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Notes -
"Communist" and "Nazi" and even "fascist" has been used as terms of abuse in America for at least all my adult life, and indeed I'd guess you're right it's been going on for 90 years straight. But I rarely, if ever, saw people trying to use obscure loopholes and technicalities to "prove" that some idea they disagreed with was "Communist" and therefore deserved to be disagreed with, like how we've been seeing with things like "misogyny," "racism," and, again, "fascism" the last 15-ish years. It's this apparent attempt at finding a "glitch" or "exploit" in the system that that seems to reflect a belief that everyone else MUST abide by such exploits that I find interesting. Rather, calling something "Communist" (or "Nazi" or whatever) in the 90s-00s was just effectively calling it a slur.
Perhaps even that isn't new. That would mean that video games weren't a necessary part of causing this pattern of behavior, though it certainly could have been a part.
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