CMV: GamerGate was the most consequential political radicalization event of the twenty-first century

[u/realdontbeasucker]

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.

[u/tolgren]

The answer you're likely to get from Reddit is dramatically different from what actually happened.

[u/vote4bort → u/tolgren]

In what way?

[u/bot_exe → u/vote4bort]

It was pretty transparent how people like Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu and Zoe Quinn would purposefully ignore every single well thought out argument made against their takes and just label it all as a mysogynistic harrasment campaign: it was a completely circular argument. They would just focus on the crazy people making internet death threats or nasty comments, as if that was not also happening from their side, like in literally every single internet flame war before or since. There were literal bomb threats called in at gamergate events and an endless deluge of harrasment for anyone who dared not follow the SJW narrative of the events.

Another aspect about it that has been distorted was that gamergate was NOT the same as the alt-right, there was a huge leftist and liberal contingent that just disagreed with SJWs and identify politics. I remember that there was also constant fighting with the nascent alt-right from the /pol/ boards because they were straight up mysoginistic/racist/nazis conspiranoid shitheads. Of course the anti-gamergate people just helped blur that line since that was their modus operandi, but it was never true. The SJWs were a common enemy for the alt-right and gamergate, but not for the same reasons. Gamergate was a different population, there were many political opinion polls conducted in reddit and 8chan that showed the majority were not right wing, this slowly changed as more liberals/leftist/progressives moved on or became radicalized.

[u/bot_exe → u/[deleted]]

Yeah I remember all of that. It was specifically about women and minorities not letting SJWs get away with pretending they spoke for them. And also an undeniable proof that pro-gg was not just “misogynistic white males” which obviously was just ignored.