Jael the wife of Heber
Last night I went down to the barricades to brave the crowds of antifascists and see Milo speak. I had bought a ticket to the 10:15 show, and arrived around 9 with a friend. From inside the car, I could hear the drone of a helicopter circling the area, and on getting out, the dull roar of a crowd chanting several blocks away. The protest was underway, and it was spectacular.
We made our way down, blended into the crowd and observed the demonstrators. By that time the protest had been going for a good three hours. It was still large and energetic. In the middle of the road there were large bands of people with banners, chanting “Nazis are not welcome here, not here! Not here!” Many people from the nearby government housing had turned out to observe or take part, including several kids. From scraps of overheard conversation, nobody was talking about anything but Milo.
The police presence was heavy. They had sealed off sections of the street with lines of riot police in full gear. We realised we had come up on the wrong side of the street, and couldn’t get through. The crowd was growing restless, gathering around us on the other side of the road from the police. I saw a thrown object shatter on the pavement at the feet of the police line.
We moved on. As we retraced our steps up the street, I heard a megaphone warning that the police were about to move their line up, and not to stand in their way. “They’re armed, and they’re looking for a fight!”
I heard an explosion. It sounded like a small firework. I heard two or three of them five minutes after we moved off. Looking back, I saw the line of riot police with their clear plastic shields running towards the area we had just left.
We decided to take the long way around, and found our way up from the other end of a side street to the entrance, where a long queue was gathering, protected by a police line on both ends of the street. On the other side of one police line, not far from the entrance, a handful of people had set up a projector, with a generator. I realised that I was looking at the Wolfenstein protest. A very small group of gamers was protesting Milo by killing Nazis on screen, to “show Milo that he may have got his grounding during Gamergate and the gaming audience, but gamers are NOT with them”.
[This video shows the epic 6-person Wolfenstein protest at 11:35.]
We waited in the queue, while the protesters went ballistic on the other side of the heavy-duty police line, and the pitiful handful of gamers shot digital Nazis. All the while, Melbourne voted with its feet. A second, and then a third show, had been added to meet demand. Quietly, and undemonstratively, thousands of people came to see Milo speak.
And it was a great talk. Milo, ever the show-pony, walked on stage in a leather jacket while the Terminator theme played. (Terminator 2: Judgement Gay.) But as the bulk of his talk has been covered already by other XYZ writers, I’ll go straight to my point tonight: Socialists!
So, let’s talk. Seriously, guys, did you think we would be upset by all of that? Did you think we would feel uncomfortable by you chanting “Nazis are not welcome”, or by playing Wolfenstein? Did you think we’d be triggered by your assertion that you did not stand with Milo?
We don’t care about you disagreeing, because, unlike you, we don’t insist that everybody agrees with us. We don’t care about Wolfenstein, because, unlike you, we’re not scolds who want to micromanage other people’s behaviour. And as far as “gamers NOT being with Milo”, that would only be a problem if, like you, we had to have total, unquestioning, monolithic backing from the groups who we think “owe” us support. It would only be a problem if we demanded intellectual allegiance based on group identity, and got upset if any of “our” people crossed the floor, as it were, and refused to cast their vote with us. In other words, your protest would only have hurt us if we were just like you.
But we’re not.
We’re not the ones who categorise people by skin colour, gender and ethnicity, and expect them to be no more than the sum total of their oppressions. We’re not the ones who call “gender traitors” at people who disappoint us in our righteous expectations, like this woman filming last night, [Matty’s Modern Life can be seen briefly at 00:14, blowing kisses to the communists…]
..who can’t get her head around the fact that not all women share her low opinion of Milo. Can you believe it? Unfortunately, being a woman is not a worldview in and of itself, let alone one that conveniently lines up with all the talking points of cultural Marxism:
You place a great emphasis on thinking the same as you, on standing together (with you), and on solidarity. You say “our solidarity is our strength”, and withhold that solidarity from us, declaring that we are “not welcome” in your corner of the playground. What makes you think we care?
Your exclusion, your subversive video gaming, and your declaration that #notallgamers – these would have been very effective if we were hyper-control-freaks, allergic to disagreement, who couldn’t survive outside a big left-wing thought collective. And I think the fact that you fought us as if that’s what we were says more about you than about us. Pardon me, but your groupthink is showing.
No need to thank me. It’s your XYZ.
