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  • I was raised in a left-leaning, progressive, atheist, LGBTQ+/minority-accepting household, but one surrounded by a white, largely conservative exurban community. I was raised to be inclusive of others, to be thoughtful, to be curious, to be polite and empathetic. I had good* parents who supported me, and taught me to treat others well.

    In the middle of fifth grade, I transferred to a magnet program focusing on STEM concepts. It took me from a school that was almost entirely white, to a school which was very much multi-racial. I was really small for my age, nerdy, and the new kid. I'd always been bullied at school, but after the transfer it got a lot worse, and got pretty severely physical. A lot of the people who harassed me the worst were black. I honestly never understood the social circles enough to know what their deal was, and it certainly wasn't only a race thing, but the fact that many of my tormentors were black wasn't lost on me, to be sure.

    When I was 11 or so, I used all the savings from a lifetime of cumulative birthdays, Christmas gifts, etc. to buy a laptop to play games on. Pretty quickly, gaming became all I did. It was an escape, and I enjoyed it. I played whatever F2P games I could. Diablo clones, random MMOs, shitty pay-to-win FPS games, whatever. My parents didn't supervise my activities very closely, and to be blunt, I quickly became way more savvy than them about subverting any surveillance they tried to put in place anyways.

    Eventually I started looking into hacks for games. I found a really large forum (think 25k members) for sharing game hacks, and joined up. By the time I was maybe 13-14 or so, I was one of the highest-ranking moderators on the forum. I hung out in their IRC server (which definitely isn't the internet chat-rooms you're supposed to be careful about, those are different) all day, dabbled in making my own (occasionally illicit) software and hacks, and was firmly in the community. These weren't good people, but I didn't know that. When I got home from school and got online, they asked me how my day was. They cared about me, they played games with me, they were my friends. I remember I was gone for like 2 weeks when I was seriously ill, and one of them tracked me down and called my house to check in on me. I didn't think anything of it, because of course they could do that. I'd been in a Skype call with one of them who was screen sharing the array of webcams they had access to through their botnet. I didn't realize at the time that they were probably blackmailing people, or holding their data ransom. We just hacked in video games, none of that actually serious stuff. The malware I was toying with was just because I was interested in it, and of course, my friends must have been too, right? Just a learning exercise. I figured I might try to go into cybersecurity when I started high school and could actually start taking courses in computer topics. Programming was SO fucking interesting!

    My parents didn't know what was going on. They should have. I was barely a teenager, I can't possibly have been hiding my tracks all that well. But then, their marriage had started to fall apart, and things were bad a home. I didn't know anything about that then, I was in my room gaming and running communities for terrible people. The headset kept their fighting far away from me. My parents didn't know who I was hanging out with. They had raised me well, but now they weren't doing what they should have been. So when my friends shared hateful content with me, "interesting" videos they'd found about how terrible women were, how violent minorities were, who was I to question it? They were speaking as those with knowledge. They taught me stuff, they knew better than me. And besides, I'd been physically harassed by black people before. I'd seen it for myself, right? My U.S. history teacher was REALLY smart, and she told us (in a MN classroom) that the civil war wasn't actually about slavery either! That was super interesting to learn! And the women they complained about weren't me. Just because a lot of the guys I hung out with had removed for girlfriends didn't mean they hated women, it was just bad luck with shitty women. Right?

    I was a good person. I mean, I was a weird socially outcast nerd, but I wasn't a bad person. My family was still caring. Still accepting. My Mom's apartment was always a refuge for any of our friends, even (and especially) the queer ones who had been kicked out by their own terrible parents. They had a place to come and be safe and be themselves with us. So I was a good person too, right? Good people, smart people, they keep their online lives separate from their personal lives. They don't talk about their online activities with others, and they don't talk about their personal information with internet strangers in chatrooms. The only people I talked with were my FRIENDS. I ran their Minecraft servers. I discussed the Jordan Peterson videos they shared. He sounds so fucking smart after all. I hardly understand what he's talking about, but I'm sure one day I will. And the parts I don't understand, other people can explain to me. I laughed at their racist memes. After all, it's just a joke. And of course, overt bigotry got stomped on. I was in charge, and I was a good person. I wouldn't tolerate that sort of thing. But a dog-whistle is just a tool for training a pet, and we'd only ever kept cats.

    I eventually joined a different gaming group on the side. We played Jailbreak in CS:S. I got really good at it. Really into it. And I stopped hanging out as much with my older friends. I still kept in touch, but I'd found a new hobby. These people weren't good people either, but I mean, the fact that they liked my voice on mic wasn't that they were creeping on a 15 year old who they wanted to fuck, it was because I had gotten a new microphone a few weeks ago and must have sounded good on it. I had gotten lucky though. These people weren't great people, but they weren't nearly as bad. They weren't literally cybercriminals, just asshole kids on the internet. So when I became a moderator in THAT community and started running things, the community actually improved. But eventually that community collapsed, and I moved on again. And again. And again. I ended up with some Brits for a while, and "mate" settled itself into my vocabulary in a deeply unwelcome way.

    I've been incredibly lucky. I'm 28 now. The last 14 years of my life, I've slowly climbed from one community to another, and mostly through random luck each of those have been better than the one I was leaving. I am surrounded now by some of my favorite people. They are TRULY good people. They care about others, and stand up for good causes. Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too. I wasn't a good person. I fell WAY down the alt-right rabbit hole. I'm sure that I've hurt people, and I've made countless decisions that sicken me now. But I've been incredibly lucky. If I hadn't been, I have no idea where I'd be now. Or what nonsense I'd still be believing, because everything around me told me it was normal.

  • Additionally to what has already been mentioned: People are susceptible to politics that confirm their prejudices. Right-wing political thought is largely based on confirming that whatever prejudices people hold, they are morally good and justified. Thus elevating an in-group above out-groups. That is a powerful lure.

  • In case it wasn’t a typo, and just to help OP for the future…

    It’s “this day and age,” not “this day in age.”

    I know I’ll probably get downvoted for the pedantry here especially since everyone understands what was meant, but hopefully OP will appreciate the information about the common phrase.

    Also to answer the OP’s question: inferiority complex. It runs rampant in society, especially among men.

  • Nazis and incels need to be dealt with, yes, but the important thing to keep in mind is they are symptomatic of suffering swaths of the population. People don't just do hate because it's fun.

    We let big businesses and the rich steamroll entire communities and industries, pay lip service to helping people who've been damaged by capitalism, and then after the election cycles are over leave their communities to rot. They are desperate and turn to the wrong answers because there aren't any others.

    We allow entertainment and advertising to blast our society with a particular view of what relationship "success" is, and accept mockery of those who cannot thrive in that narrow definition due to social anxiety or other mental issues as fair game. Those men are desperate and turn to the wrong answers because there aren't any others.

    Yes, Nazis and incels are absolutely awful, hateful problems that must be dealt with. And by the time they reach that point, I'd argue they probably can't be saved. But they don't fall out of the sky. They come from normal people whose cries for help went unheard, sometimes for decades, or generations. They're the product of systemic injustices that we can mitigate with outreach programs and getting serious about mitigating the social problems that create the soil they spring from. Stopping them is a necessary band-aid, but the real solution is to address the situations that allow them to thrive in the first place.

  • One of my closer friends is on a weird path atm. He's full into Russian propaganda, anti-western stuff, flat earth, anti vaxx and whatnot.

    I tried to reason with him. Turns out he doesn't even know how to verify something he's read online. Check sources? Nope. Google something you've seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.

    I came to accept that he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation, propaganda and lies.

    • Check sources? Nope. Google something you’ve seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.

      Those are hardly panacea, as you need a reliable frame of reference for verification.

      I remember during the heyday of WikiLeaks, how conservatives and liberals alike dismissed the info dumps as misinformation and edited images/video. You couldn't talk about PRISM with anyone over 40, because all the Cable News outlets were claiming it had been debunked. You couldn't talk about Collateral Murder because it was endlessly getting blocked on social media as "disinformation".

      And that was before the advent of AI generated images and whole books churned out with LLMs. What do you say to the guy who is hip deep in "evidence" from the Heritage Foundation? What do you say to a TERF quoting from the Cass Report? What happens when you get a rebuttal in the form of a Tucker Carlson Interview from Moscow?

      Yeah, you can just wave that off as "Fake News, doesn't count". But then so can they, and we're back to Square One on validating any kind of underlying truth.

      he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation

      None of us are immune to propaganda. Thinking this is a matter of simple intelligence is the first trap you fall into when evaluating a source.

      It's so easy to tell yourself "I'm smarter, therefore you must be wrong" and work backwards from there.

  • As a young person who grew up on the internet, with no parental oversight, I can say it's because there is a lot of right wing bullshit online that media companies love to push on their users. When I was a tween I got suckered into it hard when one day youtube decided to put mgtow videos in my recommended feed. I never initially searched for them. I did eventually get out of it, and I'm not entirely sure how, but I remember as a 13yo seeing trump in 2016 bully that disabled reporter and it really put a sour taste in my mouth. And then over the next few years that led to me leaving catholicism, becoming a socialist, and realizing I'm transgender and very gay.

    With me being transgender and pan, that adds another aspect to it, because I think I knew subconsciously that I was queer as a tween, but growing up in an environment where I was repeatedly told those things were wrong led to me feeling absolutely miserable about myself, and misery loves company. And this also makes me wonder how many nazis are queer and don't even realize it or refuse to recognize it.

  • Don't underestimate how much resentment and anger a privileged people can develop when they don't get every. single. thing. they think they are entitled to.

  • That's a very complex question with many, many answers. No individual life can be boiled down to a single phenomenon. A lot of the answers I'm seeing in here are great, ans definitely describe a phenomenon at play, but it's important to remember that nobody's just outright stupid enough to fall for a single piece of rhetoric. Instead, them coming into bigotry is the result of a complex web of ideas that brought them to that conclusion.

    That being said, I'll add my two cents that I don't see anyone saying: privilege. Privilege insulates people from how cold and cruel the world can be; in doing so, they don't learn the comraderie that grows out of shared hardship (aka empathy). They see others experiencing it, and assume they are weak, both for "allowing themselves" to fall into hardship, as well as for "getting conned" by others who have fallen on hardship. This too adds fuel to the fire that is all the other reasons people get pulled into hateful ideologies.

    Imagine being excluded from some perceived secret club based on conditions you didn't have a choice in, and seeing women or bipoc or lgbt or the working class supporting each other. You too would feel resentment towards those who won't include you in their circles. Yet you never developed the proper understanding of the ties that bind them, so you only see it as hate towards you and your demographic; this then becomes a feedback loop: your hate hurts thode communities, making them even more interdependent on each other, making you more resentful and frustrated.

    You fall in with people you don't really like because of a shared disdain for The Others, and then, because that's your only lived experience, assume all identity-based comraderie is necessarily just a loose collective of people that only get along because of a common enemy. This reinforces your belief that The Others hate you, only adding fuel to the fire of your own hate.

    This is also why these people are so easily manipulated: all you have to do is control their perception of who hates them, and they'll do whatever you say to make it stop. This is why politics and religion are such great examples, and no "side" is immune. Want to make a leftist out of a fascist? Convince them that The Jews are actually just the bourgeoisie, who must be killed for the good of ourselves and our nation. An anarchist who fears authoritarians will readily agree to being a part of an exclusive coalition of individuals that determines the way society is structured, so, y'know, the authoritarians don't get their way.

  • This youtube series is a great way to show how someone gets inundated and can turn https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJA_jUddXvY7v0VkYRbANnTnzkA_HMFtQ&si=Vi0nUXZmyOhQ1-Pv

    But here is somethings I noticed from my journey out of the right wing from my high school days.

    First we were religious and we choose good decisions and other people's choices were unwise and their fault but even though we lived in the same projects, our choices and how we lived their was unfortunate and their's was their fault. It wasn't explicit racism it was culture of racism. We were scared because we didn't understand and thought we were superior since we were trying. Then we got better off and were in church more we got inundated with right wing propaganda on the economy and Frieman econmics blaming the government and socialism. We wanted to protect our jobs and our jobs blamed the government why they had to end manufacturing jobs in America. I graduated high school in 2010. I saw hatred towards Obama and noticed my side was with the KKK and I questioned it. That is how I got out. But if I kept to my beliefs I would have hated black people and others more. Thinking I was superior as a WASP (White Anglo Saxon protestant) since I made good decisions. My parents told me I could work through college and buy a house and everything and not to take out debt. So I tried that. It was impossible.

    I blamed myself for not being good enough but I also didn't do it right because I was testing it out and not using and abusing my connections. Which is how you get ahead. When I figured out I wasn't enough and started to work with the people I know I was able to do more. But I could have blamed DEI stuff why I couldn't get into college or get better jobs. But it was I just wasn't good enough and the market is barren in Delaware.

    My few relationships break ups I could have blamed it all on women and got a negative attitude with that too. Also since I was raised in the church a bit I could have said they should be a trad wife. But bleh

    Back to being a Wasp. I could have blamed my failures and society failures on racist things or the color of my skin but I was lucky to realize it was the rich who fucked us all and the governments fault for letting it happen.

297 comments