The Continued Visceral Rejection of the Legitimacy of Gamerg

Certainly sympathetic and neutral observers of gamergate must find the absolutist rhetoric of the particularly enthusiastic anti-gamergate voices rather off-putting, but would-be neutral parties experiencing bizarre ultimatums such as "not condemning gamergate supports misogyny" likely find the reaction especially perplexing. What's probably occurring is about equal parts sad, hilarious, and amazing.

Through the DiGRA affiliation and the nature of the SJW politics, it's a very linear implication that the goal to "destroy gamers" as a culture has been a priority for quite some time. In "technical" terms, they want to demolish the cultural hegemony of "gamers" as in order to upset the existing power structure borne of capitalism, which has thus far dictated the direction of games development. Though the extent and nature of their coordination in this task may be impossible to know, the goal is very clearly in line with the values of DiGRA-type academics and critical theorists in general. They were young, they were right, and they were going to change the fucking world.

The first step was to utilize politically sympathetic members of games journalism to obtain oligopolistic editorial power, and it was unbelievably easy. They never stepped back and reflected upon why invasion of a journalistic community covering a billion dollar behemoth of an industry was a relatively trivial affair. Possibly a "manifest destiny"-type situation, with the academic back-end thrilled they'd finally broken into the main stream and the young PR front-end drunk on success and power.

The subsequent step was to steadily ratchet the overt political content of articles. This would at worst alienate and at best enrage the "undesirables" of gamer culture. The ragers would bring in clicks to keep the money flowing, and any acting out supported the editorial narrative anyway. Win-win. And it worked, probably even better than they'd hoped.

The next step would be to trigger a paradigm shift indelibly tarring the label "gamer", crippling the cohesive identity of the culture and consequentially demolishing the aforementioned hegemony. No doubt already watching intently for gamers behaving badly, it was simply a matter of waiting for an incident with sufficiently broad emotional resonance. A story so appalling that general (non-gaming) audiences couldn't look away, and news outlets had no reason to let them. With enough eyes on it, they could exploit their editorial power to ensure that "gaming culture" would take the lion's share of the blame. Then, before the story went viral, in concert "pull the trigger" declaring "gamer culture" dead, and watch the rest of the media amplify their narrative. Viola, "gamer" is a slur.

Clearly the choice of instigating incident was poor. Maybe they were having trouble finding truly juicy scandals. Maybe they were coming to rescue to a friend both to the cause and their persons. Maybe Eron and Zoe staged it for them. Clearly their relationship with Zoe never occurred to them as a potential pitfall, nor the stark disparity in the handling of Zoe's incident compared to Max Tempkin's, still fresh in people's minds.

Of whatever scenarios imagined, likely none included the current history of gamergate. In their hubris, they sought to fracture a culture and lay the foundations for ones more inclusive; what they created was nemesis.

Borne amongst censorship and slander it enshrined freedom of expression as a hard rule and truth as a fundamental virtue. Hounded from site to site, it embraced cyber-nomadism yet despite decentralization maintained cohesion. Each time a venue's mod squad clamped down (often for free!), the resulting migration adopted new converts welcomed with the warm embraces of what is potentially the most inclusive internet community since Usenet. A great deal of bitter, deep-seated animosity existed between many of these communities, fostering tolerance as another core virtue.

Rather than dissipate into the aether, the very cultural tumor they aimed to excise went hostilely virulent beyond their control, emerging as a dark mirror of their own ideological shortcomings. These would-be cultural surgeons who flipped the switch brought to life their own personal golem. Gamergate is the nightmare scenario. A motivated, educated, innovative, and intelligent culture naturally expressing all the values purported by the social justice warriors. Diverse, inclusive, and tolerant with none of the harsh shaming and shunning of dissenters. Additionally, rallying cries "freedom of expression" and "journalistic integrity" are easy sells making them difficult to oppose in a tweet or sound bite. All of this with an effectively bottomless well of antagonism towards SJWs.
Although the instigators are likely primarily concerned with the ire of the golem, likely much of the incessant and adamant push-back from most SJWs is motivated by an intense terror this monster will provide legitimization of their most hated enemies.  Gamergate opposition to social justice warriors and doctrines of tolerance and inclusiveness couldn't help but attract undesirables even more loathsome than the gamers, i.e. men's right's activists and conservatives. Understand that a social justice warrior is a fundamentally political person, filtering almost every situation through their ideological lens. Combine that with a strong collectivist instinct and a postmodern attitude towards truth. Political consequences are of primary concern, and they project this prioritization upon others; they're playing team sports 24/7 and factual correctness of their arguments are immaterial. By providing shelter for their enemies, gamergaters support their enemies and it is of little concern whether that support is generally tacit or explicit. So when pronouncing gamergate as, say for instance, misogynistic, there's an implicit "in terms of political efficacy" afterwards.

The enemies they've likely forgotten, much to their detriment, are the skeptics. The clusterfuck yielding Atheism+ ensured a deep-seated resentment in the skeptic community. SJWs being identity obsessed, likely had no clue that the vast, vast majority of skeptics did not associate with the skeptic community, or even openly describe themselves as skeptical. But they appreciated the skeptical movement as a response to the wave of religiously and politically motivated anti-scientific sentiment very visibly cresting during the mid-aughts. SJWs, before SJW was even in the lexicon, tried and failed to stage a coup demanding their core tenets vis-à-vis social justice be accepted by the skeptics without skepticism. The resulting civil war hobbled the skeptical community and spawned Atheism+, the little movement that could continue to fail. What SJWs didn't understand is that the vast, vast majority of silent skeptics took note of this travisty. Skeptics aren't obvious, because skepticism as a philosophy or point of view encourages the eschewment of identity. They're the special forces wing of gamergate, hidden in plain sight and experienced in dismantling the rhetorical abuses engaged by SJWs to squelch opposition.

The fact of the matter is, gamergate poses a very fundamental threat to everything SJWs stand for. Tolerance without censorship. Inclusiveness without shunning. Natural diversity. Objectivity over relativism. This isn't only a political threat, gamergate threatens many core tenets of the SJW outlook. The skeptics are training the gamers in the weaknesses of the SJW debate strategies, and for the first time they find their hold on the narrative slipping. Even worse, legitimization of gamergate suggests they never really understood "gamer culture" at all, despite their education by "experts" in cultural studies and in some instances direct guidance by cultural scholars specializing in gaming; specifically, gamergate thrived upon institutional oppression before it even had a name, starkly contradicting one of the most cherished "facts" of their education.  Gamergate must be a Trojan Horse, because if it isn't, what does that make them?