Why Do Streamers Give Blizzard a Free Pass for their Chronic Identity Politics Posturing?

There’s a handful of e-celebs and entertainers that make a handsome living by streaming on YouTube and Twitch while playing Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. The content of their streams usually shows them playing WoW and commenting about the design. But more often that not, streaming has morphed into a stream of consciousness fireside chats called reaction videos.

Rarely are these verbose streamers at a loss for words. But there is one subject that they never seem to talk about: identity politics or “wokeness” as it’s now called. For some strange reason they are terrified to speak out about this societal disease that has infected all walks of modern life — especially the realm of entertainment. It’s almost like they think if they put their heads in the sand and simply ignore this malignant cultural plague, that it will all go away.

The reason why I bring this topic up is that recently YouTube WoW streamer Asmongold who apparently has a net worth between $2-$3 million, made an inference to one of my previous articles that critiqued Blizzard President J. Allen Brack’s choice of clothing at the recent online version of BlizzCon.

He somehow managed to portray His Royal Wokeness Allen J. Brack — a CEO with an employee approval rating of only 46% compared to former CEO Morhaime’s approval at 96% — as an innocent victim of persecution. Perhaps this unexpected bit of white knighting is a small token of appreciation for Brack because he gave us WoW classic?

My concern wasn’t that Brack had terrible fashion sense; rather it was using him using his t-shirt as a billboard to virtue signal and pander to the LGBTQ community as a way of earning PR “carbon credits” to distract the public from Blizzard’s questionable behavior.

As President of Blizzard, is it too much to ask that Brack should be representing EVERYONE who play Blizzard games? Instead, he’s shows favoritism to a TINY MINORITY of people — professional victims — who probably don’t even play their games in any quantifiable measure: the fabulous alphabet people.

If Brack had worn a Trump t-shirt, a Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” t-shirt, an INFO WARS t-shirt, or God forbid even an American flag t-shirt, social justice warrior heads on Twitter would have immediately exploded and the neo-Marxist gaming media like Kotaku and Polygon would have gone berserk. Brack would have been summarily fired and replaced. Instead, he wears a big PRIDE Blizzard logo and nothing happens.

Other YouTube commentators are equally negligent and indifferent to Blizzard’s wokeness. Some YouTube commentators like Bellular Gaming conduct themselves like polite church mice and are also afraid to speak up and take Blizzard to task for needlessly politicizing their video games. To be fair, YouTubers who live in the police state of the UK can be imprisoned if they make mean Tweets about “protected” groups or tell the truth on YouTube, so fear of reprisals probably explains a lot about their reticence to speak out. However, the dire situation in the UK is precisely what happens when the citizenry don’t speak out and nip the problem in the bud.

Follow the Streamer and Follow the Money

Why are they afraid?

Maybe, it’s all about money.

How long would Asmongold and every other streamer last on YouTube and Twitch if they were critical of Blizzard’s LGBTQ virtue signaling? YouTube pays Media Matters caliber snitches to monitor every major channel to report any infractions to their Orwellian boss Susan Wojcicki. I’d give Asmongold a week before he’d be demonitized, canceled, and then the Asmongold Inc. empire would be over and he’d have to reinvent himself with a new Internet persona or land a real job. Maybe he could start a MMORPG studio with all his millions and put his expertise to practical use.

(If it truly is about the money, then maybe this obvious photoshopped image is more legit than we think.)

WoW e-celebs are dropping like flies these days. Even the vacuous Blizzard approved bimbo Panzer AKA Trade Chat has traded in her signature pink hair and now does Animal Crossing videos. Yes, there is a God!

Maybe Asmongold sees the writing on the wall and is afraid to speak out about Blizzard 2.0’s woke trajectory?

Every single Silicon Valley social media company and Big Tech are openly suspending and banning dissident voices that challenge the official narrative almost daily. If they can ban the President of the United States from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube they can most certainly ban you and me. And eventually they will.

You know who has power over you by who you are not allowed to criticize.

In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is King

Asmongold is the titular leader of a loose coalition of hardcore MMO players that constitute the international WoW community. He’s like a father figure to them and why not? Blizzard developers are like absentee fathers who long ago abandoned and disowned their own players for the glittering mirage of wealth, prestige, and identity politics. Asmongold has simply stepped in to fill the vacuum that Blizzard’s negligence created.

He’s also the Deckard Cain of all things WoW — a walking and talking encyclopedia that makes the original Red Shirt guy look like a illiterate, mouth-breathing hillbilly. To his credit, like the late Rush Limbaugh who also had the gift of the gab, the self-deprecating Asmongold is similarly entertaining and funny which explains his appeal and longevity. He can talk about anything and somehow it all works.

But he’s also savvy and smart. There’s just no way he’s going to jeopardize his lucrative WoW e-celeb career by speaking out about the plague of wokeness and gratituious LGBTQ content being foisted upon unsuspecting WoW players.

Unlike the average WoW subscriber who has zero power, Asmongold has a position of great influence in the WoW community. As Peter Parker AKA Spiderman noted: with great power, comes great responsibility. In a perfect world, he should be using his clout to hold Blizzard accountable.

If a video game studio is practising the dark art of wokeness by paying for frivolous PRIDE parades, and virtue signaling the latest obligatory hashtag nonsense in their studio, it’s fine because it’s not directly impacting their games. But if woke propaganda is being added to video games for the purposes of strategic misdirection and indoctrinating players, then that is another thing entirely and clearly unacceptable. With the Shadowlands expansion, Blizzard has crossed that line in the virtual sand and is now including gratutious LGBTQ content into WoW and it will only get worse with future expansions as newly woke Blizzard developers like Hazzikostas and Danuser have recently promised.

How bad does wokeness in WoW have to get before streamers like Asmongold will wake up and start bringing this up in their videos?

Does Sylvanas have to come out of the closet as a BDSM lesbian for them to speak out?

Does Anduin Wrynn have to become a genderfluid simp for them to get upset?

Does Blizzard have to sponsor a virtual Drag Queen Story Time Hour in the Goldshire Inn to groom little Billy Maclure into a future homosexual before the streamers will to grow a spine and be justifiably outraged?

Don’t bet on it.

I suspect when it gets really bad and it will, Asmongold and others like him will fold up their Darkmoon Faire sideshow tents and migrate to another MMORPG where wokeness has not yet taken hold. Remember folks, you heard it here first. I predict Asmongold Inc. will be moving to greener pastures if new MMOs like Amazon’s New World and Intrepid’s Ashes of Creation manage to pan out.

The only other possible explanation is that perhaps Asmongold is okay with all this wokeness. If that’s the case, then he should come out and say it. I’m sure GLAAD would create a special LGBTQ Streamer of the Year award just for him if he did. If not, then why be silent about it?

Free Speech Matters

Free speech is under attack in America and around the globe. The left always loved to position themselves as brave freedom fighters who spoke truth to power. They wisely used the constitutionally protected right of free speech to do it. Now that they’ve got all the power and control every institution, the virtue of seeking the truth that they once championed has become a discarded and outdated concept. It’s a shame that free speech, truth, and even reality itself, is no longer valued by the former hippies and corporate overlords who control our society.

When only approved ideas are allowed and when our right to dissent and challenge ideas is no longer permitted, our civilization will stagnate and atrophy. When even powerful people and celebrities can no longer speak the truth for fear of retribution and losing their livelihoods, you know we’re headed for a very bad place.

The left has politicized everything. Nothing is sacred to them. But if keep your mouth shut, do as your told, and be a well behaved serf and maybe they’ll let you keep playing your videos games. Or, you can speak out while you still can. The way things are moving, all of us won’t have that chance for very much longer.

Our rights are like muscles, if we don’t use them, they’ll go away.

Conclusion

Fantasy MMORPGs are one of the last places of refuge where gamers can go to escape the madness of the real world. Sadly, that’s coming to an end as cultural Marxism, identity politics, and LGBTQ depravity is being shoehorned into these virtual worlds at an ever accelerating pace. It’s up to the leaders of the MMORPG community to actual lead for a change and to speak out to stop it.

I can guarantee you this: if more people don’t start speaking out, it will only get worse. We’ve seen elections stolen, our heroes defamed, historical statues being pulled down, systemic racism against whites, cancel culture going wild and people losing their jobs, Big Tech censorship with people deplatformed and depersoned, dictionaries changed, controversial films and books are now banned. What more evidence do you need that our collective laziness and docility is allowing evil to win?

Our silence only empowers and emboldens the cultural arsonists who are waging their nihilistic war on Western civilization.

Where are former Blizzard employees like Morhaime, Metzen, Pardo, Afrasiabi, and others on this issue? If these people forcefully spoke out against the politicization of video games, the community would gladly rally behind them. But alas, these supine beta males are nowhere to be found.

We’ve become a nation of weaklings and cowards. We think we’re badass heroes because we slay evil bosses in virtual worlds, but in the real world we refuse to lift a finger to defend what’s good about our civilization. If we continue on this shameful trajectory, things will not end well for us. Maybe our civilization doesn’t deserve to survive.

“A coward dies a thousand deaths, a hero dies but once.” – William Shakespeare

As nobody with just a website, I’m doing my part. Look, I get it that Asmongold is just an entertainment persona, but it would be nice if infuential streamers like him and others, could occasionally man up and do their part too. Is that too much to ask?