Game Journalists vs Gene Park, Elon Musk vs Twitter
Game Journalists vs Gene Park, Elon Musk vs Twitter
The Washington Post writer had the audacity to speak with conservative podcaster Colin Moriarty. Everyone knows Colin is a villain with a last name like Moriarty. Duh. Also Elon Musk is buying Twitter
Washington Post video game reporter Gene Park is being dogpiled on Twitter today for committing acts of wrongthink judged most unholy and foul.
Park joined podcast host Colin Moriarty on one of his podcasts to talk about his career in journalism.
Yep, you heard that right. He spoke with a colleague about journalism on a podcast! He even described it as a “pleasant chat” omfg !!!
Moriarty is a conservative (gasp!) and in today’s cultural moment, that’s tantamount to being a fascist or a mass murderer or a Justin Bieber fan or something. You believe in limited government? You want lower taxes? You maybe think they shouldn’t teach gender identity stuff to kindergartners? You might vote for Ron DeSantis? You didn’t mention how much you hated Donald Trump every day of his presidency? You listen to Joe Rogan and don’t care for mask mandates and have a Blue Lives Matter bumper sticker?
You, sir, are a monster. A monster I say! Anyone who speaks with you is a monster. Speaking with people who have different political beliefs is one of the gravest sins of the modern era, and get ready to have a lot of people pretending to be very upset wag their fingers at you in public. Brace yourself! Those fingers are wagging!
Colin and I differ on many points. For instance, I am not a fan of Ron DeSantis and Colin is. I’m more of a Bernie Sanders guy.
In any case, I don’t care that Colin and I disagree about stuff like that, because despite our political differences we also share a lot of views in common, including our views on free speech. I’m willing to bet good money that Colin and many of his detractors actually share a lot in common. For all our many differences, I think most people who live in the West agree on most things. We roughly agree on lots and lots of big cultural issues and then disagree rather vehemently with one another over specific controversial bits and pieces. We have, in large part thanks to media and social media, allowed those small differences to define how we think about one another and treat one another these days.
And I get it on a certain level. If you’re in a marginalized group that has been denied rights for decades by conservatives, you might have some lingering anger toward them. Totally justified anger, too. But a lot of conservatives have moved left on social issues like gay marriage and marijuana, and that’s a good thing! This was achieved, in large part, through gradual change that included people talking with one another like human beings.
I often bring up the story of musician and author Daryl Davis who actively befriended members of the KKK and, through his friendship, changed their views on race. Here’s his TED talk on this remarkable feat:
Through enormous courage, patience and a deep well of humanity, Davis was able to get former Klan Imperial Wizard Roger Kelly to renounce the organization and its racist ideology. He’s godfather to Kelly’s granddaughter now. How badass is that? Seriously that is some ballsy badassery right there. The pen is mightier than the sword.
Imagine how hard this must have been for Davis. How frightening. He went to rallies with Kelly. He would visit his home and eat with his family. I’m sure plenty of people in Davis’s life were deeply confused by this (and plenty in the Klan also) but it didn’t stop Davis and the results were nothing short of miraculous.
The point is, we all agree that the KKK is a terrible organization that spews hateful, awful things. But through the power of dialogue and friendship, Davis was able to change some hearts and minds.
The current attitude on the left—that ‘dangerous’ ideas (aka anything outside a very narrow ideological window) need to be shut down, that speaking with people with other political beliefs much milder than the Klan’s is tantamount to endorsing them and spreading ‘harm’—is not just wrong, it’s ultimately toothless. Nothing meaningful happens when you just shut people down on Twitter.
Left Twitter is Very Very Upset that billionaire Elon Musk is buying the social media platform. I think a large part of this is fear over Donald Trump getting his account restored just in time to run against Kamala Harris (he doesn’t need Twitter to win that fight) but it’s often being touted as a Very Dangerous Moment because now Twitter won’t ban QAnon quacks and dangerous rightwing extremists.
Free speech is free speech. People on Twitter keep saying “free speech is only about the government” and that simply isn’t true. The 1st Amendment prevents government censorship (to some degree) but the concept of free speech isn’t constrained only to state action. Since when did the left stop worrying about corporate censorship? Aren’t we supposed to be worried about the potential misuse of information by giant tech companies?
And we can’t stop rightwing politics or conspiracy theories from proliferating or we would have by now. If it’s not on Twitter it's going somewhere else. Plenty of political movements and conspiracy theories existed long before the internet was a thing.
Free speech matters because nobody can stop you from having the debate, the conversation, the exchange of ideas.
I need free speech because I don’t have the faith this army of sneering white dudes has that I know everything, that every debate has already been settled and we just need to let the goodies rule over the baddies. I don’t think everything is obvious. I don’t think all political questions are easy. So I need free speech in order to be exposed to all kinds of ideas, including ones I find deeply offensive, because it’s through the friction of philosophical conflict that new and better ideas arise. And I need free speech because the socialist politics that are core to my identity are at present vastly unpopular in this country, despite what you might hear in Brooklyn or on the NBC News Slack, and the only way that changes is through the long, slow, uncool work of gradual persuasion.
In any case, back to Gene Park and Colin Moriarty. I link the two topics because I think they’re fundamentally about the same thing. People are mad that Twitter might stop censoring so many people; people are mad, for the same reasons, that Park spoke with Moriarty. It’s all about the ‘wrong’ ideas gaining a foothold in spaces woke Twitter wants to control (Twitter itself, game journalism, journalism more broadly etc.)
The tweets in response to Park’s involvement on the podcast all follow a very similar trend. Let’s look at a couple:
See that bit, “sent his followers” to attack people? You hear this a lot, but nobody ever actually offers up any proof that Colin has ever ‘sent’ anyone to attack anyone. I’ve seen this plenty myself. Someone comes at me on Twitter, I quote-tweet their attack, and then people cry about me ‘sending my followers’ to attack someone or claims that I’m ‘punching down.’
Nope, sorry. This is just how Twitter works. When I get in a scrap with somebody with lots of followers, those followers come for me. They don’t need to be “sent” by anyone. That’s just the nature of Twitter. More on this in a minute. And sure, some people do send mobs to dogpile people, but I’ve seen that on the right and the left and never once from Colin.
And:
Which “dangerous viewpoints” Carli? Oh right, he’s a conservative!
Ah see, “so many marginalized journalists” Colin and his followers have harassed. Who exactly? Also, what’s a “marginalized journalist” anyways? Journalists are white collar professionals. I mean, they’re mostly treated like crap by their own publications but that’s hardly “marginalized” and if you mean LGBTQ, well these days that’s typically a mark in your favor at least within the media (not necessarily elsewhere, of course).
Also, how is that Park is “giving validation” to Moriarty “instead” of these other journalists? Surely he can talk with Moriarty today and Marginalized Journalist™ tomorrow?
I asked Colin to chime in on these attacks, and specifically on the accusations made that he sends his followers to harass people. Here’s his reply in full:
For years, a game of telephone has been played at my expense, initially spread by the very same type of people who continue to propagate it: Struggling game journalists with no credibility outside of their circles and no audiences outside of the publications they gleamed onto that other, better people built. They lie about me knowingly, and they do it to hurt me. A lot of it no doubt has to do with a lack of confidence in their own skill and ability, as well as the lack of any resonance with an audience. They also have been around at these sites long enough to know that there was a time when people loved the folks working at them, and that time has long since passed. They are overseeing the intractable diminishment of something other people once loved. And they're responsible for it. That's probably hard. They are lashing out.
You will note that it's become a game, at this point, for people to ask for 'proof' of my 'misdeeds,' only for none to ever be manufactured. The reality is, I'm the closest thing to a Trump voter many of these people have ever encountered, and that is my crime. They've never heard a different opinion about anything in their life. They would have been laughed out of my IGN. You know, the one people liked. So, they have to find any little scrap they can to justify the caricature they've built-up. Because, if we know anything about modern media across industries, it's that they cannot be wrong.
Those who listen to my shows know the kind of person I am. And those that are most upset by my very existence in this industry are the ones I enjoy beating the most, by every meaningful metric. Unlike them, I don't need a masthead to survive. I'm not suckling at the teats of corporations and signaling constantly to the in-group in the outside chance I might 'make it.' I've already 'made it,' more than any of them ever will. So -- above all else -- they can cry.
We will continue doing what we do best: Making content that our audience deeply connects to.
This is very similar to what Freddie has written about his detractors on Twitter and elsewhere who came after Substack as a den of anti-woke, pro-free speech wrongthink last year:
Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow, but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you - college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m not what you’re mad about. Not really.
In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?
And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t. In fact Republicans are making great hay of the collapse of the media into pure unapologetic advocacy journalism. Some people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary ideologues or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them? Substack didn’t create this dynamic, and neither did I. The exact same media people who are so angry about Substack did, when they abandoned any pretense to serving the entire country and decided that their only job was to advance a political cause that most ordinary people, of any gender or race, find alienating and wrong. So maybe try and look at where your problems actually come from. They’re not going away.
Both Colin and Freddie touch on the same point: A lot of people in the media (games and otherwise) are mad at people like Colin and Freddie for finding huge success podcasting, or on Substack or Patreon or wherever, while they remain largely irrelevant, parroting the same boring social justice crap and acting deeply unpleasant with everyone. Like this guy who responded to my very mild quote tweet with a shocking amount of rage:
It is weird how much this appears to be a popularity contest for so many people. Oh no, I don’t get many likes on my Substack posts! Whatever will I do? Maybe if I put my pronouns in my Twitter bio I can finally get laid.1
So yeah, I’m happy Gene Park and Colin Moriarty had a conversation. I like them both and think they both do great work. I think it’s extremely important for people to talk with one another, find some common ground, hash out some differences.
It doesn’t solve everything. But it doesn’t hurt.
Leave a comment and let me know what you think, whether you agree or disagree. Let’s talk!
I honestly don’t care if you put your pronouns in your Twitter bio I just find some of the dudes who do this are pretty full of it and full of themselves. Nothing irks me like these frauds who talk a big game about social justice and then act really miserable to everyone. Do you actually care about these topics, about helping people, or are you just in it for the ‘likes’?
The far left and right seem to be trying to race each other to fly off the cliff, giving one another middle fingers and laughing that they'll win the race while their respective engines are on fire. It's insane. As a conservative, it was easy to see the left's overreach and shake your head. Then you turn around and your own people are going crazy and you just throw up your hands and, like so many others, try to find the sane people who are left (pun not intended).
Gene is a really cool dude, they can't blame him for anything but for not following their black lists. It is not something he actually do, it is that he is not performing, playing the role they want him to play.
The other time i read someone lamenting an actress took a picture with Rowling. The accusser noted that both women were friends bedore any controversy of the Harry Pother author had come up to the public opinion. The actress had never said anything about trans people. She took a pic with Rowling.
That is the most ridiculous guilty for association i have ever seen. It seems Rowling is not allowed to have friends. I have to wonder if their family is also evil by this logic.