The kid who crushed the game prizes has a trolling story

Oscar winner Al Pacino may have opened the Game Rewards 2022, a night of industry recognition and expensive marketing for today’s biggest games, but it was a new breed of internet celebrity that shut it down. “I want to offer this award to my Reform Orthodox rabbi Bill Clinton,” said a long-haired young boy who suddenly appeared on stage after elderberry ring was crowned game of the year. He wore an ill-fitting coat, sneaking onto stage behind the elderberry ring development team.

Security followed, and chaos ensued online as everyone tried to figure out what just happened during the otherwise heavily orchestrated three-hour event hosted by host Geoff Keighley. But it was not the first time that the young man, whose name my city believed to be Matan Even, had gained brief internet fame through internet trolling, although that might have been his weirdest.

After the ceremony was over, Keighley tweeted that “the individual who interrupted” the event had been arrested. Five hours later, however, Even was already tweeting. “Today there is a lot of discussion and speculation,” he wrote. “More information will be released on all fronts at the earliest.”

Asked what happened after the incident, the LAPD media relations office contradicted Keighley’s account, saying a report was written but no arrests were made. When asked to respond to this, a Game Awards spokesperson provided a more detailed account.

They said Even was taken to a “secure area” inside the Microsoft Theater by TGA security personnel, where he was then questioned by venue security as well as “LAPD officers locally hired by the TGA”. They said he was then taken into custody and transported to a local police station to be booked by LAPD officers hired by the TGA in their patrol vehicle. Asked about this version of events, an LAPD representative only confirmed that the individual had been transported to a train station. Since no arrests were made, it is unclear how long he was held for questioning.

While this may have been the first time Even had faced arrest, it was far from his first publicity stunt. Before sneaking onto the stage at one of the games industry’s biggest events of the year in front of an audience of over a million, Even smashed a BlizzCon panel, went viral for having pranked the LA Clippers fan cam and appeared on the right wing plot show Infowars at least twice.

The Clippers’ stunt took place in October 2019. Amid the Hong Kong protests, he even momentarily appeared on the team’s stadium fan camera, only to immediately brandish a black t-shirt which read: “Fight for Freedom Stand with Hong Kong”. China had blacklisted the Houston Rockets after their general manager tweeted a photo of the same t-shirt a few weeks earlier.

The following month, Even interrupted a BlizzCon 2019 sign with a similar message in support of the Hong Kong protests. Blizzard had suspended Surveillance pro Chung “Blitzchung” Ng Wai the previous month for doing the same, and with the NBA and other companies, was criticized at the time for its failure to stand up for Hong Kong Democrat protesters.

As Motherboard pointed out, this made Even a ripe target to be co-opted by right-wing political actors who saw the opportunity to attack the apparent liberal hypocrisy on the issue. But Even was also apparently already a big fan of at least one of the Infowars‘ hosts, Owen Shroyer. He said so during a 2019 appearance, calling Shroyer his “favorite person on Infowarswhile in a second appearance in 2020, Shroyer called Even “one of the young stars of the conservative movement.”

While Even’s social media activity appears to be almost exclusively concerned with the Hong Kong protests and Chinese government censorship, his journey from protester to guest of Infowars is also a perfect example of the ambient reactionary online pipeline it can lead to someone going from Google on political issues to ending up on right-wing content channels. (Even was apparently 12 when he first appeared on Infowars.) It’s also a reason why some were quick to interpret his nonsensical remarks about Bill Clinton and Orthodox Judaism as potentially antisimilar.

The day before last night, Even’s latest tweets were from March 2021 and related to concerns about increasing hate crimes against Asian Americans. Infowars, meanwhile, saw founder Alex Jones successfully sued for hundreds of millions by parents of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting. More recently, however, the site attempted to hold court with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, who used the appearance to praise Hitler, a heel turn that comes amid a larger wave of anti-Semitism in conservative circles.

It was against this backdrop that some feared Even’s stunt was secretly a racist deep cut from 4Chan. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. BloombergJason Schreier, who interviewed Even earlier today, said he seemed to understand Hebrew, and I called him “almost certainly a Jewish prankster.”

He also disavows his previous Infowars appearances, while continuing to troll in posts with other reporters.

“I have never been an avid spectator [of Infowars] neither do I now,” he said. Motherboard. He would go on to call Clinton a “true inspiration, especially in the area of ​​games.”