Jeremy Hambly, the popular host of YouTube nerd culture channel The Quartering, was assaulted in the wee hours of Thursday morning at an Indianapolis bar while in town attending Gen Con. According to Hambly, a man in a sleeveless rainbow tee shirt approached him, asked his name, and proceeded to repeatedly punch him in the face when given confirmation.
Amateur investigators have identified Matt Loter, a game store owner and fan of Gen Con guest/con artist Anita Sarkeesian, as Hambly’s attacker. Archived tweets from Loter’s now locked Twitter account appear to confirm that he was spoiling for a fight.
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| Not so easy to find now that he’s wanted for assault. |
In a move that should have surprised no one, Gen Con responded to calls that Loter be removed under a policy that lists committing crimes as a bannable offense by censoring users on its Twitch stream. Con staff have ignored attendee requests to turn Loter over to police or at least ejected from the premises. As of this writing, he’s still on the loose.
Indie comics luminary and fellow YouTuber Ethan Van Sciver started a crowdfunding campaign to pay for a civil suit against Loter on Hambly’s behalf. The legal fund met its goal on the first day.
Loter’s pummeling of Hambly is the kind of incident that shocks normies but that folks on the dissident Right have been warning about for a couple of years now. Centrists who still embrace the label exhibit a strange form of amnesia regarding political violence. Show them the latest public assault on someone to the right of Mao perpetrated by a deranged Lefty, explain why such incidents will occur again with greater frequency, and they gravely nod, only to be completely blindsided by the next attack. It’s looking more and more like being a centrist is caused by some kind of learning disability.
There’s an irony to centrist amnesia that bears directly on the topic at hand. Mere days before his encounter with a frenzied SJW’s fist, The Quartering posted a video opposing the firing of child rape joke aficionado and ex-Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn.
For those who are just tuning in, Hambly gained notoriety for sounding the alarm on Wizards of the Coast’s failure to screen out registered sex offenders from the volunteer rolls at their Magic: The Gathering tournaments. Wizards responded by punting Hambly to the curb.
Hambly intimated in his James Gunn video that he wants to go back to a world where web trawlers don’t dig through their ideological enemies’ social media histories in search of compromising dirt. A valid counterpoint is that the damned want ice water. I’d like to live in a world where guys like Hambly can discuss their differences with guys like Loter without getting socked in the jaw. Sadly, the Left brought violence into play and thereby changed the game.
It doesn’t take a strategic genius to understand what happens to guys who cling to the old rule book while people who want them disemployed or dead play by new rules. If Hambly’s unfortunate beating teaches us anything, it’s that playing fair with the other side gets you precisely nowhere. Making excuses for James Gunn earned The Quartering no sympathy from the Lefties who’ve rushed to Gunn’s defense.
There is one way back to a world where your politics and decade-old tweets won’t get you fired or punched. Getting there requires beating the Left at their own game. Punching back twice as hard, Chicago rules, whatever it takes to make them a ridiculed minority with no remaining trace of social influence or political power.
Update from the comments:
Wizards banned Hambly over his trolling of an MtG cosplayer. Which they should not have done — it was a standard SJW “how dare you say something mean about a poor defenseless woman, you horrible patriarchal white guy!” — but that was the reason.
He dug up the info on sex-offenders afterward.
Perhaps Hambly does understand the necessity of reprisals after all.