Oscar winner Al Pacino may have opened Game Awards 2022, a night of industry recognition and costly marketing for the biggest games around, but it was a new type of internet celebrity that shut it down. “I would like to nominate this award to my Reformed Orthodox Clergyman Bill Clinton,” said a child with long hair who suddenly appeared on stage after Elen’s ring was crowned Game of the Year. He wore a jacket that didn’t fit and snuck up on the back stage Elen’s ring develop team.
Security follows, and Chaos happens online as people try to figure out what the hell just happened during host Geoff Keighley’s elaborately choreographed three-hour event. But this is not the first time the young man has a name Kotaku is said to be Matan Even, has quickly become famous online through trolling rife online, even if it may be his weirdest thing.
After the ceremony was over, Keighley tweeted that the “individual interrupting” the event was captured. However, five hours later, Even tweeted. “There is a lot of talk and speculation today,” he wrote. “Sooner information will be announced on all fronts.”
When asked about what happened after the incident, the LAPD’s media relations office denied Keighley’s account, saying a report had been made but no arrests had been made. When asked to determine that, a spokesperson for The Game Awards provided a more detailed account.
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They said Even was taken to a “safe area” by TGA security personnel inside the Microsoft Theater, after which he was questioned by site security as well as “onsite LAPD officers hired by the TGA” . They said he was later arrested and taken to the local police station for LAPD officers hired by the TGA to reserve seats in their patrol car. When asked about that version of events, an LAPD representative would only confirm that the individual was transferred to a station. Since no arrests have been made, it is unclear how long he was held for questioning.
While this may be the first time Even has been in danger of being caught, it is far from his first public stunt. Before sneaking onto the stage at one of the gaming industry’s biggest events of the year in front of over a million spectators, Even crashed the BlizzCon console, which went viral for pranking fans’ cameras. grave LA Clippers and appear on the right-wing conspiracy show Infowars at least twice.
The Clippers stunt took place in October 2019. Amid the protests in Hong Kong, Even appeared briefly on camera for fans at the team’s stadium, just to immediately hold a black t-shirt “Fight for Freedom with Hong Kong.” China has blacklist Houston Rockets after their general manager tweeted a photo of that t-shirt just weeks before.
The next month, even interrupted a BlizzCon 2019 with a similar message in support of the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard has suspended guard pro Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai last month for doing the same, and, along with the NBA and other companies, was criticized at the time for not standing up for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
Like motherboard shown, which made Even a ripe target to be co-opted by right-wing political elements who saw an opportunity to attack the seemingly liberal hypocrisy on the issue. But Even is clearly already a big fan of at least one of them Infowars‘ presenter, Owen Shroyer. He said just as much during his 2019 appearance, calling Shroyer “his favorite person on” Infowars,” during his second appearance in 2020, Shroyer called Even “one of the young stars of the conservative movement.”
While Even’s own social media activism seems almost exclusively concerned with the Hong Kong protests and Chinese government censorship, his journey from protester to guest by Infowars is also a perfect example of reactionary online pipeline around that can lead one from searching for political issues on Google to ending up on right-wing content channels. (Even appeared to be 12 when he first appeared on Infowars.) That’s also why some were quick to interpret his nonsensical remarks about Bill Clinton and Orthodox Judaism as potentially rebellious.
Before last night, Even’s last tweet was from March 2021 and concerns about an increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans. InfowarsMeanwhile, founder Alex Jones has successfully sued hundreds of millions of parents of Sandy Hook school shooting victims. Most recently, however, the site attempted to go to court with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who used his looks to praise Hitler, a heel-turning move that came into the scene. a larger wave of anti-Semitism among conservatives.
Against that backdrop, some of Even’s unsettling stuntmen are secretly racist against some 4Chan. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Bloomberg‘s Jason Schreier, who interviewed Even earlier today, said he seemed to understand Hebrew and call him “almost certainly a jewish prank.”
He also denied his previous Infowars appearances, even while continuing to troll his messages with other journalists.
“I was never a fan of watching [of Infowars] so am I now,” he said motherboard. He is said to have called Clinton “a real inspiration, especially in the gaming space.”
