Adam Baldwin may be best known for starring in “The Last Ship,” “Full Metal Jacket” and countless other films and TV shows, but to a large crowd of maligned young men —and their female champions—he’s best known as the inventor of #Gamergate, the hashtag that destroyed feminism.
Well, at least that divided the feminists—like me—and the fauxminists, amongst whom I include Anita Sarkeesian, the ‘gaming critic’ who screeched her dismay at idealized female bodies and roles, as she saw it, in computer games.
The backlash amongst young men was immediate. The scandal that ensued dominated the Internet for well over 18 months, and successfully divided reality feminists—those who believe that we need to concentrate on defeating ISIS to free Yazidi women and children from gang rape, or to sever our ties with Saudi Arabia, where women can’t legally drive—from fauxminists like Sarkeesian, a proponent of navel-gazing as an art form.
Horrific abuse was flung at several female fauxminists and their allies, including doxxing and death threats, but this was wrongfully laid at the door of the gaming community.
It was Adam Baldwin who coined the term #Gamergate to describe the scandal of falsely accused young men.
Give War(craft) a Chance!
Baldwin thus found himself the unofficial godfather to a passionate community on Reddit and Twitter.
He also found himself a target. ‘Outed’ as a rare Hollywood conservative, Baldwin has been systematically targeted by Twitter moderators, who even briefly suspended his account for merely pointing out that—in a composite photograph—pro “GG,” or Gamergate, were far more ‘attractive and joyous‘ than anti-GG. Truth. (I may be biased, as a pro-GG non-gamer female —I often use the feminist solidarity hashtag, #NotYourShield.)
Meanwhile, Twitter’s inane Trust and Safety Council, on which Sarkeesian sits, allows routine anti-semitism and does nothing about child abuse accounts. Heaven forfend if you criticize a fauxminist, though!
I had the great honor to interview Adam about Gamergate and his stand for free speech. The man walks it like he talks it.
Adam Baldwin: Twitter is shadow banning. As an example, some of Gamergate’s tweets will show up in my feed and some won’t. There’s some sort of filtering going on there.
Louise: The problem that I have with it is double standards. If your tweet said, “These people are attractive, these people aren’t attractive,” people on the left say that all the time. For example, about Donald Trump, they say it about Michelle Malkin, they say it about me. It is the universal currency of the Internet.
AB: Doesn’t surprise me at all. There’s a double standard, that’s not news, that’s repressive tolerance. If you look up repressive tolerance and the history of that, it’s the left that will allow speech that furthers their agenda and will crack down on speech that doesn’t. That’s not news, that’s not an angle, that’s an aside really, it’s a given.
The problem that I have with Twitter is that it’s changed in the last year. It’s not just Gamergate, it’s other things. The social justice warriors have been on the defensive—but they’re also deeply entrenched in that tech world up there in the North San Francisco Bay Area. There are clearly some activists that work in and around or are close friends with people that have their fingers on the buttons at Twitter. I’m not going to raise hackles about it. I don’t really care. I think Twitter’s not what it used to be and it seems to be fading in importance anyway as a connectivity platform for information. There’s still lots of information that you can get there, but if they want to call a mild insult like “attractive or unattractive” ‘hate speech’ or ‘abuse’ —then it just reflects poorly on them.
LM: I think it backfired on them a bit because there was user rebellion— #RIPTwitter trended worldwide. One fauxminist who complained about your tweet was forced to write yet another angry Medium piece explaining why Mark Andreessen was a moron. Andreessen, the man who coded Netscape.
AB: Have you seen South Park? The whole backlash in South Park with a PC school principal, and the story lines being used there are a great indication of the awareness of what I like to call “totalitarian social justice warriors,” which is probably redundant but that’s what they are.
It’s my way or the highway. It’s leftist in nature, it’s authoritarian, and that’s why I jumped in in the first place—to raise awareness and also to have a bit of fun and learn a bit about gaming.
I think there’s been some successful awareness raised and that’s a good thing. More speech defeats bad speech.
LM: Yes, all those that want us all to put a scarlet “c” [for conservative]on our breasts. You’re kind of brave, aren’t you, as an actor, to be doing this?
AB: Why?
LM: You work in an industry that’s entirely dominated by people on the radical left.
AB: According to who?
LM: It’s generally considered to be that way. Is that wrong?
AB: I think so.
LM: Really? This is new.
AB: I’ve been saying this for years, the majority of the people that work in Hollywood are center-right. You have some loud voices on the left who speak out, but the rank and file, they’re all center-right.
LM: Fascinating. By rank and file, you mean working actors in television?
AB: Working actors, people who look at their paycheck and see the taxes that are slammed out of there every week or every other week and they understand that they … I’m talking about the crew basically.
They work more hours, they take home the same amount of pay or less because they’re kicked into a higher tax bracket—so they just want to be left alone. They want government out of their way, they understand they have to pay a limited amount of taxes but they want to know what the limitations are. I talk about limiting principles a lot and when I speak with my liberal friends I say, what’s a fair amount of tax for anyone to pay?
LM: Yep.
AB: They really can’t come up with a fair percentage tax rate, progressive depends on how much you earn. I said, “OK, well what’s the limit on that and where’s your limit?” They don’t want to actually say, “Well, you have to be taxed up to 90%”—that’s a whole other rabbit hole.
For young people in the gaming community, I saw this an an opportunity to raise awareness. ‘Social justice’ and ‘social justice warrior’ was a light bulb that went off for me. If they’re throwing that around, I had read about that for years from folks like Thomas Sowell. When that bugbear reared its ugly head —I thought well, I’ll jump in and see where this goes, #Gamergate, let’s see what happens and here we are.
LM: Here you are. How does it feel to be the king of … it must be millions, at least many hundreds of thousands of vocal gamers? These are young men who feel marginalized. Some of them have social issues, some are just fed up with being bullied. I’m sure you didn’t expect to find yourself leading this movement.
AB: No, I’m not leading, I’m just a conduit. I just happen to be a clearing house, an aggregator of tweets if you will and stories in my Twitter feed are spread in and around a community. I was merely one antennae in a vast gaming network, so I consider myself no more a leader than any of the other people who took the bull by the horns and acted upon what they felt. I just happen to have a few hundred thousand, two hundred thousand followers or whatever. It doesn’t matter, it’s bigger than I am, that’s for sure.
LM: Yeah, but you are the recognizable face. The sad thing is that so many people involved in this, feel that they will be repercussions—they have to use pseudonyms.
Would you consider—I know you’re probably asked this a million times a day but I’m going to ask again—would you consider running for office, Mr Baldwin?
AB: What for?
LM: You tell me. Governor of California? They voted for Schwarzenegger twice.
AB: There are plenty of people out there, that’s not my bag. I wouldn’t want the pay cut anyway.
LM: Of course, you wouldn’t. What would you do if Twitter were to un-verify you for supporting Gamergate?
AB: They won’t un-verify me, and I’m not going to delete my account. If they suspend me, I’m not going to make any kind of an effort to regain it, and it will just go by the wayside, but it is what it is.
LM: They’ll never take away the blue tick of anybody who’s actually genuinely big and famous and has a proper platform.
AB: Milo had one, but Milo is ….
LM: He’s not actor-famous. Yet.
AB: Milo is… Again what is verified for if not to differentiate between noteworthy folks and impostors? He’s who he is, he’s @Nero. If they take that away from him, there are other platforms.
LM: I love my Twitter but I do think you’re a hundred percent right. Do you think that Twitter SJWs would have been scared by the reaction to what happened to @Nero as we come up to the election season? they must find it a bit hard to be neutral.
AB: No, I think they’ll double down, and they don’t care. I think they’re happy that conservatives are up in arms about it. It makes them feel as though they’ve accomplished something. It’s also a distraction from other news. This is not a surprise.
To me, anyway. It’s not surprising that authoritarians would be authoritarian.
LM: It’s funny, isn’t it? The conservatives are actually the rebels and the so-called liberals are the authoritarians?
AB: I don’t know if you’re familiar with Rush Limbaugh, but he talks about this all the time. The thing is, when Obama was elected the promise was he’s going to heal racial relations and stop the rising of the seas and all that stuff and Limbaugh said, “No, he’ll just make it worse, he’ll make race relations worse because he’s a leftist. It’s not because he’s black, it’s because he’s a Marxist is why.”
LM: The media didn’t show the same love to Condoleezza Rice, did they, at the time?
AB: Exactly.