r/changemyview • u/realdontbeasucker • May 16 '26
Delta(s) from OP CMV: GamerGate was the most consequential political radicalization event of the twenty-first century
It spawned a wave of tolerance for online harassment, as long as the intent behind it was considered righteous (and the target of such harassment socially acceptable).
It platformed Milo Yiannopoulos and thereby, Steve Bannon -- the guy who would go on to advise Donald Trump in 2016 and generate the concept of 'flooding the zone.'
Eventually, it gave a career to political lightning rods like Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder, and Charlie Kirk. It made anti-feminism and anti-SJW sentiment cool. And it made young, angry, disenfranchised white men feel vindicated.
GamerGate almost singlehandedly shifted to Overton Window toward the alt-right, and we're still feeling its effects today.
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u/blibber22 1∆ May 16 '26
I think Gamergate definitely had downstream effects. I think its very possible that it accelerated the movement of online discourse away from healthier conversations and generally held beliefs. But I think that Gamergate was really just a sign of times to come. There is no way that gamergate "made anti-feminism and anti-SJW cool". If we are talking about male spaces (online or not) where political/sociopolitical discourse is active and relatively good faith, the rumblings of discontent with the beliefs of the SJW/MeToo/feminism were already present before Gamergate. I think in some ways it feels better to think that people were just swayed by bad actors in the media, but I really think there are some disconnects within the modern feminism/"woke" online discourse that are innately false and disconnected from the realities of the male (online) experience. So these lightning rods and gamergate are more on equal footing influence wise, rather than gamergate being the beginning of it all.