I'm pretty sure the only people that actually think this are those that have Neogaf accounts and the Neogaf mods, lol. 

Plenty of people and even developers themselves have talked about how much of a joke of a website it is. 

I can only skim that because my eyes are not what they used to be but it seems to me you're spot on. From what I can remember Gamergate was originally about corruption amongst games journalists, got ignored by a lot of 'journalists' until it could no longer be ignored and was then suddenly tranformed into an issue of sexism. A convenient transformation that allowed woman haters to spring from their mud huts and feminists to work their political voodoo.

This. Same thing happened to me twice already here :D

I'm actually for curated moderation akin to what you see on VG Chartz. Completely unrestricted moderation leads to the likes of 4chan which is so filled with nonsense that it's practically impossible to have any real, sensible discussions.

The difference is that you can exist on this forum if you're not pro-Hillary, extremely liberal, and despise Gamergate.

I myself am a Republican, and when I was on NeoGAF I felt pressured into remaining silent. Occasionally I would express my beliefs and receive so much shock and blowback that I felt absolutely terrified about going into topics and providing them with a counterpoint argument.

Keep in mind, these are simple beliefs like "Anita Sarkeesian's videos are overly reductive and there are legitimate reasons to criticize them" or "I think EVERYONE should have lower taxes, not just poor people, because government should be smaller" or "I think we should preserve the 2nd Amendment, a ban on assault weapons does more harm than good." They are legitimate opinions which are civilly discussed in many other venues....but in NeoGAF they're de facto banned and subject to harsh moderation.

When you say something deviant on NeoGAF you are immediately put under a microscope, subject to an intense amount of scruntiny where one extremely minor slight can lead to a permaban (see the OP). Here and elsewhere, your actions have to be clearly juvenile to receive bans.

On NeoGAF I have seen a well-known African-American user make absolutely outrageous, clearly racist, anti-white comments, and yet will remain unbanned because "We want to maintain diversity in representation on this site, so we give them a free pass." I have literally seen a NeoGAF moderator say those words before.

Really?  I've seen people talking about all sorts of topics, and I've never seen someone banned just for a different opinion.  I'll admit I'm more of a long time lurker here, but I've talked to people about other political and social topics that were quite touchy and so long as it never got into a name calling fight people seem to stay here.

I'm actually for curated moderation akin to what you see on VG Chartz. Completely unrestricted moderation leads to the likes of 4chan which is so filled with nonsense that it's practically impossible to have any real, sensible discussions.

The difference is that you can exist on this forum if you're not pro-Hillary, extremely liberal, and despise Gamergate.

I myself am a Republican, and when I was on NeoGAF I felt pressured into remaining silent. Occasionally I would express my beliefs and receive so much shock and blowback that I felt absolutely terrified about going into topics and providing them with a counterpoint argument.

Keep in mind, these are simple beliefs like "Anita Sarkeesian's videos are overly reductive and there are legitimate reasons to criticize them" or "I think EVERYONE should have lower taxes, not just poor people, because government should be smaller" or "I think we should preserve the 2nd Amendment, a ban on assault weapons does more harm than good." They are legitimate opinions which are civilly discussed in many other venues....but in NeoGAF they're de facto banned and subject to harsh moderation.

When you say something deviant on NeoGAF you are immediately put under a microscope, subject to an intense amount of scruntiny where one extremely minor slight can lead to a permaban (see the OP). Here and elsewhere, your actions have to be clearly juvenile to receive bans.

On NeoGAF I have seen a well-known African-American user make absolutely outrageous, clearly racist, anti-white comments, and yet will remain unbanned because "We want to maintain diversity in representation on this site, so we give them a free pass." I have literally seen a NeoGAF moderator say those words before.