I don’t understand what all the outrage was about.
I genuinely believe gamergate was and is an online movement that continues to beg for more serious analysis. It wasn’t a harbinger of Trump politics like some pundits think, actually it was a culmination of half a decade of continuous culture war waged by Rush Limbaugh types during the Obama years, and eventually evolved into a the more coherent belief of “politics is downstream from culture” by Andrew Breitbart. I said this before but this “culture war” was waged on several fronts, from movies, to sci-fi books to fucking MtG. Breitbart the magazine under Bannon was just waiting for the right movement to latch itself onto and the most explosive one was GG.
Kathleen Belew’s book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is very very good and covers exactly this subject. It was one of the main sources Robert Evans used for his similar shorter work The War On Everyone (regardless of feelings of the author it’s a good concise history of the evolution of fascist movements in the US into what they are now.
The book “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency” goes into this pretty well, and echoes your exact sentiment. Bannon had been lurking around “gamer culture” since the early World of Warcraft days.
I genuinely believe gamergate was and is an online movement that continues to beg for more serious analysis. It wasn’t a harbinger of Trump politics like some pundits think, actually it was a culmination of half a decade of continuous culture war waged by Rush Limbaugh types during the Obama years, and eventually evolved into a the more coherent belief of “politics is downstream from culture” by Andrew Breitbart. I said this before but this “culture war” was waged on several fronts, from movies, to sci-fi books to fucking MtG. Breitbart the magazine under Bannon was just waiting for the right movement to latch itself onto and the most explosive one was GG.
Kathleen Belew’s book Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America is very very good and covers exactly this subject. It was one of the main sources Robert Evans used for his similar shorter work The War On Everyone (regardless of feelings of the author it’s a good concise history of the evolution of fascist movements in the US into what they are now.
The book “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency” goes into this pretty well, and echoes your exact sentiment. Bannon had been lurking around “gamer culture” since the early World of Warcraft days.