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There is a Clear Line From Gamergate to the Election of Donald Trump

PBY

Banned
Really!? You do realize 4chan existed long long long before GG. Do you really think people weren't sick to death of the perpetually offended before GG? Nothing about video games inspired the alt-right movement. GG is just the gaming manifestation of the alt right not a cause.

The bolded isn't really what the these hate groups stand for though.
 
If only people were as horrified about actually being racist and/or behaving in racist ways as they are about being called racist.

I agree but wishing they were as offended as you are doesn't make it happen. Examining the cause of their anger/racism and finding out how to find common ground is far more constructive than lumping them all into the racist idiot bucket and telling them all they are stupid.
 
I agree but wishing they were as offended as you are doesn't make it happen. Examining the cause of their anger/racism and finding out how to find common ground is far more constructive than lumping them all into the racist idiot bucket and telling them all they are stupid.

What people don't seem to get is that there can be a medium between being a white supremacist and someone who can hold some ignorant opinions, but can still be reached and engaged. If someone is an outright bigot, to hell with them, but don't immediately paint people who don't always agree into this picture.
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
Milo himself credits gamergate with his rise and the rise of the alt-right's power.
 

Freeman

Banned
You are the reason Trump won and don't seem to even get it.

He won for the same reason one gets(or use to, lets see) banned on this forum simply for having a dissenting opinion. Ironically enough it ain't Trump supporters who have a problem with diversity.

People are sick of being labelled the most horrendous things simply for not agreeing point by point with what generally is a pretty radical (when not simply completely stupid) agenda by the far left.


Trump is the closest thing you'll get to leftist agendas coming from the right. Sure he is indelicate and was cough off-guard with the "grabbed by the pussy" comment, but he is pro gay rights, anti-war, resistant to reckless free trade deals, barely religious and not in the pockets of Wall Street or any foreigner interest. The personal animosity against your future president just seems completely irrational(like someone as if someone was lying to you, I wonder who...).

Past time you start making a distinction between what someone is saying and how they are saying it. This ain't kindergarten, behave like a child and most(or some at least) people will mock you.

Everyone just dodged the bullet of seeing the return of a political dynasty backed by Saudi Arabia and that is just one small thing in a sea of some serious wrongdoings(go read some Podesta emails, its just priceless). As a bonus we managed to see the mainstream media completely humiliated and destroyed, can't complain.

Freedom once again triumphs over control. You can cry and burn your city to the ground yet come January 20th you'll have you first orange president.

XOXO.
 
You are the reason Trump won and don't seem to even get it.

He won for the same reason one gets(or use to, lets see) banned on this forum simply for having a dissenting opinion. Ironically enough it ain't Trump supporters who have a problem with diversity.

People are sick of being labelled the most horrendous things simply for not agreeing point by point with what generally is a pretty radical (when not simply completely stupid) agenda by the far left.


Trump is the closest thing you'll get to leftist agendas coming from the right. Sure he is indelicate and was cough off-guard with the "grabbed by the pussy" comment, but he is pro gay rights, anti-war, resistant to reckless free trade deals, barely religious and not in the pockets of Wall Street or any foreigner interest. The personal animosity against your future president just seems completely irrational(like someone as if someone was lying to you, I wonder who...).

Past time you start making a distinction between what someone is saying and how they are saying it. This ain't kindergarten.

Everyone just dodged the bullet of seeing the return of a political dynasty backed by Saudi Arabia and that is just one small thing in a sea of some serious wrongdoings(go read some Podesta emails, its just priceless). As a bonus we managed to see the mainstream media completely humiliated and destroyed, can't complain.

Freedom once again triumphs over control. You can cry and burn your city to the ground yet come January 20th you'll have you first orange president.

XOXO.

This line or arguing is getting played out. I agree that immediately labeling people as racists isn't a great strategy, but the democrats lost this race themselves just as much as ever when they stopped speaking to the working class. Of course there are racists out there, but they were never going to vote democrat anyhow. Hillary as the candidate was also a major factor, so while some people do hate being labeled and want their own "safe space" to spew their rubbish, you're kidding yourself if you think that was the main reason.

I think there was a lot of complaceny from the left in general and it bit them in the ass.
 

Lime

Member
I agree but wishing they were as offended as you are doesn't make it happen. Examining the cause of their anger/racism and finding out how to find common ground is far more constructive than lumping them all into the racist idiot bucket and telling them all they are stupid.

Where did I say that I lumping them altogether in a racist bucket?

You are the reason Trump won and don't seem to even get it.

He won for the same reason one gets(or use to, lets see) banned on this forum simply for having a dissenting opinion. Ironically enough it ain't Trump supporters who have a problem with diversity.

People are sick of being labelled the most horrendous things simply for not agreeing point by point with what generally is a pretty radical (when not simply completely stupid) agenda by the far left.


Trump is the closest thing you'll get to leftist agendas coming from the right. Sure he is indelicate and was cough off-guard with the "grabbed by the pussy" comment, but he is pro gay rights, anti-war, resistant to reckless free trade deals, barely religious and not in the pockets of Wall Street or any foreigner interest. The personal animosity against your future president just seems completely irrational(like someone as if someone was lying to you, I wonder who...).

Past time you start making a distinction between what someone is saying and how they are saying it. This ain't kindergarten, behave like a child and most(or some at least) people will mock you.

Everyone just dodged the bullet of seeing the return of a political dynasty backed by Saudi Arabia and that is just one small thing in a sea of some serious wrongdoings(go read some Podesta emails, its just priceless). As a bonus we managed to see the mainstream media completely humiliated and destroyed, can't complain.

Freedom once again triumphs over control. You can cry and burn your city to the ground yet come January 20th you'll have you first orange president.

XOXO.

"if you call me a racist I'm going to vote for a racist presidential candidate and empower fascism".

Yup, it was the Left's fault because they called out bigotry which in turn made the same people vote a bigot.

I'm just saying your analysis of why this happened and how it can be avoided to be flawed and missing the forests for the trees. Half of the voting population didn't go vote.
 

Morrigan Stark

Arrogant Smirk
I remember seeing a graph that showed the majority of white millennial men and women voted for Trump too. I think people are underestimating racism here.
It appears to be a tough pill to swallow for many people, that racism, misogyny, homophobia etc. are still so prevalent, and would be the most significant factors. People refuse to admit this and cling to the economic anxiety BS.

You are the reason Trump won and don't seem to even get it.

He won for the same reason one gets(or use to, lets see) banned on this forum simply for having a dissenting opinion. Ironically enough it ain't Trump supporters who have a problem with diversity.
Hahahahaha, yeah the supporters of the man who wants to ban Muslims and deport Mexicans and openly discriminated against black tenants are those that love diversity!

People are sick of being labelled the most horrendous things simply for not agreeing point by point with what generally is a pretty radical (when not simply completely stupid) agenda by the far left.
Equal rights for everyone is radical leftfism, y'all

Trump is the closest thing you'll get to leftist agendas coming from the right. Sure he is indelicate and was cough off-guard with the "grabbed by the pussy" comment, but he is pro gay rights,
Explain Mike Pence?

anti-war,
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1314411

Freedom once again triumphs over control.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump-libel-laws-219866

You can cry and burn your city to the ground yet come January 20th you'll have you first orange president.

XOXO.
You seem like a good person.
 

patapuf

Member
I see GG more as a sympton than a cause. The alt right pockets have been present on the interent for a long time.

Though it was the first time (i am aware of anyway, at least for gaming) where a group like that didn't just die down after a few weeks. The hate and harassment just kept going and going and still is in some forms. Definitely felt like it had reached a new height.
 

Freeman

Banned
This line or arguing is getting played out. I agree that immediately labeling people as racists isn't a great strategy, but the democrats lost this race themselves just as much as ever when they stopped speaking to the working class. Of course there are racists out there, but they were never going to vote democrat anyhow. Hillary as the candidate was also a major factor, so while some people do hate being labeled and want their own "safe space" to spew their rubbish, you're kidding yourself if you think that was the main reason.

You just implied racist people don't vote democrat. That is just naive. Then you implied that all people being censored are spouting rubbish.

You can't stop it can you? So now you get your intervention, courtesy of Donald J. Trump.
 
1. The white working class voting Trump is a myth It was white middle-class and upper-middle class.
2. Black and Hispanic people are part of the working class
According to New York Times' exit polls, there was a 16% swing to Trump amongst the sub-$30k category, and a 6% swing to Trump in the $30k-$50k range. Meanwhile, all other income ranges either swang to Clinton to remained static. Stating that "the white working class voting Trump is a myth" is a position that has zero evidence.

Do also note that the same poll saw a swing towards Trump for all of the major racial groups.
 
You just implied racist people don't vote democrat. That is just naive.

Meh, you're right, but it isn't a major focus of my point which was that the loss wasn't solely because every republican voter was racist. I'm sure you would agree.

I guess I can correct myself and say that there is a certain subset that will always vote one way or the other. I simply don't think this was a great victory mainly because of the anti-PC people.
 

Freeman

Banned
It appears to be a tough pill to swallow for many people, that racism, misogyny, homophobia etc. are still so prevalent, and would be the most significant factors. People refuse to admit this and cling to the economic anxiety BS.


Hahahahaha, yeah the supporters of the man who wants to ban Muslims and deport Mexicans and openly discriminated against black tenants are those that love diversity!


Equal rights for everyone is radical leftfism, y'all


Explain Mike Pence?


http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1314411


http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2016/02/donald-trump-libel-laws-219866


You seem like a good person.
Not all Mexicans are illegal immigrants. So far Trump is only committed to deport illegals that committed felonies. Securing boarders is in no way racist or anything of the sort, that notion is just dumb.

Pence, well... Possibly an insurance measure so he doesn't get assassinated? Being serious, it was probably just an attempt to get the republican party behind him.

His supposed Muslim ban didn't last 24hours. It was poorly expressed and quickly corrected.

Equal rights? Who is against equal rights?

About being a good person. I probably am as I assume you also are.
 
You just implied racist people don't vote democrat. That is just naive. Then you implied that all people being censored are spouting rubbish.

You can't stop it can you? So now you get your intervention, courtesy of Donald J. Trump.

Looking at your edits, I guess that you just wanted to take potshots at me. I speak a certain way, which may have confused you, but I'm a conservative black male who has been shooting for sport for twenty years and rarely if ever get in a tizzy over minor PC complaints. Donald winning isn't an intervention for me, I can give you plenty of reasons why they lost and I've got plenty of complaints in regards to both parties.

I do call a spade a spade if I consider something out of line and I'm not ashamed of it. I don't like outright censorship, but people not liking what someone may or may not have to say isn't a violation of your freedom of speech. No matter how you vote, we all want our safe spaces to speak whatever opinions freely whether we admit it or not. Its funny how quick you were to place me into a little box and generalize me and insult me rather than engage me as I did with you. Guess you aren't much different than the people you were bitching about, eh?
 
I remember seeing a graph that showed the majority of white millennial men and women voted for Trump too. I think people are underestimating racism here.

CNN's exit poll does break down race/age and race/gender, and indeed according to them Trump won all age categories amongst whites, and both the white male and white female vote.
 

Henkka

Banned
Milo himself credits gamergate with his rise and the rise of the alt-right's power.

I dunno. I think the Alt-Right has a lot to do with immigration and race, which GG didn't really deal with. They share a dislike of feminism, though, and I think GG brought the "anti-PC" and "anti-SJW" movement into the mainstream.

I guess 4chan's /pol/ is viewed as the "hub" of the Alt-right, and I'll admit I've checked what those people have been talking about during the election. I remember seeing a thread about this exact subject, and some people saying that GG "redpilled normies" on the topics of feminism in culture and media collusion. So there's that.
 

Gattsu25

Banned
There are some pieces missing to the timeline, mainly how MRA/PAU predate GG and how GG was effectively a splintering of those groups, and then the Sad/Angry Puppies following GG showing that the tactics worked outside of gaming and could actually affect change.

I agree that there is a red-lined image that could be made to link GG to the current political climate, tho.
 
GAF being hyper internet aware, a video game forum, and incredibly liberal (by comparison to the rest of the country) is naturally going to talk a lot about gamergate. The rest of the country doesn't really even know about it; much less the blue collar voters that made the difference in this election.
 

Fox_Mulder

Rockefellers. Skull and Bones. Microsoft. Al Qaeda. A Cabal of Bankers. The melting point of steel. What do these things have in common? Wake up sheeple, the landfill wasn't even REAL!
This actually makes a lot of sense.
 

BocoDragon

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Realize This Assgrab is Delicious
GAF being hyper internet aware, a video game forum, and incredibly liberal (by comparison to the rest of the country) is naturally going to talk a lot about gamergate. The rest of the country doesn't really even know about it; much less the blue collar voters that made the difference in this election.
No one is saying that mainstream America knows or cares about gamergate.

Gamergate was an event that coalesced and galvinaized internet trolling, which fed into into broader support for alt-right media founded on anti-political correctness. Gamergate is how some people got into Milo, then got into Brietbart, and got into spamming the Internet with pro-Trump and anti-Hillary sentiment all over social media.

We all felt the atmosphere this election season, that the online world of Trump was this mania of vicious trolls ready to spam every poll or attack every dissident? Gamergate was a feeder school into that. One of the elements that fed into the wave.

A lot of this bubbled up to normal people in their FB feeds and in their real life discussion, whether they were aware of it or not. I saw Milo's videos getting posted on my Facebook feed, by people who'd never played a videogame in their life. And that's the most obvious link from Gamergate to Trump support. Maybe your grandmother came to view Trump as favourable, and she'd never touched gaming or social media. But she was unwittingly on the receiving end of info that was ultimately pushed to her friends via social media, pushed by trolls who got interested in trolling for Trump, via a Gamergate gateway drug.

Trump supporters needn't have jumped on with Gamergate, but it was one part of the wave that pushed a wild-eyed anti-PC Trump-obsessed online alt-media into people's faces.
 

Taruranto

Member
A 2 (?) years old Twitter/Reddit movement with like 50k (??) members is somehow connected to the election of the United State of America?

0yWHUSC.jpg


I mean, I guess you could blame /pol/ which has probably more members in total and it's far older, but even that's bit of a stretch.
 

low-G

Member
Only a few delusional Gamergaters really believe that had their "movement" never existed that we wouldn't be exactly where we are now.

GG just gave a gaming voice to the same people that existed anyways.
 

Lime

Member
delusibeta, sure that doesn't defeat my point - that it's not the (white) working class that won the election for Trump, but also the middle and upper class. Like you said, whiteness runs across all those categories that you listed.

Only a few delusional Gamergaters really believe that had their "movement" never existed that we wouldn't be exactly where we are now.

GG just gave a gaming voice to the same people that existed anyways.

Still sad to see so-called "moderates" suddenly embrace bigotry and hate.

But I guess if they were *that* willing to do be with misogynist conspiracy theorists, they were never good enough I guess and we now know their true inner selves and it's easier to just point them out with their ignorant and hateful rhetoric.
 
Well if Trump actually does some of the trade war stuff he's been talking about he could do some serious damage to the Japanese market, and thus all those anime avatars with MAGA hats may have done more damage to their precious underage waifu simulators than any SJW ever could.
 
If you want to learn about the economic factors that lead to Trump then you could watch this lecture by Mark Blyth. He uses data and facts along with humor to explain complex issues in an easy to understand way. It's long but incredibly fascinating. Or we can continue to circlejerk.

https://youtu.be/Bkm2Vfj42FY
 

Atomski

Member
I think it's more that gamergate was for many of us is our first experience with the alt right.

I did not know there was such a thing. I knew there was anti pc people out there. However I was shocked when I looked deeper specially as how many of these dudes are pretty young yet seemed to have the ideologies of past generations... That you would have hoped would die out by now.

As someone who grew up in a right leaning family it's pretty gross. The Alt right feels like everything bad about the right wing floated to the top.
 

GamerJM

Banned
I noticed this, but truth to be told I feel like I'm probably missing events related to the birth of the alt-right that happened prior to GamerGate. Like, I feel like the biggest reason I thought the exact same thing as the OP is just because video games are the industry I follow the most and there was probably some underbelly of alt-right bubbling up elsewhere before GamerGate. Though maybe not.
 

Shai-Tan

Banned
If you want to learn about the economic factors that lead to Trump then you could watch this lecture by Mark Blyth. He uses data and facts along with humor to explain complex issues in an easy to understand way. It's long but incredibly fascinating. Or we can continue to circlejerk.

https://youtu.be/Bkm2Vfj42FY

Thanks. That was pretty good. Jonathan Haidt tried to explain that phenomenon through moral psychology here:

http://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/07/10/when-and-why-nationalism-beats-globalism/

Among his other works on "moral foundations". I haven't become informed enough to investigate how persuasive the empirical background behind his theories is but it is interesting.
 

entremet

Member
A 2 (?) years old Twitter/Reddit movement with like 50k (??) members is somehow connected to the election of the United State of America?

0yWHUSC.jpg


I mean, I guess you could blame /pol/ which has probably more members in total and it's far older, but even that's bit of a stretch.
It's a huge stretch. However, while not causal I do see Venn Diagrams.

We're getting to a ridiculous point where GG is getting way more credit than they deserve.

Trump rise is way deeper than GG and is much longer in the making than some barely covered hate group without any real power or influence.

I can't buy the OP's thesis at all.
 
Gamergate wasn't the reason Trump got elected.

But the same line of thinking gave rise to both.

I sincerely doubt all those white blue-collar men who voted for Trump are all gamers. At best, they might be casual gamers who play games on their phone, and those kinds of gamers don't care about nor keep up with game industry drama. Doubtful they'd even know who Milo or the other alt-right morons are.
 

Miletius

Member
It's at least fair to say that the language and tools of the alt-right were sharpened by GG.

I don't know how else to explain the difference between the before, with the disparate groups completely disconnected from each other ideologically and tactically like Stormfront and /r/TheRedPill, and the after, with the shared language, shared techniques, shared goals of the alt-right as we now know them.

I agree. GG sharpened the alt right and provided a blueprint for them to work on a much broader scale. Maybe they would have found that elsewhere if GG hadn't existed, but to deny the influence that it had on the alt-right would be foolish. GG showed them how to be successful. And while yes, I don't believe that they were the sole influence on the election, they sure were an effective propaganda outfit for Trump. He is rewarding them now, in fact, as one of their own one step away from the Whitehouse (Bannon -> Milo).
 
This guy doesn't seem to think so.

EMNedTp.png


Gamergate is mostly made up of gullible idiots, not the alt-right.
this thread's premise is still really fuckin' dumb whichever way you slice it but a friend just pointed out this post led to a 200+ post bitchfest on the gamergate subreddit so there's that at least

I'm also weirded out /KiA/ is way less volatile than /The_Donald but I'm guessing the former is frequently freaked out about being wiped out while the latter would be too big a shit storm to get rid of
 
http://reallifemag.com/what-was-the-nerd/

this article by Willie Osterweil discusses a link between gamer gate and the alt right. Drawing comparisons to Hollywood's portrayal of the nerd's struggle against frat boys giving rise to a cohort of fascist game and comic lovers.

Can't fact check all this because I'm not super well versed in cinema of the 60s and 70s but much of it seems well argued.
This epitomizes the key ideological gesture in all the films named here: the replacement of actual categories of social struggle and oppression with the concept of the jock-nerd struggle. The jock is forever cool, the nerd perennially oppressed. And revenge is always on the table and always justified. In the nerd’s very DNA is a mystification of black, queer, and feminist struggle: As a social character, the nerd exists to deny the significance (if not the existence) of race, class, and gender oppression.
 
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