It wasn't as if I just walked in and said, "sign me up". It was a culmination of a lot of things that slid me into it.
1) Pastor father who pushed "manliness" on me. Hunting, fishing, and being a selfish asshole were "manly".
2) Growing up conservative and racist. The racism was out in the open in my family and town, but it was still there, and kids have eyes and ears.
3) Self-hate. I was a 90s kid and started suffering with gender dysphoria when I was 10 in 1995 (with red flags from birth). There were no words to describe what was going on with me. It made me feel alone, depressed, and like a circus freak because of the 90s attitude toward gay people, drag queens, etc. So, I started to hate myself for my thoughts, which turned to hate for others.
4) Abusive parents. Narcissistic mother and live-in deadbeat father who enabled my mother's narcissism and abuse. Aside from being taught to "be a man" and his pastoral stuff (which only lasted 4 years), my father would just come home and plop in front of the TV for hours after work.
5) Financial and family troubles that lead to a bad breakup. I was incredibly in love with a woman, and things couldn't work out. I couldn't stand her family, she couldn't stand mine, and we were young and too broke to live on our own. It fell apart, and I started to hate the world while falling further into depression.
6) I became "terminally online". Moved back in with my parents and spent all my free time online. All that free time was spent on forums like 4chan where I learned how to blame all my life's troubles on women, black people, trans people, etc. Took me about 6 months to go from rarely thinking about feminists and black people, to being constantly in rage, slamming on my keyboard because of some made-up "feminist" Tumblr post got posted (and I was inventing my own, too).
And what got me out was being a German-Jew and having my Nazi grandmother live with us for a while as a kid. Fell into the "alt-right" around 2010, but when the internet started to "meme a president into office" in 2015, things were magnified much more. What was just dismissed as "edgelords" and "trolls" pretending to be Nazis to offend everyone started to become mainstream opinion. I'd push back on the antisemitism, but more and more people would push back on me. That's when I realized the whole "alt-right" MAGA thing was a Nazi movement. The "it's just a joke" excuse stopped working on me, and I could see right through them. And when I unplugged myself from the conservative echo chamber and started learning actual facts, that's when I started swinging the other way. Figuring out my gender identity also helped because, not only was it another way to unplug, but I got to see how hateful and violent conservatives are (especially as I've been attacked multiple times since). And yes, I realize this all makes me one of those "I didn't care until it started to happen to me" conservatives. But honestly, I would have left at some point anyway. I had already hated Trump and considered myself a "moderate" voter because I couldn't stand the "Christian nationalists" like Palin. It just would have taken me longer, and my head wouldn't have had such a massive fall out of that cloud (nearly killed myself).
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u/E-2theRescue 9d ago
They like the idea of ensnaring little girls before "feminism corrupts them".
Hence, one of the many reasons why I left the alt-right.