Free Republic

Earlier this year, the Wikipedia page on GamerGate, the anti-corruption movement in gaming, saw extensive updates about the “legacy” of the movement and associated controversies. These edits pushed claims that GamerGate, which Wikipedia labels a “harassment campaign” due to a years-long effort by left-wing editors, helped Donald Trump become President in 2016 and that the movement even contributed to what the page called an “attempted coup” at the Capitol on January 6.

“Minecraft” creator Marcus “Notch” Persson, who sold the title to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014, won’t be part of 10-year anniversary plans for the game because of his “comments and opinions,” Microsoft tells Variety.

When Melody Hensley first met Lawrence Krauss, she was a 29-year-old makeup artist at a department store, and he was one of her intellectual idols. She ran an atheist website in her spare time and had just started volunteering for the Center for Inquiry (CFI), a nonprofit group committed to promoting science and reason above faith. She was hoping to build a career in the burgeoning “skeptics” movement, and Krauss was one of its brightest luminaries. At a CFI event in November 2006, Krauss asked Hensley for her card, and later, as she was leaving, asked her if she was...

Edgy comedy website, Cracked, has silently let go “a lot” of its staff after various writers and some senior staff were let go from the site, which has been confirmed by various writers let go and the executive editor, David Wong, confirmed the news. Across Twitter various individuals caught wind of former Cracked writers who have been laid off in the process of Cracked trimming the financial fat...one of those individuals let go is former managing editor, John Cheese. So Cracked had no qualms about getting rid of its upper management. This was further corroborated by executive editor, David Wong......

Democrat Brianna Wu claims that Moon valuable militarily because rocks ‘have power of 100s of nuclear bombs’A transgender-issues activist and Democratic candidate for Congress says the advent of the space tourism industry could give private corporations a “frightening amount of power” to destroy the Earth with rocks because of the Moon’s military importance. Brianna Wu, a prominent “social justice warrior” in the “Gamergate” controversy who now is running for the House seat in Massachusetts’ 8th District, suggested in a since-deleted tweet that companies could drop rocks from the Moon.

I am often asked why I, a Christian libertarian and intellectual, would publicly support Donald Trump, a man of no fixed ideology, no apparent religious beliefs, multiple marriages, visible ties to the Clintons, and whose taste and sophistication tends to resemble that of a nouveau riche rhinoceros. It is a reasonable question. After all, how can anyone support a candidate whose public statements are, to put it mildly, inconsistent—when they are not completely self-contradictory. The answer is as simple as it is conclusive and convincing. Donald Trump is the only candidate in either major party whose personal interests are aligned...

Crowder interviews Milo Yiannopoulos - very impressive!

Now many of you are familiar with Milo Yiannopoulos. Many of you are not. You need to fix that about yourselves. As an openly gay man living in London, he’s also capable of verbally expressing his anti-authoritarian, freedom-centered principles better than our talking heads this side of the pond. Unshackled by the chains of political correctness, Milo really does offer a refreshing, challenging and wildly entertaining interview here. Also, for the first time, there’s an extended additional 45minute interview too raw for terrestrial radio! The guy deserves some support. Truly awesome.

A group of female webcomic artists and online radio hosts have been ejected from the Calgary Expo, a Canadian pop culture convention, after publicly disagreeing with members of a feminist panel discussion. Staff at the expo informed them that they had received reports of ‘harassment’ at the panel, but footage of the discussion shows that no such behaviour took place. Consumers accused the Calgary Expo of engaging in political intolerance, and have begun a boycott of the convention’s sponsors.

This is the era in which we are all being drafted in the Culture War. It doesn’t matter if you’re secular or religious, political or apolitical, frat boys or geeks, hipsters or bros. Nobody gets to be neutral or sit on the sidelines, because we’ll all be expected to make our obeisance to the latest politically correct opinion handed down to us by a Twitter mob. By now, we know the basic ingredients of a typical skirmish in Culture War 4.0. It goes something like this: a) a leftist claque starts loudly pushing the “correct” Culture War position onto b)...

The cost to Gawker Media of its ridicule and viciousness toward video gamers was "seven figures" in lost advertising revenue, according to the company's head of advertising, Andrew Gorenstein. In addition, founder Nick Denton has stepped down as president and editorial director Joel Johnson has been removed from his post and will probably leave the company, reports Capital New York. "Ultimately #GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission," Gawker writer Sam Biddle tweeted in October, sparking a firestorm of outrage which solidified into a sustained letter-writing campaign...

<p>I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that with regard to entertainment, conservatives and libertarians find science fiction and videogaming to be the most attractive options offered by pop culture these days, mainly because there’s a lot of SF that doesn’t try and stuff political correctness and half-baked socialist egalitarianism up our snouts. The same goes for videogames, which are mostly about killing bad guys and/or solving puzzles.</p>

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the most amusing aspect of the whole #GamerGate phenomenon (background here and here and here) has been the angry progressive media types confusedly looking around trying to figure out how we got to a point where they would be targeted for boycotts and the like for casual comments they have made. As Varad Mehta noted, Crazy, right? They don’t quite understand the world they’ve created. They think it’s the worst thing in the whole world for Internet Tough Guys to make death and rape threats* and also that it’s cool to joke about Bristol Palin actually...