ROBERT TRACINSKI: The Hugo Awards: How to Fight Back in the Culture War. (Let me note, however, that the Hugo fight is not an “outgrowth” of GamerGate — it’s been going on for several years and just finally reached the breakthrough point.) “This year, the Sad Puppies campaign (and a related slate of recommendations called Rabid Puppies) swept the field. The response was a total meltdown among the leftist elites who had assumed, in previous years, that they (and their favorite publisher, Tor) basically owned the Hugos. So they did what the Left always does: they smeared everyone who disagrees with them as racists. Correia notes that on April 6, eight different news sites, from Entertainment Weekly to The Guardian, all published suspiciously similar hit pieces describing the Sad Puppies campaign and its organizers as racist and misogynist. Clearly, someone was feeding these sites the new official narrative, and they all swallowed it without any attempt at basic research.”

And then had to humiliatingly retract.