Gamergate was an astroturf by regular /pol/ users that was organized on a public IRC channel, but the original “wokespotting” also involved spotting triangles and hexagrams. I still remember how much I laughed at a conspiracy head claiming the David Star in the banking scene of the first Harry Potter movie was to make goyim children to accept the Jews as their financial overlords, all while said conspiracy theorists also claimed he was not an anti-semite, because “real christians love the sinner and hate the sin” and “Judaism is a religion/sin, not a nationality”. Did manage to find others in similar vein, especially through the whole Lion King SFX controversy, but most of it disappeared the moment gamergate blew up.
The thing is, neo-nazis vowed to recruit gamers early on, but for many years, had way too high standards, and called classics like Metroid or Tomb Raider “cultural Marxist garbages” for the sin of having women outside of the kitchen, not to mention games made by the far-right. Beginning in 2012, a lot of them started to have lower standards for geek media, especially gamers. I tried to warn my then fellow skeptics that they’re looking in ways to make their conspiracy theories more digestable to “normies”, but they wrote me off as someone trying to politicize skeptic circles, as back then a lot of skeptics and atheists tried to be politically neutral to wave off “Stalinism” accusations, and otherwise most of them thought their “hidden messages and cultural Marxism in popular culture” conspiracy theories were way too insane to save. Many of them later told me I was right and were sad to discount me as some paranoid weirdo that probably also believes nazis are living on the moon and secretly controlling everything.
Gamergate was an astroturf by regular /pol/ users that was organized on a public IRC channel, but the original “wokespotting” also involved spotting triangles and hexagrams. I still remember how much I laughed at a conspiracy head claiming the David Star in the banking scene of the first Harry Potter movie was to make goyim children to accept the Jews as their financial overlords, all while said conspiracy theorists also claimed he was not an anti-semite, because “real christians love the sinner and hate the sin” and “Judaism is a religion/sin, not a nationality”. Did manage to find others in similar vein, especially through the whole Lion King SFX controversy, but most of it disappeared the moment gamergate blew up.
The thing is, neo-nazis vowed to recruit gamers early on, but for many years, had way too high standards, and called classics like Metroid or Tomb Raider “cultural Marxist garbages” for the sin of having women outside of the kitchen, not to mention games made by the far-right. Beginning in 2012, a lot of them started to have lower standards for geek media, especially gamers. I tried to warn my then fellow skeptics that they’re looking in ways to make their conspiracy theories more digestable to “normies”, but they wrote me off as someone trying to politicize skeptic circles, as back then a lot of skeptics and atheists tried to be politically neutral to wave off “Stalinism” accusations, and otherwise most of them thought their “hidden messages and cultural Marxism in popular culture” conspiracy theories were way too insane to save. Many of them later told me I was right and were sad to discount me as some paranoid weirdo that probably also believes nazis are living on the moon and secretly controlling everything.