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Notes -
I agree that it's crucial and maybe a turning point (though I'm not sure that, in a world where Gjoni got distracted before posting, some other thing wouldn't have taken the same role). I just don't think it makes sense as a starting point.
My post to FCfromSSC goes over the left side, but while I think the impact was bigger on the right, I think you're overlooking the extent a lot of pre-Gamergate groups were less 'apolitical' or not 'interested in politics', and more just hadn't yet been shoved out of mainstream groups.
In 2009, I could write at length on rpgnet on political topics, if at the risk of (even boring) threads getting locked. A couple years before gamergate, conservative-leaning positions had stopped being zebras and started being understood as unacceptable on their own premises; by the Trump era support of a Republican President was verborten; today, "support or apologism for the use of AI generation in commercial projects" is outside of the bounds of acceptable discussion. My politics didn't change, but the extent I would be visible from the outside and especially the extent I could be seen-as-a-state-sees did, and while my pathway was unusual, I don't think the direction was.
A lot of those groups that these people motions around collapsed, either when the broader Tea Party movement did or with the collapse of web culture into social media and doxxing, and they were never as large, but they existed and in many ways were the very things that the early SJW movement were reacting to.
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