I’ve spent a lot of time observing GamerGate over the past couple years, and whatever you may think of them, one thing that can be said for certain is that many of them are people in transition- the classic GamerGate story is of a person who used to be one way, but then their eyes were opened, and now they are another way. From my perspective, what you’re seeing is liberals becoming conservative, as tends to happen at a certain age.
I’ve also noticed an interesting dichotomy of thought. Your new, anti-politically correct young conservative will react with scoffing and mockery if they hear the terms “Islamophobe” or “Transphobe” more often than not. But in my experience, the majority of them take the term “homophobia” deadly serious- they see it as a real thing that is a real concern that people are afflicted with, and not as a way to merely shut down conversation like the previous two terms. I’m 40, so to me the connection is obvious- all three terms arose in the exact same way for the exact same purpose. But then again, I wasn’t 10 years old when homophobia became a term, either. Telling an adult something is fundamentally different from telling a child something- I think these new conservatives are at an age where the term ‘homophobia’ and the ideological assumptions became simply a part of their being; when they first started thinking critically, they had already been hearing these terms and internalizing them for years and years. So what seems like an obvious contradiction to me is the most natural thing in the world to somebody 15 years younger than me. And of course the same will be true in the next generation if something doesn’t radically change: In 15 years or so, the conservatives/libertarians being forged right now by Trump movements and GamerGate and such will be faced with the next generation taking it for granted that there are 31 genders, while at the same time calling themselves ‘alt-right’ because they oppose pedophilia or Sharia Law. If you try to explain to them the parallels between transphobia (which they believe in) and pedophobia (which they scoff at), they will simply look at you like you’re insane, downvote you, and move on.
And all these people, myself included, think they are thinking for themselves. And they are, to a point. Now that they are adults, when some new SJW idea comes out, they have the ability to consider it, discuss it with each other like adults, and reject it. But they didn’t have that ability when they were 10 years old, and increasingly it seems to me that the things we learned when we were that age go unchallenged throughout our lives. So we can reject the advance of the SJW agenda, but rolling it back is another thing entirely.
But of course, the natural thing to think about next is what about my own upbringing? Are there ideas that are simply a part of my intellectual constitution, planted there by progressive teachers shaping me to their agenda, that I don’t have any easy way to challenge? The SJW hegemony of academia has been going on since at least the 70’s, after all. Well, if I see this effect in others (and I certainly do) I would be a fool to think I am exempt. But how do I challenge assumptions that were ingrained before I knew what an ‘assumption’ was, or that there was any value to be had in ‘challenging’ them- especially when these assumptions were a part of a systematic attempt to engineer my entire generation? First of all, I don’t even know what to look for until some oldster tells me. Secondly, whatever it is, I’m sure is considered now to be the worst sort of bigotry, and I would feel bad for even saying out loud what it is I’m thinking about. Any website I go to will be roundly rejected by the civilized world as being ‘hatespace’ or whatever. So I’ll be peddling up a steep hill to challenge myself, when if I decide to adopt the current accepted progressive wisdom, all I have to do is coast. In this way, the left is not only anti-intellectual, it attempts to destroy the ability of other people to think.
The only answer I have is that I have to dig back before myself- I have to consult sources older than me. Talking to individuals helps, but as I said, I’m 40 now, and people an entire generation younger than me are already starting to die off. So obviously I need to look at books from the past; what were people saying about society not only before the mainstream has shifted, but before the current concerns of the mainstream were even concerns? What did intellectual society look like when it was full of people that didn’t even know the definition of marriage or the existence of race was worth thinking about? This ability to ‘look back’ is one of the main benefits of tradition. Without a good millennia or two of intellectual tradition to sift through, you are completely beholden to whatever agenda this generation of progressive tinkerers wanted you to think when you were 9. And of course this is why everywhere the progressive is in control, tradition is condemned: The Constitution means whatever today’s needs tell you it means. We need to break away from ‘old dead white guys’ in politics and philosophy, and spend more (all?) of our time studying thinkers that don’t go back any further than the middle of the 20th century. Literature is re-written or condemned as racist, everywhere man is estranged from their intellectual inheritance.
We are told these days that white nationalism and misogyny are making a come back. I don’t know if that’s true- it could always be more propaganda, but taking it at face value for a moment, I think there’s an explanation to be had in the above. White Nationalism is a road back. Whatever else proponents of such are, they are an example of a consistent voice that has been saying the same thing for a very long time, and they obviously don’t change what they say to align with the generational demands of the progressives. So when one is looking for true intellectualism, it makes sense that some people would look there. The other major road back is religion. Religion is certainly better than white nationalism when done right, but the problem with religion is that it’s far more demanding on the receiver. It makes sense that some white males might take a road back that tells them they are superior to other people while at the same time not asking them to better themselves like a religion might.
Now, for an old thinker like me, the situation looks like this: Nazi-ism was a horrible, vile thing. Because it was a horrible, vile thing, progressives naturally began to associate everything they didn't like with it as part of a political ploy. But it is [i]almost impossible[/i] for a young thinker to see that. To a young thinker, Nazis, Christians, men, white people, Christopher Columbus are all just things condemned in the same way by the same people. As a conservative, it's frustrating to try to explain to a younger conservative or libertarian what's so bad about things like Nazi's: you find yourself saying the exact same things in the exact same ways as a leftist professor talking about, say, immigration reform or voter ID cards. In other words, if they've already rejected the "Yeah yeah, everything you don't want me to hear is sexist and racist" trick of the left, you'll sound like 'just another one of them' to the new conservative. This is how progressives destroy language when they destroy tradition.
This is typically the part where a writer would propose a solution, but I honestly don't think there is one. Once a society is estranged from history, tradition, and the useful impact of language, they are intellectual newborns with nothing to fall back on. By creating a generation who is used to hearing "nazi" casually used to refer to any Republican or Tory, and for whom "hate crime" means 'dressing up as a mariachi band for Halloween', the left has made it [i]inevitable[/i] that real racism, real hate, real evil will be experimented with again so society can re-learn the difference between the reality and the talking points.