Editor’s note: Allies often share a common worldview, but Francis Schaeffer wrote of the need for Christians to gain “co-belligerents,” people of different worldviews who will battle alongside us against totalitarian forces. This article will introduce WORLD readers to a world, unfamiliar to many, that contains adversaries but also co-belligerents.

Anita Sarkeesian and Laci Green: both left-wing feminists, both members of Time’s “30 Most Influential People on the Internet” (2015 and 2016), both with YouTube prominence. Similar at first glance, but one has chosen to continue in fierce partisanship and the other has met with her critics and found some common ground. Their contrasting routes show that in American culture we have an alternative to civil war.

Anita Sarkeesian, now 34, is a Canadian-American of Iraqi Armenian descent. In 2009 she founded the website Feminist Frequency to “make feminist theory more accessible.” She wrote articles and created YouTube videos in a series called “Tropes vs. Women” that criticized media through “a feminist sociological lens.” She gained notoriety in 2012 when she launched a Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising $6,000 to examine male dominance in video games: She received $160,000. Starting in 2013 she sat in front of a camera and explained that video games from Mario to Bayonetta were implicitly misogynist and harmful to women everywhere.

Laci Green, now 28, first appeared on YouTube around 2008 as a militant atheist from a Mormon background, though still in her teens. She then shifted her focus to sex education, saying Mormons had repressed her and she wanted toleration for promiscuity, homosexuality, and abortion. Her videos gained patronage from Discovery News and Planned Parenthood. In 2014, MTV recruited her to host a YouTube channel, “Braless,” to discuss pop culture from a Sarkeesian-like perspective. The channel gained over a million subscribers and ran for two years. In 2016, The New York Times declared her “the sex-ed queen of YouTube.”

By 2016 both Sarkeesian and Green had firm reputations as social justice warriors (SJWs). Sarkeesian declared, “Everything is sexist, everything is racist.” Green announced, “Everything is problematic!” Gamers reacted angrily to Sarkeesian’s assault on their favorite characters and franchises. She and Green became targets of a group of anti-SJW YouTubers known as the “Skeptic Community”: Sarkeesian felt so harassed that she fled her home.