It was actually really instructive to me to watch the evolution of his antagonizing efforts towards me, as he allowed himself to get radicalized elsewhere. What is worse is that he knew better - i.e. the reason he cited to me when I offered to step down and let him take over was that he was not emotionally suited to it, but thereafter not only did he not step up, he also refused to step back, and instead inflicted his assaults upon the entire community (to the point people were making memes out of our back-and-forth exchanges, which we tried to keep to removed posts that if you recall in Reddit remained publicly-accessible for anyone that had the URL but was not shown on the feed anymore) - he wouldn’t even relegate them to our DMs, despite how we had communicated that way in the past. In part that may be b/c Reddit DMs suck ass, but also I think it was in large part theater, as he seemed to be performing for the sake of approval by some tankies on a Discord server. I continually offered them my mod position as well - b/c they had been with the game for several years and knew it exceedingly well, whereas I was a relative new-comer to it; also they were in charge of the fan wiki as well - but it seems that they had much more fun belittling my relative inexperience, yet refused to do any actual work of their own to make things better, i.e. modding.

I am sure you know about Ian Danskin’s (the guy who does Innuendo Studios) The Alt Right Playbook, but he also has a series titled “Why Are You So Angry” that perfectly describes the situation, which occurs so often among young gamers who unbeknownst to them are being radicalized, both by one another as a normal part of the young male angst, but also not entirely untouched by foreign powers who used that to literally get Trump elected and thereby benefit themselves.

And yes, then covid too, plus now the MAGA movement that took many of those principles to such great effect has expanded to include women, and somehow black and jews and LGBQI and even trans people, despite how incongruous all of that seems to anyone who pays attention to “facts”, that Trump isn’t goint to somehow change his tune and support them in return…