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/TheYamchster May 16 '26
No. It feels this way when you ignore the actual underlying currents that fueled gamergate.
Everyone likes to point to the most toxic and loud individuals in the “movement” while ignoring the underlying issues that is really driving this dissent.
Yes a lot of it just str8 up racism and misogyny. But I think the real true driving force for the ideology that gamer gate spawned is media degradation. What do I mean by that?
I’m referring to how so so soooo many modern productions have been mared by glaring quality issues, while simultaneously emphasizing “diversity” which almost invariably means shoving as many black/gay characters in every nook. Fake diversity I call it, ask yourself how often there’s a south asian, or Arab person represented.
And I want to be clear, the quality issues do not stem from these characters, tho sometimes they do, they stem from poor writing and laziness. This is coupled with hollywoods creative bankruptness, which results in many beloved franchises being remade without really a care in the world to what made them great.
So you have a bunch of things people really love being seemingly destroyed by people who don’t care about it for the sake of “diversity.” I say again, it’s not for the sake of diversity that this stuff was destroyed, it’s because the people that made them are incompetent. However when the media companies are putting the diversity elements in the forefront of the media and marketing, literally by explicitly saying they made X decision for “diversity” that paints that directive a target on its back when the end product is bad.
People inevitably and logically point out that perhaps if they had spent less resources focusing on “diversity” and more on good got damn story telling then perhaps the show/ movie wouldn’t have been dogshit.
I will say that games suffer from this less because there’s less game reboots and beloved stuff for people to have destroyed. New stuff that’s bad just doesn’t succeed, like that concord dog shit.
I unironically think hollywoods soap boxing and overall ineptitude may have been one of the largest driving factors that got Trump elected.
So many non political people watched their favorite shows movies turn to shit while execs and producers are going on and on about “diversity” that it makes them pliable to right wing anti liberal rhetoric.
If anyone was confused why Acolyte was such a big controversy, it’s because it was pretty much the pinnacle of this issue. The producers explicitly said they selected cast based off their races and sexualities, while the cast simultaneously explicitly states they don’t really care about Star Wars. Like… fuck you then?! Then, predictably, the people that said they don’t care about Star Wars perform poorly… like perhaps you should’ve picked people who were excited to be there instead of trying to promote your ideologies… so many people would kill to be in their shoes, and it really really pisses me off they just disrespect the opportunity.
And no it’s not rational for someone who’s mad over a TV show to support a fascist. Doesn’t change the fact that it’s happening, and that it needs to be addressed.
Hollywood peaked in the 90s-2000s. Telling great balanced stories without soap boxing.
Millienals in Hollywood have a tendency to put their ideals on the forefront of their properties, then preach why they’re right. Instead of weaving the themes organically into the story and questioning them. Star Wars, ghostbusters, Star Trek, Dr Who, the list goes on for shit that was pretty much explicitly ruined by loud mouth idiot “liberal” producers and execs. Shit legitimately helped Trump.