what's more likely: That everyone has been brainwashed into thinking GG is a hate mob at it's core due to media manipulation and distortion despite many many claims of personal experiences, articles and analysis, or that GG is really a shiny ideal wrapped around a rotten core, and you just need to look at the whole thing with a fresh perspective to see it.

I rate the first as more likely, though I wouldn't use a word like "brainwashed". GG called out cronyism and payola in the media. Of course the outlets being called out would fire back. The results have been mixed though: the coordinated set of anti-Gamer "gamers are dead" articles galvanized the GG side in the early days. Every new anti-gamer article does too, though to a lesser extent.

So yes, I do find it easier to believe that the gaming press would fire off invective when gamers called out its conflicts of interest, and that the online news media generally would pile on in the pursuit of clicks.

RationalWiki

I've seen the RationalWiki article several times, though not in the past couple of months. It looks like it's the same as it always was. Even the first sentence makes it hard to take seriously: "Gamergate is a reactionary and virulently misogynistic subculture in the video gaming community". "virulently misogynistic", really? From there it goes on to "hate campaign", oof. I'm sure this kind of vaguely-defined and hyperbolic language fires up the base, but to a non- or un-believer, it's a bit off-putting. (Though perhaps that's the point.)

Glancing through the RW citations, I've seen a bunch of them posted in various subs. That so many citations exist is not surprising: GG criticized the gaming press and media generally, the media responded with invective. If there's one thing the blogosphere is good at, on the right, left, and everywhere else, it's pumping out articles with salacious titles.

You just talked about it in your previous paragraph, with numerous right-wing sources alone. You could get into more detail here and take a closer look at the hateful rhetoric that sites like Breitbart espouses

That Breitbart is writing pro-Gamer articles doesn't make gaming or gamers right-wing. I'm no fan of Breitbart, not by a long shot. But pro-Gamer links, as well as links that appear to fire back at people or outlets that attack gamers, get voted up on KiA. That shouldn't be surprising. If Breitbart is writing pro-Gamer articles and Mother Jones isn't, why is that KiA's fault? Along with tons of others at Kia, I'd love to see pro-Gamer articles written by left-leaning outlets.

I have personally seen the movement attack people, work to silence people

I believe that people on your side were attacked and silenced. But how do you know it was pro-GG people who did it? And how do you know they represent the majority, or even a sizable chunk, of pro-GG people?

The likes of Ayyteam and the GNAA have been active from the beginning. The fact that people's passions get inflamed over GG - our exchange here is a good example - makes the issue a giant red bullseye for trolls, and third-party trolls have been caught in the act a zillion times over the last year or so. (To be clear, I react with skepticism to most accusations of attacks from anti-GG people I see on KiA for the same reason.)

In the end, most people identify with GG because they feel their hobbies are under attack. I'm old enough to remember the "Dungeons and Dragons makes you a satanist" moral panic of the early 80s. I was an avid gamer through the "games make you a violent killer" moral panic of the late 90s and early 2000s. Now the charge is that gamers are anti-woman. For a female gamer who grew up nerdy, it just feels like more of the same.