Times on the fifth anniversary of Gamergate. I highlighted the IDW members.

Charlie Warzel writes:

...Gamergate attracted the attention of then-men’s rights bloggers like Mike Cernovich and Roosh V, right-wing political correctness monitors like Christina Hoff Sommers and middling journalists like Milo Yiannopoulos, then a writer for Breitbart.

And a little later...

Today, five years later, the elements of Gamergate are frighteningly familiar: hundreds of thousands of hashtag-swarming tweets; armies of fake Twitter accounts; hoaxes and disinformation percolating in murky chat rooms and message boards before spreading to a confused mainstream media; advertiser boycotts; crowdfunding campaigns; racist, sexist and misogynist memes; YouTube shock jocks; D-list celebrities hand-wringing about political correctness on Twitter; Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon and Breitbart; Candace Owens.

Later...

Far-right personalities swarmed Mr. (James) Damore — his first “exclusive” interview was with Stefan Molyneux, a far-right Canadian YouTuber who calls himself a philosopher and lectures about race and I.Q. and men's rights issues. 

Sarah Jeong's Gamergate piece mentions Charles Murray:

This August is an anniversary for me as well. Last year, I landed in hot water for a number of tweets I’d posted years before about white people, especially white men. They were irreverent jokes — some responses to people harassing me, others outright snark. Some were parodies of race science like Charles Murray’s “The Bell Curve.” 

And like Warzel's piece, she mentions Cernovich:

There were posts with details about her former neighborhood. Texts with pictures of where she lived alongside pictures of guns. A tweet from the yet-relatively-unknown Mike Cernovich — now a figurehead of the alt-right — about how he had hired a private investigator to look into her.

None of the articles mention that Sommers and Yiannopoulos worked together to promote Gamergate, along with another recipient of Koch money (like Sommers) Cathy Young who has written pieces for Quillette.

I tend to think of Young and Sommers as part of a female misogynist triad along with Quillette founder Claire Lehmann.

Sommers, Young and Yiannopoulos appeared together in a panel on Gamergate.

Cathy Young was so enthusiastic about Gamergate that she celebrated the two year anniversary of the "Zoe Post" which Eron Gjoni used to attack his ex-girlfriend Zoe Quinn by doing an interview with Gjoni for the now defunct Heat Street but which I found via the Wayback Machine and have posted here.

In Arc Digital Young wrote:

 This is not to rehash GamerGate but to say that I still think Milo was basically on the right side of it. (I also think he did it far more harm than good.)

She called Anita Sarkeesian, a media critic and an actual victim of the Gamergate mob a "professional victim" to her pal, the Pinkerite Jesse Singal.

Less than a year ago she was still siding with Eron Gjoni and accusing Zoe Quinn of unethical behavior.

To date I haven't found evidence that either Young or Sommers have any regrets about their role as Gamergate cheerleaders. Although Sommers had a predictable response to Warzel's piece: