You Are What You Beat, From Your Wife to Your Meat
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You Are What You Beat, From Your Wife to Your Meat<br>How a poorly-written blog post led to the rise of gay conservatism, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump
Blake Colquitt<br>May 14, 2026
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Photo by Blake Colquitt<br>August 2014, Boston, Massachusetts . It all started with a blog post — a disgruntled, rambling, six-part exposé accusing a recent ex-girlfriend of, among other things, deception, manipulation, infidelity, and, perhaps worst of all, non-monogamous cuddling.<br>The ex was emergent video game writer and developer Zoë Quinn; the author, freelance programmer and general washout neckbeard Eron Gjoni. The post itself, originally uploaded to popular forums like Something Awful and Penny Arcade before being swiftly deleted and rehosted on 4chan and Eron’s own WordPress page, eventually came to be known as the Zoe Post. And the fallout that resulted from it led in large part to the first election of Donald Trump, via an online movement it ignited called GamerGate.<br>Here’s how it happened:<br>In the early 2010s, YouTube was the summit of the online content world, boasting unparalleled reach and offering enormous financial incentive for its most prevalent creators. One of the trendiest genres at the time, so-called “commentary videos,” served two hardcore, frequently-overlapping audiences: atheists and gamers. Many such videos consisted of a disembodied voice dubbed over frenetic first-person shooter footage, haughtily dismantling Christian propaganda points while the player character massacred scores of digital adversaries in the background.<br>By the time 2014 rolled around, though, male intellectuals on the internet had already begun to progress from their previous hyper-fixation to a new one: feminists.<br>Labeled “the new religion,” third-wave feminism became the in vogue target for erudite internet dudebros. Countless male creators in the mid 2010’s — adopting the mantle of “anti-SJW” (i.e., “anti-social justice warrior”) — earned their salt by inventively ridiculing women who dared to harbor opposing views on gender relations. Oft-favored targets included transgender women, female gamers, and various Tumblr subcultures.<br>“Before long, GamerGate became the hottest topic on YouTube, pounced on by popular creators [including] a young, bleached-blonde firebrand by the name of Milo Yiannopoulos.”
These enlightened men of YouTube were deeply invested in theoretical ethics, moral relativism, and post-hoc rationalization. It should come as no surprise, then, that in their view, every intellectual enemy also happened to be deeply unethical.<br>Take the Zoe Post, for example. What was clearly a scorned lover’s depraved manifesto — intended to incur public humiliation on his alleged abuser — was instead championed by anti-SJWs as a wide-reaching call to action with respect to ethics in gaming journalism generally. This phenomenon, GamerGate, hinged on a solitary detail buried in Eron’s schizophrenic jumble of footnotes and SMS screenshots: one of Quinn’s alleged affair partners was none other than Kotaku journalist Nathan Grayson.<br>For her part, Zoë — whose game portfolio leaned heavily on themes of mental health and feminism — had already established herself as somewhat of a polarizing figure by the time the Zoe Post was published. In late 2013, she made claims of harassment against an online support group for anonymous male virgins over 30 known as Wizardchan (yes, really). Now, in the wake of the Zoe Post, incels and anti-feminists alike finally had an ostensibly empirical reason to hate Quinn, amid claims that her supposed relationship with Grayson constituted a quid pro quo for favorable coverage of her work. In actuality, the reporter had only written substantively about Quinn once, in March 2014 — before their alleged romantic involvement ever began.<br>Before long, GamerGate became the hottest topic on YouTube, pounced on by popular creators like Matt Jarbo (“MundaneMatt”), John Bain (“TotalBiscuit”), TJ Kirk (“The Amazing Atheist”), Carl Benjamin (“Sargon of Akkad”), Jim Sterling (“Internet Aristocrat”), and, last by certainly not least, a young, bleached-blonde firebrand by the name of Milo Yiannopoulos.<br>Milo would go on to become the subject of a lifelong ban from Twitter and Facebook for blatant racism, publicly defend pedophilic relationships between gay men and boys, serve as Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional intern, work with the open white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and consult on Kanye West’s 2024 presidential campaign (confusingly, all in that order). But at the time, in 2014, he was just a writer and pundit for Breitbart News, the far-right, misogynist, racist, and hilariously conspiratorial news outlet led by then-executive chairman Steve Bannon.<br>Bannon, whose name you should recognize for all the wrong reasons, has always had his little-piggy fingers in far too many pies. Like a dying slug, you can trace the trail of his viscous...