The general US norm is not that drawing the prophet Muhammed is forbidden, it's not that violent videogames are a sin, it's not that the casual treatment of women as nothing but sex objects is unacceptable.

Either I'm being confused by a triple-negative, or we are living in very different contexts. Even people who are avowedly anti-feminist will usually say that casually treating women as nothing but sex objects breaks their norms. They might disagree that a model on a billboard is a sex object.

More generally, the problem is not manufacturing offense where none exists, but deciding where it can reasonably exist. And even if you don't think that this is a meaningful problem, and that the best answer is to simply not take offense, ever, note that this:

we risk emboldening the true villains, the hypocrite brains who are torturing people to score cheap political points.

... sounds suspiciously like another kind of offense, the offense of anti-offense backlash. This line of argument also makes out feminists and game-pacifists to be "inexcusably ignorant" or "deliberately malicious," and thus is wielding a very similar rhetorical club to the one that was just denounced.

There is no conscious consideration of this, but somewhere deep in our hypocrite brains, we decide to pretend that our desired norms are the actual norms.

"The actual norms?"

Like "general US norm," that's a phrase that does not, as far as I can tell, dissect the space of possible norms in a useful way. If there were a single agreed-upon set of norms, or even an agreed-upon set of rules for describing an agreed-upon set of norms, these discussions would be a lot easier. As it stands, declaring offense can, in fact, shift norms if done enough. In some cases, it can shift them for the better.