Only my memory, but you could just go digging around in the WSJ archives of the era to find articles about it. I'm not denying that something changed which made the confluence of leftwing identity politics and practical neoliberalism more visible in the 20-teens. I'm just saying that it had been moving in that direction since at least the 90s, during the whole RATM era.

I have an anecdote. Back then there was an "anarchist" prank-comedy outfit riding the coattails of Michael Moore called the Yes Men. Their big stunt was to get space at a WTO conference to present a plan for offshoring labor to Africa, using neoliberal jargon to essentially propose plantation slavery. It was kind of a self-own because what they described was setting African workers up in little soviets with socialist benefits using language meant to appease marxoids.