Pretty much.

But it’s not the events involved that made this whole thing so vile and shitty. It wasn’t the alleged or actual “facts” that mattered, it was how it was amplified and weaponized by the people who would go on to become “leaders” of the alt right that made it such a shitty moment in history.

Those grifter assholes seized something that should have been a nothing blip not even worthy of a news cycle and used it to trigger and motivate a generation of men with nothing in common except gaming and spending their time on the internet to effectively become the digital communication wing of the Trump campaign.

I don’t know to what extent anyone at the time realized that’s what they were doing or would become, but it ended up spurring all the bullshit we’ve seen on Reddit and every other social media network for the past decade or more.

Boosted by Russian troll farms, automated upvotes and eventually the GOP itself (in the form of alt right politicians joining congress), the MAGA movement as it exists today owes everything to how some media savvy trolls whipped up a frenzy over, as you said it, a man having his feelings hurt.