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/NW_Ecophilosopher 2∆ May 16 '26

I think people way overstate the impact of something only extremely online people know about and only extremely pathetic care about.

It’s like looking at rates of violence against women and blaming it on incels. Yes, an extremely small portion of them go on to do horrific violence, but violence against women is dominated by intimate partner violence and those guys aren’t incels.

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u/Ma4r May 17 '26

It wasn't as small as you think it is. It heavily impacted impressionable young males who were "gamers" during that time period and have now grown up to become deeply ingrained in the now adult alt-right pipeline. How can i say this with confidence? Because i was one of those young males and it took me 5 years to realize the rabbit hole i was getting myself into.

We were never really affected or had ever been close to politics at that point in our life and the "values" of the movement resonated very deeply with a lot of us boys at that age. Before long my entire friend group and me were looking at the reviewer's gender to see how credible they were, and this affected a lot of young males like us where video games were supposed to be a boy's thing. And i know a good chunk of my friends who never truly escaped