The Democrats were the one's who tried to ban Video Games in the 90's and 2000's

 The Democrats were the one's who tried to ban Video Games in the 90's and 2000's

I've often heard from ex-liberals and leftists, generally ex-democrats, that the democrats of today seem like the Republicans they were trying to fight in the 90's. Moral puritans who demanded we censor things like video games and movies and so on, and now the left has become these things. Like many ideas on the supposed Republican and Democrat switches, there was no switch, and the Democrats were just always this way. A particularly terrifying trend is that media rewriting history isn't really meant for the people living through the instance in history itself, who were there and know how things actually were despite the laughably absurd takes by the media. The media constantly repeats things even after they know it’s blatantly false, and they don’t care that everyone at the time knows this, because it’s not for us. It’s for our children to read, because they didn’t see it happen. Young people due to the Mandela effect which, was also a leftwing phenomena, somehow believe it was conservatives who were at fault, because this is how history is rewritten. Without a singular agreed upon version of history, it's easy to manipulate people in to supporting bad political ideas. Even if they don't agree with people politically, they will vote for them because they think they do.

The left doesn't like guns or freedom of speech, and naturally tried to ban speech with guns, be it in video games or Hollywood, while the right-wing has historically supported both things. At this time period, the Brady laws, assault weapons ban and controversial 1994 crime bill all put in stringent regulations on guns and other things in an attempt to curb violence, largely pushed by the Democrats including Bill Clinton, Al Gore and Lieberman. Unsurprisingly, at the same time, was actually the left was trying to ban video games in the 90’s, with the 1993-1994 video game hearings and Video Game Ratings Act of 1994 being lead by Herb Kohl the richest congressman of all time and Al gores running mate and the highest ranking democrat in the Senate, Lieberman, promoted by President Clinton. Republicans overwhelmingly voted against the rating system the left wanted at the time, with only a handful of democrats defecting. Kamala Harris lost the landmark Supreme Court case for California to restrict violent video games in 2011, a low made in 2005 in California. Later Hillary Clinton and Lieberman would try to ban and regulate violent video games in 2005. Leland Yee, a child psychologist the democrats promoted and a congressmen from California, who claimed even seeing violence in video games or movies was likely to increase a child's propensity towards violence, was later convicted of gun trafficking for terror groups, as he was trying to disarm ordinary citizens for his own benefit. 

The satanic panic or McMartin Preschool trial, happened in Los Angeles, a Californian an extremely liberal city, and subsequent ones largely in liberal cities as well such as the Bronx or Chicago. Fox News doesn’t exist until 1996, but the video game hearings happen from 1993-1994 and the Satanic panic happened in 1983. Despite many proclaiming they remember Fox news covering it at the time, Fox News didn't even exist at the time; in fact almost no conservative media did, and conservative media only makes up approximately 7% of media, and less at this time. This is a very strange Mandela effect the left successfully propagated, but let’s not forget the left created the insane idea Mandela was dead or a civil rights hero in the first place too. 

Kamala Harris, Vice President to Joe Biden, while an attorney general for California at the time, oversaw the landmark supreme court case Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, where she lost the ban on violent games in 2005 and the supreme court overruled this, in the name of freedom of speech. The case, known as the "Edmund G. Brown, Governor of the State of California, and Kamala Harris, Attorney General of the State of California v. Entertainment Merchants Association and Entertainment Software Association", was a law in California which attempted to apply draconian video game restrictions, particularly in regards to violent video games. From the 1990's to the 2010's, Democrats made extreme regulatory efforts to ban, restrict, or regulate violent video games in an attempt to tie them to real world violence, and successfully did so in several states including California which had these laws as late as 2011, before being overturned by the Supreme court or federal judges in many cases. Despite this, Democrats now will insist that this is a Republican or conservative thing, and that conservatives are somehow responsible for it. This is another case of rewriting history, claiming both sides switched after the civil war or changed on civil rights, neither of which is true ,but that is widely believed. The only congressmen to change sides over civil rights was Strom Thurmond, a democrat congressmen who later became in favor of civil rights and switched over to the Republican side. Republicans overwhelmingly voted for civil rights law in 1957 and 1964, of which Richard Nixon helped to vote in, with an 85% majority in favor vs. 65% for Democrats, and maintained this percentage of approximately 90% support all the way up until the last major civil rights act in 1991. Republicans never were against civil rights, and Joe Biden was old enough to vote against it, despite being seen as a way to fight against the supposedly racist Donald Trump. 

The role of Left-wing media and culture

I've often been told that while the people in office were trying to ban video games were virtually all left-leaning, culturally it was a right-wing push, that conservative media promoted this. The problem with this other than the fact it was obviously wrong and is kind of absurd (how would the media and people be so different from who they are voting for?), is that there simply wasn't much conservative media at the time; Fox News doesn't exist until 1996. It's not really possible for mainstream conservative media to support this because it didn't exist yet. That being said, we do have overwhelming proof that left-wing media did in fact support banning video games or at least chose to associate video games with violence. The washington post absconded the violent video games and promoted democrat talking points in 1994, while this general narrative was promoted by the New York times and CNN. Salon in 2000 for example had positive coverage claiming studies would prove violent video games and hollywood movies were connected to violence, and most of these sources either directly make the claim video games cause violence or uncritically word-for-word parrot the talking points of left-wing Democrat politicians. 

Even as late as 2013, the New York times was promoting this link and suggesting video games seem obviously linked to violence, although they do try to suggest the research is ultimately inconclusive in the long term. In 2018 CNN also argued that video games serve as a "virtual bootcamp" to teach mass shooters how to use guns. MSNBC tried to show violent video games were bad with their coverage by Redneck Rampage. While this is only a small snapshot of the media's view at the time, it demonstrates that they at least were not favorable to video games, and still aren't. More modern coverage tries to tie Donald trump to banning video games, something he never tried to do, and blame Republicans, but it's clear if you go back decades, even just one decade, that the mainstream media was in favor of this.