Calling Out Hate In Fandom Isn’t Enough. We Must Deplatform It.
C/W: This article contains information about and mentions of white nationalist groups, racism, misogyny, antisemitism and sexual assault, including quotes and descriptions about rape, child abuse, body shaming, hate speech and racist harassment.
PLEASE BE ADVISED: If you see an * next to links in this article, they will direct to an alt right YouTube channel or blog, or a white nationalist website. All links for white nationalist sites have been linked through Internet Archive. These have been included for educational purposes only. Please click at your own discretion.
In March 2021, this account published an 80+ page deep dive that leveraged the racist and misogynistic backlash against Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi as one example of how alt-right ideology has spread from fringe forums and white nationalist think tanks to the most accessible social media networks online today. Within the past few months, harassment tactics enabled by loosely organized alt-right spaces on YouTube have made a resurgence in mainstream media outlets including Wired and Vanity Fair due to racism aimed at Obi-Wan Kenobi star, Moses Ingram.
On May 30th, the Star Wars official Twitter account denounced the racist hate that Ingram received via YouTube and Instagram. Star Wars posted, “if anyone intends to make [Ingram] feel in any way unwelcome…we resist.” Moments later, the tweet was flooded with Twitter users claiming that Star Wars was disrespectful to the fans and Ingram’s character was simply “badly written.”
Media outlets were quick to point out that these pile-ons were nothing new in Star Wars fandom. They specifically cited the harassment and racism that has been directed at Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega since 2015. Several outlets were also quick to blame the backlash on “The Fandom Menace,” a loosely organized collection of YouTube accounts initially named by Comicsgate leader Ethan Van Sciver.
The articles weren’t wrong to claim that. Of over 200 tweets that drove conversation against Star Wars’ defense of Ingram, half came from Twitter users who followed at least three accounts associated with The Fandom Menace (see “Methodology” below).
When discussing the YouTubers, Gizmodo referred to them as “gatekeeping trolls.” Vanity Fair referred to them as “social media personalities.” Only Salon went deeper into the group’s motives, notably discussing how their YouTube channels act as “gateways to alt-right ideology.” In the article, Melanie McFarland prompts, “what are complaints about racebending roles or casting for diversity if not a weaker version of the so-called Great Replacement Theory? You know, just asking questions.”
Just asking questions, indeed.
I believe my co-host and I have made it clear how these YouTubers — whether they realize it or not — platform white supremacy from the most well-funded white nationalist institutions and hate networks within the United States. However, this article will reiterate this claim with additional examples and findings so that we can cut straight to the point:
The handful of YouTubers who have led “The Fandom Menace” boogeyman since 2018 have nothing to do with Star Wars fandom. These YouTubers have nothing to do with “fan criticism” or opinions about a film franchise. These YouTubers platform hate mongers and right-wing extremists. These YouTubers continue efforts to mainstream white nationalism. And these YouTubers profit from consistent and targeted harassment of any individual seen as a threat to the preservation and supremacy of white identity in American culture.
Let’s look at the facts from the beginning.
Comicsgate Leader Gains Momentum for Social Media Movement Targeting Lucasfilm Employees
In March 2018, YouTube channel ComicArtistPro Secrets began to dedicate more of its videos to a small, but vocal group of extremely online people who believed Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi featured too many women in leading roles over men, among other gripes.
In a YouTube video* titled “SJW DISNEY BOUGHT STAR WARS TO KILL IT,” Ethan Van Sciver, the YouTuber behind ComicArtistPro Secrets, warns his viewers “if you don’t know what SJWs are, eventually you will learn because they are invading every little aspect of pop culture.”
Van Sciver had already made a name for himself as a leader of Gamergate-successor “Comicsgate,” a harassment campaign that targeted women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color in the comic book industry.
Comicsgate is first and foremost a grift. It is aimed at an audience of young, majority white men who feel left behind in a changing culture that they believe offers a disproportional number of opportunities to women and minorities. YouTubers like Van Sciver generate hours of content about “violent attacks” and masterful “agendas” from “social justice warriors” (SJWs) in order to affirm to these young men that they are losing their culture to diversity and inclusion. They then use that radicalized audience to sell comics via crowd sourcing platforms.
That content is typically generated from controversies that these YouTubers create themselves. Noah Berlatsky recalls in The Washington Post that Van Sciver harassed comic book creators including indie comic creator Darryl Ayo in order to stir-up outrage for his channel. Berlatsky writes that after Ayo refused to “debate” with Van Sciver after calling out Comicsgate, Van Sciver harassed Ayo:
“Van Sciver framed himself as a proponent of debate and the healthy exchange of ideas. But in fact, he was demanding that Ayo deferentially follow his orders in the middle of the night or be labeled as unreasonable and a justifiable target for abuse. A free speech frame became a way to go after someone for saying things Van Sciver didn’t like — and for putting others on notice that their tweets or comments could make them the next target.”
Rachael Krishna of Buzzfeed explains that these attacks are screenshot and platformed on Comicsgate YouTube channels, “leaving people like Ayo inundated by a constant barrage of thousands of abusive tweets.” The tactic targets anybody who speaks out against Comicsgate, much like Gamergate supporters targeted game developer Brianna Wu with almost 50 death threats after posting a meme of her own tweets making fun of the Gamergate hashtag. The harassment is to silence the dissenters of the movement, while also building up content for Comicsgate YouTube channels.
Comicsgate supporters congregate on Kiwi Farms, a far-right forum infamous for hosting stalkers, incels and trolls who keep records on targets’ personal information and mass shooting manifestos. Van Sciver has a verified account on the site.
Grifting the Star Wars fandom was a logical next step for Van Sciver, who presumably saw the profit in a growing group of disgruntled men (and women) holding tightly to the 21st century culture war against “identity politics” and “virtue signaling.” All this movement needed was a leader, an enemy and, above all, momentum.
When Solo:A Star Wars Story didn’t achieve box office projections, Van Sciver took to YouTube* to claim credit for the film’s results. “We did this,” he assures his followers, “this is awesome. This is totally awesome.” The congratulations was in part due to a hashtag campaign to “boycott Solo” led by followers of Van Sciver’s channel that they believed was influential enough to keep people away from theaters. However, the tag was only mentioned about 4.7k times by under 900 accounts, with some Van Sciver affiliates including blogger, “Itchy Bacca”, inflating the hashtag with hundreds and hundreds of tweets (see: “Socks, Bots, and Super Users”).
In the celebratory stream, Van Sciver reads a Breitbart article* blaming Solo’s disappointing box office results on Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy. “So what is happening? Why such a collapse? Two words: Kathleen and Kennedy,” John Nolte writes for Breitbart in what is essentially a copy and paste of articles previously written by far-right provocateur and former Breitbart News editor, Milo Yiannopoulos.“To anyone familiar with incompetence in Hollywood, the answer should be obvious. It’s Amy Pascal, of course,” Yiannopoulos remarked* about the 2016 all-women Ghostbusters remake almost exactly two years prior.
Nolte continues that “[Kennedy] is also a committed left-wing social justice warrior and feminist who is using the Star Wars franchise to push her obnoxious agenda.” This conspiracy would become particularly common place in videos targeting Kennedy by unofficial Fandom Menace leader Jeremy Griggs, founder and owner of “Geeks and Gamers.” In a video* titled “Lucasfilm’s Feminist Agenda,” Griggs insists that Kennedy has “done nothing but push a feminist agenda into Star Wars” by “[conditioning] kids…to think that women are the most badass creatures to ever live and men are stupid.”
After deriding the film, Van Sciver assures his audience that Solo wasn’t all bad. “I loved seeing L3–37 die,” he says, “[i]t was almost pornographic the way they killed her and you hated her so much and you got to see her complain and whine as she died and then the lights go out in her eyes. It was terrific.” Van Sciver’s review compliments that of Nolte who stated, “there is the feminist droid always harping about equal rights (thankfully, she is killed off quickly).”
Shortly after the release of Solo, the group of YouTubers loosely organized themselves as “The Fandom Menace,” a name given to the “anti-SJW” YouTubers against “Disney Star Wars” by Van Sciver.* While the movement would remain officially leaderless, several YouTubers would emerge as influential to the group including Van Sciver, YouTubers World Class Bullshitters and Griggs.
In a forward for the yet-to-be-funded “The Fandom Menace Volume One,” Twitter user “Ruin Johnson” writes:*
“The infection of social justice tactics and influence now permeates the entire entertainment industry…This pathology in our society is an attack on freedom. The Fandom Menace will not be told that our opinions are invalid because they do not align with the narrative of the content makers, their hate mobs, or their shill journals.”
The forward proceeds to call anybody advocating for diversity a “social terrorist” who “lie to their children’s faces.” To eradicate this “terrorism,” The Fandom Menace pledges to “fight against this tyranny of false virtue.”
The Fandom Menace accompanies this mission statement with a logo designed by Comicsgate supporter and indie comic artist, Steven Wayne. The logo features an armed Stormtrooper with the face of a laughing skull standing in front of the Imperial crest. Below the armed trooper are the words “saving what we love by fighting what we hate. ”
Recently, Van Sciver looked back on the early days of The Fandom Menace, affirming that the group was dedicated towards fighting back against Lucasfilm employees, who Van Sciver describes as “horrible, horrible personalities, terrible people who were ruining the things that we loved.”
Common targets included The Last Jedi director Rian Johnson, who received multiple threats on his Twitter account and was the subject of numerous and consistent Fandom Menace videos against him. Geeks and Gamers had the most videos against Johnson as of March 2021 with at least 27 videos aimed at the director.
Lucasfilm executive Pablo Hidalgo has also been the target of relentless harassment from The Fandom Menace for years. Just this month, Van Sciver referred to him* as a “fat a-hole.” A mocking edit of his likeness even graces the cover of Itchy Bacca’s closed IndieGoGo project for his now private blog “Disney Star Wars is Dumb.”
Arguably receiving the most targeted hate is Kathleen Kennedy led by Geeks and Gamers who, as of March 2021, had posted upwards of 40 YouTube videos against her.
The most unabashedly sexist* of these videos features Griggs accusing the executive of being “gifted Lucasfilm” by keeping “dirty secrets” on Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Griggs asserts:
“[Kathleen Kennedy has] let an entire generation of young girls know…that you don’t have to be talented, you don’t have to work hard, you don’t have to have knowledge or ambition, all you need to do is know the right powerful men, serve them coffee as a glorified secretary for decades, and eventually you can be handed the greatest IP in the history of the movie business.”
Fandom Menace Leaders Leverage Breitbart Playbook To Target Women of Color
The Fandom Menace is not the first group to target and harass individuals working in film and TV. In 2016, Yiannopoulos drummed up outrage against Hollywood by taking aim at the all-women reboot of Ghostbusters. This was accomplished by driving belabored and unnecessary hate towards the film, its marginalized characters, and its perceived “SJW” audience. While the intent of the hate is misogynistic and racist in nature, the hate is always explained away as “fan criticism” and a conveniently peaked obsession with “film quality.”
Yiannopoulos described the film* with eye-roll inducing sexist buzzwords and stereotypes, calling it “a feminist cash-in for angsty, blue-haired, Tumblr-obsessed, pronoun-bothering cat ladies.” Yiannopoulos continues,“‘we aren’t disliking [the Ghostbusters trailer] because of the women…we are disliking it because it looks like it’s going to fucking blow,’ reads one comment, with over 100 likes, under the film’s official YouTube trailer…It’s not misogynistic, racist or homophobic to call out a bad film for being bad, or for butchering a remake of a beloved classic.”
With this statement, Yiannopoulos presupposes that Ghostbusters will be a “bad film,” a tactic that aims to frame media as poor quality simply for containing diversity. The Fandom Menace utilize this ploy often. Followers of the group are set up with the idea that any non-white, non-cis-male, non-heterosexual character in a blockbuster film will be poor quality. This assessment is based on a conspiracy theory that diversity only exists to further a political agenda and divide Americans. Therefore, they claim that their hatred of any diverse character is simply because the character was always going to be poorly written.
When addressing his followers about the invasion of pop culture by “SJWs,” Van Sciver postulates that all diversity in film is a checklist. “[Non-white, non-cis-male characters] are just there to add diversity to what would otherwise be non-diverse characters, non-diverse meaning white,” explains Van Sciver. He insists that all diversity is automatically a concern because it exists “just to change the complexion of a movie without actually creating fascinating…human characters for people to relate to.” Van Sciver claims this plot by “SJWs” is driven by the whole of “access media” (mainstream news and entertainment outlets) and Disney.
This puts the real people of color, members of the LGBTQ+ community and women behind the targeted characters in films and TV shows in a cycle of abuse that is difficult to report. Since the provocateurs leading hate towards a specific character of a marginalized identity have already convinced their followers that these characters are pre-determined to be “poorly written,” targets of this tactic become open to harassment.
Actress Leslie Jones was one of the first to experience how this tactic works. While Yiannopoulos would compliment Jones herself as having “been funny in other projects,” he would target Jones’ character as “fat” and referred to her as a man. He did so knowing that the harassment would generate hate towards the actress and encourage other people to join in on the harassment.
Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter after encouraging harassment against Jones by accusing her of “[playing] the victim.” After the ban, Yiannopoulos’ followers retaliated by hacking Jones’ iCloud account.
The Fandom Menace arguably profits the most from leveraging this tactic. For example, YouTuber Jeremy Hambly, who has been banned from Magic: The Gathering after continually harassing a cosplayer, has attacked the appearance of Rose Tico, played by Kelly Marie Tran, on his channel TheQuartering while insisting that nobody should be attacking the actress. He states*, “if you want to say things to Kelly Marie Tran because Rose Tico looked like a character who had a full diaper in the entire movie, that’s not her fault.”
This is a trend. Geeks and Gamers has referred to Tran’s* character as “one of the most hideous characters of all time.” Fandom Menace affiliate MauLer in his review* of The Last Jedi refers to Rose as “Shrek” and complains that “Shrek didn’t even have the decency to fucking die.”
Van Sciver arguably encourages the most harassment against Tran, having made at least 18 videos about Rose Tico as of March 2021. His most disturbing video is an hour long unboxing* of Rose Tico action figures with no dialogue published while Tran was still on Instagram. He occasionally stops to stab and slice Tran’s action figures with knives and scissors, eventually cutting one action figure’s head off.
In an April 2018* video by Griggs, the YouTuber reiterates how Rose Tico is “the most unlikeable character ever.” According to Griggs, Rose existed for “forced diversity” used to “derail the entire film,” and to “sexually assault Finn against his will.”
All of these statements can be found in a surviving screenshot of Tran’s instagram comments taken a few days before the actress deleted her Instagram due to ongoing harassment. Of course, The Fandom Menace denies involvement. Despite the constant vitriol thrown at her character, The Fandom Menace deflects allegations by referencing the positive things they have said about Tran herself while affiliates including Griggs*, Hambly* and Twitter user Dataracer117* simultaneously claim that Tran is a liar generating sympathy for an “SJW agenda” against “the fans.”
Attribution is difficult to prove between platforms, however, on top of statements by Griggs echoed in Trans’ comment section, The Fandom Menace affiliates have a history of leading organized harassment. When Van Sciver targeted Ayo, Buzzfeed reported that “the majority of abuse against Ayo was coming from people who followed Van Sciver.”
Furthermore, recent comments against Moses Ingram are easy to attribute to The Fandom Menace. The wordcloud below displays all words used over 1k times from over 52k tweets that mentioned the official Star Wars Twitter account (“@starwars”) between May 30th and June 1st. The most frequently used phrase was the fatigued excuse “we just don’t like the character,” which, recall, is based on the conspiracy that any non-white character is automatically poorly written.
As previously mentioned, a sample of these tweets showed that 1 in 2 tweets that were against the Star Wars account were from followers of key Fandom Menace YouTubers including Van Sciver, Griggs, Gary Buechler of Nerdrotic, That Star Wars Girl, The Critical Drinker, Doomcock, and RK Outpost, the YouTube channel of Geeks and Gamers affiliate, Ryan Kinel.
Days before Ingram posted racist harassment to her Instagram, Kinel, along with other Fandom Menace affiliates, accused* Ingram of “attacking fans” in response to news that Ingram had been warned of potential harassment. He insists that widespread racism in Star Wars fandom doesn’t exist, proclaiming that “these lunatics, these activists, are out of their mind and Moses Ingram is exactly that..They can do nothing other than play the victim.”
In the video, he also states that Lucasfilm cannot speak out against racism aimed at their employees because John Boyega was minimized on the Chinese poster of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens in 2015, a common red herring used by The Fandom Menace. While it’s valid to call this decision out, the nearly seven-year-old event has been weaponized by alt-right and reactionary right wing accounts to direct the conversation away from racism supported in their space.
Following Kinel and other Fandom Menace videos and tweets, Ingram’s Instagram DMs were flooded with racist hate and harassment. The keyword “China” was mentioned 1,025 times underneath Star Wars’ defense of Ingram.
This is not the first time* Kinel made videos against Black women employed by Lucasfilm, previously going after “Star Wars:The High Republic” show host, Krystina Arielle, for her “documented history of dozens of anti-white tweets.” The video was in response to an article posted by Fandom Menace YouTuber, John Trent, on his blog Bounding Into Comics*. The article featured a post by Itchy Bacca* that dug up all tweets Arielle had made about white people.
A day after the article and videos by Fandom Menace members including Kinel* were published, Arielle posted a small sample of the racist hostility that was sent to her from Fandom Menace followers.
The article was representative of an on-going series that put a target on multiple authors and filmmakers working with Lucasfilm including Zoraida Cordova*, Rebecca Roanhorse*, Alexander Freed*, Rae Carson*, Daniel Jose Older*, Justina Ireland*, Amy Ratcliffe*, Lydia Kang*, Gary Whitta*, Chuck Wendig*, Claudia Gray*, and Leslye Headland*. In many of these cases, Fandom Menace members including Itchy, Trent, Griggs, Hambly, and Kinel would create outrage among their followers in multiple* videos* targeting* Lucasfilm* employees* that seemingly confirmed their conspiracy theory that Lucasfilm promotes “bigotry against white males.*”
These tweets usually contained employees’ lived experiences of racism or general commentary on racist institutions or socialization in the United States.
Once again, this tactic was used against Jones by Breitbart in 2016*. After Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter, Breitbart accused Jones of racism against white people by spotlighting all tweets Jones had ever made about white people.
The consistent YouTube videos where Griggs, Kinel or other Fandom Menace members would troll through Itchy’s articles inevitably led to targeted harassment of these authors and employees on Twitter, most notably Carson and Ireland.*
The harassment against Arielle was particularly egregious because it was boosted by alt-right reactionary Jack Posobiec, a hate monger with ties to white nationalists including neo-nazi Richard Spencer and Scott Greer, author of No Campus for White Men: The Transformation of Higher Education into Hateful Indoctrination.
Following Lucasfilm’s public support of Arielle against the racist attacks, Trent hosted Posobiec* on his YouTube channel.
White Nationalism At Center of Fandom Menace YouTube Videos
At a glance, The Fandom Menace’s obsession with “proving” racism against white people should make any reasonable person question the validity of the “fan movement.” The Fandom Menace platforming a conspiracy theorist with white nationalist ties should, at the very least, raise a few eyebrows. The deeper one gets into the hundreds and hundreds of videos trying to convince followers of grand conspiracies of cultural subversion, however, the more it becomes clear that The Fandom Menace exists to sell a future not too dissimilar from the one championed by Richard Spencer.
Spencer is commonly attributed to rebranding white nationalism as the “alt right.” In 2011, he became president of the National Policy Institute, a white-nationalist think tank that aims to “study the consequences of the ongoing influx that non-Western populations pose to our national identity.”
Spencer would be instrumental in recruiting young, radicalized white men championing “Great Replacement Theory,” an antisemitic and racist conspiracy that Jews and people of color intend to overthrow white Christians’ position at the top of society, often by force. The theory has been galvanized by white nationalist organizations in the United States for decades, including anti-immigration publication and Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) designated hate group, VDARE.
Many of NPI’s ideas were mainstreamed in the lead up to the election of Donald Trump by Breitbart. Yiannopoulos reached out to notable white nationalists including Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer of neo-nazi banned website The Daily Stormer and Devin Saucier, editor of white nationalist magazine and SPLC designated hate group American Renaissance, to publish a feature on the “alt right” entitled “An Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt Right.” Their definition of “alt right” included everybody from hate mongers and eugenicists to 4chan meme creators. It also described VDARE, American Renaissance and Spencer’s AlternativeRight.com as “a gathering point for an eclectic mix of renegades who objected to the established political consensus in some form or another.” The article is arguably a watershed moment for the American right wing’s shift from libertarianism and stalwart conservatism into far right ideology.
According to e-mails obtained by Buzzfeed, Executive Chairman of Breitbart, Steve Bannon, demanded Yiannopoulos create content that would outrage the site’s growing alt-right base on social media and “help save western civilization.” To achieve this, Yiannopoulos turned to Saucier for feedback on his stories. Saucier commented on one of Yiannopoulos’s anti-immigration pieces*, that he “especially [liked] the references to European identity and the Western greats.” Buzzfeed’s Joseph Bernstein notes, “indeed, a major part of Yiannopoulos’s role within Breitbart was aggressively testing limits around racial and anti-Semitic discourse.” This discourse would find its way into fandom subcultures through the harassment campaigns in gaming and film that Breitbart championed.
This may explain the preoccupation with white identity, and furthermore the conspiracy that white identity is being systemically attacked by Hollywood, in pop-culture based groups such as The Fandom Menace. For example, on Disney Star Wars is Dumb, Itchy writes* that “hatred of the white male appears to be a prerequisite for getting hired by Lucasfilm.” Itchy also discusses* “Lucasfilm’s bizarre obsessive hatred for straight white male Christians.”
Griggs echoes this conclusion in his video* commenting on Star Wars’ support of Arielle, contending that Star Wars’ denunciation of racism against Arielle is all part of a bigger plot by Lucasfilm to hire “blatant racists” that “[trash] the customers.” Kinel affirms Griggs’ statements, claiming in a video* against Ingram that Lucasfilm is “fine with [their] employees hating white people.”
The underlying fear perpetuated by key Fandom Menace members that cultural institutions previously seen as “white” are now against white identity aligns with fear voiced by noted white nationalists. Spencer tells The Atlantic that “our lived experience is being a young white person in 21st century America seeing your identity be demeaned.” Nathan Damigo, founder of white nationalist group Identity Evropa, agrees with Spencer, declaring that “[white men are] trying to break through the largest taboo of our times: identity for people of European heritage.”
If looking specifically for how this fear is articulated towards popular culture by white nationalists, one only has to turn to Michael Thompson. Thompson is a noted white nationalist and VDARE contributor who founded the blog “Stuff Black People Don’t Like.” He is also vocal about instigating* a racist trolling campaign in Star Wars fandom. Thompson has claimed credit for “#BoycottStarWarsVII,” a hashtag campaign aimed at directing racist hate towards non-white members of the Star Wars cast including Oscar Issac, Lupita Nyong’o and John Boyega.
In an article published* after the release of The Last Jedi on VDARE entitled “THE LAST JEDI: Are Whites Getting The Message That Disney Doesn’t Want Them?”, Thompson laments the “anti-white direction the Star Wars franchise is headed” due to the Disney take-over. Thompson then speaks to a New York Times article by Nathalia Holt. The piece spotlights women employees at Lucasfilm, including former Story Group lead Kiri Hart, who has been a target of Itchy*, Van Sciver*, and Griggs*. Thompson writes, “[t]he Holt article is nothing more than a celebration of these multiracial SJW commissars and their drive to de-whiten the Star Wars universe.”
It’s unclear if Itchy, Kinel, Griggs or any Fandom Menace members are aware that they are pushing white nationalist ideology from the foremost white nationalist institutions in the United States, and profiting from it on YouTube. However, there are a few clues that provide potential insight into their true beliefs. For example, during the Capitol insurrection Itchy Bacca supported the Proud Boys, a general hate group who has participated in white nationalist movements including Unite The Right.
Also of note, the editor-in-chief of GeeksandGamers.com, Alex Gherzo, follows white nationalist and contributor to Richard Spencer’s Radix Journal, Scott Greer, on far right social media site Gab. The site has been described as a “haven for white nationalists.” Griggs, under the name of his personal YouTube channel and Twitter account, DDayCobra, also has an account on Gab with ~2k followers.
Hambly maintains a profile on Gab, as well, with 5.3k followers. Additionally, in a recent video, YouTuber Keffals, who Hambly accused of being a pedophile based solely on her identity as a trans woman, revealed that Hambly has partnered with StoneToss, a comic creator who often features fascist ideology and holocaust denial in his work.
Furthermore, Kinel has made light of police brutality by mocking the murder of George Floyd.
Whether or not Fandom Menace affiliates can be considered white nationalists themselves does not change the fact that sympathy for and assertion of white nationalist beliefs is a driving force of many Fandom Menace videos. For example, in a 2018 video Griggs proclaims*:
“Star Wars is no longer about a galaxy far far away. All Star Wars is since Disney took over is a social justice warrior experiment. It’s a place to virtue signal and prove to everyone that you respect women and you respect minorities…and you don’t care if white men are involved. As a matter of fact, according to Rian Johnson, he says we need less white dudes involved with Star Wars, his exact quote. This is what Star Wars has become. It has become nothing more than a political machine that Disney is trying to grandstand on.”
Griggs’ concern that there is a lack of white men at Disney was set off by a tweet by Director Ava DuVernay where the director celebrated her friend, Victoria Mahoney’s, new role as second unit director on Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. The announcement garnered some press attention for Mahoney, who was the first Black woman to hold the job at Lucasfilm.
Over several minutes, Griggs tears down the tweet, claiming that the second unit director position had been “invented” and insisting that Mahoney was hired “based on just race and gender” and likely not her resume (keeping in mind that Griggs has made 40+ videos decrying the achievements of one of the most successful film producers of all time). Griggs’ focus on “less white dudes” at the beginning of the video suggests that Griggs takes issue not only with a Black woman occupying a space historically controlled by white men, but also of the celebration of this achievement.
The latter point, in particular, is a common talking point in white nationalist circles. In an NPI recruitment video, Spencer professes “as long as whites continue to avoid and deny their own racial identity, at a time when almost every other racial and ethnic category is rediscovering and asserting its own, whites will have no chance to resist their dispossession.”
This “dispossession” is center to The Great Replacement. The current idea of the The Great Replacement is summarized in an interview with white nationalist Jared Taylor. Taylor tells Vice, “I voted for Donald Trump for one reason…his policies, if implemented, would slow the dispossession of whites in the United States. If he were to deport all illegal immigrants. If he were to think very hard about letting in any Muslims. All of this would slow the rate at which whites are becoming a minority.”
While you won’t hear The Fandom Menace discussing Great Replacement theory by name, the topics of their videos align with the belief. This is especially true for videos that claim that roles and positions at the forefront of culture, which have historically been occupied by white men, are now being occupied by people of color to fulfill a “woke agenda.”
Thompson spells this out in a 2019 article* for VDARE on growing diversity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Thompson explains that the MCU “cannot be left out of The Great Replacement.” He continues, “more wokeness is coming, as the producers and directors of these obscenely profitable blockbusters fashion a new non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual MCU. The normal white man will be exiled. Who better than a black bisexual woman or “married” homosexual man, after all, to save the universe!”
Similarly, whenever there is any story of a white man not being the central participant to film or TV projects, Fandom Menace YouTubers are quick to paint this as a political and cultural operation against white people. For example, when Jordan Peele announced that he has no interest in casting a white man for a lead role, Griggs exclaimed* that “our culture is moving towards where it’s all anti-white and anti-white male.”
Media being “anti-white male” is a particular obsession in white nationalist spaces, especially as it pertains to the moral and authoritative power of leading white male characters. For example, while speaking about The Last Jedi being anti-white, Thompson states that the first step to “de-whiten” Star Wars occurred when people of color were cast as the “good guys,” while the “bad guys” were comprised of overwhelmingly white men.
Thompson queries, “…we must constantly reinforce white males are the bad guys, right?…[A]s the cultural war changed to being overtly anti-white, so the good guys of Star Wars became more diverse and non-white.” Here, Thompson is specifically referring to Luke Skywalker, “the blond, blued-eyed Jedi Knight.” He writes,“[i]n our more enlightened era, diversity is here to save us…This is why your beloved Luke Skywalker was cast so indifferently in The Last Jedi.”
Ryan Kinel has a video echoing this same sentiment. In a video* by Kinel titled “Lucasfilm HATES Luke Skywalker and White Men,” Kinel accuses Lucasfilm of stripping Skywalker of his achievements in canon and awarding them instead to other non-male characters. Kinel states:
“That white male, all he did was the last little bit, everyone else had a lot more to do with it. Things like that are very common place. Making Luke Skywalker look like less of a hero, making him look like a dirt bag…the same way we’ve seen them do it to our other heroes…That is what we’ve been saying for the longest time…They want [Luke Skywalker] to remain a failure, they want him to be replaced by all these other people.”
Kinel’s statements are in response to an article by Fandom Menace outlet Pirates and Princesses who wrote about a “rumored movement” from “within Lucasfilm and parts of Disney” to “[push] for the cancellation of any Caucasian male leads in any future feature length films for the foreseeable future.” The now deleted article reads, “we’ve now gone full circle from the days of outright racism to a time once more when we actively discriminate systemically in favor and against certain races,” the assertion drawing similarities to Spencer sycophant Al Stankard’s concern that there is “racial discrimination institutionally against white people.”
Griggs also expresses a similar fear that Disney uses other characters — namely non-white, non-male characters — to displace and/or upstage established male heroes in (white) popular culture. In a livestream* where Griggs, Kinel, and Buechler discuss Lucasfilm’s defense of Moses Ingram, Griggs contends “if Disney would have done Top Gun Maverick, Tom Cruise would have been a drunken fucking failure…and there would be some Black woman who’s already top of everything at Top Gun, broken all of his records, she’s a legend …and she’s all like, you know, respected.”
The argument that white men are being replaced by non-white and non-male characters or turned into characters with lacking morality (i.e. “dirt bags”, “drunks”) while women and minorities are written as heroes is central to the cultural beliefs of white nationalist ideology.
In a September 2013 column for National Policy Institute, Spencer writes:
“What blocks our progress is the meme that has been carefully implanted in White people’s minds over the course of decades of programming, from Mississippi Burning to Lee Daniel’s The Butler — that any kind of positive racial feeling among Whites is inherently evil and stupid and derives solely from bigotry and resentment. And that the political and social advancement of non-Whites is inherently moral and wonderful.”
White nationalists believe that culture is vital to the image of white people and, more importantly, the perception the audience will have of white people compared to non-white people. This is why control and portrayal of white identity as a force for moral good within a narrative is so important to white nationalists. They believe that if white people do not hold these positions in media, then white people will lose that position in society. For this reason, it is essential for white nationalists that white people remain the heroes while minorities be cast as either subservient or as morally bad.
Thompson has a book on this subject called Hollywood in Blackface where he asserts:
“…Hollywood is one of the primary cultural unifiers. Filmmakers skillfully manipulate character and dialogue, conflict and action, in ways that allow them to cast positive and negative images; in so doing, filmmakers profoundly shape the perceptions their audiences hold of different racial groups which they, the audience, rarely encounter in real life. It is through this constant and careful manipulation of Black characters in popular films that has manufactured a positive representation for all Black people…that reality just cannot replicate.
Now even Thor, a movie based upon Nordic gods and mythology, has cast Black actor Idris Elba as a Northern European deity. Often characters such as these…provide moral clarity and guidance, helping the feckless white protagonist to overcome some obstacle or achieve some quest, and thus the positive image of the Black person is manufactured.”
In other words, white nationalists fear the potential media has to influence the national perception and acceptance of other races and cultures outside of the white identity.
Kinel articulates this fear in his review* of The Batman. In the review, he criticizes the film for not having more white people in morally good roles and, instead, casting Black actors to play the heroes. In this review he states,
“There were only a couple good people in this movie. You had Bruce Wayne and you had Alfred. Those are the only two good white people. The rest of the…other major players that I would consider… moral good people were…Jim Gordon, who’s Black in this…Catwoman, who’s not white in this. And then you had the mayor, who’s a Black woman. Did not like that.”
After Kinel’s comments were derided on Twitter as racist, Kinel released a video, which only managed to reaffirm beliefs typically held by white nationalists. Kinel states, “[The Batman film review] was talking about the fact that every other white person, every single white person in this movie was portrayed as evil. Every living white person in this movie was portrayed as an evil piece of garbage except for Batman and Alfred…you can’t get away from that agenda in Hollywood right now.”
Kinel has also referred to race swapping* traditionally white-male characters like Robin Hood as “bastardizing” the source material. While Kinel claims his frustration is with the lack of creativity in Hollywood, he did not have the same to say for yet another portrayal of Batman.
In his review of The Batman, he states that Robert Pattinson “nailed it.” At least this time, nobody has to assume that Kinel prefers characters who reaffirm his white identity. On a livestream, Kinel confirms about Pattinson’s Batman, “he’s white, so I liked him.”
Van Sciver Receives YouTube Strike for Hate Speech, Cheers For Dox of Lucasfilm Employee on Far Right Hate Site
On a livestream in March 2021 titled “ZACK SNYDER disses THE FANDOM MENACE,” Van Sciver states “[Zack Snyder will] never stop me from killing Chinese people. Ever. I don’t care how many movies he makes.” Comicsgate supporter and YouTuber Jon Malin agrees with Van Sciver’s comments, adding “we haven’t killed enough.” Van Sciver continues, “give me a tommy gun and line em up against the wall, as the great Stan Lee once said.”
This blatant hate speech against Asians was of course argued as a “joke” by Van Sciver and supporters, fueled by anger over Justice League director Zack Snyder refusing to associate himself with Geeks and Gamers. Snyder then spoke out against the hate crime that occurred in Georgia in March 2021 where 6 Asian women were killed by a white gunman. This caused several Fandom Menace members including Van Sciver, Griggs and Kinel to suggest that Snyder was accusing Geeks and Gamers of killing Asian people.
The day after the livestream, my co-host and I made the decision to post Van Sciver’s hate speech without comment, resulting in enough people demanding that YouTube remove the video. This caused Van Sciver to create a conspiracy theory aided by Kiwi Farms and The Fandom Menace that Rewriting Ripley was a Disney PR firm trying to deplatform him. This theory was based only on several tweets that I had exchanged with a former Lucasfilm employee in early 2020.
Before my personal information was released on Kiwi Farms, including my full name, employer and details and pictures of my old address, Van Sciver threatened my co-host and I on his YouTube channel. “Who are you bitches,” he shouts*, “we will destroy you.”
That night, Dataracer117 and Hambly released my full name and employer on their twitter accounts. According to posts in the comicsgate thread on Kiwi Farms, Hambly had taken this information from users on Kiwi Farms.
In Hambly’s case, this was mostly for views. While death threats can be found in the comments of videos made about me* (that contained dug up pictures of me with information about my location), Hambly typically attaches himself to these controversies to gain followers, as evidenced by the multiple videos he made about the event.
Kiwi Farms aims to dig up internet history that can be used to troll dissenters for the “fun” of causing emotional harm, as seen in several cases where their tactics have led to suicide. However, sometimes their doxxing does have the goal of promoting physical harm, evidenced by Kiwi Farms user Furyan who wrote, “I don’t dox people just to show their address on Google Maps. I dox people to hurt them.”
The Fandom Menace, heavily aided by Kiwi Farms, also used the event to continue targeting Lucasfilm employees. A former Lucasfilm employee’s personal information and the information of their parents’ location was released alongside my information and the personal information of my co-host on Kiwi Farms.
Van Sciver reacted to the doxxing of the former Lucasfilm employee, my co-host and myself, celebrating one doxxing thread with a “winner” reaction.
What perhaps was most telling about the retaliation to the YouTube strike, however, was the attention the event received from far right circles that promoted harassment against journalists.
Immediately following Hambly’s tweets containing my name and employer, an anonymous twitter user began to troll the Rewriting Ripley twitter account with death threats alongside my personal information. Hambly claimed with no evidence that I had created the account in order to make myself the victim, a tactic, if you recall, that he used to deny any harassment against Kelly Marie Tran.
Even though the tweets contained continued and pointed harassment and threats, Twitter denied any violation of their policy. The account then went after a CNN reporter, where the account was also not found by Twitter to be violating any policy.
All of this happened as the UN was investigating a larger movement on the far right that targeted and harassed female journalists. In some cases, women were doxxed and terrorized at their homes by anonymous online accounts. While my co-host and I are not journalists, we were releasing content that has a higher likelihood of making women targets of these harassment campaigns given the nature of our research. Followers of The Fandom Menace, notably Hambly, appear to overlap with this group.
The Fandom Menace Platforms Banned YouTubers, Likens Themselves to Far Right Extremists
Van Sciver has drifted from The Fandom Menace in recent months (though he has recently made a return*). “It wasn’t fun anymore,” Van Sciver explains, “Disney actively became evil.” However, Van Sciver assures his viewers that YouTubers like Griggs, Kinel, Hambly and Buechler will continue to stay active. “They make fun of Star Wars, they make fun of awful Marvel movies and comics and they make money.”
In the past twelve months, Griggs and Kinel have moved even more towards platforming far right politics, notably taking aim at Disney’s diversity and inclusion initiative, Reimagine Tomorrow, with video titles such as “Disney Pushes Disgusting CRT Agenda “Reimagine Tomorrow” After Facing Massive Backlash.”
In the video, Kinel takes specific issue with Disney’s mission to champion accurate representation both on and off screen. Kinel gripes*:
“Accurate representation? Are you sure that’s what you want?…I think if you actually go for accurate representation…you might not have enough of the check box ticked off if you want accurate representation instead of pushing an over-representation of certain things.”
On VDARE*, Thompson voices the same concern that Disney is including LGBTQ+,and non-white persons in their films instead of putting more white characters on screen. “Reimagine Tomorrow is the bold new initiative by Disney to create a world where white men have basically no part in the corporation,” Thompson writes, “yes, The Great Replacement comes to Disney.”
The Fandom Menace’s move into explicitly platforming right wing dog whistles like the incorrect use of “CRT” has also been accompanied by platforming banned YouTuber, race baiter, and far right wing extremist Alex Jones.
In 2018, Jones was banned from YouTube after repeated violations of YouTube’s harassment policy and policies against hate speech. Examples include inciting violence against individuals or spreading harmful misinformation. Said violations are given a platform on Buechler’s channel, Nerdrotic.
On Friday Night Tights #162*, Hambly, Buechler, Kinel, Griggs and special guest Alex Jones paint a picture of America controlled by a globalist empire of “corporate mind control behavioral psychologists”, “Maoist cultural revolution types”, and a Disney-backed “army of pedophiles.”
“Billions will be killed by 2030,” Jones claims, “the globalists are setting you up for a societal collapse. They’re going to kill you…Almost every one watching this in 9 years will be dead unless we turn this around.” According to Jones, these globalists include U.S Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Former U.S. Representative Beto O’Rourke, members of the Bilderberg Group, and Disney employees who Jones claims have no humanity and will “rape an eight year old.”
Also leading to this ominous, depopulated future are hoaxes about climate change and vaccine mandates. “Millions of people are already dead from vaccines,” Jones insists, in continuous fear mongering about the COVID-19 vaccine that is undoubtedly against YouTube’s ban on vaccine misinformation. He presents only a vaguely readable chart on an unsourced piece of paper through his video camera as proof.
Jones also claims that Covid lockdowns are “trauma based mind control” to help the “communist overthrow” of the United States. That is, of course, unless Jones and his followers fight back.
“I’m working seven days a week because the war against humanity is now,” Jones declares. Buechler responds, “[the war] doesn’t take fucking days off.”
Jones does present a solution to stopping this horrific imminent genocide of the human population. “Hang [“psychotic predators”] until they’re dead,” Jones actions. “We’re going to beat you people after you’ve been indicted and tried and found guilty of war crimes. We’re going to publicly execute your ass..we’re going to hang these people.”
Buechler replies, “we got comfortable and they took advantage of it.”
“Your lives are all in danger,” Jones insists again towards the end of his appearance on the channel. “This is a takeover and it’s not a game…so I appreciate you guys and I look forward to having you on my show.”
After Jones exits the stream, The Fandom Menace members continue with their typical schedule of harassing Lucasfilm employees. They target Sam Maggs, a frequent* target* of The Fandom Menace and Comicsgate, who was formally tied to the Knights Of The Old Republic video game remake. After learning that Maggs featured in a Gamergate-era TV interview condemning hackers for simulating virtual rape in GTA V, YouTuber HeelvsBabyface tells Maggs to “go fuck every fucking orifice, bitch.”
Jones’ second appearance on Buechler’s channel* features Jones and company inciting support for investigating so-called “election fraud,” claiming that the Biden “deep state” are manufacturing mass shooting to distract from low approval ratings, and asserting that Disney is manufacturing racism.
Buechler also suggests that what he does on his YouTube channel is not far off from what Jones has been platforming his entire career. He states that “[information wars are] something we’ve been fighting for years,” referring to the hundreds of videos uploaded by himself, Griggs, Hambly, Kinel, Van Sciver and other Fandom Menace members. “Before I showed up, Alex has been fighting this for years. I do it on a very small level with Disney,” Buechler affirms.
Like Jones, Buechler continues to drum up fear for the impending changes in culture and politics. “When we call it out in entertainment…we’re called bigots.” Buechler actions, “the meteor is descending. We need to get out in front of this now.”
Deplatforming Is The Only Solution
Almost everything I have presented here is currently not in violation of YouTube’s guidelines. These cycles of abuse are permitted since, by design, there is no hate speech or insults directed at individuals. This allows these YouTubers to churn out video after video on conspiracies and controversies they create themselves, each of these videos and livestreams taking in money from YouTube’s monetization features.
This is why simply calling out bigotry from these YouTubers won’t work. While I appreciate outlets like Gizmodo and Wired suggesting that Lucasfilm needs to call out the “bigoted part of the fandom,” Lucasfilm addressing racist hate from The Fandom Menace is what they are hoping for. Any engagement will only allow these YouTubers to monetize and grow their audience. For example, when Twitter users called out Kinel on racist statements made in his The Batman review, Kinel boasted later on a livestream, that “I think I got like a thousand subscribers yesterday.”
This is why the only solution is to deplatform.
I initially never wanted to advocate for deplatforming because, frankly, I thought these people weren’t worth that kind of attention. But I observed something interesting when my co-host and I were able to remove one of Van Sciver’s videos for hate speech: these YouTubers were terrified. They need YouTube.
Nothing made this more apparent than a comment on Kiwi Farms where user glbtev addresses a Rewriting Ripley tweet reposting Van Sciver’s threat against Asian people. “Ethan’s done a bunch to bully proof his business,” the user writes, “but YouTube is obviously one avenue they can still get him. He should’ve been more careful given how much Comicsgate relies on YouTube to sell their product.”
If it’s not clear to you by now that these YouTubers know exactly what they’re doing, it should be.
Yiannopoulos and Breitbart were incredibly successful in crafting a playbook for targeted harassment that exploited many loopholes in platform community guidelines. Yiannopoulos encouraged followers to harass named individuals indirectly through attacking something related to them, like the character a target played on screen. This bypasses rules against harassment on major social platforms. The only reason why Yiannopoulos is not still platformed today is because Jack Dorsey made an exception when given evidence that Yiannopoulos was inciting harassment. His tweets, however, were not technically against policy.
Furthermore, by framing racist targeted harassment as political “free speech,” it’s become easy for YouTubers to attack marginalized individuals. YouTubers like Kinel and Griggs don’t have to employ explicit insults or slurs based on gender or race to incite harassment. They can create hate towards Arielle, Ireland, and other targets by simply claiming they are “racist bigots against white people.” That doesn’t violate any policy.
Additionally, employing white nationalist ideology to create momentum for said conspiracies is not against policy either. However, it does bring up the question: how committed are social media platforms to actually addressing targeted racism?
If the intent and result of what would otherwise be accomplished by hate speech is the same without ever using hate speech, why are we not treating clear cases of organized, targeted racist harassment as racist harassment?
Critics will say this is promoting “censorship,” but blanket censorship should never be the solution. For this reason, I understand why YouTube and other social media platform guidelines are written the way they are written. However, asking to evaluate evidence of harassment enabled by a handful of YouTubers is not requesting censorship, it’s requesting consequences. This is about evaluating action, not words. This is about evaluating intent and results, not association or happenstance.
At the time of publication, Van Sciver on his YouTube account “ComicArtistPro Secrets” has 147k subscribers. Griggs’ “Geeks + Gamers” has 341k subscribers. Buechler’s “Nerdrotic” has over 500k subscribers. Kinel’s RK Outpost has 159k subscribers. And Hambly’s “TheQuartering” has 1.24M subscribers.
That’s hundreds of thousands, potentially over 1M people, who are being fed a conspiracy theory rooted deeply in white nationalist ideology that culture is turning systemically against white men, erasing them from culture in favor of other races and genders.
That’s hundreds of thousands of people who are consistently given targets to blame for this supposed erasure.
That’s hundreds of thousands of people being rallied to take action against said targets, their beliefs and their identity.
As the United States becomes less and less white and culture continues to represent that demographic shift, are social media platforms like Twitter and Youtube committed to protecting the marginalized communities who will continue to be impacted by targeted hate?
Methodology:
All twitter data was collected using a python script from Github that leveraged Twitter’s API.
Data does not include tweets from locked accounts or tweets that have been deleted or suspended at the time of the data pull. Data includes 52,463 tweets mentioning “@starwars” between May 30th, 2022 and June 1, 2022. This included tweets mentioning the Star Wars account and replies to the Star Wars account.
Keyword Analysis
To find top used keywords, tweets were cleaned in R and leveraged the libraries (library (tm)), (library(stringr)). Words were removed from the analysis including all stop words and “https”, “wars”, “star”, “http”, “com”, “youtu”, “youtube”, “starwars”, “moses”, “ingram”, “reva” and “www.”
Top keywords were obtained from a wordcloud visualization created using (library(wordcloud)). Minimum frequency to be featured in the wordcloud = 1,000.
Themes for top used words were grouped into categories:
Writing/Character
Keywords: “character”, “acting”, “writing”, “actress”, “actor”, “story”, and “written.”
Race
Keywords: “race”, “black”, “racism”, “racist,” “racists,” “white,” and “china”
Tweets were analyzed for keywords using (=SUMPRODUCT( — ISNUMBER(SEARCH(‘Themes Greater than 1k’!$B$2:$B$7,Edited!H27928)))>0 where range = keyword groups.
After grouping together tweets with frequently used keywords (n=8,654), tweets with ≥ 25 total engagements (likes + comments + retweets) were sorted manually for sentiment (n=656).
Tweets were considered “For” if they tweeted in defense of Moses Ingram. Tweets were considered “Against” if they tweeted negatively about the Star Wars account or Moses Ingram. Tweets were considered “N/A” if they either 1) were off topic or 2) were part of a related conversation that was multiple tweets removed from the original Star Wars tweet in the reply section.
Final raw data set can be found here.
Follower Analysis
Followers were analyzed for tweets categorized as “Against.” Followers were analyzed manually and confirmed on https://doesfollow.com/. To be considered “following” The Fandom Menace, users had to be following a minimum of 3 Fandom Menace accounts that were identified here.
