Connections: Internet Culture and Donald Trump

Stop thinking of history as a linear progress, because it’s not. History is in fact a giant monster web of seemingly inconsequential ties that make up a nigh incomprehensible whole. A quick question: how did Donald Trump get popular enough with the youth to become president? For that, we need to untangle quite the web…

Let us begin in the year 1997. Bill Clinton is president for his second term, the Monica Lewinski scandals were still a year or so away, and the American economy is as good as ever. The Internet is slowly becoming more popular, but it is still a “nerd thing” for all intents and purposes. It was on this year that the very first original Internet cartoon was released: The Goddamn George Liquor Program, created by now-VERY-disgraced animator John Kricfalusi.

The cartoon was very simple, possessing limited animation and bad sound quality that was otherwise above and beyond what one could find on the Internet of the 90’s. Each episode was a minute long, at most. However, though, the cartoon has not withstood the test of time, it still remains an important part of Internet History for being a trailblazer for what the Internet would become.

The era of original Internet content can be argued to have truly begun with the rise of Newgrounds. Newgrounds is a website dedicated to UCC, or User Created Content, where anyone could upload and share anything they made, and anyone could see said creation(s). The site became known for its flash animations and games, with many big name online creators having made their start on Newgrounds. Such names include online comedian and video game commentator VideoGameDunkey, animator Neil Ciciriega,and others.

The site Newgrounds was also the host for what may well be considered the first truly viral video, the Numa Numa dance. A one minute, badly lit video of private citizen Gary Brolsma lip synching to the song Dragostea din Tei, by Romanian band O-Zone. Numa Numa created two fads; one temporary, and one that endures to this day. The first was the fad of people making their own versions of the Numa Numa; most of these videos have since been lost to time. The second was the notion of gaining fame via the Internet.

Perhaps one of the first true online celebrities was James Rolfe, better known as the Angry Video Game Nerd. Rolfe uploaded videos of his character, the Angry Nerd (then known as the Angry Nintendo Nerd) onto the Internet, wherein he’d critique video games of yesteryear in a profanity-laden tirade. The videos would be uploaded onto ScrewAttack, but Rolfe would not become the celebrity he is today until the rise of YouTube in 2006.

During this time period there was another original online program that was steadily growing in popularity: Game Life. This revolutionary video game critic show is now mostly forgotten, the memory kept alive thanks in no small part by celebrated online critic Guru Larry. What made Game Life so revolutionary for its time was the fact that it proved that an online show could become popular in spite of the fact that its creators are amateurs at video production and editing. The show’s popularity of its time, counting with 200 subscribers total, was enough to get MTV to pay attention and negotiate with the creators to bring Game Life to national television. These plans were canceled, and those bridges burned to the ground, thanks to Game Life’s creator, Andrew Rosenblum, was arrested in 2007 for threatening to kill his girlfriend, just days after the V-Tech Massacre.

GameLife and the AVGN proved that there was an audience for online review shows, which GameLife proved could be done by just about anybody with a camera and working knowledge of what they were reviewing. With the slow rise of YouTube, a new era began: the era of the Online Critic. The three biggest names to come out of this era are Doug “Nostalgia Critic” Walker, Noah “Spoony” Antwiler, and Lewis “Linkara” Lovhaug. Other big names that owe their fame to this era are Lindsay Ellis, “Guru” Larry Bundy, and others.

The year 2007 was the year YouTube was slowly becoming big, with many users uploading their own videos on the site. One of the most popular uploaders (hereby referred to as channels) was the show Fred. A video-blog (or vlog) program about a hyperactive and eternally frustrated 6 year old boy (portrayed by then-teenaged Lucas Cruikshank) Fred became the first YouTube channel to hit one million subscribers, which at that time was unheard of. Fred also became one of the very first online personas to gain mainstream media fame/infamy thanks to Nickelodeon’s productions of three Fred movies, a Fred TV show (which lasted one season), and an original series for Cruikshank named Marvin Marvin (also lasting one season).

YouTube, like Newgrounds, was made popular thanks to its accessibility. It was easy to make, upload, and find videos on YouTube, allowing the site to become the entertainment mainstay that it is today.

Thanks to websites like YouTube, the Internet became a place where the historically voiceless (the majority of the human population) could suddenly be heard. One of these historically voiceless communities is the Atheist community, which thanks to the Religious-Secularist Culture War of the late 2000’s saw the birth of new online celebrities. The two most famous of these are TJ Kirk “The Amazing Atheist,” and Philip “Thunderf00t” Mason. Both men would go on to become YouTube’s biggest names in Atheism, helping to give birth to what has gone to be known as the Skeptic Community.

The Skeptic Community enjoyed a period of popularity between 2008 to 2012, when a new Atheist movement was proposed: Atheism +, an atheism that also focused on social justice, feminism, and anti-racism.

Atheism+ has some roots in the short lived (and now mostly forgotten) controversy dubbed ElevatorGate, wherein Atheist spokesperson Rebecca Watson shared the story of the time a man followed her to the elevator at 4 AM and invited her to his room for coffee. Many big names in Atheist, such as Richard Dawkins and Thunderf00t, criticized her for allegedly complaining about getting hit on. Dawkin’s critique was particularly scathing, comparing the suffering of a woman in an Islamist country like Saudi Arabia to Watson’s experience on the elevator, an experience that by Watson’s own admission ended almost as soon as it started. The Atheism+ movement and the ElevatorGate incident helped expose the inner rifts of the Skeptic Community between the socially Liberals and Conservatives.

This schism would pave the way to a new community, one represented by many of the old big names of the Skeptic Community: the Anti-SJW community.

To understand the Anti-SJW community, two things must be done. First, a definition of SJW. An acronym for Social Justice Warrior, an SJW is a person who dedicates their online (and sometimes offline) persona to fighting for various admittedly just causes of Social Justice. Social Justice itself means justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privilege in society. As I personally explained to a friend the other day, Social Justice basically says “shit like homophobia, racism, and poverty prevent people from having the same opportunities, and that’s not fair. If we got rid of these things, the world would be more fair.”

Second, we must comprehend the roots of anti-SJW sentiment. We go to the year 2010, when a TV program called My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic premiered on the American network called The Hub. A few months after its premiere, the show was discovered by users of the website 4chan, who began to spread the word regarding the show, promoting it all over said site. With time the show was given its own subforum, named /mlp/. Thus was born the Brony Community, which was the collection of adult male fans of the animated children’s series that has traditionally been aimed at little girls.

The Bronies began to spread to various other sites, such as YouTube and Tumblr. The latter is a blogging site, where users can “reblog” and share the works of others. On YouTube a new subsidiary of the Brony community was born: the MLP Analysts, who made videos analyzing the themes of each episode. Tumblr became popular for the “Ask a Pony” blogs, wherein users would send messages asking one of the “ponies” a question, and the moderator would then draw a comic or write a blog post answering said question. Among the most notable, and notorious of these blogs was “Ask Princess Molestia.”

Molestia was a lewd parody of Celestia, a major character from the show. The Molestia blog-comic was infamous for its risque nature, with much of its content centering on how the title character sexually molests other characters from the show. Not at all child friendly.

This drew negative attention from various other fans of the franchise, including a then-teenaged fan who went by the moniker PinkiePony. This fan founded the StopPrincessMolestia movement, which aimed to rid Tumblr of the Molestia blog permanently. The movement gained some notoriety online, and was in fact one of the first major movements of the SJW community. But a problem soon arose: PinkiePony herself had some skeletons in the closet.

It was soon revealed that PinkiePony had a history of emotional abuse and bullying. Perhaps the most infamous incident regarding PinkiePony was the time she anonymously called Immigration in hopes of deporting the husband of one of her critics, a user named VikingLumberJack.

The PinkiePony drama was commented on by some members of the Brony community, which by then was receiving some negative attention from the wider online community. Bronies had long developed a bad reputation for their “obsession” with the show, and some of the community’s members have done some questionable actions and made questionable content. The controversy eventually caught the attention of a then growing YouTube channel named InternetAristocrat, who dedicated the fourth video of his show The Hugbox Chronicles to explaining and criticizing PinkiePony’s actions. This video gained some attention and was spread across Tumblr, which easily helped expand its view counts.

The entire PinkiePony debacle quite easily demonstrates the worst aspects of the SJW community: they are young and inexperienced in how nuance plays a role in social power structures, which leads them to adopt a black-and-white view of the world in which those who aren’t with you are against you. This leads many SJW’s to be needlessly confrontational and dogmatic in their views, which led to many people rejecting the very concept of Social Justice. In the words of Mahatma Gandhi: “I like Christ, but I’m not wild about Christians.”

And this attitude is what led to the creation of two distinct movements. The first was the Real Justice movement of Tumblr, where blogs were dedicated to focusing on issues of Social Justice while also criticizing the less savory aspects of SJW’s. Two of the most popular blogs were the Disney Villains for Justice and Real Justice Waluigi blogs. The second movement was by far the more popular one: the anti-SJW community.

The antics of SJW’s on Tumblr gave rise to many YouTubers. The aforementioned InternetAristocrat was one of the most well known, but he was soon followed by other users like Shoe0nHead, Armored Skeptic, Sargon of Akkad, and others. But there’d be one event that would truly propel the anti-SJW community to new heights: GamerGate.

To understand GamerGate, we need to go back to 2004. Disgraced lawyer Jack Thompson was leading a crusade against video game violence, insisting that they were “murder simulators.” The Internet mocked him endlessly for it, including the overwhelming majority of online publications. This caused online Video Game Journalism to develop a Liberal stance, in direct opposition to Thompson’s Conservative politics.

As time went on, the Liberalism in game’s journalism only grew stronger, to the point it could be argued that there was no Conservative voice in game’s journalism. This would not entirely be a problem until 2012, when famed online pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian announced her Kickstarter for her Tropes vs Women in Video Games series.

The Kickstarter was met with controversy, particularly once it was revealed that Sarkeesian was receiving death threats over the series itself. This was extensively reported on by online games journalists, and not once was a critical eye cast on Sarkeesian’s story; it was all reported as was, often showing some of the disgusting tweets and emails she had received.

The problem was that this also meant that ANY criticism against Sarkeesian’s project, not matter its legitimacy, was immediately shut down and compared to the death threats. You couldn’t point out the stolen artwork used in the Kickstarter’s main image without drowning in accusations of being a sexist fascist, to give but an example.

This attitude was widely reported on by and discussed by the anti-SJW community, which ironically helped give Sarkeesian’s show more promotion. In any case, the production of Tropes vs Women in Video Games proved to be far less than what was promised, with there being month long gaps between episodes with no apparent change in quality of production. This is noteworthy as the show requested 6 thousand dollars in donations, only to receive a respectable 153 thousand.

The drop in quality was not at all reported, much less criticized, by the online games journalist industry. This helped create a greater schism between the online journalist community and many of their readers. That is not to say there were no professional voices that criticized Sarkeesian, but these were ignored or drowned out by the majority.

On August of 2014 a man named Eron Gjoni made a post detailing the emotional abuse his then-girlfriend, video game developer Zoe Quinn, made him go through. The post, thousands of words long, contained several accusations against Quinn, including incidents of infidelity. One of the most noteworthy accusations was of Quinn sleeping with games journalist Nathan Grayson, whom had previously written glowing reviews of Zoe Quinn’s game Depression Quest.

It was this accusation that got people talking, asking of Quinn had exchanged sexual favors for positive coverage. The evidence was piling against her, and many people began to comment on the controversy online, particularly on the most popular message boards of the Internet: Reddit and 4chan. The discussions, however, were heavily censored by mods on both sites, to the point where entire threads were deleted overnight. Even YouTube commentators were not spared.

One of the most notable incidents was then-minor YouTube vlogger and commentarist “Mundane” Matt Jarbo releasing a video on the Zoe Quinn incident, then dubbed “the Quinnspiracy.” The video was deleted by YouTube after Zoe Quinn made a copyright infringement claim on the video due to said video using an image of Quinn’s game, Depression Quest. It should be noted that the image was the same one Quinn herself used on Steam to promote her game. This incident was reported on by InternetAristocrat, which helped Matt Jarbo gain a wider audience.

This controversy reached a peak of a sorts on August 28, 2014. On this day, several of the big names in online games journalism released articles essentially saying the same thing: gamers are bad, don’t pander to them. The most inflamatory, and influential of these pieces was “Gamers don’t have to be your audience anymore. Gamers are over” by journalist Leigh Alexander. Several of the articles released during this period were influenced by, and directly quote, said article, even if it was released on that same day.

On September 8 of 2014, Right Wing provocateur (then known more as a reporter) Milo Yiannopoulos released a document proving the existence of a GameJournoPros mailing group, where games journalists would discuss among themselves what to cover, what to ignore, and which message to send to their audience. This solid proof led to GamerGate becoming more organized, going from a bunch of angry people on the Internet to a bunch of angry people on the Internet with a solid end-game in mind: removing these journalists and the sites they worked for from the journalist profession. These incidents went ignored by most media, including the mainstream media that had been reporting on GamerGate as a “coordinated attack on women in gaming.”

Who WAS reporting on these incidents? Right wing bloggers and news outlets. The biggest of these was Breitbart.com, with Milo Yiannopoulos himself being their main reporter for the controversy. The Anti-SJW community of YouTube also reported and commented on the controversy, therefore informing non-gamers on GamerGate. Other sites like The Ralph Retort grew in audience and traffic thanks to GamerGate.

The Right Wing had now found itself a new audience, one dissatisfied with Progressivism and Liberalism. Members of the Far-Right began to “invade” (for lack of a better word) online spaces where these controversies were being discussed, allowing these political activists to spread their ideologies among the youth.

Which then led to Donald Trump. Since 2015, during the Republican Primaries, Donald Trump was being held up as this beacon of light against the corrupt, Liberal institution that had ignored them when they needed a voice the most. Memes were propped up around Trump, my personal favorite being “Can’t Stump the Trump.” The “unfair media bias” against Trump also certainly helped influence young voters to support Trump, ignoring his more questionably actions such as saying “grab (women) by the pussy.”

That is not to say, of course, that all members of the GamerGate community fell for this. In fact, something most media outlets ignore is how politically diverse the community really was, with many actually decrying the harassment Anita Sarkeesian was going through. I would know; I was among them.

To summarize what we’ve learned today: Newgrounds revolutionized web creations by giving users a common place to upload and share their creations, which was then greatly improved upon by YouTube by allowing literally anyone with a camera to become a content creator, which led to the creation of online commentators and critics and their popularity, which led to the creation of various online communities, which led to great schisms within said communities, which eventually facilitated the election of Donald Trump as President.