No, there's no denying that 4chan and GamerGate were a breeding ground for the alt-right. There's a reason Milo went from mocking them to patronizing them to leaving them in the dust - they made for a great launching off point. Those areas are full of angry young men who are socially awkward and looking for someone to validate both them and their anger.

I was behind the *concept* of gamergate before #gamergate was a thing. I saw that games media was in danger of becoming like the mainstream garbage that passes as "news" today - biased and slanted based on who is reporting it with a focus on agendas rather than reporting the actual news - and I didn't want games media to go there. The instant that gamergate became a thing, however, I ran the other way. I WILL NOT be a part of any concerted activist movement for the simple fact that as soon as your movement has more than 6 people in it it becomes something beyond your control and invariably is co-opted by a vocal minority of assholes who in turn become the face of your movement. It wasn't hard to see right away the type of cretin that would be drawn to the type of movement gamergate was and I wanted no part of it. I'm sure that the majority of the movement's followers who remained personally invested shared my beliefs from the outset but its takeover by racists and misogynists was inevitable and they unwittingly aligned themselves with that. Activism in my opinion is always pointless at best, and destructive at worst.