The Tangled Web We Weave

The lessons that can be learned from this are fourfold. First, if you are a movement on the outside looking in, be mindful and understanding to those more extreme than you, and be firm, and yet understanding to those more moderate than you. You desperately need one another far more than you think. The risk of losing any sort of impetus due to infighting, especially when acting outside of the establishment's wishes, are far greater than the rewards of purity or the attempts at rapid shifts of the Overton bubble. Tension, after all, can cause ties to break as much as act to hold two entities together.

Second, if you wish to exploit the tension between extremists and moderates, then you must find a fracture point within their ideologies and exploit it. In the case of /pol/ and TRS, the fracture point was the acceptance of homosexuality within the alt right. Within GamerGate, the fracture point was whether or not developers should be embraced or boycotted. If you can separate the outward pull from the moderates, you can twist them to your cause, or leave them adrift and pacified. Often, angering the extremists against the moderates is a very effective strategy at shattering the will of a movement. After all, the extremists tend to be rather emotional, while moderates are more self-absorbed and interested in self-promotion.