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In the mid-2010s, it appeared that cultural progressivism was on an unstoppable ascent in the United States, thanks largely to the decisive re-election of Barack Obama in 2012 and the historically progressive Millennial generation entering the workforce. There seemed to be a surge of online publications that consistently took left-wing stances on contentious subjects, often in the context of feminism, ranging from broad-interest news sites like Vice and Buzzfeed to more niche traffic-chasers like Jezebel and Everyday Feminism. Around this same time, social justice politics began encroaching into more and more areas of life, a trend felt most pointedly in 2014 with the swift social justice turn the online media coverage of video games took. This brings us to GamerGate.

Few people could have expected the scope and far-reaching influence of GamerGate, which began with a jilted ex-lover and resulted in a hail of persistent death threats. What fewer expected and even fewer could possibly know was that this story only made the waves it did courtesy of a proxy war waged against a media empire by a gay billionaire they had wronged nearly a decade earlier.

A Blueprint for Online Culture Wars

More than 10 years later, the story of GamerGate has become well-known in its broadest strokes, though it does require a little explanation for those who managed to miss what can very reasonably be seen as a storm in a teapot. GamerGate was a vicious and protracted battle, waged online and through the media, between social justice warriors and 4chan shitposters over the content of video games. The former saw video games and gaming culture as retrograde, too male-centric, and even sexist. The latter saw gaming as fine just the way it was. One could be forgiven for not taking this discourse seriously. After all, it began with an unknown blogger writing a now-infamous post accusing his ex-girlfriend, the indie game developer Zoë Quinn, of sleeping with gaming journalists working for the outlet Kotaku in order to secure good reviews of her small project, Depression Quest. What followed was, in Internet terms, a shitstorm.

GamerGate became one of the largest stories on the Internet, dominating social media and YouTube and generating hundreds of media articles, including coverage from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the BBC, the New Yorker, Newsweek, Wired, ABC News, NPR, Vox, and Time Magazine. The controversy also pulled a lot of young people — predominantly men — into political debates for the first time. For many, it went far beyond politics.

Quinn found herself deluged with threatening and abusive messages. In response, Quinn, along with other prominent feminist influencers of the time, such as Anita Sarkeesian and Brianna Wu, spoke out against what was becoming a harassment campaign directed not only at Quinn personally but toward any feminist critic of gaming culture. In turn, the mostly (but not exclusively) male posters and bloggers — known as “GamerGaters” — began haranguing against the political correctness they felt had infected the gaming industry.

It was here that the gaming press, led by the outlets Kotaku and Polygon, felt all too comfortable with providing the grist for the GamerGaters’ mill and began publishing proclamations about how “Gamers are dead” and how gaming culture was inherently misogynistic and toxic. It was almost as if they were baiting the harassers and their supporters to respond in ever more unhinged ways — which of course, many were only too happy to oblige. Things became about as ugly as they could get. Gamers of all stripes (including those who just wanted to play a few rounds of Call of Duty and didn’t care about this latest incarnation of the Battle of the Sexes) found themselves lumped into the same bad-faith and morally libelous soup. Meanwhile, any women daring to speak their minds faced avalanches of death and especially rape threats.

The more harassment these women faced, the more outspoken their pushback became, leading to even more vehement harassment. Sarkeesian mocked her critics for seeing themselves as “noble warriors”, while Wu said, “From the top down in the video game industry, you have all these signals that say, ‘This is a space for men.’” And on and on it went. A dynamic had been created, one that formed the blueprint for the online culture wars in which we still find ourselves stuck today: online bullying being met with more online bullying, drenched in morally existential and deeply personal terms. In the case of GamerGate, this revolved around video games, but nothing has fundamentally changed in this blueprint except the specifics of what is being discussed, with politics often taking center stage. But the seeds of this blueprint were planted long before the “Zoë Post” of 2014.

Gawker and the Outing of Peter Thiel

To trace the true origins of GamerGate, we must go back to the blogosphere of the mid-2000s: an online landscape that dripped with nihilism and snarky contempt for anyone deemed unworthy. Indeed, the Internet was a place akin to the woods of Gaul, and the blogs of that era were the nomadic hordes harrying civilization at its edges. Like the nomadic Gallic tribes, these bloggers managed to do damage, taking potshots at various cultural shibboleths that sometimes landed. But what they did not expect is that one of those shots would connect with someone powerful enough to bring about their downfall: a proverbial Julius Caesar. Or, in this case, one Peter Thiel.

Back in 2007, very few people knew who Peter Thiel was compared to today. The billionaire entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder was a well-known figure in Silicon Valley due to his early angel investment in the up-and-coming platform Facebook. However, he was largely unknown to the wider culture. This was why it was all the more curious that the Silicon Valley-focused blog, Valleywag, published a story on December 19, 2007, with the headline “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People.” The fact that Thiel was in fact gay was less relevant than the fact that he had not made his sexuality public knowledge. While Thiel was not closeted and had already been out to those he trusted, he also did not advertise his sexual preferences. Nevertheless, the article in Valleywag served as a public “outing”, and one that Thiel did not endorse, especially since he did not see his sexuality as particularly relevant to anything he did in public.

The article came and went without making much of a splash and was soon forgotten — but not by Thiel. He fumed about it for years and became increasingly determined to exact revenge on the publication’s parent company and its founder, Nick Denton. Denton, who himself is also gay, was the opposite of Thiel in that he believed that transparency was of the utmost importance, even if that transparency was foisted upon people or organizations, or concerned people’s personal lives. That ethos of brazen transparency governed not only Valleywag and its parent company but also another of its media properties: the increasingly infamous gossip/public shaming blog Gawker. Thiel being outed by one of Gawker Media’s blogs was nothing special to Denton and his crew. To them, it was just another day at the office. But what they did not consider was that someone like Thiel had both the resources and disposition to enact brutal retribution against them that would eventually result in Gawker’s destruction nine years later.

The Proxy Wars Beneath GamerGate

The story of Thiel’s conspiracy to take down Gawker Media is one of a proxy war waged secretly on behalf of the pro wrestler Hulk Hogan. Gawker had posted Hogan’s illicitly obtained sex tape on their site and left it up despite repeated requests by Hogan’s lawyers to have it removed. When Hogan sued, Thiel, operating through a proxy, bankrolled the lawsuit. His goal was to sue Gawker Media for damages, with the company’s bankruptcy serving as the final outcome. No one, aside from Thiel’s proxy, knew he was involved. It is a fascinating and riveting tale covered at length in Ryan Holiday’s excellent 2018 book, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue.

Where this saga ties into GamerGate is that the publication at the center of the fracas, Kotaku, was owned by none other than Gawker Media, making it a perfect additional vector — an “opportunity,” in Holiday’s words — for the attacks on Gawker from Thiel’s camp to intensify.

It is important to note that Peter Thiel was never directly connected to GamerGate. One of Holiday’s sources — a figure close to Thiel named only as “Mr. A” to preserve his anonymity — explained that “the conspirators [working with Thiel on the Hogan case] had nothing to do with starting GamerGate, but they undoubtedly fanned the flames.” He went on to say that the harassment campaign that transpired was “largely autonomous but very helpful.” The Gawker ethos, shared by Kotaku and by extension other anti-GamerGate publications following their lead, was “defiance and scorn”, in Holiday’s words. And Gawker’s defiance and scorn helped turn the court of public opinion against the company.

For example, it did not endear many to the anti-GamerGaters when Gawker writer Sam Biddle wrote that “nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission” and that we, as a society, should “bring back bullying.” Recall that this was happening just when the anti-bullying campaigns of the early-to-mid-2010s, including “It Gets Better”, were in full swing. On cue, the GamerGaters jumped into action, flooding Gawker Media’s corporate affiliates with form emails demanding divestment, even relying on the now-classic cancel-culture move of pointing out that these harmful and dangerous remarks were coming during “National Bullying Awareness Month.” The tactic worked. Many lucrative advertising contracts were pulled from all Gawker Media sites. For Gawker, the timing of this blow couldn’t have been worse. As Holiday explains, “Gawker would estimate the loss in revenue to be in the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars — money the company needed as its legal bills mounted.” Legal bills accrued in their continued fight against Hulk Hogan and his Thiel-funded legal team.

The question of how involved Thiel actually was with GamerGate technically remains open. Holiday suspects that it was “more than a coincidence that GamerGate’s target was the same one that Thiel had in his sights.” The rise of alt-right provocateurs like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich and their oblique connections to GamerGate is another “coincidence” that is hard to dismiss. Even though “Thiel might not [have been] funding and coordinating [GamerGate] attacks directly,” Holiday writes, “his campaign in the shadows certainly benefit[ed] from them because the enemy of his enemy [had] created a crisis that [could not] be ignored.” Nothing can be proven with a paper trail, but Thiel’s associations within the right-wing media ecosystem of the 2010s-2020s are well-known, and this ecosystem often served as the main bulwark that both amplified this controversy to far wider cultural prominence and launched the most high-profile attacks on anti-GamerGaters.

In addition, the aforementioned Mr. A was the middleman between Thiel and Hogan’s lawyers, facilitating the transfer of Thiel’s funds to the legal team, but he also served as Thiel’s mouthpiece to anyone involved in the conspiracy. Therefore, if there was any connection between Thiel and the main propagators of the GamerGate narrative, it would have been through Mr. A. Through proxies and right-wing media allies, GamerGate would have served as one line of attack among many that Thiel used to wear down Gawker Media and Nick Denton while they were dealing with the Hogan lawsuit.

In the end, Thiel won. In 2016, the trial between Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media was decided in Hogan’s favor, and Gawker was ordered to pay $115 million in compensatory damages and another $25 million in punitive damages. While a $31 million settlement was reached by the end of 2016, the damage to Gawker Media was catastrophic, and the company was sold for a pittance to Univision Communications. That same year, after it became impossible to deny, Peter Thiel publicly admitted in the pages of the New York Times that he had been the financial backer of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the media company, shocking many, including Hulk Hogan himself.

The Butterfly Effect of GamerGate

One could argue that Thiel’s victory and indirect promotion of GamerGate did more than just destroy Gawker Media. Some have absurdly tried to claim that Trump won the presidency in 2016 because of GamerGate. Such arguments are extraordinarily reductive and overstated. But GamerGate, as the most visible part of Thiel’s war on Gawker, helped set the tone for what became today’s culture wars. When GamerGate initially erupted beyond complaints about an ex-girlfriend’s alleged dalliances, it was little more than a bunch of online reactionaries returning what they believed had been served to them: harassment. The question of whether anonymous gamers and gaming enthusiasts online were being “harassed” by snarky articles written by smug progressives is a moot one because obviously the answer is no. However, in hindsight, it did not matter because the perceived slight was enough to motivate them into acting as they did. GamerGate happened to benefit Peter Thiel in his shadow war, who thus had every reason to pour fuel on the fire. In the process, the fight between GamerGaters and anti-GamerGaters created the default dynamic that persists to this day — one of reciprocal crybullying in which all parties venerate victimhood and grievance as the ultimate moral currencies. And we are undoubtedly worse off for it.

The story of GamerGate is indeed one about harassment, but it’s slightly more complicated than the story of outspoken women being harassed when one considers its deeper origin story: the non-consensual outing of a gay man close to a decade prior, robbing him of the ability to fully live life on his own terms. Peter Thiel’s sexuality was not something for others to reveal or publicly proclaim. There is, of course, no reason for anyone to be ashamed of being gay or bi, but no one is obligated to make it known to the world, and someone else taking that freedom of choice away from them is a heinous thing to do. That is the classically liberal position on such personal matters.

As Thiel himself wrote in his August 2016 New York Times Op-Ed:

“Gay men had to navigate a world that wasn’t always welcoming, and often faced difficult choices about how to live safely and with dignity. In my case, Gawker decided to make those choices for me. I had begun coming out to people I knew, and I planned to continue on my own terms. Instead, Gawker violated my privacy and cashed in on it.”

Whatever one thinks of GamerGate or Peter Thiel, the ethics of outing a man against his will, even when he’s a public figure with contrary politics, are questionable at best. Regardless, Thiel, like Caesar, proved to be the wrong man to cross. And the ripple of that outing is one we still feel today. GamerGate would have transpired with or without Peter Thiel, but had he not been indirectly nudged into its path, it may never have grown to become the cultural flashpoint it turned out to be. It’s hard to blame Thiel for his vendetta, but the rest of us have been living with its downstream consequences for the past decade. The players and issues change, but the game stays the same as we play out the GamerGate script over and over.

Published July 09, 2025