Perhaps the most rebellious thing you can do to the liberal elite is to be a white person, marry another white person, and have a lot of children. No wonder the

Perhaps the most rebellious thing you can do to the liberal elite is to be a white person, marry another white person, and have a lot of children. No wonder they hate the Mormons so much! I agree with your thoughts about "shock" as we know it being a tool of political conversion that modern conservatives have learned to tune out, but I wouldn't discount the effect of some different kind of shock on modern liberals. Certain people pretend to be shocked and offended when anyone so much as disagrees with them, but they're mostly using this offense as a tool, part (as you say) "look how offended and thus good I am!" and part "now I have another person to point to as the source of 'the problem.'" But I am genuinely curious about how one would go about actually shocking those people. What first comes to mind is outspoken, public, mass disagreement with liberal norms, done proudly and on the public's own terms rather than the meek "give me a chance, guys, I so agree with you about X Y and Z but maybe W" contrarianism you usually see. I think this is exactly why people have gotten themselves whipped up into such a furor over Gamergate and anonymous messageboards; the offended have done an excellent job of reframing the controversy in terms of misogyny and neckbeards, but the sheer magnitude of the response on both sides indicates that some kind of shock is afoot.