As I suggested in my first post here on this account, this seems to happen every twenty-odd years. Today's SJW are the PC thought-police from the 1990s who were the hippie-activists of the late-60s/early-70s who possibly were an incarnation of post-WWII communist/socialists.

Thankfully, if history has shown us anything, its that with each generation, they hit a peak and fade fast, as the culture at large - after seeming to embrace the new wave of pseudo-progressive thought - rejects the the bulk of their ideas as irrational and without merit. The hippies were followed by many years of the "Me" generation and general debauchery (and I don't mean to use debauchery disparagingly; the no-fun crowd could benefit from engaging in a little more debauchery and a lot less mental masturbation and general navel-gazing). The politically-correct mid-nineties generated a new wave of libertarians on one hand and sex-positive feminists (Paglia and Sommers, for instance) on the other. I expect much the same outcome this time around, but that doesn't mean that the vileness that identity/oppression politics shouldn't go unchallenged. Encouraging ethics in gaming journalism - and by extension, journalism as a whole - helps do this by exposing the nepotistic ideological cliques that exist to help coordinate talking points and present a coordinated narrative that they try to advance regardless of facts and logic - in fact, "facts and logic" be damned, in their minds.

Now, as to why the SJW crowd seems to have a finger in everything: with each passing wave, more True Believers are created. While the majority of the culture may move on and, a couple years hence, look back and scoff at how we succumbed to a moral panic and were calling all these innocuous things harmful, the newly converted True Believers will adhere to their radical ideologies. In fact, their ability to rationalize is so strong that they will see the culture at large rejecting their views as VALIDATION of their views. They work into positions where they can influence others (education and media being particularly prominent), and then they wait for the opportunity to form the next wave of extreme-leftism when a new generation - a generation that wasn't alive or was too young for the last incarnation of thought-policing foolishness - comes along. There are always those in new generations who are enthusiastically looking to improve the world and believe in something radical, and the hold-outs from the last wave of extreme leftism set the hooks in the vulnerable members of the new generation. At first, it seems like an entire generation has bought into the new paradigm, as few people are against things that sound so good as "social justice." However, it's short-lived. The ideas spread like a virus though the culture (organized efforts to build up narratives and peddle dogma), the culture builds up immunity to the virus (the narratives and dogma fall apart under scrutiny), and most of the new generation becomes immune. Yet, some damage is done and some new True Believers are made, and the cycle repeats.

tl;dr: In each generation, there are Crusaders looking for a holy war to wage and one-true religion to believe in. In a different era, the SJW crowd would be the crowd burning heretics at the stake.

EDIT: I'm at the tail-end of Gen-X myself (I identify more with the Millennials/Gen Y, but demographically, I'm an X-er). The result of the PC wave in the 90s was that a lot of moderate Xers seemed like radical leftists during the grunge years but, as the Kool-Aid wore off, reacted by swinging to the right - in many cases, far to the right. Had the extreme left not pushed their nonsense so hard and instead been called out by other leftists as extremists, I believe more Gen-Xers would have stayed moderates who were more likely to be open to ideas from the left. Instead, the extreme left sabotaged the more rational left...which is why I am trying to call attention to the SJW crowd and why I encourage anyone who leans left to publicly call out our loonies as the loonies they are rather than simply ignore them, brushing them off with the thought, "Sure, they are wack-jobs, but they mean well. And at least they are OUR whack jobs instead of the Tea Party types."

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