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Comment on From 4chan to the White House: James Ball explains how failing to take games seriously has fed the populist right

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p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

I remember seeing JonTron videos back in 2011, well before the 2015 gamergate era. Even back then he’d make offhand remarks about how tough it was being White, how badly women treat men, etc.

You seem to mistake cause and effect. JonTron was an racist and misogynistic asshole because that’s who he was. He wasn’t doing that because he was trying to tap into some kind of audience as a trick.

And he has been largely forgotten because of his behavior and image. People ditched him and moved on. GameGrumps cut him out a long time ago.

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t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago
I think you’ve mixed up the timeline in my comment.

Pre-gamergate era (2010-2014): channer-esque misogynists like JonTron are heavily popular on YT, but there is no political pipeline established. They are just voicing their own shitty thoughts, and their audience is almost exclusively young white males.

Gamergate (2015): Right-wing politicians and shock pundits like Shapiro take notice of the large amount of misogynistic content that a lot of gaming YTers are spouting as GG gets national attentions, and think, “hey, those sound like people I can capture”.

Early Alt-right pipeline (2016-2019): figures like Shapiro and Yiannopoulos start making content intended to target gamers, usually ‘shock’ videos with gamer-derived terms like “own” (the libs), and/or are interviewing right-wing-aligned gamer influencers, and the gamer->conservative voter pipeline is developing.

Late Alt-right pipeline (2020-onwards): there are tons of right wing YTers, streamers, and talk-shows that target young white males, especially gamers, telling them that everything they dislike is due to ‘wokeism’, ‘DEI’, etc… you know the rest.

Even before that, there was this whole corporate wokeness marketing trope that really drove the concept into the ground

You’re using ‘woke’ unironically, in the way that the Right does. Neither of those things you posted are Woke, they’re just pandering. Woke means aware of the systemic biases in our social institutions. Your examples aren’t “wokeness”, they’re Feminist Capitalism (and Rainbow Capitalism also gets called ‘woke’ by the Right).

It’s like kids all running with this popular meme, only for parents to sudden adopt it and it’s not cool any more. So, right-wing spheres to pick it off of the ground, dust it off, and just carry that energy forward, which is unfortunately what they are good at.

No, that was never what wokeness was, it’s just that right-wingers started calling anything they didn’t like “woke”, despite their examples having nothing to do with wokeness.
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