Each of the Channel Awesome crew speaks as a cautionary tale of some sort, but there's one lesson I believe can be taken above all others, so prolific in Channel Awesome's former alumni that it's quite literally a rule of thumb with every lolcow on that site: If you bend the knee and take a position you don't believe in for the sake of expediency, as many on Channel Awesome did, it can ultimately result in you adopting that position wholesale if you don't course-correct.
Like an ontological contagion, this hit the bulk of CA's creators, and at very different times. Some were always on-board with this shit, but others had it forced on them and to various degrees. Many CA members used to be a lot more chill and open with their audiences. How many former CA members now express full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome and spend more time shrieking on Twitter than interacting with their audiences or making videos? Most of them, now. The same shit happened to Arin and many others who used to make edgy jokes and/or good content and now produce nothing but sterile PC content that alienates their fanbase. It's no coincidence.
The cliquey nature of Channel Awesome made it a naturally appealing area to pull this shit in, since if the usual ideology could catch on here, each creator had an audience to propagandize to. Moreover, it's easy to get people to adopt a stance they don't believe in if they're pressured by their friends and co-workers: "Just say you support X, even if you don't." The problem is that in having to say that and then defend it, they've already put themselves halfway into accepting this shit, since their real feelings on the matter remain unsaid and they now must maintain the illusion in order to keep their status. It's cowardice, pure and simple.
If I had to pinpoint the exact moment this hit critical mass, I'd say it was 2014 (the incident with Dan Olson and Kyle Oancitizen driving a massive ideological rift on the site at the behest of one Zoe Quinn), though I may be wrong and I'd be wholly unsurprised if one could find examples of it from well before then. Once a lot of these content creators could be browbeaten into supporting someone most of them had never fucking heard of, the first seeds were sown and very few would ever break out of that for fear of being labelled an apostate by the other CA creators.
