Why Banning Nazis is Good, Actually

If you’re familiar with speedruns, video games, charity events, the Prevent Cancer Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, or the general concept of lots of people getting together to do something really good, then you’ve probably heard of Games Done Quick, a semi-annual week-long event in which a wide variety of video games are played as fast and as entertainingly as possible in order to raise money for the previously mentioned good causes. They’ve raised more than seven and a half million dollars for Doctors Without Borders and more than ten million dollars for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. And they’ve done this all by getting together and playing a bunch of video games.

If you’re familiar with Games Done Quick, you probably have a list of your own favourite runs and moments. Mine would be Naegleria’s Sonic the Hedgehog run of Summer Games Done Quick 2013, Witwix’s 100% I Wanna Be The Boshy run at Awesome Games Done Quick 2015, any of the blindfolded runs of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out (which I can’t believe they eventually beat), anything by ProtoMagicalGirl, and Bonesaw577’s legendary Jak & Daxter run, which is just, wow, unbelievable. As for favourite moments, it’s not unusual to see a world record, a newly-discovered frame-perfect trick or game-breaking bug – sometimes all three at the same time – and the commentary is always providing comedy gold. And when there’s a break for some donations to be read, they can be heartwarming, tear-jerking, or hilarious; or, again, a mixture of all three. Shout-out to the anonymous hero ‘Spamsack’ who sent in the donation “I lost my virginity to a beautiful girl and my dad to cancer. One of these was awesome and done quick, the other not so much.”

But if you’re familiar with Games Done Quick, you may also be aware of the multitude of trashy dramas surrounding the event. We’re not here to talk about most of those, for the simple reason that they are trashy dramas and I have little to no interest in them. The big scoops usually involve bans of some kind, and I hate to ‘Both Sides!’ this topic, given that we will shortly be moving onto the discussion of an actual Nazi, but I would like to throw out that I’m not suggesting that everyone who criticizes a GDQ ban, or has a critique of the event in general, is automatically stupid and wrong. One of the favourite runs I just mentioned earned its runner a six month ban which I would definitely disagree with, but not to the extent that it would sour my opinion of a charity event that raises millions of dollars for great causes while incorporating some of my favourite video games.

Most of the complaints are based around one element; the fact that Games Done Quick is a much larger event than it used to be, and it’s definitely lost some of its personable, rough-around-the-edges charm, the kind that it used to have when the event was literally hosted in the basement of one of the runner’s mothers. It’s now a lot more professional, there’s more planning and an official opening and closing to the event, and skits, and prizes, and generally the tone of a PG-13 film. And to these complaints, I say, well, no shit! (Which I wouldn’t actually be able to say at a Games Done Quick event, but still) Of course the event is more professional, it has sponsors and organizers and it makes millions of dollars every year for charity. Of course they’re going to want as many viewers as possible. And it’s not like they aren’t still playing a bunch of awesome games that are done quick, so unless the only thing attracting you to GDQ was the frequency you heard someone say “Fuck!” then I don’t see the big deal.

And then there are the manufactured dramas, the biggest being in Awesome Games Done Quick 2017, when some people snuck in a couple of MAGA hats to wear in the audience, and they were promptly ejected, and then they immediately started posting online about how they were being discriminated against for their politics, in spite of the fact that they knew GDQ’s official policy when it comes to making any sort of political statement on their stream, which is ‘Don’t’. Although there is something quite beautiful about a very small and insignificant group of idiots knowingly breaking the rules and then trying to complain that they’re being treated unfairly. There’s a reason why this wasn’t the event-ending controversy it hoped to be.

And for the sake of balance again, I should disclose that if you’re on the same side as these idiots, then I don’t automatically think you’re stupid or a racist. I do think that you probably have a fantasy, deep down, about a radical AntiFa activist breaking into your house to accuse you of assuming the house’s gender, and when you try to call the police to have them ejected, you accidentally say ‘policeman’ instead of ‘policeperson’ and you’re sent straight to prison for hate speech, and the judge, a blue-haired vegan feminist, sentences you to death for not pleading guilty to your white privilege, and as you’re strapped to the electric chair, you weep – not with remorse, but with joy – because in the last few moments of your life, you finally have what you’ve been looking for all along; proof that you, anonymous young to middle-aged white conservative man, are actually the single most persecuted human being on the face of the planet, and the realisation that you were right all along gives you more joy than a dozen afternoons of scrambling in the dumpster behind your local Starbucks, writing ‘Merry Christmas’ on all of their discarded ‘Happy Holidays’ cups.

… I’m trying to be more professional, but I’m still me, you know?

But we’re not here to talk about those attention-seeking turds, we’re here to talk about Nazis. One Nazi in particular. In December 2018, Games Done Quick announced that a popular runner who hadn’t been to any of their events for a few years, RWhiteGoose, would not be allowed to return to any future events. He was a reasonably popular GoldenEye runner and little information was given in regards to why he had been banned, although there was some pre-existing drama between himself and another runner with mainly involved both of them trying to have the other’s times kicked off the official leaderboards. It’s an integral part of the story, apparently, but you can see why it pales in comparison with “and then one of them was a Nazi.”

Now, I will not lie to you. I don’t like to admit it because I don’t like feeding in, even in the tiniest bit, to the garbage right-wing “Oh, you just call everyone you don’t like a Nazi!” mindset which stopped being anything but petulant whining when Nazis felt safe enough to organize rallies with tiki torches and murder some people every now and then. But the first time I saw RWhiteGoose described as a Nazi in this situation, there was a tiny part of me that thought “Okay, but… I mean, what tier is he on? Is this a PewDiePie situation where “Oops! I accidentally went and did a Nazi thing!” Or is this like a racist grandma situation where he shared something bad on Facebook? Or is this genuinely like, he is a full-blown Nazi?”

It, uh, turned out to be the latter. And I was not prepared for what I saw.

It turned out that there was an extensive record of Discord chat logs showing that the White in RWhiteGoose quite clearly stood for white supremacist, and the Goose stood for goose-stepping, and the R presumably stood for racist flaming pile of garbage. Once again, there is some less interesting drama about this regarding the person who leaked the chat logs and whether they are squeaky clean themselves, whether they were revealing this chat logs for the good of Games Done Quick or whether they just didn’t like RWhiteGoose, but once again, this kind of pales in comparison to the revelation that this guy was a fucking Nazi.

Now, when I saw this covered by Apollo Legend and Regular Unofficial Speedrun Highlights, what pissed me off the most was that they completely neglected to cover the things that RWhiteGoose – I’m just going to start calling him Goose because it’s a pain to type like that – had said and done in the chat. A little more on that later, but that means I now have quite an uncomfortable task at hand, because I spent a few minutes scouring the chat logs to find the most reprehensible and occasionally laughable in a weird, pathetic kind of way, stuff that I could find.

Unlike the previous two sources, instead of covering this in the most half-assed way, neglecting to mention all of the disgusting things that Goose said in favour of stirring up outrage with a generic “Games Done Quick bans popular runner for controversial opinions?” clickbait, I’m actually going to show you the things he said. Some of it is funny, some of it is gross, and all of it is pathetic. So I’m going to slap a big fat trigger warning on this, for the primary reason of throwing out a quick “Fuck you” to the kinds of people who hate trigger warnings, and if you want to know exactly what kind of bigoted stuff is in this chat, I would sum it up as… everything.

Let’s get started! Over to you, Goose!

… Honestly starting off with a pretty blunt but tame one. I really like imagining a typical RWhiteGoose fan who’s really angry about this unfounded slander of one of their favourite speedrunners, and eventually they’re given a link to the chat logs themselves, so they check it out – not sure why, because obviously this is just a bunch of hysterical SJWs – and just as they expected, they don’t find anything that could possibly be construed as racis-oh. Oh no.

Let’s get to one of the big ones; the ‘JQ’ or Jewish Question, as seen in the Nazi phrase “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question” is essentially the idea that the existence or presence of Jews in a location is a problem that needs to be addressed. This is pretty much a 10/10 on the Nazi scale, with a bonus 1/10 for RWhitePowerGoose discussing the technique of not mentioning the Nazi conspiracy theory invented and peddled by Nazis to justify the systematic murder of millions of innocent people by Nazis, until the ‘Overton Window’ has shifted far enough to the right that it is once again okay to openly say “Maybe the Nazis had a point about murdering all of those people!” This got dark really fast, here’s a funnier one!

This is my go-to example when people mention this guy because I just love getting to say the following sentence; RWhiteGoose sincerely believes that there is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the porn industry and give most of the leading roles to black men as part of a global effort to cuck and emasculate heterosexual white men. The next time you think you’re being too self-conscious, just imagine this guy seeing a black man in a porn clip for the very first time, crashing like a computer in 1998, and not being able to wake up until he has invented an adequate theory to explain why there’s actually a conspiracy to make him feel bad about his tiny penis.

“I don’t know Dopefish, he’s just linking to a video, how can you be sure that that’s really what he-“

Tag yourself, I’m degenerate, dangerous anal sex.

The sad thing is, while this is definitely one of the more hilariously disgusting things he believes, this doesn’t even come close to being the most cringe-worthy. We’ll get there.

For most online personalities, being outed as a Pizzagate truther – the belief that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta and probably George Soros are running a series of satanic child sex-slavery rings in the basement of a pizza restaurant that doesn’t even have a basement (I like how that’s the bit I italicize, like it was all totally believable up until that point) – would be enough to sink them. This one barely registers on the list of Top 10 Most Ridiculously Stupid Things RWhiteGoose Actually Believes.

I thought I’d just put this one in as a fun game. Guess which minority he’s offending this time! Is it A) Muslims B) Women C) Trans folk or D) Hispanics? The answer is… it could be literally any of them.

If you don’t know who James O’Keefe is, don’t worry, nobody important does. But if you’re unimportant, like me, you might know him as the head of ‘Project Veritas’, that alt-right news source most famous for paying one of their employees to lie about being sexually assaulted by Roy Moore, hoping that someone would take the bait and believe them so that they could reveal that it was fake, thus promoting the message “If we could have been lying about this, so could all of those other women!” Unfortunately, nobody believed them, and if they weren’t already known as literally the worst people in the world, it probably would have hurt their reputation to be known as ‘The people who tried to lie to get you to doubt victims of sexual assault’, but they were, so it didn’t.

Anyway, RWhiteGoose is a big fan of theirs, and was very happy with their reporting into the… *mumbles* running Twitter. Yeah. It was actually a slur I hadn’t even heard of before, and I’m British so I know a lot of them. Our history is basically a long list of slurs we invented to describe other people, and also ourselves.

Getting a little serious there again so let’s lighten the mood. This is the only one that came close to making me feel sorry for RWhiteNationalist, because imagine there being everlasting proof on the internet that you wanted to ‘make white babies’ with Tomi Lahren, who you have presumably begged to keep her Trump-themed socks on. I mean, wow.

But wait, there’s more! Sorry Tomi, looks like you won’t be making white babies with this guy any time soon, not when he has to choose between you and ‘Taylor Swift Aryan Goddess’. Joking aside, I don’t exactly have close ties with Taylor Swift – at least, not any more – but I have a feeling that if she had something to say to the specific people in her fandom who are also advocating for a white ethnostate by kicking the Jews out of their country, it probably wouldn’t be very nice. Although I’m not surprised a Nazi would be attracted to a woman who made a song called “Look What You Made Me Do”.

And here’s a little ‘Best Of’ compilation to finish us off. There were dozens of occasions when RWhiteGoose would do (((this))) to indicate when he was talking about someone Jewish, sometimes specifically, sometimes not, and sometimes he would just surround random negative words with it, like (((problem))) or (((sexual assault))) (?!?!?) So if I could reiterate the main reason behind this blog, and sum up the message I am trying to present, allow me to do so in a way in which I think will be the easiest to understand.

…

Seriously, fuck this guy.

Now, normally a Nazi being a Nazi isn’t much of a news story, but with the gaming community at large remaining the self-absorbed garbage fire that it always has been, when news broke that RWhiteGoose had been banned, or at the very least, Games Done Quick were looking into whether a ban was going to be implemented, a couple of people who I otherwise had respect for immediately jumped onto the bandwagon of complaining about over-sensitive snowflakes and censorship. To reiterate, they were angry because a gaming event was considering rescinding the invitation of a guy who wants to wait until the political climate has moved far enough to the right that he can openly talk once again about exterminating Jews.

But luckily, the speedrun community as a whole has several, uh, ‘reporters’ so to speak, who tend to be medium-sized YouTube channels that cover the highlights and lowlights of most speedrunning events. Two of the biggest that I’m aware of are Apollo Legend and Regular Unofficial Speedrun Hightlights, RUSH for short. And like any people who spend a lot of time talking about video games on the internet and not much else, they are presumably some of the most-qualified people on the planet when it comes to discussing potentially offensive political issues. Just like Notch.

Let’s start with Regular Unofficial Speedrun Highlights because for reasons that will become apparent later I think they’re slightly less garbage, albeit still a very respectably high score on the garbage-meter.

… I can’t help but think that the words ‘FOR BEING A NAZI’ are missing from this thumbnail. I mean, if I was covering the story of a guy who was banned from an event for being a Nazi, I feel like that’s a very integral part of the story that I wouldn’t be glossing over. I would probably lead with that actually, being the most important detail. ‘Nazi banned from speedrunning event’ would be my choice of words. In fact, I would go one further, because while most matters can be covered objectively, Nazis are objectively fucking trash, so I would include the sentiment that it was right for the Nazi to be banned in the headline. ‘Speedrunning Event rightly bans Nazi from attending’ would probably be my headline, or something like it.

Now, here’s why this isn’t quite as garbage as Apollo’s video. This was posted on December 8^th, right when the story was first breaking. And while this would make a great cautionary tale about waiting until you have all of the facts before making a dramatic video declaring that one of your friends has been banned from a popular event, when it would later be revealed that the reason for this is that he was a fucking Nazi, then it’s also slightly more understandable, or less bad, I suppose, that they made this mistake when there is a possibility that they literally didn’t know that he was a Nazi. The only evidence that people had that he was a piece of shit was… logs of a Discord chat where he was posting a Jordan Peterson video. Still a pretty strong indicator, to be honest.

Here’s a bigger version of specifically what Goose was saying in the chat. I really hope people read this because I now have 16 different images saved that are named ‘agdqnaziban’ followed by a number.

I have about three things to quickly point out about this. Number one, the Twitter account that posted that tweet has since been suspended, and just in case I need to make myself clearer on this, the fact that Goose turned out to be a huge piece of shit in no way means that I am seeing this person as an anonymous hero who did the right thing at great personal cost, yadda yadda yadda. If I had to guess, I would say they were probably on friendly-ish terms with Goose at one point – at least friendly enough to be in their private Nazi Discord chat, and presumably the Nazi stuff wasn’t a deal-breaker back before they had fallen out, so… eh. That’s complete speculation though. Just sayin’, Goose being garbage doesn’t make this person not-garbage.

Secondly, this is really just a nitpick, but you’ve all seen the stuff that I posted from Goose’s Discord, right? I have to wonder what’s going through someone’s head when they have access to those records, and they want to draw negative attention to someone, and the excerpt they choose isn’t the Jewish Question or porn conspiracy or wanting to make white babies with Tomi Lahren… but the recommendation of a Jordan Peterson video. I mean, Lobster Boy sucks and all, but that wasn’t exactly the best arrow in your quiver, was it?

And that brings me onto the final thing; if all he had done was recommend a Jordan Peterson video then this would be a much more complicated matter and there would have to be a sincere debate regarding how bad it was and the difference it makes that it was in private. To be completely honest, I personally would shed no tears if he had gotten banned for sharing the video, but if someone made the argument that they didn’t think it was offensive and it was in a private chat, then… well, that argument would be a lot harder to refute than it is now that we know he was actually a Nazi the whole time. It’s definitely worth nothing that Games Done Quick at first said that he wouldn’t be banned from the event, and it was only after the more openly White Supremacist things that he said came to light that they told him to fuck off.

So my issue with RUSH is that there are two possibilities here. Either they genuinely did not know about Goose’s personal beliefs, and innocently did not cover them in their haste to address the drama, or they did, and were actively helping to present a truly awful person as a victim of over-sensitive social justice and political correctness. So they only get a middling thumbs down because there is a chance that they were just lazy and didn’t know everything at the time. There’s no evidence that they are buddies with Goose and-

Well, shit. Fuck those guys.

On the one hand, there still exists the possibility that they were moderately friendly with him while not knowing that his beliefs extended into ‘waiting for the right time to start talking about getting rid of the Jews again’, but you know what? Their video went up more than a month ago, and they still haven’t retracted it or posted an update or mentioned in the slightest that it turns out that Goose got banned he was a Nazi. So they still get a big ole’ ‘Fuck you’, only slightly smaller because they might just be really stupid instead of actively lying about the situation.

… Speaking of which, oh dear Apollo Legend. Where did it all go so wrong?

Yes, that’s really the picture he used to illustrate a vocal white supremacist getting banned from an event. Also, now I can’t stop thinking about this shot from a HBomberguy video.

Apollo is a much bigger name in the speedrunning community, and his video on Billy Mitchell ‘The King of Kong’ has close to three and a half million views. He has more than 180,000 subscribers and mostly covers speedrun drama, both the relatively important, and the more minor gossips. Despite being basically identical to the RUSH video – not word for word, just the content and the tone – Apollo’s video has far more dislikes and far more people in the comments are calling him out for what he’s done, and the reason why his video can be considered so much worse than RUSH’s is very simple. Their video was posted on December 8^th, when the details were still a bit fuzzy and it’s entirely plausible that they didn’t know all of the facts. Apollo’s video was posted on December 25^th – so the next time you think you’re having a lousy Christmas, just remember that you’re not uploading YouTube videos about defending Nazis – meaning that there is literally no way that he didn’t know all of the things that Goose said that I’ve posted above.

Somehow, for some completely unfathomable reason, Apollo fails to mention any of them.

He covers the hullaballoo over the Jordan Peterson video, and then… nothing. I suppose it’s still technically possible that he didn’t know about it, but his laziness would have to extend from ‘is unaware of all of the facts’ to ‘willingly went out of his way to avoid the facts about the matter he made a video about for more than a hundred thousand subscribers’.

That’s really all there is to Apollo’s video, he doesn’t cover new ground or present any new facts. Well, there is one change – at the end of the video, Apollo encourages his subscribers to follow Goose on YouTube as well, because it’s unfair that he’s been banned from a speedrunning event for such petty reasons, and he wants to make sure that his friend can still get viewers for his GoldenEye speedruns and occasional ramblings about how he’s sure he would have a world record by now if (((they))) weren’t plotting against him.

Apollo’s video is much worse because he is consciously making the decision to hide the fact that his friend is a Nazi, while asking more people to subscribe to the Nazi because the Nazi really got screwed over by those whiny over-sensitive babies who were bullying him just because he’s a Nazi. Apollo also gets some bonus points for posting a link in the comments to an 80 minute follow-up stream, in which the first 5 minutes are a half-assed non-apology in which he states that he really should have made it clearer that he doesn’t necessarily agree with Goose’s views, he just deliberately omitted them and then told people to subscribe to him. And also, sure he said those Nazi things in private, but that’s what people talk like in private so…

Okay, let’s get onto the final stretch of this article, because while the ‘Should Nazi Punks be told to Fuck Off?’ debate was settled once and for all by The Dead Kennedys as far as I’m concerned, if I’m writing a 5,000 word article about this, I might as well rebut the actual, terrible arguments I’ve seen in Goose’s defence. And speaking of rebutting arguments, I should point out that a fair rebuttal for all of these points is “Goose is a Nazi”.

Let’s try Apollo’s first line of reasoning, that we all say offensive things in private chats. Which says something really damning about what must be going on in his own private chats. I mean, here’s a shot from my DMs on Twitter.

If your first response to the revelation that someone was spreading Nazi philosophy inside a private chat was ‘Well, don’t we all do that?’ then I am very worried for you. It’s not like this wouldn’t be a rational argument on any other subject – I for one have definitely made offensive and childish and downright stupid comments in private chats, but I feel like I could defend them a lot more enthusiastically than I would be able to if they were messages like “tbh I think Hitler had some good ideas.”

The second argument, also courtesy of Apollo, who may as well have made a beeping noise due to how quickly he was backing up, is that even if it isn’t a bad thing that a Nazi got banned from an event, it’s still emblematic of a problem. Which is a perfectly valid point, I mean, I can think of lots of things that are unambiguously positive but also emblematic of problems. Like, uh… um… hmm… pfft. Okay, not to be entirely sarcastic, but that’s pretty much all I can do because the honest rebuttal to this argument is that it’s patently not true. A Nazi getting banned from an event is not emblematic of a wider problem of other people getting banned from events, in the same way that me buying a lottery ticket and then not winning the lottery isn’t emblematic of discrimination against big green fish from Commander Keen 4.

This does tie into the final argument though, and it’s an old classic; the slippery slope. “Well, I’m just saying, one day you’re banning someone for being a Nazi, and then the next day you’re banning someone because you think they’re a Nazi, and etc, etc, suddenly you’re banning someone because you don’t like his shoes!” It’s an old classic, and my response for a while had been… toilet paper.

“Think about it! Toilet paper is a slippery slope! You start off using it to, y’know, clean yourself, but next thing it’ll be enforced by law! The next day there’ll be toilet paper attendants and if they don’t think you’ve used enough then they push you to the ground and spray you with a fire hose! And if you don’t say “Thank you very much, can I have another?” then they throw you in prison and you get the electric chair. That’s why I refuse to use toilet paper. It’s a slippery slope. I just walk around smelling awful all day and nobody wants to be around me. But it’s a slippery slope.”

Not everything is a slippery slope, least of all showing people that there are negative consequences to being a Nazi. Also I’m just going to throw out that if you’ve come here to explain to me that actually while Goose is definitely a bigoted, anti-Semitic, white supremacist, he’s not technically a Nazi, then shut up, reassess your priorities, and then shut up some more.

That just about wraps things up, and to finish on a moderately positive note, I’m writing this a day after the end of Awesome Games Done Quick 2019. I was hoping to get this finished before then so that I could capitalise on it, but I just kept getting distracted from writing this, most often from the amazing runs that Awesome Games Done Quick were featuring. A Mario Kart DS run that was more entertaining than I thought possible for the game, Kratos in a fish costume for God of War II, whatever the hell you would call Sanic Ball… the highlights were amazing, and why wouldn’t I spend time watching them instead of writing about some guy who was too much of a Nazi to be allowed there?

So, kind of hypocritically for someone who just wrote so much about it, let’s not forget what this matter is, in context. This is a tiny, laughable footnote about a tiny, laughable person who couldn’t attend an event that will continue to overshadow them for good reason. Let’s leave this Nazi trash to be the focus of angry overly-long articles on WordPress sites that nobody reads. Let’s focus on the millions of dollars that Games Done Quick have raised for Doctors Without Borders and the Prevent Cancer Foundation, the entertainment they’ve brought to all of us, and the dedication of the runners, commentators, tech crew and donators. Let’s focus on the good that they’ve done.

And banning a Nazi from their event is definitely one of the good things they’ve done.

…

Seriously though, hashtag free Bonesaw. That Jak & Daxter run is incredible and I completely disagree with their decision to-

-The Dopefish