"Gamergate happened because gamers hated women" "Animemes revolt happened because they hated trans people" "Christians want to kill queer people and want all women to be handmaidens"
Why do they keep making up these kind of lies? They always ignore what people actually say or what actually happened, and keep making up lies about people.
Because strawmen can't fight back.
Correct. To elaborate:
Strawmanning is when you can't defeat an opponents argument, but rather than concede the point, you create a flimsy version of what you wish their argument was -- a strawman, that you then tear apart and declare victory.
This is also how you know when someone is arguing in bad faith. People arguing in good faith don't lie about their opponent's position.
Of course, some of these strawman arguments ("Gamergate was a harassment campaign agains women") have become so pervasive that you will find people making that argument without realizing they are repeating a lie, mainly due to tribal affinity and intellectual laziness that keeps them from making any effort to find the truth.
And as more time goes on, I realize more and more that most of progressivism's growth is owed to this. A shockingly large amount of the human population has no real beliefs or perspectives, other than what they are told is right and wrong by their thought leaders. So many people have never thought about anything further than what they have heard most recently. Truly.
They use them like literal scare-crows. Scary caricatures stuffed with straw to keep the easily spooked away, so they can't look too closely at what they might otherwise want underneath.