The president woke up today mad at the press in a tweet that sounded awfully reminiscent of Gamergate.
Exhibit A:
Fantastic. “Honesty back to journalism and reporting,” sounds a hell of a lot like “We’re about ethics in journalism,” the oft-repeated argument that Gamergate was not, in fact, about violent misogyny and instead just about trying to get journalists to do their jobs honestly.
This is the easiest scam there is. You create an environment where people mistrust the press, but claim that you’re not against journalism as an institution, you love the First Amendment, you’re just against bad journalism. What is bad journalism? It’s the journalism that people like Trump don’t like, of course. The shit that makes you mad.
Maybe you make up some lies about someone sleeping with a reviewer or incite your thousands or millions of followers to lob abuse at writers you don’t like. It’s all Gamergate, and it will never die.
There’s a direct line between Gamergate and the rise of the alt-right. The online militias of 2014 were already pissed off and reactive when Trump came around and welcomed their shitposts with open arms, giving them license to say all the non-PC things they were convinced were the TRUTH—and then push even further under the guise of biting humor. We’re two years in to this presidency but it feels like five, at this point, because it might as well have started in 2014.