Horseshoe Theory is Not Enough

I was crawling through my Discord and Facebook threads about politics and chatting with friends when a buddy shared a screenshot of a tweet that made my jaw drop. (Discord is a social chatting platform similar to old IRC chats, but with a nicer interface; if you don’t know what Facebook and Twitter are, I would like to know the location of your rock, and exactly how many other blind salamanders live under it, because it should probably be protected by UNESCO.)

Anyway, there’s a content producer called Peter Coffin. They create video essays on Youtube, and since I tend to watch my fair share of “Leftube”/”Breadtube”/educational and witty videos about current events and philosophical topics, I’ve come across their work. They’re very aggressively against “horseshoe theory,” which is the idea that the extreme left and the extreme right bend around to being similar to each other. This makes it seem as though the center/centrism is the most rational perspective and belief — obviously, I personally disagree with that.

(All screenshots were taken on January 15th, around 12 AM, by myself.)

The tweets I’ve screenshotted here are, to put it colloquially, cursed as fuck. Proceed with caution (and some type of memory-scrubbing agent, especially for that Pence tweet).

However, the way this political theorist has spoken about Gamergate has been — to put it mildly — a warning sign. Gamergaters launched targeted harassment at game designers Zoe Quinn and Brianna Wu, among others, citing their role…