Here's How the US Became a Troll Nation: From Gamergate to the Rise of Trump

They delight in cruelty for its own sake. Building something positive has no real value in this new right wing. Pissing off per­ceived enemies, such as feminists and liberals, is the only real political goal worth fighting for.

They are, in other words, a nation of trolls.

Trolling is a term that started on the internet, to describe peo­ple whose main purpose online was irritating other people. It’s the sort of thing that people of all political stripes used to engage in, a casual bullying for its own sake that was low stakes. But as the boundaries between real life and internet life have broken down, and as the internet has become the primary form of polit­ical communication, trolling morphed into something of a right wing philosophy.

No longer do those on the right feel any need to offer a partic­ularly positive vision of America. Even Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” was rarely backed up with an artic­ulated vision of what, exactly, that greatness entailed. Instead, it was an angry yelp, aimed at liberal America. It’s about tear­ing apart a new America that was becoming more feminist and racially diverse. When social progress cannot be argued against, its opponents instead turn to trolling. And Trump — ignorant, thoughtless, mean, barely literate — would be their leader.

Trump’s election had the strangest of bellwethers: the world of video games.

It’s hard to believe it now, but in 2014, a storm of controversy raged for months in the online world of video gamers and became the template for what has been deemed “Trumpism.” Before there was Trump, there was “Gamergate,” where the smaller but equally American community of video game players was torn apart as the same bitter white guys (and their sad suck-up female supporters) lost their minds because some women had opinions about video games.

To most people who witnessed it at the time, Gamergate seemed like one of those incomprehensible internet wars that fades as quickly as it erupts, but in retrospect, it was an alarming portend of the rise of Trump, the alt-right and an America that now has torch-wielding white supremacists starting street fights in the name of fascism. It foretold a country where the American right has devolved into a nihilistic movement, prepared to tear down the country rather than share it fairly with women, LGBT people and people of color.

Like many historical calamities, Gamergate began because a young man did not accept it when a woman told him no.

In August 2014, a man named Eron Gjoni wrote a nearly 10,000 word essay about his ex-girlfriend, a video game developer named Zoë Quinn. The piece, which he posted online, was an incoherent train wreck of thwarted male entitlement, in which Gjoni obsessed about Quinn’s sex life. Calling a girl a slut online is often enough to get the internet hoards to attack her, but Gjoni’s real stroke of genius was in claiming Quinn’s professional success was not a result of her talent, but due to her trading sexual favors for good press coverage.

The accusation, and this cannot be stated clearly enough, was flat-out false. (Quinn did date a journalist, but he never wrote about her work.) But it played off the resentment so many men feel when they see a woman who has more professional success than they do. The lie gave these men a comforting fiction to cling to, which is that women who excel aren’t really talented or inter­esting, but instead must be cheating — using sex or liberal guilt or anything but their actual talents to get ahead.

It’s the same myth that millions would later use to convince themselves that Trump was somehow more worthy of their vote than Clinton.

Gjoni shared his post on internet forums where a lot of young men had already gathered to complain about women who were gaining a foothold in the video game industry. The result was the stalker’s dream: Hundreds, possibly thousands of young men (and some women!) became lieutenants in Gjoni’s quest to punish Quinn for dumping him. They harassed and threatened Quinn until she was forced to leave her home.

The campaign continued to spiral even further out of control, as the online mob expanded the circle of harassment. The targets of the Gamergate are familiar to anyone who watched the rise of Trump. While women who were viewed as uppity were the main hate objects, accusations also flew against journalists, deemed corrupt and out of touch by the Gamergaters. People who advo­cated for gender and racial equality were sneeringly dismissed as “SJWs,” short for “social justice warriors.” The vitriol was always justified by a hazy nostalgia for the good old days, when video games were supposedly simple and didn’t bother players with all this political correctness.

Gamergaters, one could say, wanted to make video gaming “great again.”

While the entire debacle garnered a lot of media attention, mostly from journalists—including myself—who couldn’t believe how angry so many young men were, one enterprising young writer named Milo Yiannopoulos saw an opportunity. He saw that Gamergaters were incoherent and unorganized, but with a little leadership, they could be whipped into a hard-right youth movement. Yiannopoulos got to work injecting himself into the middle of Gamergate, writing apologies for the movement on the far-right site Breitbart and riling up the harassment mobs on Twitter.

Mainstream conservatives tend to lean on arguments of tra­dition and morality in order to undermine women’s progress. Older conservatives try to spin their sexist views in positive terms, claiming that putting restrictions on women’s reproduc­tive rights and job opportunities is about constructing a happy family life. Traditional conservatism is genteel and condescend­ing to women.

Yiannopoulos, despite — or because — he’s both gay and Brit­ish, seemed to get why Gamergaters were different. He dispensed with the niceties of the past and embraced a politics of unvar­nished resentment. He told angry young men that they were being terrorized by “an army of sociopathic feminist programmers and campaigners, abetted by achingly politically correct Amer­ican tech bloggers,” and gave his young followers permission to embrace the politics of destruction.

Milo didn’t pretend to be motivated by sexual morality or family values. Instead, he wallowed in foul language and bragga­docio about his sexual exploits. He told his readers that they were justified in their feeling that women had, by striving for equality, stolen something from them. He offered them an anti-femi­nism stripped of any pretense towards chivalry, instead giving them permission to embrace a politics composed of nothing but resentment and destructive urges. He let them believe that the minor bumps and bruises of young adulthood, such as career struggles or dating struggles, were the direct result of women’s efforts towards equality — and that justified harassment and cru­elty towards women in return.

Gamergate faded, but Yiannopoulos’s star continued to rise. Mainstream media sources were fascinated by how he was selling a right wing politics that wasn’t interested in the usual justifica­tions of social order or religious faith. Milo portrayed himself as a rebel, framing destructiveness as subversion. He harnessed an army of young male supporters he cultivated by tapping their resentments towards women, and pointed their ire at targets, such as Muslim immigrants, that fit the larger Breitbart agenda of white nationalism.

It was Yiannopoulos who really grasped, for instance, that the 2016 reboot of Ghostbusters, which starred four women instead of four men, created a perfect opportunity to tap into a vein of male outrage. For every man who still can’t believe women are allowed to reject him, for every male college student angry that a girl got better grades, for every sexist still bitter that a woman got promoted over him at work, Milo offered yowling about the supposed injustice of Ghostbusters as an opportunity for revenge.

Yiannopoulos called the movie “an overpriced self-esteem device for women betrayed by the lies of third-wave feminism.” It was a perfect distillation of his immense powers of projection. It’s his audience whose self-esteem is shattered by seeing women in the kind of comedic roles they wish to believe that only men are capable of mastering. And it’s his audience that would rather tear the Ghostbusters franchise down by its ears than have to share it with women.

As with Gamergate, Yiannopoulos was a ringleader in the movement to destroy Ghostbusters through an online harass­ment campaign, a movement that unsurprisingly focused mostly on the one woman of color on the cast, Leslie Jones, who Yian­nopoulos called “barely literate” and “another black dude.”

Even Trump got involved, putting out a 6-minute video where he whined, “And now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women. What’s going on?!”

The harassment of Jones got Yiannopoulos kicked off Twitter, but his banning only seemed to reinforce the view of Yiannopou­los’s fans that they are victims of a “politically correct” culture that supposedly wishes to suppress supposed truths about race and gender through shaming and censoriousness.

To be clear, neither Yiannopoulos nor the modern right writ large invented this idea of trolling the left as a political ideology onto itself. Plenty of right wing personalities laid the pathway for the idea that messing with liberals is a reasonable substitute for having a coherent political philosophy. Rush Limbaugh, for instance, has maintained a multi-decade career as a radio talk show host by focusing his show primarily on the subject of the alleged evils of liberals and why listeners should hate these omi­nous creatures.

But after decades of that kind of propaganda, trolling liberals is no longer considered just a fun sport, but the ultimate purpose of conservative politics. The idea of making a positive argument in favor of conservative values has atrophied, leaving only the desire to troll in its place.

Ultimately, Yiannopoulos’s most lasting legacy will likely be in his support for the Trump campaign, which in turn helped a generation of resentful young men believe that voting Trump, who Yiannopoulos called “Daddy,” was the ultimate way to troll the feminists and liberals they hate. That Trump had nothing positive to offer doesn’t bother Milo and his fans. If anything, that is seen as a plus: Trump is the politics of destruction, per­sonified.

“I can put up with almost anything from Donald Trump, because of the existential threat he poses to political correctness,” Yiannopoulos told me when I interviewed him in October 2016.