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?
Absolutely not.
A huge, and I mean massive, chunk of GG's success was pointing out how the media was lying. That's why it was compelling, because we weren't a Hate Group™.
If we'd "embraced the hate," then the media wouldn't have been lying when they called us Nazis and the worst people ever. GG would be a more "pure" but much, much smaller fringe movement that was quickly forgotten, and accomplished nothing.
GG also would have lost a lot of people, who would still be left-leaning, or even get sucked down the absurd leftist "pipelines" and be trannies and shit. GG being more milquetoast, and not being a hate group, likely literally saved lives.
It also, despite it being a meme, may have been a deciding factor in the 2016 election, and going forward. All the "GG created Trump" and "we're in a different timeline" memes have some Truth to them. A hateful GG would have had much less impact, Trump may have lost, and we may have already been in WW3.
I'm not even kidding.
GG woke people up, including more normie-adjacent people. Hate groups largely don't do that.
Eh, I'd call pretty much the entire spectrum of wokeism a "hate group", or at least an ideology completely derived from envy and hate, and it's been pretty successful.
Wokeness didn't begin that way either. It started with "political correctness" (it started even earlier than that, but even the PC movement serves the point) which may have been diametrically opposed to proper morality, but it was mild, milktoast, and easily absorbed by the populace at large.
All movements must begin this way, no major movement ever started from it's extreme point. On both sides they must begin with mild "tolerable" grievance, or else they simply fail to build any velocity.
Communism has made science out of this and "the long march" has been happening everywhere on earth for a century. The opposition to communism is ultimately reactionary, but it doesn't just jump up one day in complete opposition, it builds grievance over time.
Going to disagree here.
Maybe they wrapped up their envy and resentment in "is it so difficult to just be nice?" rhetoric, but the progenitors of this stuff made absolutely no pretenses about their motivations. They always hated normal, successful people.
There were no secret GG organizer masterminds conspiring to kick the women and blacks out of the video game industry. In fact, the reason that the woke assholes made these accusations is because of projection because that was what they wanted to do: kick white/Asian men out of the industry.
If you call turning the goose that lays golden eggs into an entree "successful" then maybe I could agree with you, but they're basically the perfect example of how, even with all of the power in the world, their hateful ideology is literally incapable of producing a functional society.
This is such a huge cope it actually made me chuckle.
The media was lying long before GG. People have been ringing that bell for 80 years. But it wasn't hip back then.
And GG was one of the hurdles that helped make exposing them hip. The very fact leftists still seethe about it to this day should illustrate that.
GG was important as it was, because it happened on the internet. Yes, the media lied for decades before that, and I never said otherwise. GG was important because it was so milquetoast and unimportant. It was about video games. It wouldn't have had the same impact if it had just been a hate group.
I'm not sure how my stance is "cope," exactly. It's a pretty accepted position, that one of GG's biggest and primary wins was exposing the media and opening normie-adjacent eyes to their lies. The legacy media lost a lot of credibility after they went after gamers. They wouldn't have lost that credibility if the people they'd been going after actually had been Nazis.
GG needed to happen just as it did.
My point is that it didn't expose shit that wasn't known for centuries by people who paid attention, GG is number 4,372 on the list of examples of milquetoast political movements that "discovered" human nature again.
It didnt "need" to happen at all, it already did during the Nixon years, and the people who knew it got shouted down and disenfranchised just like they will today, until somebody with guts takes the first shot.
Always been that way.