Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I've been thinking on something lately.
@Dom Cruise and I both have mentioned how the early 2010's (2010-2012) seemed to be a lot more positive than the woke malaise of the "Current Year" era that has succeeded it.
Even with Occupy Wall Street (probably the closest thing we have to a single origin point for SJW's) there seemed to be a lot of positive vibes from 2010-2012 and even the Occupy protests seemed to be a lot more innocuous at the time than they have become in hindsight.
But something happened that caused the cultural shift and I'm not fully sure what that is. Obviously, a lot of this stuff had been brewing underneath since the Great Recession (and for some issues, since 9/11) and Occupy was probably the first "bubbling over" of the Woke Left before we went into full "Current Year" around 2014-2015.
2013 is kind of a weird outlier year because it wasn't quite as hopeful as 2010-2012 but it also wasn't quite as woke scold as everything from 2014 onward. The Trayvon Martin trial was a big deal that year, which was almost like a preview for the insanity of Black Lives Matter.
Something happened in the latter half of 2012 that really accelerated this cultural shift, and a lot of people will say it was Obama's reelection that year, and while that definitely played a part, I'd say the bigger "wake-up call" event would be the Sandy Hook massacre at the end of 2012, at least in the United States.
Sandy Hook really was a game-changer for the Left and a lot of the gun control spergs started going into overdrive after it. The gun control debate drifted away from pistols to rifles, specifically the AR-15 and its many derivatives.
Both the Woke Left and the liberals tend to get really emotional and angry over Sandy Hook even to this day. While it was a horrifying tragedy where innocent people were killed, the way that they react to it today, especially with regards to "truther" conspiracy spergs.
When they un-personed Alex Jones, a lot of the justifications the media gave was because of his asinine statements about Sandy Hook. But here's the thing, there have always been "truther" types when it comes to politically significant tragedies.
You have the 9/11 truthers, and back in the Bush years, most 9/11 truthers were explicitly left-wing and usually militantly atheist (Zeitgeist: The Movie and the Tuscon shooter) with Alex Jones as the sole major exception for most of the 2000's.
Hell, there's even Columbine truthers, who were a big part of Web 1.0 culture (at least in conspiracy circles) and a lot of their rationale was similar to the Sandy Hook conspiracy nutjobs, but they didn't attract near the amount of MSM ire that Sandy Hook truthers do.
I personally think that Sandy Hook was just one of those "black swan" events that helped forge the Woke Left in its early days, along with the 2008 Recession, Occupy Wall Street, and The War on Terror.
Earlier in this thread, we talked about how certain major events signified the demise of 90's culture and the beginning of 2000's culture and I think it was
@Dom Cruise who mentioned Columbine, 9/11, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq as those big changeover moments, and I see a similar trajectory with the transition from 2000's culture to 2010's culture.
The Great Recession was probably the defining moment of the late 2000's and in many ways, it did a lot to set the stage for the culture of the 2010's. It was sort of the "Beginning of the End" for the culture of the 2000's in the same way that Columbine was for the 1990's.
Occupy Wall Street was the direct response to it, and I think this would be the best "start date" for 2010's culture much like how 9/11 is often seen as the event that truly kicked off the 2000's.
I think Sandy Hook was probably the point where any of the positive vibes of the early 2010's and the hard-partying nihilism of the 2000's were killed for good, although you could probably have the Zimmerman trial or Ferguson as that event as well.
