Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: Gamers and White Nationalist Recruiting
Male gamers are ripe for white nationalist recruitment (Games for Change)
August 21, 2021
By Bill Berkowitz
“You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned on to politics and Trump.” – Steve Bannon
Was Gamergate the first serious indication that disaffected young white male gamers – seeing their spaces “invaded” by women -- might be fertile ground for recruitment by white nationalist groups? Would it lead to a Trumpism portal? Why is a certain sector of gamers attracted to fascism and authoritarianism? In trying to unravel answers to these questions, the novelist (We Are Watching Eliza Bright) A. E. Osworth recently explained, “What was especially confusing for me was that nerd properties are, broadly speaking, anti-fascist. In Star Wars, we’re on the side of the rebel alliance and not the empire. Everything from Adventure Time to X-Men to The Name of the Wind prioritizes, in their plots, connection to community, anti-authoritarianism, and standing up for socially just ideals. … If these populations are mainlining anti-fascist stories, then what about the subset of straight, white cis men from within these fandoms seems to be especially rife for radicalization? How can they cheer the explosion of the Death Star not one, not two, but (basically) three whole times and then turn around and become the IRL equivalent of a Storm Trooper?”
“If nerds see themselves as inherently oppressed, see themselves as a chaotic good hero, and see everyone else as the opposite of them,” Osworth asks, “does their fandom make them easier to radicalize?
For the uninitiated, Gamergate was the systematic harassment of women and queer people in the game design industry, including female journalists covering the industry. Coverage of Gamergate took off in right-wing spaces; Brietbart media had a field day and white supremacists took notice. “The white supremacist online journal Radix published an article about how Gamergate should be this moment where young men, millennial men realize that feminism has this great power of this broader culture and that this is their opportunity to kind of rise up and push back against that,” Megan Condis, a professor of communication at Texas Tech, an avid gamer, and the author of Gaming Masculinity: Trolls, Fake Geeks, and the Gendered Battle for Online Culture, told Vox’s Zack Beauchamp.
In April 2019, Vox’s Beauchamp reported that Condis’ research “found that the misogyny of Gamergaters is part of a much bigger reactionary tendency among a certain subset of men and boys who play video games, an ideologically charged ‘gamer’ identity that centers a stereotyped white male nerd as the ‘authentic’ gamer.”
Condis added: “[V]ideo games and virtual worlds are spaces that have always been marketed to us as the place where you could have an adventure, a place where you could act out some of your more taboo fantasies, whether it may be violent fantasies or sexualized fantasies or even just, like, impossible fantasies — like, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a dragon slayer.
“So coming into those spaces and saying, ‘The way that you behave in these fantasy worlds has to be considerate; you have to be aware of racial politics and gender politics in those spaces” — there’s a lot of pushback against that. I think that’s where a lot of the resistance to PC culture or the belief that ‘feminist criticism is going to ruin video games’ comes from. It’s this idea that they will no longer be spaces where you can enact these off-the-wall fantasies.”
“Recruiters go to where targets are, staging seemingly casual conversations about issues of race and identity in spaces where lots of disaffected, vulnerable adolescent white males tend to hang out,” Condis wrote in a March 2019 New York Times op-ed. “Those who exhibit curiosity about white nationalist talking points or express frustration with the alt-right’s ideological opponents such as feminists, anti-racism activists and ‘social justice warriors’ are then escorted through a funnel of increasingly racist rhetoric designed to normalize the presence of white supremacist ideology and paraphernalia through the use of edgy humor and memes.”
It is unclear just how many white nationalist groups are recruiting in gaming spaces. In an early October 2020 interview with Steven Cherry of Radio Spectrum Megan Condis said she thought that 2014’s Gamergate “was a preview of some of the issues that were to come. [F]rom 2014 to today, we see a lot of different venues in which this figure of the male who feels like their place in the world has been taken away from them, that they don’t have the same opportunities as they used to have. But also, I think Gamergate was a precursor to the rise of the alt-right in the culture wars, in the sense that there were outlets such as Breitbart.com or various alt-right affiliated writers that very intentionally waded into the Gamergate debate and tried to stoke those fires, spread the hashtag, spread the kind of terminology or ideology that they wanted to spread within those circles as—I’m going to use the word recruitment, or at least as an onboarding mechanism—to try to introduce a group of people who probably before 2014 didn’t think of themselves as particularly political, but could be introduced to the political implications of what their hobby could mean or what their feelings of being erased; how that might be useful to be recruited into a particular ... not a political party, per se, but a political ideology.”
At the end of her essay, A. E. Osworth concludes: “White nationalist rhetoric and thinking is always a threat of violence because it is predicated on the idea that a large amount of humanity is subhuman, belongs in zoos. It shouldn’t take training in nuance to understand that the people espousing white supremacy are the bad guys. Etymology doesn’t matter, community history doesn’t matter, in-groups and out-groups and human nature don’t, shouldn’t matter. There shouldn’t be an amount of video games or movies or comics we can read that makes it easier for a person to succumb to the alt-right, to buy into fascism, to become another Storm Trooper. And the more anyone tries to explain it, the less sense it makes.”
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