The GOP's Reverse #GamerGate Problem

Feed the Trump
Trump Grow Big
Feed More Trump
Trump More Bigger
No More Food Trump
Adopt the Cruz
Trump Eat You
Then Eat Cruz#YouBuiltTrump

— Marcus Hawkins (@HawkinsUSA) January 21, 2016

Today Marco Rubio came out and gave one of the best speeches I've ever heard him give--and he is a talented speaker. Rubio, clearly facing a (probable) impending loss in Florida and the (likely) collapse of his campaign speaks forcefully and sincerely about his dismay with the state of the party and the rise of Trump.

He even manages to last one hundred and fifty seconds before mentioning Obama's divisive rhetoric. That sounds snarky--but The Omnivore is, for real, impressed.


One thing he doesn't do, though, is figure out exactly where Trump came from. He mentions the media-coverage: fair. But what about the message itself?

The worst part about Trump isn't actually Trump. It's that GOP voters are proving all of the awful stereotypes the media has said they are.

— Josh Jordan (@NumbersMuncher) March 12, 2016

The #hashtag-movement #GamerGate was notable for claiming to be about ethics in games journalism (computer games) while, for the most part, having visible activity that was centered around dislike for female game designers and female game critics.

What was #GamerGate really about? Well, who could say? Do you go by mission statement? Aggregate behavior? Some other marker? It's impossible to say. Thus far, there has been no test that someone could run to see if, given the choice, most of the members would go for a less combative Ethics-In-Game-Journalism approach rather than a Twitter Harassment club. What if there was? What if you could force a clear choice of either-or?

To be sure, such a test would be expensive and difficult. You would have to register GamerGaters on some kind of list. You would need to cover the entire area and have some kind of mechanism to let them all choose a leader, a direction, a philosophy. It could cost millions of dollars. Such a test will never be run for #GamerGate.

As such, we'll never have a definitive answer about what they stand for--or what proportions of different factions stand for in comparison to the whole. In the absence of such a test, people who like the ideas of #GamerGate (ethical journalism in a multi-billion dollar industry) could claim activist critics were focusing on the bad elements--the false flags (people who don't like #GamerGate harassing people in its name to give it a black eye)--and strategically ignoring the good things it did.

You could have, it turns out, quite a discussion about that. In the absence of any real, widespread test, everyone could have their own side. You could choose what you wanted to believe.

Right Wing Thought Leaders

If you follow conservative bloggers, there is usually a pretty firm disconnect between the blogs themselves (which, in the top-10, say) may be snarky or even angry--but are usually thoughtful and fact based. They also tend to be quite conservative--but not fascist or racist. These authors, to hear them tell it, believe that their comment sections are not indicative of their party or their ideological position (mostly). For a large conservative blog (say, Hot Air), the idea is that people who follow them closely (and pay their bills by visiting) are just over-zealous or hyperbolic in their racism, sexism, etc.

It isn't hard to find conservative blog comments that would seem to confirm the left's worst stereotypes (you can run the reverse test on the top-10 liberal blogs if you wish)--but it historically has been hard to find out just how much of those worst-common-denominator beliefs are present in the GOP at large.

As with #GamerGate, there hasn't really been a test.

But What If There Was Such A Test?

Here's the cover of a book by Jonah Goldberg of the conservative National Review Online. Liberals practice fascism. Specifically in a Nazi fashion.

 Here's a Trump supporter from last night's cancelled Trump rally--marred by violence and chaos.

The problem with #hashtag movements--online, leaderless activism--is that there is no way to exclude assholes who fly its flag and get support for trollish behavior. The good news for these nascent forces is that their lack of organization provides plausible deniability.

The bad news for traditional, hardened organizations with voter-rolls and ballots and candidates who stand for specific things is that when you get an actual vote you get a very clear picture of where they really stand.