>>513308376
GG was a pretty obscure event in general outside of /v/ and terminally online gaming communities. But honestly I don't think that the weaponized Pepe memes and kek ever would have expanded to the level that they did without GG. GG was what caused /pol/ to grow due to an influx of /v/ users, which never would have happened organically without GG. This lead to the mass creation of original content including the original 2015/2016 Pepe memes and kek memes associated with Trump, which later expanded into QAnon and mobilized millions of retards IRL. While GG was certainly not the only contributing factor to this, 4chan (at the time) generated a very significant portion of all the OC worth a damn on the Internet. Rickrolling, i can has cheeseburger, over 9000 and all your original garden variety memes find their origins in chan-related communities. 4chan had extraordinary force over the zeitgeist in those times. So even though your average retard may well know nothing about GamerGate, chances are they know what Pepe is because of GamerGate, and there's no way Trump is ever elected without Pepe memes flooding socmed in 2015 - it was a mass political mobilization the likes of which had never been seen before and lead directly to the censorship and policing of content that we see widespread today.