Hail the king!
GamerGate provides a rare example of rats climbing aboard a sinking ship.
As the “movement” stews in its own conspiratorial rage, a small army of reactionary misogynists, sensing opportunity, have joined the cause. Sure, right-wingers like Adam Baldwin and Milo Yiannopoulos have long been Gaters, but it’s only in recent days that they’ve been joined by some of the better-known manospherians, from angry lawyer and juice seller Mike Cernovich to the charming Roosh V.
The latest manosphere douchebag to take up the GamerGate cause is the lovely and talented Matt Forney, who has promptly claimed for himself the mantle of GamerGate leader and hero.
Oh, sorry, he hasn’t done this, as this actual tweet from his real Twitter account makes clear:
No, he’s just a humble man drawn to the movement because of his deep Vivian Jamesian love of video games. Oh, wait, that’s not it either?
Ok, well, maybe he feels a certain kinship with gamer culture? I mean, like a lot of angry gamebros, Forney likes to think of himself as a sort of outsider maverick misunderstood and underappreciated by the masses.
Maybe these excerpts from a post he wrote last year will help to shed some light on this. You know, the one where he described hardcore gamers as
narcissists. … the basement-dwelling, poorly-shaven, masturbating troll of legend. The kind of person who doesn’t shower and has gigabytes of porn on an array of portable hard drives. The nerds. …
Because these dorks don’t have the social acumen to build normal human relationships, their false identities involve submerging themselves into trashy pop culture. …
I remember trying to research an article about Mass Effect around the time of the game’s release, sifting through thousands of angry threads on BioWare’s forums before giving up out of depression. Seeing all these people crying, fuming, screaming, acting like their lives were over because of a fucking video game… it made me want to drink.
Huh.
Well, anyway, he’s part of #GamerGate now, and hoping that the movement will help him in his neverending battle with the Real Enemy: “Weird Twitter.”
No, really. He thinks the anti-GamerGate “movement” is an elaborate plot orchestrated by Gawker and a bunch of people who make weird jokes on Twitter.
There’s just one problem with Matt Forney’s new gig as not-leader and not-hero of GamerGate: he’s such a reprehensible pice of human dogshit that even GamerGaters find him a bit repellent.
After all, this is the guy who thinks women with tattoos are “broken,” psychopathic, “unlikable cunt[s].” He’s the pudgy wannabe Lothario who believes that “fat girls don’t deserve to be loved.”
He’s the guy who once declared that “[w]omen should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps,” and who wrote D-I-Y guides titled “How to Beat Your Girlfriend or Wife and Get Away with It” and “How to Crush a Girl’s Self Esteem.” (As Forney sees it, constant gaslighting and generous helpings of emotional and physical abuse will do the trick.)
Anyway, in order to address the issue of his own loathsomeness, Forney today posted what he called a “Publisher’s Statement Regarding Matt Forney’s Articles and GamerGate.”
Yes, he published this on his own blog. He’s the “publisher” making the statement, and referring to himself in the 3rd person.
In the “statement,” Matt Forney’s publisher, Matt Forney, offered a bit of a mea culpa for some of his more, er, questionable past statements.
I have said things that I have later disavowed. For example, two years ago I wrote an article gleefully celebrating the suicide of a teenage girl who engaged in a gangbang with several football players. While I still believe that [name redacted by DF] behavior was evidence of a poor upbringing and deeper psychological issues (which the media coverage about her suicide completely ignored), rejoicing in her death was morally abhorrent. For that, I apologize.
Well, gosh, I guess you deserve a few points for recognizing that a post “gleefully celebrating the suicide of a teenage girl” doesn’t look too good on your resume. Pity you had to sully that “apology” by suggesting that she was psychologically damaged and that the media should have been saying even worse things about her than it did.
Still, given that a lot of GamerGaters seem to have no problem gleefully harassing vulnerable women, Forney’s other big apology might turn out to matter more to his potential gamebro allies:
[F]our years ago, I wrote an article for my now-defunct In Mala Fide blog titled “Why Nobody Likes Nerds, and Why You’re Justified in Hating Them” that advocated bullying as a way to “shame” nerds into normality. …While I am and will remain critical of nerds and geek culture (a big part of why I have no desire to be a “leader” of GamerGate), I’ve since realized that bullying is wrong. I may not want to hang out with nerds, but they’ve never hurt me and they just want to be left alone. Again, I apologize.
Huh. Well, that may be all you need to become a GamerGater in good standing.
Matt Forney, I now pronounce you King of GamerGate.
PS: Forney has the approval of at least one prominent GamerGater: the amazing Davis Aurini:
Uh, you spelled Bukowski wrong. But you’re right about one thing: I’m laughing.
