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Were you not young before/after the start of the internet? Not trying to be snarky, it's more trying to understand perspective.
I could have been MAGA, no question. Here's my anecdote: (edit: too lazy to correct so please don't pay close attention to the tense of my words here, I was partially speaking from the perspective of being a kid again but I didn't stay consistent)
I grew up in a diverse area, so I've really never believed in racist stuff. Those kind of conspiracies I used to just handwave the racism stuff away cause it wasn't the important stuff to me that I did kind of believe in. I literally even used to watch some of Alex Jones conspiracy videos.
Really easy to get lost in this crap as a teenager alone at 4am.
Like I said I grew up in a diverse area, and in one of my first real relationships, I got a lot of pushback about certain things (I was kinda blue lives matter for a bit for example) and when that ended, one of the big things I took from it was I wanted to be a more accepting person, and I've been an increasingly-raging leftist ever since.
With the rising loneliness epidemic (which actually extends to both genders - EVERYONE is increasingly isolated) I can only imagine this sort of story is increasingly common. And not everyone comes to the same conclusions about wanting to be more accepting, etc.
I was very lucky to go through those experiences and learn what I did from it. There's probably another universe where I instead got increasingly angry & further into all those things - from the cruel & crass words to the conspiracies - and am wearing a red hat
🤮🤮 at the thought of that
Very self-aware comment.
I have to agree, we're very easily swayed, especially as teenagers.
I had to suffer through a lot of rejection by girls I was interested in as a teenager, and also pondered some very misogynistic ideas, that I ultimately rejected only because I couldn't bring myself to extend that hate to the one girl that ever loved me back for a while. Otherwise I could have totally turned to a sort of incel (before I knew that term even existed), some of the ideas I came up with are shockingly close to what I later learned that they believe.
I can only imagine how easy it would be to fall into that trap, when you're feeling frustrated and are being bombarded by Tate and the likes through the self-enforcing ideology machinery that is social media.
We really need to teach young men a healthier way to deal with the frustrations that occur in life and lead a better example of how to deal with negative emotions other than turning to hate like that.
I feel the same way. I find it near miraculous I didn't fall into the trap that's being sold to young men these days.
I'm hesitant to share too much of my own story, but it makes me feel real sympathy for the guys being ridiculed for following Tate and such. I know the leaders are garbage, but its hard to not feel attacked when I hear the general internet lashing out at the followers for being ensnared.
I know what its like to be young and dumb, to be told you have so much potential, but then to also feel direction-less and like a loser.
I know the leaders are charlatans that are selling snake oil...but I don't know what to tell these guys to get them unhooked from that crowd.
I was absolutely on a version of the alt-right pipeline a decade ago. I was raised by far-right, Mike Johnson-style "Christians," so I was already pretty far down that path before I was drawn into any pipeline.
Luckily, I ended up on a weird libertarian branch of the pipeline (LearnLiberty rather than Prager U), and somehow the YouTube algorithm steered me into Veritasium's content on climate change, and clips from Adam Ruins Everything. It sounds a bit crazy, but those things started opening my eyes and expanding my worldview. Probably didn't hurt that my favorite TV show at the time was Leverage, which had plenty of its own anti-corporate-grifting themes.
Eventually, I realized that the Libertarian utopia doesn't work because greed is an unlimited resource, and that makes regulation important.
Of course, there were other things that helped me escape my upbringing and the alt-right pipeline during gamergate (I wasn't into gaming at the time, so that probably helped), but looking back and seeing how easily I could have ended up being a January 6 insurrectionist. I'm so thankful for all the little things that nudged me out of that worldview, and helped me see reality.
I wish there was an easy way to show young guys that the people they are listening to are liars and grifters who are manipulating young men into believing that their real pain is somehow the fault of women. But if I look at my own journey, it was a thousand little nudges. I didn't change overnight, but there was a day during the 2016 election cycle that I remember realizing that even though I had spent almost 8 years despising Obama, that he had been an alright president - especially compared to the Republican nominee, Trump.
'Greed is an unlimited resource' absolutely slaps.
Haha I tried to be.. mostly vague
I'm not sure either. It's really hard for me to come up with things since it took a breakup for me to WANT to change, and of course I'm lucky that it's for the positive.
I really hope it doesn't take such powerful inciting incidents for a significant portion of them to change how they feel.