You’ve seen it yourself again and again, and it’s a theme that I feel is presenting itself with this GameStop saga now.
After the 2020 election, there’s been this sense of hopelessness that many Americans have had. They truly feel that when it comes to battling the elite, that they are severely outgunned despite the elite being incredibly outnumbered. There have been worries that we may never see a time where we overcome those in power.
For many others, it seemed they didn’t even know how deep the corruption went, or even how the corruption worked in the first place.
Then came along a subreddit with what I can only describe as some of the most insane people on the internet. The subreddit known as r/wallstreetbets was what I could only describe as “wild.” It was the stock market Thunderdome. A Mad Max take on the exchange that featured people walking the financial edge by throwing around thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of dollars around on stock options. A lot of these people weren’t rich to begin with either. These were people who threw entire life savings into a call and come out the other side either filthy rich or having lost everything.
The community developed its own little mini-culture and language. Memes and funny videos were traded as frequently as stock options. An entire YouTube channel even dedicated videos to keeping track of some of the wildest stories to come out of the culture that had developed around the practice of risking it all for massive gains.
Like I said…wild.
But you need wild in order to pull off what many would be too afraid to do, and wild was what was required to take on the elitists who currently have their claws so deep into our system that they can literally influence the law or work outside of it. Wild is what caught these elitists completely off-guard and forced them to act out in the open, exposing just how deep their corruption actually goes.
We found out who our enemy was real fast, but more importantly, we found out that they aren’t invincible. In fact, they’re easily defeatable. In order to win, they had to manipulate the system and cheat their way back into safety.
To put it into context, a bunch of guys on message boards with screen names like “u/king_mudd_butt” were able to bring major hedge funds to their knees. This was, of course, done with the trend arising to buy GameStop stock, but the point is plain.
When we band together under a cause, the people win.
This reminds me a lot of the GamerGate battles that were fought in 2015 when the mainstream media and its activist groups attempted to conduct a hostile takeover of the gaming industry. They were beaten back by gamers who had united under the purpose of keeping their corruption as far out of it as they could.
Gamers won the battle and made it clear that a god can bleed. Today, a bunch of Redditors got together and struck a huge blow against people who have been hitherto untouchable.
Discouragement has infected much of the Conservative movement but it should be noted that things that we stand for will find defenders from every corner of our society if the message is clearly gotten across. Crony capitalism was spoken about from many platforms and then something conservative happened, we eliminated cronyism as a people.
Things really can change for the better, it just requires a solid message and the wild will to fight.
