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When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg
In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.
But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.
So who is Sarah Nyberg?
Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".
However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.
The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.
The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.
https://archive.is/2ciMR
Oops.
In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.
In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.
To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.
Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.
In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:
In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"
In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:
In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:
The response from other users is as such:
Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".
To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):
On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.
In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".
A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:
If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."
Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).
Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".
Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.
So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.
Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480
Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.
https://archive.is/B8jBZ
In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."
Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."
Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".
After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.
https://archive.vn/eBVCb
And:
Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.
It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.
Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".
There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.
RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.
Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.
This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.
I still don’t know what gamergate is or was, other than ‘a sufficiently massive train wreck that everyone involved on either side should be fired into the sun’, but I don’t see how it’s notable that a not-very-prominent participant is a minor attracted person.
I don't know a huge amount about GamerGate either. At least, not the start of it. We'll get to that.
The end part, the part that... well, not quite "matters", but the part that turned heads, was basically this: SJ openly declared culture war on nerdy men; the Grey Tribe ruptured fully from the Blue Tribe. I say it doesn't matter because the cracks had been growing for a while due to SJ's increasingly-censorious nature (indeed, Scott's criticism of SJ started a couple of years before GG); something was going to explode sooner or later, and it merely happened to be GG.
...all of which means there's a bit of an issue with reading up on it: since the Grey Tribe as a separate identity didn't actually exist for the most part until GG, it didn't have any narrative-producing institutions of its own, and the Red Tribe didn't care yet. So nearly all the media coverage is Blue propaganda intended to make the "pro-GG" side - the Grey side - look as bad as possible. Frankly, at the time I mostly bought it.
GamerGate is one of those cases, in hindsight, where each side had a public definition of what they thought it was about, and both of them were lying or self-deluding. This is necessarily a simplification, since neither side of GamerGate was univocal - both were unsteady coalitions and contained substantial diversity of motive - but it's one that helps make sense of it to me.
What pro-GG said GamerGate was about was ethics in game journalism. They were concerned about lack of disclosure, conflicts of interest, a journalistic field controlled by the industry it claims to report on, and to an extent (though GG was always a bit cautious and divided in expressing this) by journalists who were not culturally members of or sympathetic to their audiences.
What GamerGate was actually about, to pro-GG, was video games as a cultural scene being taken over and gatekept by cliques of progressive journalists, people alien to and contemptuous of the traditional gamer demographic, but who, by taking over journalistic institutions, arrogate to themselves the power to define who is and is not a 'gamer', and who also seize privileged access to publishers and developers and thus influence the types of games that get made. What it was really about was entryism.
What anti-GG said GamerGate was about was a harassment campaign. It was about a bunch of reactionary troglodytes who hate women and minorities lashing out to try to punish the diversification of video games, both as products and as an audience.
What GamerGate was actually about, to anti-GG, was a bunch of gross ugly people being gross and ugly in public, and worse, trying to exert control over a cultural or media sphere that anti-GG felt they were rightful custodians of. GamerGate was about a bunch of basement-dwelling virgins acting out their resentful misogyny against people who are leading the rise in diverse games. I realise this sounds very similar to what anti-GG said it was about, but I think the distinction is that the public anti-GG line was about behaviour ("they're harassing people") while the real feeling was about identity or even essential attributes ("they're gross").
In a sense, what GamerGate was about was control of 'gamer' as an identity - about who gets to decide what it means to play video games, what 'gaming' is as a subculture.
Seen in that light, I feel like the ultimate result of the controversy was probably a marginal pro-GG victory. Anti-GG got to control the narrative, to the extent that e.g. the Wikipedia article on GamerGate is pure anti-GG propaganda, but that control didn't translate into success because the traditional video game journalistic scene that anti-GG had their base in was becoming irrelevant. If I think about the movers and shakers who get to define gaming as a subculture now, it's all much more crowdsourced - it's streamers and YouTubers and content creators. If I think about the people with privileged access to gaming companies whose feedback changes the way games are made now, it's, well, it's content creators. It's not journalists. Asmongold doesn't have a journalism degree, but he has significantly greater access to Blizzard than anyone working for Kotaku.
It's not a total victory and journalism still matters - Jason Schreier, say, still has a lot of influence - but it's not got the stranglehold that I think it was felt to have in 2014.
Whether this is good or bad overall is a separate question - I think personally I prefer the streamer/content-creator-based world to the progressive journalistic clique, but frankly I dislike both of them - but insofar as it was about gaming as a scene, I think pro-GG have probably come out better than anti-GG have. Even if all the official histories favour anti-GG and will probably do so forever.
W/o evidence, this doesn't strike me as charitable as your "What GG was actually about, to pro-GG..." explanation. Pro-GG cares about entryism, but anti-GG is just about denying people who trigger a disgust response?
All right, that’s fair. I suppose I’m not unbiased. I remember the narrative from GamerGate at the time was obsessed with expressions of contempt towards them (e.g. that Sam Biddle tweet), but it would be unfair to present that as necessarily representative.
I'll admit that I might be reading a more general progressive politics of contempt into it - the smug style and all that. But it may not be helpful of me to pattern-match GamerGate to later cultural disputes.
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I think there's another layer to it, where even within behaviour the Blue perspective insistently defines GG as being a "harassment campaign" despite GG doing stuff other than harassment (most obviously, awareness-raising, and IIRC also boycotts) and TTBOMK only a tiny minority of GGers actually doing things normally considered to be harassment.
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Your breakdown of the motivations and rhetoric of both factions seems accurate.
I don't play many video games these days, but of the few recent ones I bought, Elden Ring seems celebrated in GG circles for being especially non-woke. Its character creation uses "Body Type A / Body Type B" rather than a gender option. Another celebrated non-idpol game, Hogwarts Legacy, apparently lets you play as a black male witch in the female dormitories in 19th century England, and has openly transgender NPCs.
Yes, traditional gaming journalism is a shadow of its former self, but that's just social media killing the legacy press. The culture of AAA games shifted with everything else. Calling the situation a pro-GG victory seems like telling a 1924 Russian white that he won the civil war because Lenin died.
Oh, certainly the last decade or so has been a defeat for social conservatism in video games. Actual conservatives have been consistly losing. Even in games or franchises that in my experience are particularly beloved by conservatives we can see this - BattleTech, for instance, has no gender selection for PCs, but merely lets you select 'pronouns', which can be mixed-and-matched with any body shape or facial features without limitation.
But I think it would be a bad misreading of GamerGate to see it as a social conservative response? GamerGate was never conservative.
Thus to take the case of Hogwarts Legacy - that game's success strikes me as much more compatible with the narrative that pro-GG won? The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy isn't "Hurrah for trans representation!" The anti-GG position on Hogwarts Legacy is "boycott this transphobic filth". (Indeed that review is a perfect example of everything that drove GamerGate up the wall - a 'review' that barely touches on the game itself, which is mostly an autobiographical ramble, and which doesn't even seem to care about the question of whether the game is fun to play. At the time I remember pro-GGers citing this review as an example of what they were angry about - a review that seems more interested in passing moral judgement on a sin, in this case sexism or objectification, that it does in considering whether or not a game is fun or well-made.)
Pro-GG never cared about gay or trans characters in video games. Pro-GG was team "shut up and play video games", and was opposed to any sort of moralising. GamerGate was not anti-woke in the sense of "don't have LGBT characters in games". GamerGate was anti-woke in the sense of "stop lecturing me you puritanical douchebag".
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Yeah, in the context of gaming I'd have to say anti-GG won.
In the broader political context, it's hard to say, particularly since as I said something like GG was essentially inevitable.
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I have seen plenty of complaints about the latter from people who care about IDPOL.
My gripe with it is more that it makes absolutely no sense in the Harry Potter universe, they've got polyjuice potions, presumably other means of body altering via magic too. There shouldn't be any trans people who have a visible mismatch between their expressed phenotype and what they desire to be, let alone a glaringly obvious case.
They could easily have just had a character who you don't even know is trans until you dig into their backstory and figure out they're on it
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I don't think the red tribe cares about gamergate even now. "Some degenerate internet weirdos getting into it over something retarded, IDK and IDC, it's so stupid it really just demonstrates why the blue tribe shouldn't be in charge of things that they care about this enough to blow it up" is probably the median red tribe opinion when it's brought to our attention.
I mean, of course it doesn't care about GG; GG's long-past. But there've been quite a few Greys who've become Red-adjacent in the years that followed (the alt-right and alt-lite), which means this sort of fight gets more attention. Elon Musk buying Twitter and the AI debate are, of course, more important, but they're also centrally Grey-on-Blue conflicts (Grey-on-Grey-on-Blue in the latter case, since Grey has both Butlerian Jihadis and uncensored-AI-for-all types), and you do see Red media taking some sort of interest and sympathising with Grey.
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Even at the time, they were pretty divided? GamerGate made conservative media for a short time in 2014, but the reaction seemed to be mostly incomprehension plus a little contempt - look at those weirdo nerds.
There were a few people who thought it might be a chance to do outreach to gamers (re: Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart), but they didn't get that far. Even post-2014, there is still the occasional, token attempt to reach out - consider something like this, arguing that games are a conservative medium and describing GamerGate as a "gamer-led consumer revolt" against "the attempted control and corruption of leftist-dominated gaming journalism sites", but it never went past a few lone voices. The traditional right, overall, just isn't really trying.
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