Timeline of the Online Culture War 2014

The pre-Trump social justice era reaches its peak

2011-2013

1/18/14: Dear White People film released. If you want a film to summarize the state of race relations post Zimmerman acquittal, and pre Michael Brown killing, this is it. A couple of years later, a TV show of the same name was created.

1/31/14: 4chan Launches Operation Freebleeding. This was intended to cause feminists to make themselves look disgusting, one of many trolling campaigns that would come from 4chan. This was mostly brushed aside, but some feminists took it seriously.

2/4/14: Bill Nye debates Ken Ham on creationism. By this point, internet atheism was fading into irrelevance, but this debate breathed some life into it for a bit.

3/9/14: Ban Bossy Campaign launched. The irony of women telling people not to use a word that describes someone who tells people what to do was apparently lost on them. If there was a transition from geek feminism to corporate feminism then this represented one of the beginning stages of corporate feminism since the campaign was led by Facebook COO Cheryl Sandberg, though of course events that would occur later in the year would show geek feminism wasn’t over yet.

3/17/14: I sexually identify as an attack helicopter copypasta posted to Pastebin. This seems to be the earliest example of the attack helicopter meme being used. This would become a prominent meme mocking people who thought that you could just identify as whatever gender you want.

3/27/14: Cancel Colbert offending Tweet posted. It is important to remember before Colbert was a hero of the #resistance at the Late Show, he had a show on Comedy Central where he pretended to be a right-winger. After airing a segment about the Washington Redskins and their Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, the account for the Colbert Report tweeted the following satirizing the foundation: "I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever." An activist named Suey Park thought that this was offensive so she started the #CancelColbert movement trying to get his show cancelled. Park became a subject of ridicule, and even the Huffington Post reporter who interviewed with her wasn’t having it.

4/3/14: Brendan Eich resigns from Mozilla. Eich had been appointed as the CEO of Mozilla in late March which ended up being controversial because he had donated to support an anti gay marriage ballot measure in CA six years prior. Many people called for him to resign and OKCupid even created a banner that was displayed on every Firefox user discussing the donation. Eich ultimately decided to resign. Many were unhappy with how this was handled, and this saga has been cited as one which pushed some in tech to the right.

4/10/14: Christina Hoff Sommers launches the Factual Feminist. Christina Hoff Sommers is a commentator for the American Enterprise Institute. She was a prominent critic of feminism in the mid 2010s labelling herself the factual feminist (presumably in contrast to the other non factual feminists). It is fitting that her first video was about the gender pay gap because that was one of the largest topics of the time. The right considered it a tired myth because the 77 cent statistic didn’t control for any variables, while feminists claimed that the variables one would control for were evidence of discrimination themselves (ie. women were pushed out of lucrative science careers).

4/17/14: Melody Hensley gets PTSD from Twitter. Hensley would claim to have gotten PTSD from Twitter, also stating “Military/ex-military combat folks: there are groups that have higher statistics of PTSD than you. You need to educate yourself.” The triggered meme mocking feminists who claim to need trigger warnings for everything was spreading throughout pop culture at this time, and Hensley certainly contributed to this with her antics.

4/23/14: Laci Green lets us know why she is a feminist. Laci Green was a popular feminist who posted content on Tumblr and Youtube. She made a video explaining why she was a feminist. If you want 2014 Tumblr feminism summed up into a five minute video, here you go.

4/25/14: Flint water crisis begins. The city of Flint, Michigan switched water sources on this day, which led to water being polluted. This was considered to be environmental racism because Flint is heavily Black.

5/23/14: Elliot Rodger’s Day of Retribution. Rodger was a so called “Incel” or involuntary celibate who was frustrated over not getting laid. He planned to go to the hottest sorority house at UCSB and “slaughter every single spoiled stuck up blonde slut.” Rodger fatally stabbed his two roommates plus one of their friends who entered the room, but was unable to enter the sorority house and fatally shot three more people on the street. If you want an extremely detailed description of Rodger’s life and crimes you can watch this video. This event brought mainstream awareness to the incel subculture, and launched the #YesAllWomen movement (a response to the much derided among feminists phrase #NotAllMen) claiming that all women had faced some sort of sexual harassment from men, a sort of proto #metoo movement, though not necessarily directed at specific people.

6/30/14: Meghan Trainor Releases “All About That Bass”. Fat acceptance never became mainstream but with lines like “I'm bringing booty back Go ahead and tell them skinny bitches that” this hit song by Meghan Trainor may have been the closest that it got.

7/4/14: 4Chan Tumblr wars. Tumblr tried to raid 4chan and 4chan raided them back. I’ll let Internet Historian tell the story. This event was significant enough for the The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies to write an article about almost a decade later.

7/17/14: Eric Garner dies in police custody. Garner died after being restrained for resisting arrest for selling loose cigarettes. One of the three big events that helped relaunch the BLM movement in 2014. This was often held up as a foil to the other events by conservatives, as the one that was actually unjustified murder. The officer who was involved in this incident didn’t end up being indicted, and unlike Ferguson, a plurality of whites disapproved of this.

7/25/14: Somewhere In America Poem. One thing social justice types were really into during this time was slam poetry. This was one of the most popular, filled with typical social justice rhetoric.

8/3/14: The Daily Shoah first episode. The Daily Shoah, hosted by the Rightstuff.biz was a play on the popular television show The Daily Show hosted by Jonathan Leibowitz and the Hebrew word for Holocaust. This would go on to be one of the more popular white nationalist podcasts throughout the mid 2010s, and was responsible for the creation of the (((triple parentheses meme))) used to denote Jewish ancestry. The first episode can be listened to here.

8/9/14: Michael Brown Killed by Police. Since they are well known, I won’t rehash all of the details here. This event breathed new life into the BLM movement that hadn’t made a large impact since the Summer of 2013. The local population decided to take their anger out on a local QwikTrip.

8/11/14: Dindu Nuffin. This is the first known example of the term “Dindu Nuffin”, which was posted on /pol/. Dindu nuffin is a phrase mocking the AAVE pronunciation of “he didn’t do nothing,” which would typically be claimed by a black mother on TV after her son was shot.

8/16/14: The Zoe Post starts Gamergate. I am not a gamer, I have never owned a video game console and the game I have played the most is probably Club Penguin, so I didn’t really pay attention to Gamergate at all at the time. My understanding of what happened here is that an ex boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn made a post alleging she had traded sex for positive reviews of her game Depression Quest. This launched a frenzy about ethics in gaming journalism, that became known as “Gamergate.” The detractors of Gamergate claimed it was nothing more than a targeted harassment campaign. For what it is worth, I don’t think there is good evidence of Zoe Quinn trading sex for positive reviews. Gamergaters were also highly critical of feminist critic of the gaming industry Anita Sarkeesian (mentioned in the last post), and trans game developer Brianna Wu. Gamergate is sometimes credited with creating the modern alt-right. Most of the key alt-right figures have nothing to do with gaming, but Gamergate did help launch the career of Milo Yiannopoulos through his reporting at about Gamergate at Steve Bannon’s Breitbart. Later, Bannon would state, “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.”

9/9/14: Mattress Girl picks up her mattress. Columbia student Emma Sulkowicz decided to carry around a mattress, representing the one she claimed to have been raped on and not stop carrying it around until the man that she claimed raped her was expelled. I don’t know the exact date this started, but this is the earliest date I could find it being referenced. This piece of performance art gained Sulkowicz quite a bit of attention, with Senator Gillibrand inviting her to be a guest at the State of the Union. The man she accused, Paul Nungesser, eventually filed a Title IX lawsuit against Columbia who ended up settling. I don’t think anyone can say what really happened other than the people involved, but it is fair to say that Sulkowicz interacted positively on Facebook messenger with Nungesser after the event, and that Sulkowicz made claims that were verifiably false.

9/22/14: Emma Watson gives He for She speech at the UN: Not much to say about this, pretty standard feminist talking points.

9/23/14: Sam Pepper claims prank was a “social experiment”. Sam Pepper was a popular prank YouTuber who made a video showing him grabbing women’s butts on the street. This caused a backlash on YouTube among both feminist and mainstream creators. He put out a video claiming the whole thing was a social experiment to raise awareness about the double standard about sexual harassment of men vs women after he had put out a gender swapped version of the original.

10/3/14: Serial Podcast airs. This podcast hosted by Sarah Koenig discusses the story of Baltimore native Adnan Syed who was then in jail for the 1999 murder of his ex girlfriend Hae Min Lee. The trend of certain elites trying to free obviously guilty criminals goes back a long time, but this podcast launched the current wave of this type of activism which led to shows like Making a Murderer, got the Menendez brothers case new attention, and launched Kim Kardashian’s career of trying to free obviously guilty criminals who were mostly black with white victims. If you want a good case for why Syed is guilty you can read this.

10/6/14: Ben Affleck gets into it with Sam Harris on Bill Maher’s show: Sam Harris said that Islam is backwards, and Affleck called him a racist bigot. The debate about Islam in this era had flared after being dormant for a while up due to the rise of ISIS, and would continue to flare up after the many Islamic terrorist attacks of the 2010s.

10/7/14: More SJW wackjobs. In all likelihood, this is not the first SJW cringe compilation, but it was the earliest I could find. SJW cringe compilations became a big thing during the mid 2010s and many who were relatively young at the time cite them for why they moved to the right.

10/13/14: Ezra Klein Wants men to be afraid of having sex: The state of California had introduced a “Yes mean Yes” to criminalize sex without explicit verbal consent. Writing for his publication Vox Ezra Klein said that while the law is bad, he still supported it stating “everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.”

10/22/14: Potty-Mouthed Princesses Drop F-Bombs for feminism: Feminists love vulgarity and this video is certainly no exception.

10/28/14: 10 hours of Walking in New York as a woman: If Elevatorgate was an event that was emblematic of the divide between feminist and anti-feminist atheism, than this was an event that divided “white” feminism and “intersectional” feminism. A viral video was released of a Jewish woman walking around NYC for 10 hours being catcalled, mostly by minorities. Many claimed that the video was racist because it portrayed minorities badly.

11/14/14: Matt Taylor Apologizes for offensive shirt: Matt Taylor was a scientist for the European Space Agency, best known for his involvement in a mission to land a probe on a comet, while wearing a shirt with scantily clad women that feminists freaked out about. Sexism in science was a big topic at the time, so this controversy caused waves. He eventually issued a tearful apology.

11/19/14: “A Rape on Campus” article published by Rolling Stone: A Rolling Stone article came out describing a horrific gang rape that occurred at UVA. Eventually it was determined there were many holes in the story, and the story was retracted months later.

11/25/14: Ferguson grand jury: A Ferguson grand jury decided not to press charges against officer Darren Wilson who killed Michael Brown. Brown’s stepfather urged protestors to “burn this bitch down.” This decision launched a wave of protests during Thanksgiving and black Friday, which gave us images like this.

11/28/14: Tamir Rice shot: This was the third of the main events that brought BLM back into the spotlight. Tamir Rice was a 12 year old from Cleveland playing with a toy gun with the orange tip removed, who was fatally shot by police. The main talking point that this event produced was that black children were not granted the same sense of innocence as white children.

12/20/14: Blue Lives Matter. On this day, a criminal shot and killed two police officers in NYC. Because mayor DeBlasio was supportive of other BLM protests earlier in the year, many police officers turned their backs when he spoke at the funeral of the officers. This event lead to the creation of the “Blue Lives Matter” movement to counter the Black Lives Matter movement.

12/28/14: Leelah Alcorn suicide. Early on the morning of December 28th, transgender teenager Leelah Alcorn committed suicide by walking in front of a truck on the highway. Later in the day, this automated post was posted to their Tumblr. This event became a rallying point for trans rights activists, and was eventually mentioned in a speech by Jill Biden.

That raps up the events that occurred in 2014. What did I miss? What events should I be sure not to miss in the next posts?