Academy Award winner Al Pacino could have opened the Game Awards 2022, a night of industry recognition and expensive marketing for the biggest games, but it was a new breed of internet celebrity who shut it down. “I want to nominate this award for my Reformed Orthodox Rabbi Bill Clinton,” said a young man with long hair who suddenly appeared on stage after elden ring was crowned Game of the Year. He was wearing an ill-fitting coat, sneaking up to the stage behind the stage. elden ring Development team.
Security followed, and chaos ensued online as everyone tried to figure out what the hell had just happened during the three hour event heavily orchestrated by host Geoff Keighley. But this was far from the first time that the young man, whose name Kotaku thinks he’s Matan Even, rose to brief internet fame via internet trolling, even if he might have been the weirdest.
After the ceremony was over, Keighley tweeted that the “disruptive individual” the event had been detained. However, five hours later, Even was already tweeting. “Today there is much talk and speculation,” she wrote. “More information will be released on all fronts sooner rather than later.”
When asked what happened after the incident, the LAPD media relations office contradicted Keighley’s account, saying a report had been taken but no arrests had been made. When asked to square that, a spokesperson for The Game Awards provided a more detailed version.
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They said TGA security personnel took Even to a “secure area” inside the Microsoft Theater, where he was later questioned by venue security and “on-site LAPD officers under contract to TGA.” They said he was later detained and transported to a local police station by TGA-contracted LAPD officers in their patrol vehicle. When questioned about that version of events, an LAPD representative confirmed only that the individual had been transported to a station. Since no arrests were made, it is unclear how long he was held for questioning.
While this may be the first time Even has risked arrest, it was far from his first publicity stunt. Before sneaking up on stage at one of the biggest gaming industry events of the year in front of an audience of over a million people, Even sneaked into a BlizzCon panel, going viral for pranking the LA Clippers fan cam and appeared on the right. conspiracy show infowars at least twice.
The Clippers’ stunt came in October 2019. Amid the Hong Kong protests, he even appeared momentarily on fan cam at the team’s home stadium. only to immediately pull up a black t-shirt which read: “Fight for freedom, support Hong Kong.” china had Blacklisted by the Houston Rockets after his general manager tweeted a photo of the same jersey just a couple of weeks earlier.
The following month, he even interrupted a BlizzCon 2019 panel with a similar message in support of the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard had suspended Supervision Pro Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai the previous month for doing the same, and along with the NBA and other companies, it was criticized at the time for failing to stand up for Hong Kong’s democracy protesters.
What Motherboard points, this made Even a ripe target for co-optation by right-wing political actors who saw an opportunity to attack the apparent liberal hypocrisy on the issue. But Even was apparently already a big fan of at least one of them. infowars‘ hosts, Owen Shroyer. He said as much in a 2019 appearance, calling Shroyer his “favorite person in infowars”, while in a second appearance in 2020, Shroyer called Even “one of the young stars of the conservative movement”.
While Even’s own social media activity seems almost exclusively related to the Hong Kong protests and Chinese government censorship, his journey from protester to Infowars guest is also a perfect example of the Reactionary Environmental Pipeline Online that can lead one from Googling political topics to end up in right-wing content channels. (Even was apparently 12 years old during his first appearance in Infowars.) It’s also a reason why some were quick to interpret his nonsensical comments about Bill Clinton and Orthodox Judaism as potentially anti-Semitic.
Before last night, Even’s last tweets were from March 2021 and were addressing concerns about the rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans. infowarsMeanwhile, founder Alex Jones has been successfully sued for hundreds of millions by the parents of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. More recently, though, the site tried to speak to Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who used the look to praise Hitler, a twist that comes amid a bigger wave of anti-Semitism in conservative circles.
It was against that backdrop that some worried Even’s hack was secretly a racist 4Chan deepcut. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. BloombergJason Schreier, who interviewed even earlier today, said he seemed to understand Hebrew, and called him Almost certainly a jewish joker.
He also denies his previous appearances on Infowars, even as he continues to troll messages with other journalists.
I was never an avid viewer [of Infowars] neither do I now,” he said. Motherboard. He reportedly went on to call Clinton “a real inspiration, especially in the gaming space.”
