I saw some other discussion of “cultural Marxism”, and it seems to imply an identity between two groups of activists who are frequently at odds with each other.
It’s a complicated story, but in short, I was following up some other debates on social media, and found some accounts of heated arguments between anarchists and Marxists on the one hand, and advocates of identity politics on the other, in which the advocates of identity politics were labelled “social justice warriors”, usually abbreviated SJWs. I believe this preceded Gamergate.
An interesting thing is that I recognized a couple of the names involved, described as SJWs. And, the same people came up in an episode in which some people at 4chan worked up a scheme to humiliate SJWs by initiating a hashtag campaign, “#EndFathersDay”, using sockpuppet accounts on Twitter, and trying to bait SJWs into expressing support for it, as they ratcheted up the absurdity of it. To their credit, several SJWs recognized this for what it was, and set out to expose the sockpuppet accounts, showing that their avatars were stock photos, pointing out inconsistencies in their use of language, and so on.
The central SJWs in these prior episodes, as far as I can make out, haven’t really had anything to do with #Gamergate, though there are overlaps in the networks. Pretty much all the lefties I’m familiar with, who’ve taken notice of the issue at all, have been firmly against Gamergate and supportive of Sarkeesian, Wu, etc. I’m guessing that Gamergate may have started in part as a second effort by the same people behind #EndFathersDay.
