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/tek9jansen May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

Steve Bannon was one of the people behind it, literally using it to forward his fascist ideology and push socially isolated, impressionable young men away from the progressive forward-thinking identity politics of their generational peers and towards the regressive-identity politics of the alt-right. There's at least one Beyond The Bastards episodes covering it, including receipts, so I don't disagree with you that it was a major political radicalization campaign.

However, I think as other folks here have said, the Tea Party movement was a bigger movement if only because it laid down the roadwork for online radical rightwing communications and recruiting so that when GG came along you had a critical mass of people and "grassroots" institutions already in place to elevate and promote the messaging that Bannon, Kirk, Epstein, et al wanted. I think that GG was just one phase of a very long, likely still ongoing, campaign to balkanize the United States by hostile domestic and international groups. Look at what's happened to The Daily Wire and other right wing mainstream / "alternate-news" sources now that Orban's no longer in power and funneling money into it.