Looking back through GG history (as well as I can, since it seems Deepfreeze is never going to get fixed...), it's curious how long we tried to affirm a moral high ground when it was clear the lying press were content to paint whatever picture they wanted. Didn't matter how many women, coloreds, or colored women of color tweeted "#NotYourShield", GamerGate was only ever about "angry white male rage". Honey Badgers and Sad Puppies fell on deaf ears and only made the press hate us more for pointing out their hypocrisy. We teamed up with "good fags" and "good feminists" like Milo and CHS and the only thing it ever achieved was excommunicate them from their in-groups before they eventually dumped us further down the line.
It also didn't help that the GG movement was being strangled for years thanks to control of the 8chan board by Acid Man following Niko's capitulation to the Ayy Team. Cole Lamberson's obsession with "muh pr" tanked the entire movement and stalled genuine discoveries such as Seattle4Truth uncovering the money trail between the Literal Whos and big organizations like Microsoft, even if he went totally insane in the end and committed matricide.
What happened over the next decade was virtually an entire generation becoming politically active in a way that hasn't happened since the Vietnam War. Two US elections won, Pizzagate exposed to the world, trannies banned from sports, populism movements sprouting up all over the world, and it was all because we only ever wanted to play video games and be left in peace.
So I ask you - if we had our 2025 mindset back in 2014, would you have skipped the #NotYourShield part of our movement entirely and just got straight to shutting out troons, fags and general SJWs? If not, why?
Probably not. I've already understood for a long time that the problem is the majority of the population have fully embraced some misconceptions and delusions that have been fed to them for years, and on a practical political level we need numbers to succeed.
People generally don't like extreme, sudden cultural changes, most resist it instinctively. But most of the people who let themselves be brainwashed into the harmful delusions we've been fighting against have no strong internal beliefs and are very susceptible to a slow ratcheting up of constant exposure to an idea that doesn't trigger their culture shock response. That's why they kept riding the slow slippery slope all the way to insanity in the first place.
So for me it's been years long guerilla warfare against globalist+state propaganda and the softly softly red-pilling approach may have been the best chance we ever had of winning anyway. I don't know if we could have red pilled the gormless masses any faster without triggering their defensiveness and pearl clutching, and the propagandists could have (and probably did) send in both mollifying "moderates" and false flag extremists to fragment the pushback into fighting each other instead. But the propaganda couldn't do anything to innoculate people against uncompromising, slow-marching cultural pressure that quietly insisted on taking just one step more than last time without undermining all their own brainwashing efforts too. I'm just thankful that enough people with an actual internal moral compass never compromised their position even if they had to keep their heads down for years to get to this point.
I mostly agree with this and I have evidence to support that.
Back in the KotakuInAction days, there was a small contingent of posters that was very insistent that SJW activities were actually all intended to oppress white people. They were completely right, of course, but they gained no traction as most people dismissed them as kooks. "Anti-racist is code for anti-white" is what they posted most of the time.
"But that's internal gamergate politics, what if all of gamergate advocated that?" You'd get the same response on a grander scale. Most people didn't even have the cultural vocabulary to comprehend what they were saying, and frankly they didn't do a great job of explaining because the very act of explaining is definitionally a softer, diplomatic approach, and radicals are not inclined to do that.
The part of "slow redpilling" that I don't agree with is telling white lies about your beliefs for the sake of optics. THAT will slow you down. You should never lie about your beliefs. It's largely an adaptation to cope with the influence of women, and we would be living in a much better world if our politicians shoved those concerns aside. Exhibit A, Trump.
Women will destroy civilization if left unchecked, but good luck getting anyone to believe that back when the entire movement was sincerely advocating "ethics in game journalism" (about as naive as advocating for ice cream that doesn't melt).
Arguing by proxy and/or accepting false premises are short term solutions that result in long term defeats.
KIA literally begged for women talking heads to notice them senpai almost daily, and would cream themselves if one (or a PoC) gave them the time of day.
It was the same Identity Politics all the Left played, that NotYourShield was meant to call out, and its why by the time KIA2 was born they were all sucking off their "based tranny" the Narwhal.
The people talking about how everything was just White genocide seemed so crazy, now that’s the dominant opinion.