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?
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.