Gamergate happened in 2014, a fat fuck Wikipedia admin named Gamaliel (power word: Robert Fernandez) became one of the primary administrators enforcing the topic area. Why? Because he wanted to white knight Blowy Zoe and the other 'victims' of Gamergate. Why? Just look at him.
Bernstein showed up in November and chimped the fuck out against Gamergate and editors he thought were "Gamergate rape apologists." Why? He has been involved in hypertexts (like modernized choose your own adventure type books) for decades and believed that Blowy Zoe and Wu were his "peers." He sperged out so fucking much that he flounced while saying he was fantasizing about Five Guys.
One of the editors that Bernstein fucking hates is an admin named Masem, and Bernstein had tried to file an enforcement request against him back in 2014. This quickly began to boomerang back towards Bernstein as he was clearly deserving a topic ban for being such a sperg, but the admins were dragging it out because it was Gamergate related and everything about Gamergate had been a clusterfuck of drama so far. It's unknown when the relationship began, but Bernstein was clearly friendly with Gamaliel, and when he flounced again he made sure to tell Gamaliel to call him.
Around this time the Gamergate arbitration case was starting up. After an admin named Drmies said he would have indefinitely topic banned Bernstein already if it wasn't in the Gamergate area, Gamaliel seems to have intentionally made the ban himself, indefinitely topic banning Bernstein from Gamergate. Why is this important? According to the wiki rules, Gamaliel would be able to remove the ban at will, and because Bernstein was indefinitely banned and had acted in a manner in which he should not have ever been unbanned, nobody bothered building a case against him during the Gamergate arbitration case. Pretty sneaky, eh?.
As we have seen, Bernstein is literally incapable of shutting the fuck up about Gamergate, and in spite of himself spending about a week saying he had quit and himself being topic banned, he kept going back to sperg about Gamergate, eventually getting a 1-month block for repeated topic ban violations. Bernstein also wrote a bullshit blog post crying about Gamergate and ArbCom while claiming it would "disgrace the internet," which was then conveniently picked up by several newsrags like The Guardian,who printed Bernstein's lies that ArbCom was lining feminists up against the wall and banning them all while nothing was being done to "GamerGate's warriors," when the case was still ongoing. (
http://archive.is/53VNI)
The Gamergate arbitration case ended in late January 2015, and Gamaliel conveniently decided to unban Bernstein very shortly after. So, they had a big, drama-filled case where a bunch of spergs were indefinitely banned and required ArbCom approval to unban them, but because Gamaliel banned Bernstein
before the case his ban was treated as a normal ban that could be undone by Gamaliel. If they were willing to take down veteran wikispergs like Ryulong, there's no fucking way Bernstein would have made it through ArbCom without getting the book thrown at him.
Gamaliel and Bernstein begged the admin who had blocked him (HJ Mitchell) for the topic ban violations to unblock Bernstein. Bernstein ended up making a deal with Mitchell and an admin named Dreadstar, and the only way he would be unblocked and allowed to edit in the Gamergate area was if he ceased all commentary about other editors and only focused on content. This deal was violated within a week and Bernstein was eventually topic banned for 90 days, spent around 3 weeks sperging in protest of the ban, was finally blocked for a month, then the admin who had topic banned him (Dreadstar) got in a fight with the admin who had blocked Bernstein (Mitchell) and chimped out. Dreadstar, who had been enforcing in the Gamergate area for months, was so fed up with dealing with Bernstein (Dreadstar considered him a "burden") that when he ragequit Wikipedia he unbanned and unblocked Bernstein as a final act of vengeance against his fellow wikispergs.
Once again, someone who clearly deserved to to be topic banned if not blocked was let off the hook because the banning admin undid the ban. At least this time wasn't a wink-wink, nudge-nudge scenario as with Gamaliel, but instead because the admin knew Bernstein to be such a loon that he would be a nuisance to everyone the admin disliked. With one of the admins he had made the deal with gone, the other (Mitchell) decided to fuck off and ignore the Bernstein situation completely, forgetting the deal they had made and allowing him to be unblocked since the ban was now lifted.
As the months went by, Bernstein was still acting the same way he was back in November when he earned the topic ban, and with most of the administrators in the topic area gone or willfully turning a blind eye like Mitchell, Gamaliel was able to keep Bernstein from being topic banned by pretending to be "uninvolved" whenever Bernstein ended up at the arbitration enforcement noticeboard.
Enter Vordrak aka Samuel Collingwood Smith. Vordrak had been looking into Bernstein's history on Wikipedia and had found evidence of his conflict of interest editing relating to hypertext articles. (
https://archive.is/kC2Av) He was also sperging about pedophiles and had been given a one-way interaction ban with Bernstein due to his efforts to bring attention to Bernstein's conflict of interest editing and Gamergater loonery.
In July 2015, Bernstein decided he should edit the Gamergate controversy article and label it as "terrorism" using something from
Bustle (the same rag that published Brianna Wu/John Flynt) and
VICE as his sources. Vordrak was annoyed with Bernstein's recent exceptional behavior regarding Gamergate, and Vordrak sought to build an arbitration case against Bernstein. In response to Vordrak's arbitration request, Gamaliel stated his intentions to indefinitely ban Vordrak while completely ignoring anything Bernstein had done. An admin named Floquenbeam then indefinitely blocked Vordrak since Gamaliel was going to do it anyway.
If you've read Vordrak's thread, then you know he is a very vindictive person, and he began plotting revenge against Gamaliel, which, let's be honest, is kind of justified all things considered. If Gamaliel hadn't abused the wiki rules to protect his friend, Bernstein would have remained indefinitely banned, and Vordrak wouldn't have been pissed off by Bernstein's anti-Gamergate stuff and felt compelled to put a stop to it. Although he probably would still end up blocked for his wikipedophile stuff eventually.
Not long after Vordrak was kicked out, Bernstein started harassing Masem (the same guy he had a hateboner for back in 2014) because Masem disagreed that
The Mary Sue should be quoted as gospel, and Gamaliel once again protected Mark when Masem filed a complaint about the harassment. Later in the year, both Mark Bernstein and Gamaliel ran for the Arbitration Committee. Due to the number of empty seats, Gamaliel made the cut and became an arbitrator.
In April 2016, Gamaliel couldn't keep his bias to himself and ran anti-Trump things in Wikipedia's newsletter for April Fools. After the 1st had passed, people complained that one of them was claiming that Trump sued Wikipedia and Gamaliel sperged out when they tried to get the
joke removed. This ended up at an admin's noticeboard and Gamaliel began chimping and accusing Gamergate of being behind this, and Bernstein backed him up.
Gamaliel, who was on the Board of Directors for Wikimedia D.C. in addition to being an ArbCom member, was chimping about this so much that he ended up with an arbitration case against him, and almost immediately after it began he claimed he was "no longer able to edit" Wikipedia due to "extortion." Bernstein also ended up at arbitration enforcement for the umpteenth time and, despite the efforts of Gamaliel and other sympathizers, was finally re-topic banned indefinitely. (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement/Archive190#MarkBernstein)
Once the arbitration case began against Gamaliel, Vordrak decided he would publish the revenge article he had been planning, which boiled down to: Vordrak had yelled about a wikipedophile on his blog, Gamaliel had presumably read it, Gamaliel had not blocked the pedophile, therefore Gamaliel had violated WP: CHILDPROTECT policy. In April, Vordrak emailed several people for comment about this article, including St. Leo's Catholic university, where Gamaliel works.
Bernstein and Gamaliel were enraged by this. (But how would Bernstein even know? Because they were such good friends Gamaliel shared it with him, of course, while even ArbCom pussy-footed around the issue on-wiki and never really explained what happened) Gamaliel stopped editing Wikipedia (he instead emailed in all his statements for the case, at the last minute of course so no one could respond) and claimed Vordrak was blackmailing him. Bernstein started chimping out on Twitter and Wikipedia, getting himself blocked repeatedly. Gamaliel also chimped out on Twitter because a journalist called David Auerbach had been tweeting about the arbitration case. Gamaliel and some of his Wikipedia/Wikimedia buddies called this "harassment" and tried to get Auerbach fired by lying about him.
Months later, the arbitration case had ended with Gamaliel resigning from ArbCom, requesting he be forbidden from using administrator tools in the Gamergate area, and "retiring" from Wikipedia (in reality, he just started focusing on Wikimedia instead). Inspired in part by Gamaliel's attempts to get Auerbach fired, Vordrak finally published his revenge article and in it he admitted that he was the one who had emailed Gamaliel's employer in an attempt to get him fired back in April. (
http://archive.is/40rZk)
Mark Bernstein has been chimping about Vordrak's "blackmail and extortion" to this day.