Last month, the Florida chapter of the Society for Professional Journalists hosted an afternoon panel about GamerGate, the yearlong campaign either about ethics in game journalism or the harassment of women in the tech industry, depending on whom you ask. Since the campaign was launched by a young software developer who published a 9,000 word blog post smearing his ex-girlfriend—a post which led to a mob of harassment and accusations that she had slept with a games journalist for favorable reviews of her game (she hadn’t)—most people, including Wikipedia and almost all media outlets, are not sympathetic to the “actually it’s about ethics” framing.

That camp, composed largely of people who spend their time posting on niche forums, like Reddit’s KotakuInAction, chose a telling group to represent them at SPJ’s afternoon panel: Christina Hoff-Sommers, an author and scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who’s critical of modern feminism; Milo Yiannopolous, a writer at Breitbart with a history of unflattering comments about gamers and a poor record of journalistic ethics, who most recently accused Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King of lying about his race to get a scholarship (he wasn't); and Cathy Young, a contributing editor at the libertarian magazine, Reason. Notably, none of them are gamers or game journalists.

Though GamerGate is nearly incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been following it closely, it’s unusual in that it captured the attention of people who have nothing all to do with video games when it’s ostensibly preoccupied with whether certain online blogs have properly disclosed their writers’ ties to indie game developers. A recent post at Breitbart, however, helps to explain GamerGate’s appeal: It’s an accessible front for a new kind of culture warrior to push back against the perceived authoritarianism of the social-justice left.

Allum Bokhari, the author of the post and a panelist earlier in the SPJ event, calls this new movement “cultural libertarianism,” and he describes it as in opposition to “cultural authoritarians” who argue “that ‘problematic’ media can lead to racism and misogyny,” a view with “little scientific evidence to support it.” Instead, cultural libertarians support unrestrained free speech, what Bokhari calls “total artistic and intellectual freedom.” Just as economic libertarians believe that an unregulated market is an unmitigated good, so too do cultural libertarians believe that free speech can do no harm. Of course, they’re completely wrong.

There’s much to object to in this view, not least in its fundamental premise: that there’s little to no evidence that media promoting sexism or racism can be harmful. To support his statement, Bokhari cites a single longitudinal study that shows no correlation between playing video games and sexism. The study is fundamentally flawed, however, because the researchers defined sexism by the answers to only three questions: should men make decisions in the family, should women do the chores, and should men be leaders.