Call of Duty

Meet the streamer who fights the online right while speaking the language of gamergate.

- By Ali Breland

STEVEN BONNELL SIGHED deeply. “You a bitch-made motherfucker,” says a woman’s voice coming from his computer. “You are retarded,” it continued.

Bonnell, who live-streams his life under the pseudonym Destiny, was in the middle of a debate that had gone way off the rails. The woman, a lower-profile conservative internet figure, had been slated to talk with him about police brutality, but the plan was thrown after she got mad that he called her an “anti-vaxxer.”

As she lobbed insults, Bonnell hardly raised his voice. “I don’t know if I’ve ever debated a smart conservative,” he says to me, turning away from his computer in frustration as she kept up a monologue.

Bonnell is a professional video game streamer who makes his living broadcasting nearly constant footage of himself, usually talking politics, playing video games, debating people, or some combination of the three.

Politically, he’s an outlier. Gaming spaces have a reputation for incubating online right-wing culture, most famously exhibited by Gamergate, the sprawling reactionary harassment campaign that began by targeting women working in gaming, spurred by their presence in the industry and the increased diversity of its products. Like any troll, Bonnell loves an argument, and his battles with the online right have earned him hundreds of thousands of dollars. He regularly spends up to 16 hours a day championing largely left positions, streaming to thousands of viewers at any given moment. Video game streaming is a new public square, and Bonnell has built one of its bigger soapboxes.