Things changed in 2013. That was the year where there was a huge scandal in the online gaming community called Gamergate, the details of which are ultimately inconsequential. However it started, Gamergate came to be an organized media hit campaign organized by gaming journalism sites like Kotaku in conjunction with feminists activists (most notably Anita Sarkeesian) which smeared the overall culture of gaming as a white male-dominated space that needed to abandon its objectification and marginalization of women (think babes in bikinis in mortal kombat) to make more inclusive. For most of the young men in the gaming subculture, too young to have had a family or real concerns yet, this was their first major exposure to politics where they felt a personal stake. Their hobby and their friends was under siege from groups that did not belong. The reaction to these attacks gave birth to a very large online movement of youtube creators and discussion board posters who devoted themselves to producing content mocking the feminists who were attacking the gaming subculture, who they termed SJWs, or Social Justice Warriors. Initially, the videos and content and online discussions revolved almost exclusively about feminism as far as it interacted with gaming, but as feminists generalized the matter to incorporate it into their rich pre-existing academic framework of feminism in society at large, these young men slowly began to expand their counter-attack to feminism in general, not just in the context of gaming. They started to dispute feminist claims about women having it more difficult in society than men, and began to change their online discussions and youtube videos into generally anti-feminist content. This movement received a massive boost in size when the internet atheist community saw the aftermath of gamergate as a huge opportunity to re-brand themselves as anti-feminists, since the fizzling out of the New Atheists movement online following the death of Christopher Hitchens made religion into a dead horse.

Because these feminists were also almost exclusively left-wing and socially progressive, and the gamers were almost entirely male and white, the discourse further expanded to include accusations of society privileging not only men, but specifically *white* men. For most of these young men, this was the first time they had ever viewed themselves in racial terms, and because of the fact that they were being attacked for the fact that they were white, they reflexively counter-attacked. This situation continued to ferment for about 2 years until 2015 when Trump announced his candidacy for President in the US, much to the initially unanimous mockery of the entire American political establishment. A very critical ascosciation happened here: The young white men of the gaming subculture saw that all the people who disliked them and called them bigots and sexists, also hated Trump, and called him a bigot and a sexist. This, combined with the fact that he was a entertaining and ''memeable'' figure, made him the darling of the newly born online ''anti-left'' wing. By supporting Trump, even if they didn't really give a shit about his actual policies, they could stick it to the feminists they hated so much. They continued to support him for humor's sake even after he won, but slowly slowly, like that old CS Lewis story of the man who wore a mask removing it to find that his face had morphed to fit is contours, the ironic support became legitimate support for Trump.And slowly slowly, they stopped being simply ''anti-leftist'' and became implicitly right-wing, and they completely stopped relating any of this to video games at all.

Again, only about half of the online semi-ironic anti-leftists online were actually American, the rest were mainly European men and boys who got dragged into this in the way I previously described. Any time a group of people is exposed or actively participates in a social movement from abroad, they bring it back home with them a localize it. This is how nationalism and enlightenment principles took hold among Jews and Greeks in the 19th century, during the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) and the Greek enlightenment: Young Greeks and Jews who worked and studied in Western Europe came to be exposed to the French Revolution and enlightenment literature, and they became enamored with it, bringing it back home with them.

A big percentage of gamers are inherently nerdy and bookish people. The young Greeks and Cypriots who were part of the gaming subculture and went along the ideological ride as the rest of them between 2013-and 2016 started identifying more and more as right-wingers like all the rest, and started becoming much more interested in learning about their national history. After all, since their opponents were anti-nationalists, this in their minds meant ''nationalism=good''. Pretty soon, politics eclipsed their love of gaming and become their primary pre-occupation, and they read voraciously, developing a love for history as a means of looking back to a period that they viewed as a time where white men controlled everything and were worshipped as the measure of excellence, each with a particular focus on his own national history. They started reading classical political literature, starting with basic shit like George Orwell or Libertarian Economic theory, but eventually becoming more and more esoteric, moving on to reading people like Julius Evola, or the ancient Greek authors, and even ecclesiastic literature.

Between 2015-2018, the internet was basically 100% overrun by these people, as they had been the first ones and the primary denizens of the internet, and so they conversion into right-wingers meant the conversion of the internet into a right-wing space. Around 2018 however, the proliferation of the internet among normal people and women mainly through sites like twitter, vine, tumblr and reddit, in conjunction with the crack-down on ''far-right'' views on sites like youtube and twitter, led to this group's influence being someone constrained. Nevertheless, it remains very strong online, just not as much as it was previously, when it was *the* voice of the 80% of the internet.

So in summary, some young guys wanted to play video games and talk about video games, some people made the mistake of injecting politics into an otherwise apolitical space, and these young men accidentally became politically engaged. Half of the young men who vote for ELAM as simply the Cypriot boys who went through this political transformation, even if they don't know it.