It's like, at first, it was relatively apolitical except maybe the New Atheists who got popular by criticizing the mostly right-wing religious nutjobs.
But then, I think around the mid-2010s, it started to get super political. Suddenly, everybody started to talk about how the evil wacky removed SJWs were trying to destroy gaming and our culture?
At this point, it seems like many people have snapped out of it and are making fun of these "anti-woke" crazies, but what materially caused this phenomenon to happen in the first place and why does it still persist to an extent?
Nerd culture was always fairly reactionary, all things considered. The "girls don't play video games" trope was so overplayed in the mid 00's even Ctrl+Alt+Del was able to subvert it by having a gamer gf and B^U is not a creative person by any stretch of the word.
Although it did get worse when reactionaries realised they could make money by criticizing otherwise non-issues. If San Andreas came out today the right wing youtubers would lose their minds that the protagonist is black, the main antagonist is a cop and the secondary antagonist is a CIA agent and the supporting cast includes a female Latina, a weed smoking hippy and a disabled Chinese American. Gamergate's consequences hasn't exactly fallen away.
Interesting thing about that one is that C.R.A.S.H. is actually barely abstracted away from a real portion of the LAPD involved in a real scandal.
Reminder that Dungeons and Dragons creator E. Gary Gygax justified lawful good characters killing the babies of races listed as evil by quoting
CW: genocide
an American colonizer giving his reason for pursuing the total extermination of American Indians.