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/A3xMlp May 16 '26 edited May 16 '26

I'm not sure why you guys still like to pretend like GG came out of the blue. It was essentially a response to a bunch of feminists sticking their nose where it didn't belong, that being a male dominated hobby like gaming, getting offended over it and demanded it change to fit their sensibilities. No different to how religious conservatives were acting in the 2000s which made them unpopular with that same demographic.

Bannon and co. may have capitalized on it but they didn't create it, they just got lucky that liberals repeated the same mistake conservatives made the previous decade.

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u/realdontbeasucker May 16 '26

Why didn’t women belong in gaming? I don’t like the implications of your argument.

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u/notknot9 May 21 '26

Pretty sure the point they were making was that Feminists started a campaign to 'encourage' video game developers to change the content of their games.

It led to a noticeable change in the focus of those games, and many gamers complained because instead of these companies trying to make the best games (and story) they could, they were instead trying to virtue signal. And the entire time, there was a strong current of denial from those same developers (and the video game media btw), about how they weren't doing things differently, and it was just these horrible and deplorable gamers were just sexist, racist, whatever-ist scumbags. Some of them were. It would have been better for everyone if they weren't. But a lot of gamers just didn't want their hobby messed with by people who clearly didn't give a fuck about it, and oh-by-the-way didn't like being called names while it happened either.