this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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Zoey Quinn was an indie game developer, most known for their game, Depression Quest. The game got good reviews. A while after their game was reviewed (like a year I think?), their abusive ex sent out a letter about how awful they were and they cheated on him with game reviewers to get good ratings. This ignores how the man they were dating at the time is someone they met after DQ came out at a very public convention. He would later get a job at a game review magazine (Kotaku IIRC).
This didn't stop a bunch of angry GAMERS from launching a harassment campaign against Zoey Quinn, just accepting the lies their ex told as facts. It started with review bombings on places like Steam and escalated to actual bomb threats. People even sent stuff to their house threatening to removed and murder them.
Enter Anita Sarkeesian (the person in the video) who came to Quinn's defense. Sarkeesian had a small YouTube channel where she analyzed video games from a third-wave, intersectional feminist perspective. She used her platform to debunk the lies told about Quinn. Sarkeesian's fundraiser outlets for her channel then exploded overnight. She went from something like having an annual budget of $15,000 to $10 million per month overnight.
Sarkeesian used the funds to increase the production values on her channel (hiring an editor, lighting professional, director, etc.), set up/donated to non-profits for people experiencing discrimination in video games, donated to women's shelters, and spent the rest helping Quinn go into hiding along with their family.
This directed attention towards Sarkeesian, who GAMERS decided was also a liar and sleeping with everyone while embezzling money. Sarkeesian released her tax returns and made finances of her organizations public, which showed she was paying herself below minimum wage while doing what she said she had been doing with the rest of the money. This didn't end any of the harassment she received. She, too, was now getting death,removed, and bomb threats to her home and anywhere she was making a public appearance.
That's the gist of it. Chuds are still angry at both of them for made-up reasons. YouTubers like Boogie2988, Thuderf00t, Sargon of Akkad, and Stephen Molyneux made a name for themselves during this time. Other rightwing personalities appearing in traditional media, like Milo Yiannopoulos, Ben Shapiro, and Christina Hoff Summers, also emerged. They were all backed by Steve Bannon, who had been open about radicalizing isolated young men through online platforms. This is around the time Epstein started doing shit on Xbox live and 4chan.
Thank you for the deep, and horribly depressing lore dive. Fucking chuds need to play with their toys in silence. Because thatsbwhat they're threatening to kill people over, just toys.
Zoë Quinn uses they/them pronouns
Fixed!
your remind me of this every time i see you
this was also a time when new atheism was a powerful current in the internet subcultures, many of the youtubers you mentioned were (or intersected with) the militant libertarian push against young earth creationists and other evangelical christians. it appealed to the chud brain to rationally and logically beat the opponents of them gaming/masturbating on their own edgy terms. they got the opportunity to present themselves as smart free thinkers who fought oppressive theists. the more converts to atheism the better, but then came "atheism +" who criticized their lifestyle through a secular perspective and they mobilized their newfound mass against them instead. Sarkeesian was a useful symbol to these insecure men because she made enough public appearances to provide fodder for them to react to. they started calling themselves the "alt-right" because they needed some conservatism to defend themselves just not the christian kind. then they rediscovered a love for christianity because atheism and equality was too "liberal", which they didn't want to be called any more, and they needed something to defend the west from islam, then queerness, then black people and so on and so on... the liberalist completed their transformation to fascist as they are all fated to do.
I still really don’t understand how this happened. I was a part of the “New Athiest” community (until this, basically), but the reason it appealed to me was seemingly the opposite of 90% of that group.
I was a young teenager that grew up in a conservative small town full of evangelical southern baptists, so I had no understanding of class analysis, but could see that the white evangelicals were loudly in favor of making everything worse. When your main enemy is evangelical Christianity, the obvious conclusion is that the things they hate are good: LGBTQ rights, feminism, racial equality, and international solidarity.
How the fuck do you have “evangelical Christians are bad” as your only political belief and end up agreeing with every single thing they believe?
A lot of those atheists became STEM majors and went to work in the defense industry.
Skill issue, I became a STEM major too and I just look at fluorescent microscope images of mouse brains all day, didn’t make me a fascist
IMHO there were two key factors: one, the broadening of new atheism to critiquing religions other than evangelical Christianity, Islam in particular. That gave cover for Western chauvinism, imperialism, and “cultural Christianity” as fighting Islamic repression.
Second, for a good chunk of the movement, new atheism didn’t erase anti-feminism, it just gave it a new veneer. They centered it in pseudoscience rather than religious doctrine. What made this tricky and not readily apparent is that, at least initially, most of those misogynistic new atheists played a self-congratulatory “I have rejected religion ergo I’m one of the ‘good guys’” tune.
The first major public drama that exposed this was elevatorgate; there was some secular/atheist conference where a female attendee had an uncomfortable encounter with a male attendee in an elevator. After the conference, she made a blog post about it saying, guys please don’t be creepy. Now while there were plenty of people who agreed with her, there was also a vocal group that attacked her for it (not surprisingly, the latter included Richard Dawkins).
they were only bad because they opposed harry potter, pornography, violent video games and the powerful truth of science. the social consciousness was only as good as it was compatible with that so you'd get the occasional lip service until and unless there was pushback on saying the n-word to their black friend with the power of free speech.
I'm sad now
Check out this dope-ass owl:
Damn! That's a dope ass owl!
Gamergate also was the time when neofascism learned to weaponize troll armies by ragebaiting communities like 4chan and then sending them on harassment campaigns and other PR missions. Breitbart covered Gamergate extensively, Steve Bannon leaned into this stuff a lot after just having learned the ropes of orchestrating online armies in his time as a WoW gold farm operator for Goldman Sachs.