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?
I don't know what more people think GG could have achieved that it didn't. GG successfully turned gaming into a battleground by establishing what is and isn't wanted within the gaming sphere. Every games blog, talking head or forum which went against the GG line is either gone or tainted. But the battle can't actually be won from inside gaming alone, since we know it to be much bigger, which GG also left people in no doubt about. I don't see how you divorce GG and the organic nature of it from the bigger political swings since - our enemies certainly don't, and it might be the only thing they're correct about.
Going more extreme from the start would have one possible benefit, in influencing normies and devs into realising that racism/sexism/etc isn't worth getting worked up about, and that creative freedom should remain king. This is - funnily enough - an optics argument. It's influence by appearances. It has all the problems of the optics arguments on the other side, which is that they don't really matter in the face of government power and blackrock. Nobody is organically deciding to insert genderqueer rubbish in their games any more, only selected ideologues and mercenaries are. That's not to mention that the most hardline arguments in politics today are not necessarily friendly to creative freedom at all or even gaming itself; should gamers have 'risen up' by becoming actually politically active, ditching their childish gaming hobby, and denouncing all 'degenerate content'? So tranny mercs march into gaming even easier? Doesn't look like a win to me.