It’s that gamergate taught conservatives and republican think tanks that it was advantageous to focus on online communities to weaponize them to build massive hate movements, to sow distrust in experts and what not in order to finish the job of taking over the Republican Party, to activate that coalesced base into actual voters, and to build a sort of modern militia that Trump quickly used for j6, which kind of burned all that potential brown shirt energy out too quickly for their long term needs. Still, gamergate absolutely was the roadmap for using memes, propaganda, existing grievances to pull newcomers in and pull already motivate politically interested citizens into more concentrated spaces where they could be more easily propagandized and made useful for things later, like as targets for trumps meme coin grifts, as parrots for his talking points to try to shore up support for his various acts from tariffs to the wars/invasions to domestic policy chances and doge.

It turns out expensive gas and new forever wars isn’t popular even with those online communities, however, and the yard signs and flags and hats have slowly gone away.