Somebody from the Dispatch I have never heard of interviews frequent Free Press contributor Brianna Wu. Wu is an interesting person, and the Free Press (specifically Bari Weiss in round table podcasts*) typically present her as an “in the room” Democratic donor and strategist who is disaffected with the direction of the party.
I am not a Very Online Guy, but I recall Gamer Gate (through the lens of NYT/The Atlantic, etc) as being a reactionary mob of mostly male, mostly white dudes hectoring/bullying/doxing figures seen as advocating for broader representation in video games and perhaps more broadly in popular films and TV. Here, Wu describes what must be the earlier stages (of which she claims to be a part, as a video game designer herself) as being instigated by hard-line progressives. There were some uncompromising groups of left-wing interest groups imposing representation of their groups in an uncompromising and bullying way. The later-stage Gamer Gate controversies — not addressed in this interview — was a predictable reaction to the actions of these special interest group ninjas.
This framework seems to be popping up all over the place. Bill Maher on Pod Save America podcast (among others of the Free Press persuasion and Wu herself) fit the transgender** youth controversy in the same way. In their words, shadowy trans activists are pushing hormone and surgical treatments on younger and younger people without parental or input or careful deliberation or study by the broader medical community. The result is hateful conduct towards the first transgender legislator in the US Congress and federal bans on transgender participation in school sports. The special interest groups did it to themselves by pushing their agenda and ‘sidelining’ critics.
And, of course, plenty of people seem to be putting the Trump re-election into this framework as a whole. Special interest groups on the left wing pushed all the moderates out and sparked the fire of Trumpism. And those special interest groups deserve all the blame for Democratic losses. Thoughts….
1) Current Democratic representation in congress isn’t full of these types of special interest crusaders. Very Online People will say they were embedded throughout the Biden administration and secretly pulling the strings, and their involvement in organizing is more pernicious than the end results suggest. Still, though: look at the end results.
2) I suspect Very Online People are sensitive to a media environment that is very good at unearthing and amplifying nutty special interest types, and then presenting them as representation of progressive causes as a whole.
3) The framework is that “Democrats did this to themselves.” But there is no criticism of Republican actions. Republicans and right-wingers are just sort of treated like a natural disaster and the (almost always unnamed!) special interest ninjas are the nutria turning levees into string cheese.
I suppose this framework continues to be convenient as pundits lecture Democrats on how to reform and rebuild into a supposedly more-representative party and regain power. Still, I am stunned that so much punditry spends so much time on this narrative. Let’s keep complaining about online bullying from left-wingers and campus protesters that made a few students walk an extra block to class last spring, rather than the actual assault on free speech being carried out by the Trump administration.
*Batya Ungar-Sargon is soooo Trump-pilled in these round tables that I often shut off Weiss’ “Honestly” podcast or avoid it all together.
**Wu explicitly insists on saying transsexual vs. transgender, and I’m honestly not educated on the difference.