"I am a word person."
are you sure
In his big "Ethics in games journalism"-article he makes the point that, once trust is lost, it can't be regained.
He makes that point in an article he posted on The Escapist, which he bought after it turned into one of the central havens for Gamergate.
Dude is legit shook at all the backlash he got over this. He probably thought he could dog whistle his way back into the good graces of GG and no one would suspect a thing.
I don't think it's that. I believe him when he says that he abhors what Gamergate stands for. He's a Boogie, a classic "centrist" who thinks that you can never really take sides and, if you criticize Gamergate, you also have to criticize Zoe Quinn because, hey, surely she kinda deserved at least some of this, right? He thinks he can, at the same time, denounce Gamergate for what it "turned out to be", but also commend it for "what it was trying to be". Ignoring, of course, that it never tried to be anything but what it turned out to be. He is one of the people that will bend reality just to make it fit his fence sitting, his total dedication to being the centrist who knows better than all those silly people who end up on one of two sides.