Gotcha, bro. In fact, since
he decided deleting 50,000+ tweets last week was a good idea, I thought it'd be a good time to immortalize his accomplishments via this thread.
Patrick Klepek flashing his progressive bonafides.
So who the hell
is Patrick Klepek?
Patrick with Zoe Quinn, 7 months before the beginning of the Autism Holy War
Patrick Klepek is a "game journalist" who is, for all intents and purposes, a major reason GG even fucking
happened. He was a member of the infamous
Game Journo Pros list - the proverbial "smoking gun" of GG, which showed that not only were a number of indie game journalists in open collusion with one another, they were doing so in violation of the law, and were actively involved in attempting to suppress not only the Zoe Quinn scandal, but GG once it became clear that the public wasn't going to shut the fuck up about said scandal. He was, of course, financially supporting Quinn at the time of the scandal.
Klepek's hands were anything but clean on this. He was involved with
attempting to blacklist Kevin Dent, a former IGDA chair, mostly because Phil Fish took issue with the guy, to say nothing of how aggressively he tried to fight against those pushing the Quinn scandal in the GJP leaks.
Throughout the entirety of the Autism Holy War, he tried avidly to play both sides, pretending to be on-the-level while actively supporting Quinn and the usual suspects at every opportunity. The dude is a gigantic triangulating fucker who will never commit to anything unless it backs his SJW buddies. It doesn't always go so well, however; the above blacklisting attempt
would spell the end of Patrick's work at GiantBomb. He also has a tendency to Virtue Signal, which, of course, means he tends to make a
gigantic ass of himself in public, one of the truest of lolcow behaviors:
The world's most oppressed white man demands your sympathy
He currently works for Vice via Waypoint, but has a history working for everyone from EGM to G4 to 1UP. Like any good infection, Patrick's found ways to survive his host's destruction, and somehow always lands in another indie game publication where he quickly resumes doing exactly what he was already doing until that, too, goes under. He was also a regular on NeoGAF, where he helped the usual suspects coordinate their shithead assaults and would broadcast their talking points to whatever publication he was part of at the time. That's only scratching the tip of this iceberg - there's a
lot to cover about this loathsome asshole, so without further ado, let's get into the deets, with part one of three:
"Pollute the Waters if It Means A Single Click":
While many things are hallmarks of why Klepek deserves coverage, there is one in
particular that quickly establishes why even the most even-tempered of people can be pushed to go full A-Log against him quickly: His propensity to push
absolute horse-shit if it means getting attention.
Time and time again, Patrick has been caught lying, misrepresenting people, and committing flat-out slander before being either bitch-slapped by his corporate parents, threatened with legal retaliation, getting absolutely butt-fucked on Twitter, or having his talking points systemically dismantled. Despite this, without exception, he will charge right back into the fray to do it again, and deny he was ever wrong.
Below you'll find two really good examples of the shit he's done in the name of clickbait:
1.
Causing a Gigantic, Autistic Clusterfuck Through Shitty Reporting:
I mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: after Alison Rapp was fired, Klepek wrote
this fucking thing claiming that Rapp had been fired because of "harassment" from GG (as opposed to her
being a fucking prostitute). He further went on to
blame Jamie Walton for getting her fired because Walton went to Nintendo regarding Rapp's repeated pushing for advocating age of consent lowering and whining about how victimized pedophiles were.
Klepek doing this didn't just lead to a ton of Social Justice-types screaming about Jamie Walton being a double super secret Gamergater (because throwing that accusation a year after GG died off makes
perfect sense), and subsequently led to a fuckton of abuse being thrown at the head of an Anti-Child Trafficking Organization, but it nearly led to an industry-wide boycott of Nintendo by many of Klepek's fellows in the indie gaming press:
While it's doubtful Klepek's buddies boycotting Nintendo would have actually
done anything (Social Justice is not an audience, after all), the fact that this fucking thing got as far as it did is testament to how much influence he
used to have. After the fact that he had essentially rushed to judgment and caused this minor shitstorm got exposed, he issued
this no-pology, which ends with this fucking statement:
He does that one a lot when he's losing arguments -
claim he's been harassed, so you can't criticize him.
2. Helping to Further Ignite Existing Shitstorms:
So, you guys remember the Jontron debacle? If not, you missed a doozy. Basically, Jontron got in a debate with Destiny, and, being less than experienced at debate and not having all the facts, wound up saying some things that could be
construed as being racist.
That was all Klepek needed, and he was one of the first on the bandwagon to claim Jontron was a Nazi. In what can only be called a particularly Autistic Kafkatrap,
Klepek claimed that the very fact that he went on the likes of Breitbart in response proved his guilt (when in truth, nobody in the so-called gaming press would even agree to an interview with the guy). This was hot off the heels of the PewDiePie debacle too, so you'd better believe that the usual suspects were out for Jon's blood. Not one to shy from this, Klepek
also entered the fray to take potshots at those defending Jon on Twitter.
While this was going on, more was brewing behind the scenes. Notorious corrupt moderator on NeoGAF Besada led the charge in trying to get Jontron subjected to his own Autistic form of
damnatio memoriae; this started with aggressive attempts to bully Playtonic, Yooka-Laylee's developer, into removing the alleged Iranian Nazi from the game. Playtonic caved, and
this quickly pissed off quite a bit of the fanbase, who demanded refunds.
So how did Klepek reward Playtonic for capitulating to his friends' demands?
....By
accusing them (and Bloodstained) of
scamming about a month later.
Klepek has fucking
dozens of these. He's tried to purge them with mass tweet deletions, but, as ever, the Internet does not forget.