Do we like Adam Baldwin?
Our score: 2 out of 10. He is credited with naming Gamergate and the Daily Dot reported he compared gay marriage to incest; I found no verified good deeds to set against that.
Adam Baldwin (no relation to Alec, Stephen or the rest of that clan) started acting in My Bodyguard in 1980 while still at high school. He went on to play Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket, then Jayne Cobb in Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity, and NSA agent John Casey in Chuck. On screen he's a big, dry, funny presence, and that's why people love him.
Then came Gamergate. Baldwin is credited with coining the #GamerGate hashtag in 2014. When Raw Story interviewed him that November, he insisted on doing it over Twitter, mostly pointed to his old tweets, and objected to the headline by saying the movement was a small win in a larger fight. The piece noted the interview never touched the threats made against critics of Gamergate.
By January 2015 more than 4,000 fans had signed a petition asking Australia's Supanova convention to drop him as a guest. Organisers alleged he was involved in harassment of women and accused him of tweeting links to the personal details of two game developers. One of those developers called him a “sexist bully”. He suggested the petition could be libelous under Australian law, and a counter-petition defending Gamergate drew about 1,800 signatures.
The harm check, as far as I could verify it: the Daily Dot reported he often posts offensive opinions, including comparing gay marriage to incest. In 2015 he told AAP “I think political correctness is evil” while defending the film Aloha, after its director apologised for casting a white actor as a character of mixed Asian heritage. He also told AAP that people who complain online as a career should mostly be ignored. A few other posts turned up in searches, but I couldn't open the pages, so I've left them out.
Nothing new on him lately. The most recent thing I could open was an August 2024 episode of Hot Air's web series The Amiable Skeptics, where he and host Ed Morrissey dug into Tim Walz and the stolen-valor issue. The page was a short summary and didn't give his own words, so I won't say what he argued. A search for 2026 news turned up only gossip-site junk, including a death hoax, so ignore that.
The good stuff is thin on what I could verify. In a 2014 Dragon Con interview he said he has “nothing but the highest regard for people who are in the armed forces”, and he spoke warmly of his father and grandfather's service. Search listings mentioned veterans' charity rides, but I couldn't open a page that confirmed it, so I'm not counting it.