Gamergate is a distillation of the worst of the worst of the Internet (especially in the mid 2010's), taking the form of a 2014 4chan raid that went on for far too long, showing everyone how reactionary, virulently misogynistic, and frankly stupid the cellarian underbelly of the video gaming community can be. Gamergate has its roots in antifeminist attacks directed at media critic Anita Sarkeesian in 2012 after the start of her crowdfunding campaign, but what everyone recognizes as "Gamergate" began after Zoe Quinn's ex-boyfriend Eron Gjoni recruited 4channers and Redditors to his personal army to perpetuate his abusive relationship with Quinn. Gamergate advocates, known as "Gamergaters" or derisively as "Gators", later claimed that they were a plotting a "consumer revolt" against what they perceive as "unethical practices" by game reviewers, a talking point they came up with to deflect accusations of harassment or that they were simply attacking Quinn. They also claim that they advocate for "freedom of speech", but only in response to being banned from every website they use to mount witch hunts against Quinn, Sarkeesian, and anyone else who gets in their way. From the start, Gamergate was a village bicycle for any and every conservative and/or reactionary pundit who tagged along in order to attack feminists and "social justice warriors" (by which they mean people who aren't reactionaries), as well as to fool as many people as possible into joining what would eventually become the alt-right.[note 1] Another subset of hangers-on used Gamergate as a weapon against those in the industry who rightfully panned their games for being unplayable garbage. In turn, Gamergaters used their new figureheads to try and lend their movement some legitimacy, despite the fact that those people never had any of their own in the first place. Gamergate as a whole is an amorphous and leaderless hate mob, characterized by Nintendo as an "online hate campaign",[1] but a few particularly heinous assholes show up now and again to lead it to their pet cause. The cream of the crap includes vloggers Phil Mason, Carl Benjamin and Davis Aurini; failed tabloid journalist-turned-alt-right media gadfly Milo Yiannopoulos; feminist in-name-only Christina Hoff Sommers; and just terrible science-fiction writer Theodore Beale. When these dim bulbs aren't pointing the masses in their favored direction, the rest of Gamergate just goes along doing what it normally does: embroiling itself in sexism, misogyny, anti-feminism, racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, transphobia, and the culture war against "SJWs" (with a focus on video games), while others in the movement try to deny culpability and lay the blame on third party trolls.