Was not surprised to read this news. Not because CalebHart is kind of well-known around those parts for being *that* kind of person, but because there very much is a larger problem, I think, with the speedrunning community in general. It's really, really easy to write it off as a "gamer" culture thing, and lets be real, there is a ton of overlap there so it's fucking insanely hard to parse out the difference, but there actually is an aspect of the speedrunning culture on its own that has harbored and defended people like CalebHart.
You can actually see in real time the growing pains of the better parts of that community to grow *out* of that shit. You see it during the larger GDQ shows, where now we're starting to acknowledge the blatant transphobia that has been a staple of that community since some higher profile streamers came out as trans (it ruined their career on Twitch, by the way). But look, as awful as that shit is, it's a smaller piece of the puzzle. The speedrunning community has long held people like Jordan Peterson in hugely high regard, and spend some time looking up the various threads on that guy in Off-Topic (or, anywhere, really), and you're bound to see why that becomes an epidemic in those communities.
Speedrunners haven't really been under the lens much because a lot of them are... well, fine. Normal, even. They play games, and play them fast, and they don't spend all that much time being overtly political or making commentary, but when they do they show their ass a *lot*. I gotta hand it to the people organizing the GDQ events every year; that shit must be hard with so much rotten shit in that community popping up now on a very frequent basis. Twitch has yet to, imo, take a strong stance on the curation of the platform.
Handing out 30 day bans for the N-word on Twitch isn't good enough, never has been, and never will be. Being a popular Fortnite streamer needs to stop being a shield.
So how do a lot of these guys, sub 400 viewers in a lot of cases, but in some extreme cases 3000-4000+ viewers, make it out so fucking frequently? They are really, really good at hiding it in their Discord channels or elsewhere where this stuff is fucking blatant, then they spent a shitton of time dog whistling in their chats. They think they're super smart, but the people who know what to look for are seeing it every day and, frankly, it's disturbing that it is as widespread as it is.
