More specific parallels between gamer misogynists of now and Hofstadter’s paranoids (all quoted sections are from his essay):

Why the relentless viciousness of the worst of the attacks: doxxing, hacking, death threats, creation of violent images featuring their targets? Because the enemy must be destroyed at any cost, irrevocably, never to return:

“As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated — if not from the world, at least from the theatre of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention.”

Why can’t Anita Sarkeesian simply be an academic and a video essayist, sharing her critical analysis with the wider world? Why can’t Zoë Quinn simply be a small scale indie video game developer and writer, creating games and sharing her thoughts with those who may be interested? Because they are the all-powerful leaders or designated public agents (impossible to tell which, given their organization’s shadowy structure!) of the feminist enemy vanguard, and it is from their work particularly that the corruption and destruction will flow:

“The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman — sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history […] he manufactures […] or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will.”

Particularly resonant to the prior quote: the nauseatingly salacious obsession with Zoë Quinn’s personal life, and the perpetual unfounded accusations of greed and fraud thrown at Anita Sarkeesian for the success of the Kickstarter for her video series.

Why are the attackers organized in a loosely-coupled, publicly leaderless, largely anonymous and pseudonymous movement centered around 4chan and Reddit? Because they presume that the “Social Justice Warriors” they clamor about also exist in similar secret organizations, and emulating the devious structure of their enemy is the best way to avoid infiltration, compromise, and exposure:

“It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self; both the ideal and the unacceptable aspects of the self are attributed to him. The enemy may be the cosmopolitan intellectual, but the paranoid will outdo him in the apparatus of scholarship, even of pedantry. Secret organizations set up to combat secret organizations give the same flattery. […] The John Birch Society emulates Communist cells and quasi-secret operation through “front” groups, and preaches a ruthless prosecution of the ideological war along lines very similar to those it finds in the Communist enemy.”

That Zoë Quinn monitored the discussion group where her attackers plotted against her (and speculated about her relationships and mental health in vile terms) adds a weirdly circular through-the-looking-glass quality to this particular cognitive distortion of the paranoid style. Her actions could inevitably only reinforce to them the need for secretive organization and compartmentalization, despite only being triggered by the dramatic nature of the attacks on her and her friends.

Less overtly hostile members of the anti-Sarkeesian and anti-Quinn cohort disclaim particularly vicious attacks or death threats as the work of unknown individuals from outside the video games community, or “false flag” operations by their targets or allies designed to garner public support for their work by manufacturing sympathy and favorable media coverage for faux harassment. (Accusations that Anita Sarkeesian faked much or all of the harassment she received online have been a staple of this “discussion” for years.) Even more notably, a particularly fevered assertion that Zoë Quinn planned to stage a false physical assault on herself at the PAX gaming convention surfaced publicly at least once.

While not directly covered in Hofstadter’s essay, it’s also impossible to not draw parallels between the attacks on Zoë Quinn and their unbroken yet implausible chant of “this is about corruption, integrity, and ethics” (summary from Matt Lees and Owen Grieve), with the witch hunt to ferret out purportedly terrifying and omnipresent “communist influence” (particularly in the entertainment industry!) during the Second Red Scare.

And finally, what of the countless numbers of “gotcha” YouTube response videos attempting to show a pattern of deliberate deception or basic errors by Anita Sarkeesian in her videos? Or in the case of Zoë Quinn: purported positive coverage of her games by people she was intimately involved with; a network of Patreon connections (documented in plain sight); friendships, acquaintances, social connections in work contexts, Twitter conversations? And for their friends and supporters: what quid pro quo occurred such that two notable video game journalists garnered a listing in the “Thank You” section of a much-loved indie game’s credits? (Spoiler: They’re all friends, and have been there for each other during times of emotional difficulty, and like each other.)

“A final characteristic of the paranoid style is related to the quality of its pedantry. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed. […] The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it.”

Here, gamer misogynists differ from Hofstadter’s generic paranoid, likely due to the much-changed nature of the media landscape since 1964. In contrast, having seen other public movements achieve at least some level of political success and positive coverage via concerted social media outreach, they expend a great deal of effort attempting to share their “evidence” with the wider world, or at least to assert, via sheer volume, that there might be a story of interest here to media outlets with greater reach.

Regardless, the videos and “evidence” presented in these cases bear no weight, carry no integrity, and present no substantial response to the bodies of work of their targets; their content is so far removed from the expected contextual structures of academia, academic criticism, intellectual debate, and journalism as to be laughable. But they do serve several useful functions to their creators and propagators: