Good morning, Peevesen, Welcome to wok F Daily with me your Girl Daniel Moody pre recording from the Home Bunker, Folks. As I said yesterday, I am away for a trip to London to join Meddie Hassan on one of his infamous debates panels that he does and I am super super excited to be joining him. So today, on today's episode, we are doing part two of my in depth conversation with the fabulous producer of wok F Daily, Andrew Marcello.
If you remember, in part one we went through kind of this incredible web of gen z white male gamers and how they have become fertile ground for MAGA, and how this did not just happen overnight, it actually has been years, if not decades into the making, and what this could potentially mean as we move into not only the ferocious sprint of this election, but in general the sanctity and security of our democracy going forward. So Andrew walks us through this world again, giving us some insights
that are just frankly mind blowing. And my feeling is that, like we all need to be aware of what is happening and how Steve Bannon and others are tapping into this cult of personality and essentially weaponizing this group against democracy, against progress, against a multiracial democracy, and more so, that
conversation with Andrew is coming up next, folks. I am so happy to be rejoined on Woke app Daily by my producer extraordinaire Andrew Marcello, who if you remember, we are doing a two part episode on the rise of oh God, right wing gen z but basically through the
world of gaming. And Andrew gave us in our first episode of this two part series a real deep dive in timeline that took us back to the nineties in terms of like when this world was created, who's responsible for it, and kind of moving us through to today to the present day, where there's a particular set of white young male gamers that are I guess, what would you say, Andrew, like a foundational part of like the Maga movement, an arm of the Maga movement.
Yeah, they're definitely a wing and I want to get into how their presence got minimized over time as well.
Actually, okay, so like bring us in. So where we left off was this extraordinary timeline of how we got to this present place, but we still don't really understand this group of young white males that are seemingly misogynist, racist in cell types who have created like this network, this web that is able to coordinate and take people down in various ways. So like, give us the insight into these people.
Absolutely, so I appreciate you having me back on to wrap up this discussion if you're listening right now and you want more detailed context for what's going on, the September sixteenth episode of WOKF From Gamergate to Trump was really my full primer on what I'm about to discuss.
But the Cliff Snowes version of that conversation is in twenty thirteen, many online social factors such as the rise of populist feminism, the rise of non traditional video games that are more focused on narrative and more focused on social issues, and a history of gamers people who play video games and identify as gamers feeling like they are a not oppressed people but socially ostracized, you know, So
all of those things conflated. And then the spark that blew this up was a jilted X of a woman presenting person who worked in the video game industry and so that create an online harassment campaign, which at first
was called quinspiracy and then became known as gamergait. As much as they denied that it was coordinated, it was a coordinated harassment campaign not just against this one person, but against multiple women and fem presenting people who worked in the video game industry, the tech industry, and the
gaming and tech online journalism space as well. So that started in twenty thirteen, really blew up through twenty fourteen, and then continued through twenty fifteen, aided very largely by articles being published on Breitbart, which was being operated by Steve Bannon at the time.
So what a tangled web we weave.
Everything is connected. We have to have context, like the coconut tree, like.
It's so true, because like it's like you pull one thread, which I think is like, oh, this misogyny that's also a present in the gaming community, and here are these examples of how this happened. But then when you pull the thread, you have all of these characters that we've been talking about on WOKF but in a different context. So tell us about Steve Bannon's involvement here, and then why it's necessary for his involvement to then create this wing of the MAGA movement.
Absolutely so. Steve Bannon, if you don't remember or aren't familiar with the name, was a operator, and I believe he had become at this point the owner or co owner of bright Bart News, which was a blog, not a newspaper or legitimate news source, but it was called bright Bart News. It was a right wing hate blog that was at least infamous among people on the left for how extreme they were, as well as people on the right, at least people on the online right what
became known as the alt right. And I should say actually that Breitbart was essentially a funneling mechanism for the alt right, because it took people online who already had antisocial notions, misogynous notions, racist notions, all these kind of things, notions of hate, and brought them into this space where those notions of hate could be stoked by having headlines
about things they're interested in, like video gaming attech. So Steve Bannon hired a writer named Steve Vann, hired someone who writes words named Milo Unopolis to write these articles about Other people wrote them too, but Milo was a really big figure in writing these articles on Breitbart, which Steve Bannon literally once called the platform for the alt right, and at the same time this was happening, I was reminded that there was a man named Mark Cernovich. Do you remember him?
No, no, I don't so.
Mark Cernovich was in early one of those people early online who was pro hashtag gamer gait, along with some other people like an actor from Firefly and all this other stuff. But Milo Unopolis was in Breitbart at the same time. Mike Cernovich was plowing a crusade against the mainstream media from a right wing perspective. He was a person who would call CNN the Clinton News Network. He
was an online right wing extremist. So he was someone who early on said he was pro gamergate and would post things about it, and again bringing those people in, bringing people in who are interested in this, and again, if you want to find out why people were so interested in Gamergate, you got to listen to the last episode.
So he takes this population that's already primed for hate and then brings them into the Trump world and the anti Clinton world and the anti democratic world and the anti mainstream media world in a way that is very different than the way that you tak against the mainstream media.
It's just wild to me. I guess I'm still stuck on the how did we get here? But I don't want to like Boo labor that. Like, I just say that as like a how the fuck did we get here?
I hate to give the man credit, but it really was a master stroke of strategy by Steve Bannon. I really hate to say it, but like some people saw it happening in real time, and it's like watching a car crash when you see something happening that you have no control over, and it's like, oh, this guy is coordinating all these different anti social movements in this space
that not everybody knows about. If you try to talk to normal people about it, they might look at you some kind of way because you're telling them about all this stuff that's happening on the internet, and they don't think it's quote unquote real. They don't think it's important. Let me just mention real quick, A lot of people don't think online harassment is a real issue, is a serious.
Issue, except for those that are actually caught up in it right and have their lives up ended.
It leads to real world harassment. People who exist online are people who exist in the real world, and people who make threats online can absolutely translate those threats into real world action. So let's make that perfectly clear.
Yeah, one hundred person.
But that's part of it too for me, is that you do then do this, all this organizing in an online social space that not everybody takes seriously, and by the time you can take it seriously, like we're discussing, it's already in some ways, it's already happened. I don't want to say it's already too late, but it's already happened. Twenty sixteen already happened. All the conversions of these movements into the alt right and then into what is now
called maga has already happened. We're here, We're in twenty twenty four, and.
I feel like by the time that the mainstream and I consider myself in the mainstream population because this is not my niche and not my world, by the time I'm hipped to something like this, we've been a decade
in it. Steve Bannon, to your point, had eyes on what can be named as a disaffected group of young men that are the same that have been targeted with YouTube personalities that listen to Joe Rogan, like the same kind of angry young white men who don't know where their place is in a changing world where they are no longer considered like white men still run every fucking thing, but like there is just more people of color, more women, more equity, but we're still not at the equitable fifty
to fifty split of how C suites of how business and industry run. But yet Steve Bannon and the MAGA misogynist sexist movement is able to capitalize on this group. And I guess my question, Andrew is like how and why and is there a way out?
So I think the why of it for me as a white person is on standable. It's not relatable to me, but it is understandable white people and white men even more so white CIS men, Like the more privilege you add to it, the more this multiplies, I would say, or at least you know, adds, multiplies, exponential, whatever math you want to do on it. White mail cis straight. You start stacking all these on. There's a lot of
reactionary feelings there. There's a lot of sensitivity there, to be honest, and you know, traditional masculinity is not about sensitivity, but a lot of people who are traditionally masculine are the most sensitive people because they haven't had to exist in a world where their existence is threatened in any way,
even like the remotest possible way. So, if you're growing up in a world where you see yourself in everything, and the protagonist of everything you've ever every piece of media you've ever engaged with, the main character is a white man, and he's presumably it doesn't even have to be explicitly stated. You can just assume that he's also sis and straight. And this has only started to change in take it for granted. This has really only started to change in the last decade or fifteen years in
a major way. Yes, there was representation before that, but like in a major way. We've started to see like Star Wars only got a black protagonist in twenty seventeen.
And we saw how that went out.
I have a lot of thoughts on that as well. That might need to be a different podcast anyway. So the why of it is white people are reactionary. White men are reactionary white men on the internet who are sensitive about not every single video game character being a white Man anymore and let them, you know, making Laura Croft skinny. They're a very reactionary population. And Steve Bannon recognized this. I gave this quote last time, but I'll read it again. This is a quote from Steve Bannon.
I realized mylow connect with these kids right away. You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever, and then get turned onto politics and Trump. So there's a lot going on there in his mind. In Steve Bannon's mind, he calls them kids, these are seeds. He's not going to the boomers, He's going to the young people. What's the article we were discussing many gen z men feel left behind. Some see Trump as an answer. They
get them young. That's any marketing. Really, why did they used to market McDonald so much to children? You get them while they're young, You activate that army they come in through Gamergate or whatever. And it is worth noting this wasn't just Gamergate. We talked about this a bit last time, but there was the rising in cell culture online that got funneled through this. There are other anti social movements like I mentioned online that got funneled through
this and then get turned onto politics. And Trump, because it's not just activating them politically that matters, of course, but activating them towards not even just the Republican Party. Steve Bannon's goal. He was not a Republican strategist. He wanted people to be part of this extremist movement that honestly, in a lot of ways, Donald Trump was kind of just a tool for right, Like Donald Trump is a
hateful man and all that other stuff. I'm not trying to absolve Trump, but behind the scenes twenty sixteen, I think it needs to really be remembered that he had a lot of people operating around him, using him as a pawn for their own means. And Steve Bannon was one of the biggest Breitbart gamer gait maga. These were all tools to the same These were all means to the same end. And we're now living in Steve Bannon's endgame.
Yo. I mean I needed you to roll that back, Andrew, because I literally, like my heart just stopped when you said we're playing in Steve Bannon's end game. Oh my god, keep going, because I'm like, you're right, because we're still and by we, not you, but I mean like the mainstream and the Democratic Party is still ten years behind trying to figure out what the rules of this new world political order is. Meanwhile, they are activating all of these different cells. Yep.
And it's not just gamer Gate. I don't want to spend all this time going Democrats and American liberals have missed the boat, but missing the boat on this missing the boat on the whole rise of the alt right into what it's become echoes, missing the boat on the anti abortion movement and how deep that went, and missing the boat on the fight for the courts, and how deep that went. And I think that I can't speak so much to the political world because I'm not in it.
But my experience with this in the mainstream media world, where we both were at one point was trying to sound the alarms to this was like the people. It felt like being a person on the Titanic saying that there's icebergs in the water. There was a indifference towards it.
There was that attitude of this is online. It was in some ways too late because Trump had already been elected when this was happening from my perspective, but even then I had wanted to connect the dots like I'm doing right now, but I wanted to do it in twenty sixteen or twenty seventeen, and the feedback I received was this is you know, this is too niche, this is the tech world, this is online, and there hadn't been a lot of mainstream reporting on it, and there
still isn't. But there's what sparked this conversation was you sent me that New York Times article and I said, Wow, the media is finally reporting on this, huh.
And I was just like, wait, what you know what I'm saying like, there is just I think the depths of which this goes and how far back, like we in the liberal kind of democratic sphere want to believe that Maga happened overnight and want to believe that these weren't plans that much in the way to your point of the overturning of Ruby Wade were fifty years in the making. You took us back on the first episode thirty years of when the seeds of this were being planted.
And so what I realize is that then nefarious nature can we continue to say like, oh, it doesn't know any depths and it's because it was it's a project, a thirty forty to fifty year long project to dismantle democracy from the inside out. That you weren't going to need foreign agents. You were just going to need to activate disgruntled young white men.
Yep. And I you know, even giving a charitable reading, which is the stuff that happened in the nineties with the Senate committees and the stuff that happened in the two thousands with Jack Thompson, those don't even have to be part of any sort of grand plan because the fact remains, as you said, that these things even coincidentally, I'm a population, a sub group of people in society to be a certain way, and behave a certain way,
and be reactionary in a very strong way. That then someone like Steve Bannon, a strategist who isn't I don't remember the name, but there was it, Leonard Leo, like Steve Vann, is not the first of his kind either, but he is someone who understands the human condition and uses their understanding of the human condition for very nefarious means.
And I think that that's the thing that we have not really fully been able to tap into, is the psychology of the thing. And that's where I feel to your point, Steve Bannon and the rest of them have been able to do right, Like they've been able to really get into the psychology where kind of I don't know, maybe to our detriment, and I don't think that it's a big maybe we were like the world is changing, move on, catch up it.
It is flawed thinking on any political side to have the feeling of most people think the way I do. You see it manifest in Trump people with like he says what everyone's thinking, and it's like, I'm I'm not thinking that stuff, but they think it is because they think that way. I think how that manifests on the liberal and left wing side, unfortunately, is I can't believe people would think that way. How could people think this way? How could people have that much hate in their hearts
or whatever? And it's not even necessarily all the time. It definitely is for some people. But it's not even like all these people like wake up and think about
how freaking racist they are. It's that they have a reactionary Again, they're so used to living in a world and the world is changing, and rather that the only way that they have to cope with that is projecting this negativity onto whatever they perceive is threatening their existence as a dominant force in society, an unquestioningly dominant force in society. And if there is nowhere else for them to turn to, they're going to turn to the people
who say welcome in. We hate those slur slur slur too, and just make those people worse because they're primed to be made worse.
Yeah, it's something that is quite extraordinary. And while I would say just like kind of pushing us into the present where the Harris Walt's team is trying to tap into this place of hopefulness and possibility, you can't at the same time then ignore and I hate to fucking trust me, like the quote unquote economic anxiety, the racial anxiety, all of these things that are coded for racism. I hate to even give any attention air and oxygen to it.
But there is something to what would have been or what should be the right way, or at least an initial step in bringing these kind of young men into the fold. Or is it now? I guess is it just too late?
I think for young people it's not too late. I don't know about the people who are affected by this ten years ago, because now a decade has gone on, and if someone's in MAGA world and someone's that entrenched in it, I genuinely don't know if you can get that person out of that type of thinking without some like really serious one on one intervention, which is not
what we're talking about. But with people who are younger, like the gen Z men, who feel quote unquote left behind, like left behind you could take as another sort of code like economic anxiety and all that other stuff, but I think it does speak to that perceived real feeling that they have, Like if you feel something, then it's
real to you. And there's that feeling even if they can't place why it is of like my dominance is coming to an end or already has come to an end, And it's not a good thing, in my opinion, to want to be dominant in society in that way. But there is that very real feeling of like the world is changing and I feel left behind. So let's put it that way. How do you help someone when they feel like the world is changing and they're being left behind.
My feeling is you show them that they're not going to be left behind by the world that's coming or the world that's already here. You show them there's a place for you in this world. The place for you in this world is not lesser. The place for you in this world is equal. The place for you in this world is equitable. And by the way, the right wing is going against the word equity and have been for the last few years, because that's really what's trying
to be achieved. There's been an understanding of the difference between equality and equity, and so now they don't even want young people to find it desirable to exist in an equitable world. But I think unfortunately, I say unfortunately, because when you're in a place and you understand something, you don't want to have to do the work of explaining it to someone else and explain to someone why, like you want to live in an equitable world. Inequitable
world is good for all of us. But that is the work, in my opinion, that has to be done. You don't need to coddle people, you don't need to make people still feel like. You don't need to protect people's privilege. But I keep saying people, I mean white people, I mean mostly white men. You don't need to coddle them or anything else. But I do think that you need to welcome people in and show them that this world has a space for them. There's a conversation now
about feminism and inclusivity. Jonathan had mentioned the like feminist phrasing of like I hate men, and men are like this and painting men with a broad brush. And I don't necessarily, like find that so problematic, but I do feel like movements like that, like social movements for positive change, like feminism and like pro black movements, can bring men and white people and white men in in a way
that's like, you're coming along with us. The world that we're advocating for is a better world for all of us. Come along with us, help us make that world better. And it's a tough needle to thread to say, like, men have created all these problems, white people have created all these problems, help us solve them, because those problems also have made your life worse. But I genuinely think that that's part of the work that has to be done.
And I realize I'm saying that as a white man, but as someone who lives in the world as a white man and interacts with a lot of white men, I think leaving white men out is only going to make white men feel left out of the world that's being created, in the world that we want to form, because otherwise the world that gets formed is the world that they get called into. I mean, it's just like children are the future. Teach them well them and let them lead the way.
That's the problem is that, like evidently we're they're not teaching well.
Oh, And there's so much that can be said about that, and the schools and the right wing and the right wing interest in schools and George Bush and no Child left Behind and how George Bush got into office. Dan Yelle, we got back to Bush v. Gore again. I do that anytime I appear on anything. It's kind of like and who was at the Brooks Brothers riot? Now a Supreme Court justice? Anyway?
A seven degrees of separation. It's like the game that was played in the eighties, but it's with like the election.
So how do democrats do they Democrats need to start paying more attention to things when they start happening, and not ten or twenty years later when they've already happened, and it's arguably too late. Hopefully not.
I don't know if it's not too like I guess that's The problem is that while I feel like we're unearthing these things right now, like the mainstream is in unearthing these things right now, I don't want to believe that it's too late to clean up this mess because I feel like if we do, if we're just like, well fuck it. Steve Beannon had like a twenty thirty year head start, so these people are gone.
Right, We've lost the courts, so we can't keep fighting for it.
Right, so then we just acquiesced, which is part of their plan. So I'm just I'm kind of in the place of we need to understand this, We need to continue having these really important conversations so that we don't leave groups that are susceptible to MAGA, because it's not going to go away. I guess that's my point of how like maga's not going away just because we have an election in November, if by the grace of God, Kamala Harrison Tim Walls are able to win, they'll just retreat,
clean up, and repackage with a new candidate. But the same principles, is same network, the same web that they have built will remain. So it's like the conversation needs to continue, Like these are activated. Dare I say, white supremact terrorists cells that are activated one after the other. And just because you play whack a mole and you hit one down, it doesn't like you need to pull it out from.
The bottom, activated in a coordinated way.
Yeah. I appreciate you so much bringing this to my attention, to our attention, to the audience's attention, because it's like a conversation that I want to keep having because there's just so much there, so less thoughts to you.
I've been thinking about action points since we've been talking, and Democrats need to stop shutting out young people from everything from movements from like official movements, from the party, from narratives from democratic media. It's not the Clinton years anymore.
Democrats need to live in the modern world and welcome younger people and welcome younger voices in a broader way than they're currently doing right now, because I feel that otherwise the same cycle of not recognizing patterns until it's too late will continue to happen.
Yeah, it's truly, it's extraordinary, and I so appreciate you for bringing us this conversation. We need to have more of these so that people get a sense of what's going on, and this, you know, frankly to the listener is like this could be your kids, and like your grandkids, and like your roommates, folks that you don't really know, but you're like, something seems off. We're not having the conversations with each other. And I think that that's extraordinarily important.
I'll button real quick to say that, actually because I talked about one on one intervention before and to go from systematic to the listener. Talk your loved ones, talk to your family, talk to your neighbors, talk to people in your communities, and don't start arguments if you can help it. But also don't just passively accept that they have hate in their heart. Bring them in and try, if you haven't already, try to help them see the light before you see them as a lost cause.
One hundred percent. Andrew Marcello, thank you so much for coming from behind the scenes to the microphone to have this conversation on wokaf with me. Greatly appreciate it. That is it for me today, dear friends on wokaypp as always, power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.