I personally came razor close to becoming a GamerGate incel freak. GamerGate ironically had the opposite effect on me because they were so obviously wrong and acting like weirdos that it pushed me toward liberal politics. At that point though I was still hopelessly naive when it came to responding to the rising new conservative movement GamerGate was a harbinger of.

People might laugh now about how dorky and irrelevant GamerGate was and is, but in hindsight it was a very ominous portent of increasingly widespread right-wing sentiment both on the internet and in real life. I feel like it probably acted as a moment of political awakening for a whole lot of white suburbanite 16-20somethings who were vaguely conservative but politically apathetic up to that point. People who became fanatical Trump Pepe psychos by 2016.