C/W: This article contains information about white supremacist groups, racist hate, misogyny, anti-semitism and sexual assault, including quotes and descriptions about rape, racial slurs, and violence against women.
PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you see an * next to links in this article, they will direct to an alt-right associated YouTube channel, a white supremacist website or blog, or a male supremacist website or blog. These have been included for educational purposes only. Please click at your own discretion.
Since December 2017, pop culture news has been overcrowded with the same narrative: Rian Johnson’s Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi has divided audiences.
Despite a 90% approval rating from critics and an A CinemaScore, we can’t stop talking about how The Last Jedi is a polarizing film that has allegedly alienated fans en masse and sent Disney’s multi-billion dollar juggernaut in an unsatisfactory direction.
Creatives involved with Star Wars projects have even commented on the hate against the film. For example, Ron Howard, director of Solo: A Star Wars Story, took to Twitter to respond to comments blaming dislike of The Last Jedi on Solo’s underwhelming box office performance shortly after the film’s release in 2018.
Actor Anthony Daniels, best known for his role as C-3P0 in the Star Wars franchise, noted in his memoir “I Am C-3P0” that after encountering the hate towards The Last Jedi on YouTube, he was “genuinely sad” that fans “felt their loyalty had been slighted.”
And in the lead up to the release of the final film in the Skywalker saga, Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, director JJ Abrams acknowledged the animosity towards the franchise’s eighth installment by suggesting that fans didn’t want to be told that what they love about Star Wars “doesn’t matter.”
The Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens director then went on to release a film that, according to Time Magazine, “feels as if Abrams read every critical tweet in [Rian Johnson’s] mentions from the last two years and answered each one, scene by scene.”
However, even though The Rise of Skywalker addressed “fan” concerns, the Skywalker saga ended with a whimper. It obtained the lowest critic score of any Star Wars franchise film on record at 51% and received a lukewarm reception from the general audience with a CinemaScore of a B+. After its release, Disney and Lucasfilm seemingly turned away from the sequel trilogy to focus on new opportunities on Disney’s recently launched streaming service, Disney+.
To the majority of people who decide to spend two hours invested in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, the Star Wars sequel trilogy films are likely fun popcorn flicks that added little to the saga overall. In the end, the sequel trilogy is an ode to the past — a chance to recapture the energy of 1977 and reclaim the heroes of a time that the world is quickly passing by.
Moreover, the failing of The Rise of Skywalker to provide a satisfying conclusion to the Skywalker Saga for fans and casual viewers, alike, will likely make the sequel trilogy the least consequential addition to the franchise. While there is value in nostalgia and honoring the past, the reality of this particular situation carries with it something much more sinister that is easy for most people to miss.
The Last Jedi forged an ambitious path forward in a time when governments around the world were regressing into fear and hatred, spurred on by the growth of progressive politics and rise in minority populations. Johnson took a beloved cornerstone of western culture and turned it on its head, much like Star Wars creator George Lucas had done with the franchise’s prequel trilogy.
In the film, Johnson questions the beliefs and principles of the saga’s legendary heroes and lore. The journey of each character is defined by a failure that could have been avoided if characters from different races, genders, and age groups simply communicated with one another. In one scene, he sends iconography of the past up in flames, only to imply that the parts worth saving would be passed on to the next generation.
This next generation includes a woman whose strength and resourcefulness are attributed to her lived experiences and not a power from her lineage; a resilient fighter, played by British-Nigerian actor John Boyega, who had fought against all odds to free himself from an oppressive regime; and the next leader of the Resistance heroes, played by Guatemalan-American actor Oscar Isaac.
At the beating heart of the film is a courageous mechanic Rose Tico, played by Vietnamese-American actress Kelly Marie Tran. Rose’s ceaseless compassion and drive to dismantle inhumane powers around her culminate in the most critical line of the film: That to truly defeat those who seek to subjugate you, your true power is saving what you love, not destroying what you hate.
These themes and characterizations make the The Last Jedi a film that dares to move culture into a more diverse and hopeful future. And in response, the film has been faced with an organized hate campaign against it.
Most publications discussing hate against The Last Jedi are quick to note that the backlash has manifested into racism, specifically against Tran and Boyega. Esquire has arguably gone the farthest in its critique against The Last Jedi hate, attributing the worst of the negativity to “neckbeards,” a belittling term for terminally online men who hold misogynistic views.
However, it is not enough to call these people “fans” simply pushing back against The Last Jedi’s themes of diversity or change. Nor is it enough to label them “trolls,” “cry babies,” or the often misused term “incels.”
We need to talk about the fact that almost 40% of negative YouTube videos mentioning The Last Jedi are from radical right wing or alt right accounts. These accounts have also dedicated their channels to hate campaigns against Captain Marvel star Brie Larson, former SNL cast member Leslie Jones, and feminist YouTuber Anita Sarkeesian.
We need to discuss how the leaders of hate mongering against the film are radical conservatives including Ben Shapiro, founder of right-wing website The Daily Wire and former editor-at-large of Breitbart News. Breitbart is notably responsible for pushing alt right ideology mainstream.
We need to discuss how the hashtag campaigns calling for fans to boycott Solo: A Star Wars Story over hatred of The Last Jedi are led by bloggers who spread white supremacist ideology under the cover of pop-culture reporting.
We need to discuss that the racist #BoycottStarWarsVII hashtag aimed at The Force Awakens actor John Boyega was started by members of an organization designated as a hate group by a leading United States civil rights organization, yet was written off as mere internet trolling. This kickstarted a slew of racist harassment against Lucasfilm employees, authors and actors that made Star Wars fandom a hot bed for alt-right recruitment in the ongoing 21st century “culture wars.”
We need to talk about how this so-called “fan backlash” is part of a larger movement to change and control culture put into motion by former White House Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon, in 2014. And it was a movement that successfully lead to far right governmental shifts in the United States, the UK, India, Italy, and Africa.
Leveraging over one million tweets and greater than one thousand YouTube videos, this article will track the successful rise of radical right wing hate, white supremacy, and misogyny in fan spaces starting with Gamergate and leading up to The Rise of Skywalker.
This article is an analysis of the closely connected networks that enable hate to spread from influential white supremacist groups to mainstream YouTubers. It is a warning about the dangers of apathy and lack of education around organized hate in highly evolving technological spaces that will only continue to develop at a faster rate. But, most of all, this article is a plea for any entity that has enough power to control a narrative — whether it be major corporations like Disney or entertainment journalists at Vanity Fair — to be aware of how hate is designed to manipulate those narratives without most people ever realizing it.
This is the full story of how organized bigotry latched itself onto the Star Wars sequel trilogy and won.
What Will Be Discussed:
I. Defining 21st Century Culture Wars: Gamergate, Cambridge Analytica, & The Rise of the Alt-Right-Timeline of Outrage Media
-What is Gamergate?
-White Nationalism Targets the Star Wars Franchise
II. The New Gamergate: The Rise of Alt-Right Ideology in Star Wars Fandom
-Was “The Last Jedi” Polarizing?: A Twitter Analysis
-All Roads Lead to YouTube: An Analysis
-The Star Wars Alt-Right Recruitment Problem
III. How Far Right Hate Turns Into Fact
-The Danger of “Click Bait” Headlines
-Socks, Bots, and Super Users
-Hashtags and Boycotts
-Lack of Education About the Dangers of Online Conversation
IV. The Generational Cost of Hate: The Alt-Right’s Successful Political Attack against Progressive Culture
-The Targeting of Progressive and Diverse Creatives
-Mission Completed: The Rise of Skywalker Retcons The Last Jedi
V. What We Never Learned From Gamergate
Defining 21st Century Culture Wars: Gamergate, Cambridge Analytica, & The Rise of the Alt-Right
In 2018, revelations about the UK-based data firm Cambridge Analytica revealed that the firm had used data from 50 million Facebook profiles to target users with personalized and politically driven advertisements. The ads were often racist in nature, fueling the spread of white supremacy and racist fear into the mainstream and successfully manipulating presidential elections in Africa, India, the UK, and the US.At the center of this controversy was Steve Bannon, former White House Chief Strategist for Donald Trump, former Executive Chairman of far-right media site Breitbart News, and former Vice President of Cambridge Analytica.
Bannon is credited by whistleblowers of the Cambridge Analytica scandal as an important figure who sought to destabilize governments in influential regions around the world and shift their politics towards populism and far-right extremism.
Christopher Wylie, a data scientist for Cambridge Analytica, states that Bannon was interested in the firm “because [Bannon] follows this idea of the Breitbart doctrine, which is that if you want to change politics, you first have to change culture.” He stated that Bannon wanted “weapons to fight a culture war.”
Bannon’s “culture war” against progressive politics was also fought through his work as Executive Chairman of Breitbart News, a radical conservative site commonly credited with bringing the “alt-right” ideas of white supremacy, anti-identity politics, and anti-liberal journalism into the mainstream.
Breitbart’s success leverages a long timeline of conservative outrage media culture that was harnessed by Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s, and perfected by Roger Ailes and Fox News. The quick acceleration of technology and the creation of social media platforms in the mid to late 2000s created centralized communities that were easy for conservative outrage media to target and radicalize.
Bannon found the key to enacting political change in online gaming communities, which would become the stage for Bannon’s so-called 21st century war on culture. More specifically, he found the base he would need to fuel traffic for Breitbart in the infamous attack on women in the video game industry known as Gamergate. Bannon tells author Joshua Green in his book Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and the Storming of the Presidency, “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”
What is Gamergate?
In August 2014, game developer Zoe Quinn’s ex boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, released a blog post accusing Quinn of receiving positive reviews on her game Depression Questfrom Nathan Grayson, a writer for Kotaku, because the two were in a relationship. Gjoni accused Quinn of cheating on him and released personal information about her in the post. The clear angry attack of a disgruntled ex boyfriend was quickly transformed into a frenzy against “ethics in gaming journalism.”As the attacks against Quinn spread online, Gjoni continued to post personal information about her whereabouts. At one point he anonymously posted on 4chan reports of the hotels Quinn had stayed at. He also gave the legal complaint Quinn had filed against him to “Roosh”, an online personality described as a “male supremacist extremist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). The legal complaint was used to attack Quinn on his website “Return of Kings.”
The misogynistic attacks against Quinn spread to other influential women in the video game industry including feminist YouTuber, Anita Sarkeesian.
Sarkeesian is most known for her YouTube channel “Feminist Frequency,” where she critiques video games through a feminist lens. Her platform primarily calls for less sexualization and murder of women in games. These critiques led to bomb threats against her life, which required her to cancel public speaking engagements at Utah State University.
Other women attacked included Brianna Wu, a game developer who posted a meme mocking the group of gamers who were threatening women’s lives. After threats against her life, she was forced to go into hiding.
This event developed the current playbook of how to weaponize the internet to carry out mass threats, doxxing, and abuse against women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. The goal of these tactics is always to stop unwanted progress of diversity into culture that these groups have identified as their territory.
Paul Booth, a professor at Depaul University, explains that, “today, angry internet mobs routinely use the threat of rape, bombings and assassinations as a way to lay claim to whatever it is they think they’re losing to what they describe as political correctness. And along the way, they’ve adopted new approaches that combine old-school write-in campaigns with internet terror efforts like publishing people’s private information online, with the intent of bringing chaos and fear into their lives.”
Vox describes these “angry internet mobs” as “mens’ rights activists, white nationalists, and neoreactionaries” that Gamergate united “around indignation over the inroads that women and minorities had made into video game culture, previously dominated by young white men.”
One of the best examples of this is the rise of male supremacist ideology in gaming spaces during Gamergate led by Mike Cernovich, a 1st amendment lawyer who became associated with the event after he offered legal services to Gjoni.
Cernovich has a history of anti-women and anti-trans beliefs. He wrote on his blog “Crime and Federalism*” in 2010 that, “it is now beyond debate that the culture has shifted. It is — or will soon be — a woman’s world. Women earn 3 college degrees for every 2 that men earn. Women are overrepresented in managerial capacities. Women have taken over.”
He frequently wrote about how to avoid “false” rape claims and that women exist “for [man’s] sexual pleasure.” The SPLC has documented many examples of this including a tweet where Cernovich states “after abusing a girl, I always immediately send a text and save her reply.”
Using the following he built up through Gamergate, Cernovich published Gorilla Mindset, which propelled male supremacist ideas into the mainstream by detailing how men should embrace their “gorilla nature” to find “dominance and power.”
Cernovich went on to push the “pizzagate” conspiracy, a conspiracy created in the lead up to Trump’s 2016 election as President of the United States that democrats were operating a child sex ring inside a DC pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong. The conspiracy developed into domestic terror threat QAnon, a conspiracy theory, which alleges that Satan-worshipping pedophiles hold high positions of power within government and threatened former president Donald Trump.
Cernovich was not the only alt-right associated leader to rise in power during Gamergate. Milo Yiannopoulos, an infamous provocateur known for shameless misogyny, anti-semitism, and racism, was given the green light by Bannon as an editor at Breitbart to use the anti-feminist sentiment growing within gaming spaces to increase traffic for Breitbart’s far-right agenda.
Breitbart covered Gamergate extensively, increasing the size of the site’s audience that would soon push white supremacy into the mainstream and be instrumental in the election of Donald Trump.
One 2015 article* applauds Gamergate as the heroes fighting valiantly against the “authoritarian left.” Yiannopoulos writes,
Arguably, nothing bad did happen. Mainstream coverage around this event varied from a critical discussion around misogyny and culture wars on MSNBC to a dismissive interview with Brianna Wu by CNN. Ultimately, threats on women’s lives were given a slap on the wrist and Gamergate faded from public attention.
It should also be noted that during this same year, a chlorine bombing attack at Mid-West Fur Fest linked to Nazi radicalization in the furry community put 19 people in the hospital. When the story broke, the coverage of the event was met with laughter instead of addressing the seriousness of a fascist terrorist event on domestic soil.
Indeed, alt-right radicalization within fandom spaces is typically not discussed as a major threat to society, whether it be small, zealous communities of gamers, furries, or science fiction writers. Yet, this extremist radicalization is an important variable in explaining how the United States in particular experienced an attack on democracy in early 2021. This is partially because society still looks at people in fandom communities as inconsequential nerds. This is also because actions of white men are protected. “Boys will be boys,” as we have always said.
Even now after a racist, tyrannical leader has risen to power in the White House and the United States has drifted towards fascism at an alarming rate with malicious anti-immigration policies and racist riots led by self-proclaimed neo-nazis, these “fan” communities who contribute to far right extremism are still discarded as “trolls” or “manbabies” stewing in their mother’s basement.
The lack of attention given to these groups gave Steve Bannon the perfect opportunity to push the limits of racism, misogyny, and hate long held in America’s culture without most people noticing.
And in October 2015, as the anti-feminism built up in Gamergate raged on in the pages of Breitbart, the right-wing’s organized attack on progressive culture was about to enter a new battlefield.
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