See, moral busybodies who think they have the right to dictate what people think, say, and do is nothing new. They're something that dates back to literally before the internet, and our parents fought them off in their own way, back when it was Rock Music, Dungeons and Dragons, and Halloween. In the past they were mostly just the subject of mockery, though they had some power due to their cozy relationship with the government, who, as is the case in the later generations, would actively exploit their idiocy to try to push policy.
This group crystallized into the Christian Coalition/American Family Association/Moral Majority crowd. If you're not familiar, these were essentially outrage machines that would bitch about moral decay in media. As an example, the AFA alone, for about over a decade and a half, was responsible for somewhere in the 90-95% range of all complaints written to media outlets over "obscene content." Republicans hated these fucks about as much as Democrats did, but because the Republican party relied on appealing to "values voters" (read: religious people and the traditional family crowd) to help secure voterbase dominance, they were more tolerated on that side.
What happened inevitably is that despite all the sturm and drang about moral decay and people marrying sea turtles (thank you, Bill O'Reilly) is that the country moved on. People had gay people appear in their lives, their families. Unlike transpeople currently (who account for an infintessimally small number of people), gays are pretty much everywhere and families have had to come face-to-face with the fact that pretty much all the Moral Majority's arguments that gays were a sign of the apocalypse were fucking bullshit. This was helped by many members of the Moral Majority getting outed as gay themselves (usually by getting caught soliciting gay sex or the like) with such clockwork regularity that it's a joke your parents probably referenced. They discredited themselves thoroughly, and the truth was undeniable: they weren't ever going to win with this strategy again.
Time is like a river, however, and history repeats. At this point, the right was taking it on the chin. They'd suffered multiple losses, and even with Bush getting in office, the "value voters" were no longer an essential block of voters to pander to. Suddenly, God, Gays, and Abortion weren't the inevitable draw they used to be because the younger generations of Americans all grew up knowing gay people, understanding circumstances better, and seeing what happened before when their parents were around. Worse, a lot of the right were making it clear that they felt that the current leadership didn't properly represent them one bit. Realizing that fracturing would only worsen electoral losses down the line, several large corporate groups tried to get together activists on the right in order to properly use them as a resource during election season. While it looked like a grassroots movement on the surface, in fact, it was entirely bought and paid for, making it what is now known as a "astroturfed" movement. It was thought by the establishment at the time that they could keep some leash on the right, and by feeding them the right scraps, they could get them to knee-jerk enough to stir controversy, while driving enough message in order to help maintain control. It backfired spectacularly. The Tea Party quickly became commandeered by its craziest elements, who proceeded to push the group further and further into extremism and echo-chambered themselves harder and harder.
The Tea Party had been pushed into crazyland by being fed a sustained diet of complete madness for years (OBAMA IS GONNA TAKE AWAY YOUR GUNS AND MAKE GAY SEX MANDATORY FOR EVERYONE), to the point where you could completely contradict every single thing they'd spout with evidence, and they'd fucking deny reality. In the process, they completely pushed out the Republican mainstream, who was far too centrist for their liking, declaring them enemies and ratcheting down on the violent rhetoric.
Sound familiar?
When the mainstream Repubs were left disenfranchised, they did exactly what the Democrats would later do in 2016, voting for the scary Black Man en masse because their own candidates sucked, didn't represent them, and were being backed by people who would declare you a fucking terrorist sympathizer if you tangentially disagreed with them. Eventually, by the time 2008 rolled around, the Tea Party crowd were completely divorced from reality that we used to jokingly call them "Teahadists," and no amount of talking facts with them could penetrate their armor. Their involvement was a major contributing factor to the massive Democratic sweep in 2008, one that saw states that hadn't voted a Democrat since the Civil War go for Obama, at which point the Tea Party went nuclear, and led to the birther movement, where they were mocked by Democrats and Republicans alike. In short order they were disavowed by the establishment, and left to rot, relics of their time.
There was a warning there, but nobody picked up on it on the Left, and the Right didn't really realize what had happened either until way later, when realization sat in proper. At the exact same time, the framework for what would become the modern regressive left, the Social Justice movement, was still getting its formative steps, and with the Right undergoing a veritable civil war within its own ranks, there was nothing to contextualize what was about to hit the Left against.
The Left's version of the Tea Party is simultaneously exactly like its counterpart, and yet completely divorced from it. While the Tea Party was a top-down organization, started by wealthy financiers to swing electoral successes down the line, the Social Justice movement is bottom-up - it was begun by actual Marxists in mainstream academia with the intent of basically ripping out the system itself. The methods differed - the Tea Party fearmongered over familiar "value voters" ideals and spewed paranoia about terrorism, whilst Social Justice used identity politics and public shaming - but the spirit was in every way the same, pushing an agenda that was ultimately self-destructive to most involved, executed for the betterment of a tiny minority of unpleasant fucks who wanted control over everyone else. Both are Authoritarian, completely intolerant of dissent or mercy, willfully ignorant, destructive, spiteful, and utterly hateful towards anyone who will not walk fucking lockstep with them on the party line.
