On Friday, a hardcore GamerGate supporter named Joshua Goldberg finally crossed over the line between shitposting and real action, getting arrested by the FBI. Critics of GamerGate may be quick to point out that this seemed inevitable, and not a real surprise. However, very little about Goldberg’s case does not result in the raising of the eyebrows.
First off, fair is fair: Goldberg’s arrest had nothing to do with GamerGate. Instead he was arrested for, while pretending to be an Australian ISIS member, attempting to help jihadists build pressure cooker bombs similar to those in the Boston Marathon attack, with the intent that they would detonate at a Kansas City memorial service for 9/11. Earlier this year, he took credit for instigating the attack on the Muhammed Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Texas, which resulted in two would-be jihadists being shot dead by security guards. Those really interested can view the 30-page legal indictment here.
Turns out, he was a 20 year old Jewish guy living in Florida with his parents.
KotakuInAction has been trying to spin him as nothing more than a troll. However, the FBI doesn’t jail people for 20 years for shitposting. That being said, his shitposting skills are legendary. He had dozens of alter egos across the web, focusing on Reddit. One commenter noted that he was like the ‘Forrest Gump of Reddit Trolls’ – he was involved in almost every major controversy in the last 12 months, often as an instigator – and frequently on both sides of the fight.
Goldberg’s primary twitter account was MoonMetropolis. He was a GamerGate adherent from very early on. He’s also been shitposting against Anita Sarkeesian since 2012. He was quite literally one of the NotYourShield sock puppets that critics have accused gamergate of being populated with.
Humorously, he has no problem admitting he’s a guy in this mail to Milo Yiannopoulos, a man whose approval he craved for unfathomable reasons. Yiannopoulos shares the love right back when he writes articles about Social Justice Warriors. Goldberg appears to have been the primary impetus behind Yiannopoulos’ hit piece on Shawn King, a core activist behind Black Lives Matters. Perhaps sensitive that his credibility is already somewhere below that of Mad Magazine due to his habit of posting unsourced tabloid-style bullshit as fact only to have it blow up in his face later, Milo attempted to delete evidence of his public interactions with Goldberg. Unfortunately for Milo, Goldberg was so proud of this correspondence that he posted it himself.
Goldberg had a handful of personas on Twitter and reddit, and was moderator of more than 150 subreddits, including 25 subreddits that are quarantined (I.e. you can only access if you are logged in with a valid email address). Quarantined subreddits are where the truly awful stuff on reddit lives – the purist, distilled racism, sexism and homophobia that the internet has to offer. One example was running a blog and subreddit named ‘Philosophy of Rape’ where he wrote “whores and feminazis need to be put in their place through rape”.
He also was Michael Slay, a writer for the Daily Stormer, the daily zine for Stormfront, the largest nest of neo-Nazis on the Internet. This reddit persona (European88) was one of his favorites, and one that he posted from very regularly and vigorously. He’s particular notable for urging Stormfront to recruit on the fertile soil of Reddit’s extremism. He was also u/Emily_Americana (another equally repugnant persona), who outed Michael Slay as European88 – i.e. himself.
Needless to say he had a 4chan account, where he announced his goal was to start a race war. This attempt to set up the race war led to him setting up fake accoutns in the name of real people in an attempt to smear him, which fantastically ultimately led to his discovery and arrest.
He was a particular fan of using one account to point out what another persona was doing, such as below when he inexplicably decided to show one of GamerGate’s most notable posters (and former lead of GamerGate’s Harassment Patrol) an article about neonazi politics featuring the corpse of Aylan Kurdi (note: link not for squeamish).
But that’s not all! He also tried to write diaries for Daily Kos (note- anyone can write a Diary for Daily Kos after jumping through minor hoops, like many other sites including Gamasutra and Red State), but was largely unsuccessful giving up after two writings (one of which was pointing at how horrible his other personas were). He still spent effort trying to nurture this persona, one Tanya Cohen, a supposedly redheaded feminist writer working for Amnesty International. People were calling bullshit on her writings from as early as April:
Her schtick is a fairly consistent line on freedom of speech that amounts to “freedom to agree with Tanya Cohen” and the arguments are almost certainly satire of the loopiest left-wing stances. Still, she ticks all the mainstream left-wing boxes (retweeting Julian Burnside, attacking George Brandis, declaring Andrew Bolt a racist) and I cannot help but think that she’s only doing so to make it to a bigger platform. Keep an eye on this emerging hoax.
He tried to drum up activity on GamerGhazi with a left-leaning personal called DreamBug. Most of his effort seemed to be trying to call attention to his other personae. He also managed to insert himself into the ridiculous ‘Samus is Trans’ controversy, but a sharp-eyed Brianna Wu managed to get the work taken down almost immediately for being unprofessional. Note in the link that Milo is desperately trying to argue that the left was fooled as badly as he was, when the facts tell quite the opposite story.
If anything, this speaks to my professional credit. I saw someone writing something that was unethical – stepped in to privately correct it.
— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) September 12, 2015
At any rate, the left-wing sock puppet accounts appear to exist primarily to throw outrage at his ‘main’ accounts, and then he’d throw back the outrage in order to raise the notoriety of all his accounts. So what did he really believe? Kotaku In Action would like us to believe that he trolled both sides equally. Is that the case?
Well, we can look at his posting history. KiA has a list of his known personae. His neonazi persona European88 had 113626 karma and thousands of links. Nearly as awful Emily_Americana has 133850 link karma. His left-wing persona Dreambug has 12705 link karma, and most of his links go to point out how awful his neonazi persona was. On Twitter, his MoonMetropolis persona had 23.6K tweets, and was the persona that (despite the tweet above) he ascribed to his real name on multiple occasions. xTanyaCohenx, meanwhile, has just 433. Perhaps he’d have been more prolific with these alter egos if he could write about them more convincingly, but they never seemed to earn traction.
Reading through his work – particularly the stuff he wrote under his own name for Thought Catalog – it seems obvious that his true ideology was a fanatically libertarian support of free speech, an utter hatred of social justice warriors, and a belief that any means necessary was acceptable for him to reach his goals. Aside from his also fanatical hatred of muslims, sounds a lot like GooberGrapes to me.
Also, he had way too much free time.
Currently, GamerGate’s critics are focusing on Goldberg’s relationship with Milo Yiannopoulos. However, that part is actually secondary. The real value of this story is that it confirms what critics of GamerGate have said about the movement from the beginning.
Goldberg was a right-wing culture warrior with little or not interest in ethics in games journalism, and a complete fanaticism for anti-liberal and anti-Social Justice Warriors. Goldberg happily made sock puppets to make his pieces look like they had more support, and more diverse support, than they actually had. Goldberg actively worked to troll his opponents by trying to infiltrate them to try to embarrass them. Goldberg believed that any means necessary was acceptable to progress his anti-SJW views, including slander, character assassination and up to and including violence.
In pretty much every way, Goldberg was the prototypical bad GamerGater that is endemic to the sorts of abuse that the victims of GamerGate have pointed their fingers at. He is the troll that we’ve always said has been lurking within GamerGate’s ranks, using their noise and furor as a cover for his unsavory activities. KotakuInAction has condemned him, of course, because he committed the cardinal sin: he got caught. But while it would be inaccurate to say that all members of GamerGate are as despicable as Goldberg, the last year of GamerGate activity leaves little activity that there are more of these despicable trolls hidden within the movement, and it’s decentralized, leaderless movement leaves it ill-prepared to actually get rid of them.
Milo’s posts about Wu were just trolling because that’s about the same amount of evidence that Goldberg was his source or inspiration for the despicable hitpieces on King.
Goldberg did appear to be a free speech lunatic, though not really indicative of any larger trend. The violence he advocated was against his “allies.” He didn’t try to instigate violence against Muslims; he tried to instigate violence by Muslims. He was more interested in smearing Muslims than in promoting tolerance by and of Muslims.
There’s a hell of a lot more evidence that Milo’s story started with a terrorist, than the bullshit he’s peddling that starts from 10 year old, illegally obtained and easily doctored chat logs, largely because Goldberg was utterly delighted his hero recognized him and posted all about it.
All you have is an email from Goldberg to Milo. What, is Goldberg Don Lemon’s source, too? It was a despicable story, that doesn’t mean IT was sourced by a terrorist. Regardless, it’s obvious that Milo was just trolling Wu, and not seriously arguing that she had an obligation to release all of her communications.
As for your pedo-denialism, um, whatever. Butts just wants some defense to stick. They were fake! She was just joking! Your story is false because of illegal hacking! I have a copyright on these faked chatlogs so you can’t post them!
Yeah, sorry, not buying it. And, journalists really shouldn’t give a shit if papers are illegally obtained. Maybe read about the Pentagon Papers, sometime.
But, yeah, you carefully said “impetus” which the evidence supports. Wu and King, however, claimed “main source,” which is silly. So I’ll give you that much credit.
Are you in lockstep with the latest excuse? Just being edgy by cultivating a pedophile persona across multiple websites, ironically posting pictures of her cousin, going to 12chan for the lulz?
I have no opinion. I don’t have enough information to say one way or the other. Neither do you. I do know that so far no actual evidence of a child being hurt has come up, and that she is quite correct in the fact that Nero could have confirmed much with a contact to the police, and he either didn’t, or he didn’t report it. I’d challenge you to give me proof that I’m wrong, but this has fuck all to do with ethics in games journalism OR diversity in games, so why is it important to you at all?
As for what you want me to prove, Butts is an admitted pedophile who tried to groom her cousin as a “little girlfriend” and shared pictures of her cousin with strangers online. Evidence suggests these pictures were not illegal.
Pedophiles have a right to be left alone so long as they aren’t trying to groom or abuse children.
They don’t have moral authority to try to shame anyone for what video games they like to play.
Yeah, sorry, someone who thinks about diddling real prepubescent kids can’t criticize me for murdering digital prostitutes.
I’m not sure why you’re so worried about being “shamed” for your choice of video games. In today’s fast-paced global economy, it’s impossible to shame anyone who doesn’t want to be shamed. If anyone tries, then you can just shrug and say, “Who cares what that sort of person thinks? I’ve got access to a worldwide community of other people who agree with me.”
Of course, the opposite holds true as well. If you run around bragging that you enjoy playing games where your goal is to “murder digital prostitutes”, then other people are going to form their own opinions about you, and they won’t be ashamed of doing that.
(The good news is if you ever do decide that what you’re doing is shameful, you can stop doing it. That’s what the srhbutts saga has proven: She outgrew the juvenile 2edgy4you chan ‘culture’ and moved on with her life. The other channers went into Full Gossip Mode to try to shame her for that, but, honestly, why should she or anyone else care what lies those people are telling about her?)
I think the worst part about this is that even though he got caught, that’s only going to further expose him and glorify him to the other unsavories. Yea, he’s going to prison, but its almost a success story for people whose goal it is to create havoc and intolerance on the internet.
Thanks for writing these blogs though, I always feel smarter after. 😀
Seriously, I don’t see why so much attention is paid to Goldberg, even with the Yiannopoulos connection. To me, in this context, to say that he is emblematic of GamerGate makes as much sense as saying he is emblematic of Judaism.
If you want to read some genuinely eyebrow-raising stuff from someone whose implication in GamerGate is far more relevant, have a look-see at Alexander Macris’s Twitter (which I came across by accident earlier today), where it’s all about military history (especially when quotable or well integrated into popular culture), portentous elegies of the decline of the West, mixed with gaming culture and peddling new Escapist merchandise. This guy terrifies me a great deal more than a professional troll whose misfortune it was to finally be taken seriously.
Could have done without the picture of that poor dead child, sorry.
Damion, this is pretty comprehensive and I’d like to forward the link out to some people, but can you maybe hide the picture of Aylan Kurdi somehow?
I’ve moved the picture in question to be behind a link with a squeamish warning.
If only his parents had made their basement-dweller get a job.
No, they weren’t entirely to blame for his actions. But this must have required an awful lot of time, most likely was perpetrated from within their house and used their Internet connections. I know parents of 7-year-olds who use keyloggers on top of site blocking software. At this point, I think it wise to insist upon it for people still living with their parents but spend more than 10 hours a week online.