I remember arguing with people during the early days of GamerGate about the term “social justice warrior” or “SJW,” for short. They were dead set against using it and felt that the acronym caused harm to the fight against radical feminism. My main argument against dropping it was that it had already gained wide acceptance. I was seeing it pop-up on Facebook from people who weren’t deeply involved in the stuff I wrote about daily. Keep in mind, this was in the fall of 2014. Since then, it’s only gotten bigger. I see the term all the time, in headlines across the world. The SJW epithet is now widely used all across the internet.

Even Vox realizes how much harm it’s done to the people who wish to subvert society with their twisted cultural deviancy.

Over the past few years, Gamergate and male-centric Reddit communities have popularized the idea of “social justice warriors,” commonly abbreviated as SJWs. This disparaging label is an updated way to accuse progressives of extreme political correctness. The “SJW” label is a huge and successful weapon in the alt-right’s arsenal; it paints feminists as manipulative, oversensitive, shrill women who attack men with claims of sexism at the tiniest of provocations while rejecting their sexual advances.

The article itself is mostly hogwash, but I found that nugget quite illuminating. The people who wish to see us go away have begun to acknowledge the potency of our strategies. The ones who said GamerGate and its surrounding movements were worthless and powerless, now claim that we have a GamerGate president. I don’t see Donald Trump’s election as some sort of GamerGate victory, but I do think that the tactics and organizational methods popularized by the fight against SJWs in gaming laid the groundwork in many ways for the fight against Hillary Clinton and “progressives” in general.

They made us out to be laughingstocks for years, but now we’re the ones laughing. It’s a beautiful thing to see. And the great part is, we’ve only just begun.