I really wish I could say I was kidding on this one, but I’m not. These people are real.
In the wake of the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by Trump supporters, bystanders on social media had plenty to say about the root causes and contributing factors that may have led to this flash point. Among these was Gamergate, the year-long harassment campaign from 2014 to 2015 that eventually became subsumed into the greater rise of the alt-right movement online.
Several viral threads posited that the far-reaching watershed movement was a crucial precursor to everything that took place in Washington, DC, this week.
As many have pointed out, Gamergate was by no means the beginning of the rise in extremism; the fault lies with a broad cocktail of factors ranging from centuries of racism, to decades of neoconservative grassroots organizing, to the rise of conservative media and online echo chambers, to internet recruitment by actual white supremacists, and much more.
