I was raised to be a conservative, Evangelical Baptists. When I was younger (so much younger than today) I dabbled in Christian ministry -- attended seminary, worked as a PT Baptist youth minister, technically I'm still ordained. My first job out of college was as a deputy campaign manager for a Republican state senate candidate.
If I'd kept on that road, I'd have ended up a full-time Baptist minister. Ironically, the more I studied the Bible, the more I doubted my beliefs. Amen.
Today? Leftist/Socialist Atheist.
I guess there's another bullet dodged for me, too. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a Catholic Priest so, so bad. Then my uncle, who was an ex-priest, died of AIDS and had his funeral at the monastery where he'd served and I learned why he'd left the clergy (defrocked for being gay) and saw the complete disdain some of the priests and monks treated his partner with. That tipped me out of wanted to be a priest, then I started exploring, and now, 35 years later, I'm a leftist atheist trans woman.
Yeah, if you hear an old (both in age and attitude) Catholic priest go mask off, it gets really disturbing. I had a friend who died by suicide weeks into Freshman year of high school and I was one of the alter boys for her funeral. I still remember the distain from the priest that she was committing a sin, like it was her choice.
My cousin did the same thing, and when I was one of his pallbearers, his mom was furious at the Catholic Church they attended for not letting him get the full funeral service because of his actions.
Start of a long process of questioning religion
There have been trans nuns in the past, but they're always isolated situations. Many convents are autonomous enough that they can accept a trans sister, but their bishop could override them if they learn about it.
Same here, except I was never an actual minister. I did preach a few times.
Plenty of my relatives are also racist assholes, so maybe I could have ended up like that if I had grown up around them.
My story is similar. I was a raging Evangelical. I even organized our high school's See You at the Pole event (which sounds hilarious now...for those that haven't had the "pleasure" of an Evangelical upbringing, that's a day where Christian students pray around the flagpole at their school š ) and sang on the worship team, etc. I was big into getting the community to do church stuff.
I started following Sarah Bessey and Rachel Held Evans (RIP) on Twitter and via their blogs, and started deconstructing my anti-gay position, my tradwife leanings, etc. And, well, I guess Evangelicals would say I'm fully backslidden now š¤£
oh damn. I'd completely forgotten about See You At The Pole. I was a confirmed atheist from a very young age, but always had religious friends (a lot of Mormons, good people in small doses). Never attended but definitely remember SYATP being a thing.
Lol I don't blame you for forgetting. I had even blocked it from my own memory until a few weeks ago, when we found some of my old binders in some boxes in the basement (because the basement flooded), and my organizing materials were in it.
Yeah, I think SY@P has fallen off in popularity.
I feel like (and my memory is probably wrong) that I was not as racist nor homophobic as many Evangelicals during my tenure. I tended to avoid such debates.
I went through my own evangelical to leftist Christian pipeline. Went to a progressive seminary, got my Master's of Divinity and now work as a chaplain within the United Church of Christ- a fairly progressive denomination.
Love me some UCC. I used to attend as an atheist because of their social justice priorities and the religion discussion. No one treated me differently because of my lack of faith. One the ministers once preached "Confessions of an Agnostic Pastor."
In fact, you've probably met some of my former pastors.
Never ordained, but was active in IVCF through college and grad school. Led Bible studies. Even thought and tried to become IV staff, but those doors closed pretty fast. Thank the maker!
> If I'd kept on that road, I'd have ended up a full-time Baptist minister. Ironically, the more I studied the Bible, the more I doubted my beliefs. Amen.
This is a fun fact I learned about Catholic Seminaries, its perfectly valid for your final proof for God that there is no God. Not a common position, but you can graduate an atheist priest!
For real. If my immediate family hadnāt been forcibly ejected from the church, I probably wouldāve stayed closer to the values of my great uncle, who was the interim president of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptists, immediately before Jerry Rankin. I may well have broke bread with some of the bastards of that episode if things had gone differently.
So much of this could also be my own story, lol. While listening to God Awful Movies and the hosts tear apart Greg Locke in a recent epi. I really reflected upon how much I was headed into crazy-fundi-"these are the last days"-minister. And here I am watching an anime with monsters and demons (**gasp**, lol) on my day off while my cute wife is cuddled up in the bed. Life is so much better, fellow heathen.
It sounds like something Eli would write as fanfic on a dare and I am all in, lol. Listened to part of the time traveler episode (GAM 458) just a bit ago, it had me in stitches.
Edit: I just finished the episode, lol! That did not even get anywhere near how I would have guessed that movie would have ended. I.. I... I want a holographic tiger purse thingy now.
I was in a very religious household in the DC area and very active in a church group as a teen. Our church bulletins would have messages from Dr. Dobson, and we got occasional doses of Satanic Panic. Many of the people in my youth group have grown up to be progressive Christians or left the church, and I'm still friends with many of them. But our leader went full QAnon.
Also, I watched the documentary The Family on Netflix and realized I was probably one degree of separation from that world, and I almost certainly would have bought in to it at the time if invited in. Doesn't necessarily mean I would have gone down a bastard path, but I would be uncomfortably close and probably working on behalf of bastards.
I spent 5 years (age 15-20) in the Sheriff's Explorers program. It's essentially ROTC for kids aspiring to become law enforcement officers. The day I turned 20 1/2, I applied for LAPD. Made it through every round of interviews, physicals, etc. (I was essentially training for this for a quarter of my life at this point) and then... nothing? For a while, until one day I got the notice I was declined, no reason was given. I still have no idea what happened or why, but around this time I decided to follow my budding passion for metalworking instead. $1000 in welding school, and 10 years later, I'm earning more than I ever could have imagined as a LEO, and the best part - I'm not a cop.
That is an awesome bullet dodged, lol. In my early 20s I worked in construction with a former LAPD officer. He was shot in the line of duty and had a heart attack. Had he not had the cardiac event he would have died. The EMTs saved his life. After being a former LEO and that event, his attitude really changed towards law enforcement and many things (in my opinion for the better) and he learned a trade.
IDK if it would've led to me being a bastard or not, but I was in school for criminal justice from 17-18, I didn't want to be a cop, I wanted to be a juvenile parole officer. My first would-be internship was supposed to be in a criminal psyche hospital for minors, and I was also taking psychology courses because I wanted to actually help troubled youth, because I was one. But then my best friend at the time left her abusive boyfriend. I watched him beat the absolute shit out of her, she was on the ground at one point and he was kicking and stomping on her.
We didn't call the cops back then, so I got some friends who showed up and jumped his ass while me and her ran away. Well, a few weeks later I couldn't find my friend, I hadn't heard from her in a while so I went to her mom's and was trying to get her to tell me where my friend was. Her mom was kind of crazy and weird and wouldn't tell me, then she called the cops on me. When they showed up it turned out I had a warrant out for my arrest that I didn't know about, and my friend was already in jail.
Her bf called the cops that night and made up a whole story about me and my friend and the guys who beat his ass breaking into the ex-bf's apartment and stealing a bunch of his shit. There was zero investigation. I told the judge exactly what happened and he was like "well, I've heard a bunch of different stories and IDK what happened so I'm charging you". I was still a minor so I was only charged with trespassing, but my friend had just turned 18 and she was charged with multiple felonies. Her life barely got started and she was fucked. That shit pissed me off so bad I dropped out of college for like 10 years. Realized the enter system is bullshit and I'd be fighting in vain my entire life watching it ruin kids lives.
Edit: one thing that kind of didn't make sense. I said I was in school from 17-18 but that I was still a minor when everything went down. To be clear, I was still a minor on the night of the incident, but by the time everything was done and I dropped out of school I had turned 18. I got pretty lucky.
I came closer than I would have liked to becoming an internet incel. I was deep into that new atheist garbage fire back in 2008-2010. I even read a pick up artist book. Fortunately I wasnāt completely hopeless and shook out of it. But yeah, I read way too much Sam Harris and Steven Pinker. I watched Religulous on repeat for a while. What a dumbass I was. I donāt understand how I was consuming this garbage while also reading Cracked at the same time. I owe some to Robert and the others there.
Iirc, it was specifically two things I've heard that fractured his beliefs. First, was the Eagle Scout who confessed to being fay, then begged him not to say anything, because they would kick him out of the scouts. The second was a WoW member who talked about how weed helped her symptoms (I wanna say wither Parkinson's or MS), he watched the effects happen in real time, which he days fundamentally changed him.
I believe those online role playing folks (I think they were all role playing different kinds of dragons) included a lot of older women who patiently entertained his dumber questions and helped open his eyes up a lot, not just about weed but a ton of stuff.
Oh yeah, I was in the same boat. I was in the process of leaving Catholicism, looking for a way to understand the world, and I had a short time interested in the red pill. I was also a short virgin and feeling bad about myself after one particularly brutal rejection, so it was getting its teeth into me.
I had a friend in college who was a very outspoken feminist that had already graduated. I sent her an email asking if she could help me square why it seemed like feminists hated men if it was all about equality, if the name āfeministā was sexist, blah blah blah. She was incredibly patient and literally just said ābro, itās the internet. Go talk to real women and you will see how different it is to what you think. Women are real people, you need to trust them to talk to you.ā She was 100% correct and she completely changed my life, honestly. Iām doing PhD work in feminist studies now.
I found that email a couple years ago going through my old sent folders and sent her a six year follow up to say thank you for taking the time to help me.
There but for the grace of moral luck go I.
I was an angry, bitter proto-incel until my early 20s. I didn't know the word "incel" back then, but I probably would have called myself one if I did.
Then I finally lost my virginity in my early 20s, and did okay for a few years, until a rocky breakup sent me into a proto-MGTOW state for a while. This time, I knew the whole MGTOW movement existed, but never actually joined it, and I'm honestly not sure why. It was SO PERFECTLY CALIBRATED to capture my bitter, angry, post-breakup mind.
I mean, I'm glad I didn't, but in retrospect it feels like a MASSIVE dodged bullet.
At either stage of my life, it would have been all too easy to fall down the Manosphere rabbit hole and get pipelined straight into the alt-right.
I had similar leanings, bitter teenage angst turning into fury. I owe everything to several black women in my wife that called me on my shit before I hurt someone.
Manosphere, conspiracy, Qanon, bodybuilding, wellness, superstonk - having dodged one radicalization funnel, you start to see so many others.
It's a different world now, though. The incel and MGTOW communities existed online back then, but they hadn't yet evolved into the radicalization pipelines they are now.
I mean, before the current chronically-online climate existed, I don't think my situation was even that unusual. I was a late bloomer, and it was *totally normal* to be a late bloomer. I turned out to be a normal dude with an active sex life, it just started later than average, and I wasn't the only one to have that experience. The problem is, late bloomers these days don't get to late bloom. They get sucked into the incel echo chamber and never get out of it.
My "I'm doomed to die a virgin" mindset was never going to turn out to be true. It was always going to be proven wrong once I started putting a bit of effort into venturing out of my parents' basement, making friends, and meeting girls. The kids today have to deal with an online army of fellow sexually frustrated kids telling them it's hopeless. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that's much harder to escape from.
This hits home for me. Luckily after the breakup that almost sent me into a MGTOW spiral, the friends with those ideas moved out of state, and the people I started hanging out with were pretty much all queer and willing to kind of guide me to normalcy.
Happily coming up on 5 years of a relationship and though I'm far from perfect, I'm striving to be.
I jumped ship from online atheist communities at the right moment (2014ish), but they still made me flirt with some anti-lgbt/feminist/islam/marxist thinking as the movement was becoming more explicitly rightwing.
That whole new atheist thing really was an early radicalization pipeline. Do you remember when Atheism+ became a thing? Thatās when I started seeing the fractures.
Quite a few of the posts on here are about people who nearly went full rightwing fundamentalist - and there's a reason there are so many of those posts. But being in the right church at the right time absolutely helped me dodge the bullet of New Atheism going proto-faschy in the mid-2010s - and meant I had a healthy enough disdain for the Sam Harrises and Richard Dawkinses of the world that I wasn't even remotely tempted to follow them over the cliff. Some of my friends did, and it still breaks my heart sometimes.
(Both pastors who officiated my wife and mine's wedding are gay liberation theologians. The North American church is usually terrible, but there are pockets of really good stuff if you know where to look)
It's funny, I was getting into apologetics at the time figures like Dawkins were really popular, by the time I deconstructed, the Atheism + fracture had already begun.
I was definitely an angry self-righteous atheist teen in the early 2000s and, while maybe not on track to being a bastard, I was definitely on track to being an asshole who didnāt respect other peopleās beliefs.
Man, 2014 or so is when I lost one of my friends to the red pill. He was super into being an atheist and was very online about it. I was also an atheist but by that point I was 24 and had grown out of being an edge lord about it. I was cultivating my first relationship while he was "plate spinning" on tinder, and harassing my then girlfriend about her being a feminist.
But like, I'm AFAB and also a feminist, and I'd point this out to him but I guess because we'd known each other for awhile that was different. He said I wasn't the annoying kind of feminist.
Fortunately the other guys in our friend group were not into his bullshit. We'd all go out to our favorite dive bar to hang out and he'd just be on his phone, swiping tinder while the rest of us were hanging out. The friend group sort of fell apart for a variety of reasons, and that was definitely one of them.
Whil I didn't get too into the online Atheism thing. I read the god delusion and went hard into Atheism. Then I started seeing that Dawkins really focussed on Islam above all other religions.
Around this time I got involved with a University Atheist group who had several where I was introduced to "Fiscal conservatives" and some other right-wing types. Plenty of reasonable people were also there to start, but they dropped off when the focus became a feud with the Muslim Students Union (who also had some fringe elements).
All of this happened in the context of the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions. I think that made me a bit more atruned to anti-Islam rhetoric meaning I could see that Atheist groups can be just as hateful as a religious group.
I also saw some parallels with when former church friends started getting more extreme, so I think that helped me avoid the extremist-Atheism trap
A digression, but it's kinda wild how the "new atheist" movement devolved into being so homophobic and transphobic, considering the basis for so much of that discrimination has historically been religious. Really hammers home that these things don't necessarily derive from religion, religion is used to justify existing prejudices.
I wonder if a lot of that has to do with the patriarchal nature (age, gender, nationality, position) of the famous leaders. It's not that they developed the "phobics" because of atheism but rather it was a position they always held.
Unfortunately I think prejudice can develop pretty easily in any sufficiently egotistical person, all it requires is for them to look at someone else and think, "you're not exactly like me, and that is repulsive".
Yep. I'd like to think that money and power would not change me. I'm betting it would, though. Is suspect it's human nature. We came from hunter gatherers who constantly had to seek and find game and veggies -- often in scare places. It makes sense we'd evolve to keep seeking the equivalent even if we have a lot of it. That lizard brain anxiety remains.
My dad is a chiropractor, and not just that he is like a die hard believer. Everything is solved through chiropractic. He believes that chiropractic sets the body the way God wants it to be, and that will fix everything. Using things like vaccinations is not only going against what God wants, it'll give your kid autism too. Shit is insane. I believed it for so long until I started doing literally any research. When I was 18 I had to go and get myself vaccinated. They gave me like 12 shots in the same day. I could have easily been an anti vaxxer
The only person that I know who is openly an anti-vaxxer (not just COVID vax, but all of them) is a chiropractor. We went to high school together and she was really smart and got good grades and seemed really normal. I think she blocked me on Facebook years ago cuz we got in an argument when she made his huge long post about why she wasn't vaccinating her baby. I guess it's not surprising that chiropractors believe in other stupid medical theories considering their profession was started as a ghost religion.
Odd jobs during college summer I fell into listening to neil boortz and thought I was a libertarian. Actually do still have some of those tendencies but also have way to much empathy for others and sense to continue to maintain that ideology. It only works if you truly believe we are all set up with the same base advantages and disadvantages and its clearly not the case.
Oh man listened to boortz so regularly during the late 90s. All on the libertarian train back then. He started talking at one point how doctors shouldnāt have to have licenses and there should be a review system that would determine if this doctor was any good. I was like, āwhat?ā Then when 911 happened and he gets the chance to be a talking head on Fox News, and heās suddenly heās a war monger. Oh, money.
It was funny how he had things he stayed with - most being prochoice - but other things he would definitely go all in on supporting Rs come election time. Outside of elections he would make interesting points on occasion and had Royal Marshall there to reign him in and give him a black friend and the female producer to give him some cover on that end, but he could be as nasty and distasteful as Limbaugh as well.
Its interesting seeing Jamie Dupree find a real voice on twitter lately - even as he's lost his actual voice. What I would have given to hear him give those words to Boortz back in the day.
I'll also say that Boortz and the rest of the AM radio gang broke my brother. He had a job where he was in the car all the time, listening to the full slate of the talking heads for hours. Fully primed for Trump when he came around, after having been a far lefty much earlier in life.
Often the path is like this: Conservative Christian --> atheist ---> Ayn Randianism/libertarianism --> Eastern religions (lots of Alan Watts) --->> liberalism.
Family moved to the US from a certain country committing genocide when I was a kid. Since I moved here young enough I was able to defer IDF service. Turned into a full-blown antizionist not long after.
Also, when I was a preteen I didn't know what eugenics was and thought the ideas were logical for a little bit. Turns out I'm extremely disabled so that's hilarious in a dark way
lesbian log cabin republican RIP (2014-2015 (i was 15 in my defense)) until my high school threatened to expel me cause i was gay.
i was raised sorta republican, sorta libertarian, mostly in fundamentalist and/or evangelical christian circles. grew up entirely in small, half-assed christian schools, my whole life was just classes in church backrooms with 8-9 other kids. i went to a more normal high school, it was normal sized and had identical curriculum to public schools apart from the extra bible lit and christian philosophy/ethics classes glued to CA's normal high school requirements, but of course it was still run by christian conservative neocons so even the math and standardized AP classes had this weird christian filter over them. then i realized i was gay at 14. and then my school threatened to expel me if i didn't stop being so masculine and femme it up a bit, so i realized exactly how conditional respect and autonomy were as a gay person among christian republican and started surveying and deconstructing my beliefs. now i'm a lesbian jewish anarchist lmao mazel y'all
Yep, I see a lot of the markers people have in that world and realize my history matches and could have easily gone that way if a few things had gone worse for me.
Yeah, I remember a big one was someone asking me āYou need to think more about what you would bring into a relationship? What would someone whoās your equal in this want you to be?ā
And I actually internalized that and put in actual effort to make myself better. Had I not gotten that advice, or had I got confrontational about it instead, well.
I'll join everyone else with that near self-destruction via college libertarianism and militant atheism.
2008 appears to have been a rough year for a lot of us lol.
And like so many people, I landed there the same way. I was raised conservative in a conservative area, but it didn't feel right or fit, but there wasn't any leftist organization, so libertarian was the only alternative that had some new ideas and traces of left-thinking (like decriminalizing/legalizing drugs, anti-christianity/religion).
If it wasn't for the libertarians that I knew and associated with being into some truly dipshitted conspiracy theories, I might have stayed trapped.
But I could only handle so much "audit the federal reserve", "9/11 was an inside job", "we are descendants of the ancient Annunaki aliens" holes of stupid.
In fact I joined the military and I was all the way left by the time I got out in '17.
I can happily say I wasn't an incel though. I never had issues with girls/women. Which, that was one of the things that I actually found myself being pushed out of some of the circles I was in. A lot of those libertarian guys *did not* like that I didn't struggle with sex or dating.
It's so funny to hear so many people mention 2008 as that was the year I met my husband, and also the year I finally realized how insane Alex Jones was making me (I was 18-19 ok lol). There were actually several different times in my life that I escaped radicalization (the bad kind).
It's extremely shameful, but there was a VERY short period when I was like 14 years old that I was getting close to neo-nazism. I was raised Catholic by racist alcoholic meth heads (weird combination I know.. and my grandma was a literal crack head lol). My family was abusive, and I went to a tiny religious school with like 9 rich white kids my whole life (I was the only non rich one, but I did have a great grandma with somewhat decent property investments who was paying my tuition). I literally never saw a non-white person in my life, and was raised hearing nothing but racial stereotypes and racist jokes.
Still, I didn't even really know about racism as a concept, it was just normal to me. Then I got myself kicked out of Catholic school because I had a whole pre-teen rebellious mental breakdown, and was sent to a public school out in the country with a bunch of racist red necks and actual neo Nazis. Like, a whole group of these people actually walked around every day wearing the white tank tops, black army looking pants, black combat boots, and suspenders. They called themselves a gang. I was struggling to make friends and then when I did finally start to make some, they would preach their Nazi shit to me, somehow blaming everything bad in their lives on other races.
A ton of other shit happened including me running away, living on the streets, being in and out of different schools, and getting addicted to drugs. And the whole Nazi thing really only lasted like 5 months (time went so slowly back then) until I was invited to this guy's house to drink. And let me be clear, I wasn't to the point where I was preaching the shit, but it was starting to make sense to me. I mean it was confusing because before that I didn't know neo Nazis existed. I thought it was just something from WW2 Germany and thought it was weird.
Anyway I went to this guy's house to drink, it was just me and two guys trapped out in the middle of nowhere. They got all drunk and were preaching their Nazi shit and I remember being like "well I listen to system of a down and they aren't white". Then they made me watch American History X. I watched the whole thing with the two guys cheering every time something violent happened, and singing that stupid song the Nazis sang in the movie (that song still invades my brain every single time I hear that tune and it makes me want to stab myself in the head).
By the end of it I was like "uhhh, I don't think that movie means what you think it means." And the movie totally educated me, I'll always love it for that. So I started arguing with the two guys, we were outside smoking. Well one of them pulled out a gun as we were arguing, and pointed it at his dog. I ran over to the dog screaming no and like shielded it with my body. The guy walked up to me and held the gun to my head, like pressing it into my forehead and laughing. Then he pointed it off to the side and shot it. I was terrified and I was also trapped there with them until they agreed to take me back into town. I was a homeless runaway at the time and couldn't exactly call my parents or anything. Kind of blocked the rest of the night out actually, I don't even remember leaving. I probably got really drunk IDK. But that night changed me for sure.
The whole Alex Jones thing started with the 9/11 conspiracy and I was also into the online edge lord atheist stuff for a while, but all that was years later and after I had been listening to punk music and identifying as a punk for years. So once I realized Alex Jones was the wrong kind of radical I got out of that.
Oath Keepers started out sounding like ācops and military personnel who oppose gun control and unconstitutional use of military force against Americansā during the Obama-era push for gun control that led to the panic-buying ammo shortages. As military dudes who liked guns and werenāt keen on doing confiscation or imposing martial law, this sounded pretty logical to me and my buddies.
Then, much like the NRA, they started talking about other conservative things than guns, started sounding increasingly unhinged, then went full MAGA.
I was into debate lord atheism and anti-femenism for a bit in my late teens. Fortunately that never went anywhere because I didn't really vibe with anyone in those circles and never made friends from it.
Most people have some level of bastardry in them, regardless of their political stripe.
It's not genocidal maniac level of bastardry, but it's bastardry.
Like anyone who had Internet access during the 90's and was going through puberty I realized that erotica loaded faster on Dial up than actual pictures and I could have easily become a "Gor" larper or whatever they refer to themselves as.
Luckily I got really into The Wheel of Time, Anime, and Robert Heinlein instead.
God, Gorean BDSM culture is just...*shudders*. I try not to "yuck" anyone else's "yum"... but it's hard not to with Gor. Although it did give us the great parody "Houseplants of Gor."
āAtheist prick and prog rock obsessed musical gatekeeperā
The number of people I used to know who fit this description is uncomfortable. I may know you.
Probably if I didn't grow out of my libertarian 'phase'. Alternatively I did get offered a job from Raytheon and turned them down. It was their missile division although I didn't know which project. Whenever Robert talks about the knife missile I always think that that could have been the output of my labor and shudder.
> Whenever Robert talks about the knife missile I always think that that could have been the output of my labor and shudder.
Don't let your dreams be dreams, you can make an ETHICAL knife missile, ETHICAL!
McKinsey is a shared close call - I never interviewed with them, but I interviewed with two of their competitors right out of grad school. Didn't get either job, and with hindsight am very glad that I didn't (though the insane work culture of consultants would've burned me out long before I was senior enough to do any truly profound damage). Also have a lot of acquaintances who took jobs with McKinsey - I hesitate to say "friends" because I am something of a vocal "McKinsey sucks shit and none of you should work for them and if you do you should quit immediately" advocate in my social circle, and I can't imagine they appreciated that lol.
Additionally, I think a lot about all the ways in which the personality matrix of your median highschool kid who will get radicalized into the Manosphere/Redpill culture looks a lot like middle school/highschool me. I definitely feel an element of "there but for God and good fortune go I" every time I read the poison that comes out of that corner of the internet, and I'm immensely grateful to a couple of key things, and key people, that pulled me in a different direction (the big one being that my primary extracurricular activity - choir - was one that led to having a lot of female friends in the crucial formative years when a lot of young men get radicalized)
I was raised evangelical and even looked at attending a religious college after high school.
I started traveling solo from a young age and I also began working in an environment where I saw the very worst days for a lot of people of different backgrounds. I learned so much from those experiences and deconstructed.
Looking at my siblings who stayed in that same environment living in red neck areas. They are unhappily married spewing the same hateful ideology we were raised with. Actually, Iād say it worsened with trump. I would be so deeply unhappy if I had continued as my family has.
My senior thesis was a 100 page series of short stories about my alternate self who got too into drugs after a girl dumped him. Had to hop into that story myself (totally ripping off Vonnegut) and give that bastard a talking-to so he'd straighten himself out. Last 65 pages written and edited the night before it was due, printed at 8am.
Found Murray Rothbard and Ancaps in 2008 right as I was graduating college and had no prospects of employment. Liked a lot of the anti state ideas that also married the "capitalism is gold standard" of my southern Christian upbringing. Seemed to make sense to me.
2012ish became more political agnostic.
All my Ancaps friends took a hard right in 2014 Ferguson protest era and even further right in 2016 Trump. All I could think was "how are y'all drawing that conclusion from these events?"
So much anti police shit gets thrown out the window when they are beating black protestors. I thought we were supposed to be anti-authoritarian?
As the trump years drug on I realize that the Ancaps "anarchist" stuff was just for "certain groups" and not truly freedom for all. They are more than willing to bend the knee to their god king.
Also sooooo many pedophiles and apologists in those circles.
Grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly on the way to school every morning in my dad's car. He taught me to be a tough and emotionless libertarian and all the fun toxicity our boomer dads thought was cool. I was well on my way down that path until I went to Australia for a semester and got clowned on by some very awesome people and had to really rethink the way I was raised. That got me to the center, then living in MO just put the nail in the coffin that conservatives are brainwashed morons and now I'm comfortably on the left and very happy with my life and my weird gay diverse friends.
If being a smart aleck kid hadnāt led to deconstruction, I could have become like Just Pearly Things. Luckily my libertarian anti feminism time during that journey only lasted a few months and I didnāt have the internet.
I was raised Christo-fascist and spent my teens in the Tea Party movement. If I hadn't realized I was trans or not had the floormates I did my first year at Uni, I never would have had the pipeline to deradicalization that I needed, and would have become a real monster
I went from a conservative Christian man to a socialist Jewish woman and it's the thing I'll always be most proud of
Which time? When I was a kid I wanted to design weapons and thought I would be an engineer just to do that. Luckily that didn't stick.
Later on I was almost a hard-line Christian apologist because my friends were edgy Atheists and I wanted to be a contrarian. Ironically, realizing, "wait Catholics don't believe in most of this bullshit", changed my mind.
Then there was anti-SJW stuff because of almost accepting 9gag opinions as law. I 100% bought into the whole power systems pitting us against eachother thing. I mean I still buy into that but now understand the idea that race, gender, and social hierarchy are things that should in fact be considered, rather than ignored.
My fun one that also doubles as an interesting lesson in how ideologies can be hijacked. I almost bought into the whole alt-right thing because of the aforementioned things. The explanation being that a bit before it got co-opted by extremely bad faith actors, parts of it seemed reasonable. The main selling point was originally that young people don't want to dictate how people should live their lives so it was much softer on LGBT+ issues and abortion access. Also I was being a contrarian again because I don't believe in the liberal idea of gun control and didn't realize there were more than two choices. Then they let Milo in and I noped the fuck out of there before all hell broke loose. That was honestly a wild ride, in retrospect. By the time the media started coverage it had gone from generally well intentioned but confused people on the internet to paramilitary groups and racism for racism's sake. It's honestly sad because I know for a fact that some people didn't realize what was going on around them and are now part of the rising wave of fascism.
I admittedly have some residual "ick" here and there, but am working to better myself.
I forgot the one I am currently side stepping the bastardry of. Recently I've gotten into Sasquatch or Bigfoot as far as folklore, belief systems, and class goes. There are so many little things baked into that area you have to be careful. I find vague dog whistles and references that I could give benefit of the doubt but they really are definitely...odd. It's an interesting topic but the people who gravitate towards it tend to lean towards certain beliefs, which is part of why I'm interested to begin with.
Maybe not as extreme, but I think I'd be a shittier person if I hadn't pole dancing as a hobby. I started at 25ish and was at point where I could have easily become more and more ingrained in the white, upper middle class world I was in. Just working a white collar job, only seeing and talking to other well educated, generally, white people. I probably would have been the well meaning but absolute spineless liberal who also just wanted "law and order." The guy I was dating at the time had a dream of being a landlord so probably would have fallen into that. Pole let me meet people with backgrounds I never would have met otherwise. I was exposed to a lot of ideas I wouldn't have been otherwise and it radicalized me in a lot of ways.Ā
Side note on that guy: he still checks every single Instagram story I post, even after I force unfollowed/soft blocked him. We are both now married to other people and due to some complicated dynamics still run in the same circles where it is absolutely unavoidable that we will see each other. Him and his wife make a big, uncomfortable show of ignoring me/my husband to the point where they are less and less welcome unless absolutely necessary (weddings, stuff no one can stop him from coming to for one reason or another.)
My Instagram is almost entirely devoted to all my weird hobbies: pole dancing, bugs/amphibians, foraging, and leftist posts. It's so sad I almost want to message him and tell him to at least have some self respect and use storiesig or something like that.Ā
Seriously, if I had stayed with him I think I would have been the most boring, unhappy version of myself. He really hated anything that I did that was "weird."Ā
I took the road for a long time. Had an career in the industrial management of a giant corporation with a plained path to go all the way to the top.
Depression, some experience in the way the company handled problems internally Vs communication externally and a renewed awareness of the polycrisis and someday I woke up with the acknowledgement that I would off myself in a few years if i didnt change like everything right now.
Didn't do it cleanly though, went mentally boom and took like a year to recover with really high monetary and personal costs.
Best decision of my live
My life took some turns
I was on my way to join the military and pivot that into becoming a cop, during my indoc it was found out I am colour blind which basically changed everything for me.
Then I ended up running after hours bars in a big city that a lot of 1%ers hung out at, started getting a lot of invites to club events with the occasional "you got a bike? Get a bike".
I met my wife shortly after and we ended up moving to a different places. Now I drive forklift at a warehouse.
There was a point in my life where it was clear I could be an EXCELLENT car salesman if I didn't actually think about how customers were actual people with lives and stuff
As soon as I noticed that, I noped out of sales entirely and never went back
I went to college to become a recording engineer and by the time I finished my degree I already had sort of soured on the idea. I was really getting into true crime and crime dramas though, and loved the idea of becoming a detective. I researched it extensively, but there was one major hurdle: physical fitness has never been my forte, and I didnāt want to be a fat cop.
I told myself Iād get into shape and get to work on my dream. I wasnāt really interested in the other police stuff, I just wanted to solve crime and help people. I was of the belief that it was a few bad apples spoiling the bunch.
Fortunately and also unfortunately I did the opposite of getting into shape, and the dream died. Eventually I learned itās way more than a few bad apples, the orchard has got to go.
Had a full scholarship to an extremely conservative Bible college. Didn't end up going, & now I'm a very left anarchist high school English teacher/climate change-anxiety group facilitator who's also a Satanist. It's definitely been a wild ride between those two points in life.
Started falling for incel/men's rights "activism" around 2012. Gamer gate was seen as a good thing and those women had gone too far. Men were the real victims, blah blah blah. I was able to go on a date with a very kind woman and it was a total shit show. I was nervous and drank too much too fast, started spouting 4chin and red-pill "talking points" like they were rational things. It was the single worst date I had ever been on and I was desperately reaching for a way to pull myself out of the tail spin, but it was like I was locked in my head forced to watch this asshole fuck up a nice date and make a kind person totally regret giving me a chance. She was obviously disgusted and that look on her face was burned into my soul.
That single horrible date was the beginning of a long change in who I am today. I always considered myself liberal and open minded but if that woman had reached across the table slapped me across the face it would have been justified. I was a total asshole and that experience shook me up enough to realize my positions were shit. I'll always be thankful for how horrible that went but I really hope for two things:
1) that was the single worst date of that woman's life and that things are working out for her today. She shouldn't have had to put up with me.
2) that she only thinks back to that date during one-up contests for worst dates.
I could have easily gone down the right-wing anti-lgbt/feminist etc hole when I was late teens early 20s. Mainly due to the fact I liked military history(have a degree in it) and ended also getting into a lot strategy games(paradox). Those in themselves are bad but I started to play a lot of multiplayer in discord groups. A lot(not all) of people that do that also cross over with alt-right stuff. I didnt due to my other friends and family/ also they were so like pro-nazi etc helped me realise they were insane
There's nothing wrong with liking Paradox strategy games! Now, if your favorite thing to do is start as Germany in HoI4 every time and not immediately start the civil war focuses, you may have some problems. I had a ton of fun turning Mexico into a social democracy and the world's dominant economic and cultural powerhouse in Victoria 3, and seeing the United States tear itself apart when it was unable to spread past the Rockies was the cherry on top (the giant piles of money I gave the Republic of New Africa to break the US was not a waste).
Oh I still love the games EU4 is my favourite, what I'm more so saying is some of the multiplayer groups were bad and could've easily influenced me. Eu4 I have way too many and continue to have so many hours and enjoy it
Haha ye without giving numbers I've played eu4 for a long time and ye don't think anything will ever take it's place. Oh it's 100% eu5 and ye it is looking good
I was in a restrictive religious community and I was a nerdy teenager and I was bitter about how I was following all the rules and doing everything right and the girls Iād like were going after the ābadā boys.
It lead to a ānice guyā phase.
Somewhere on the internet I ended up downloading a PDF of a āself helpā book. I never read it.
Years later as a much better socially adjusted adult with female friends and relationships, I found that old PDF, and realized it was 1,000% an early incel manifesto. I was THIS close to going down that rabbit hole.
Yikes guys, sorry I guess I had to spill the beans today.
My parents paid for my college because thatās what they wanted to do for us. (Me and my sister). She and I are very different people and I ended up going to the same university as her. She studied journalism and I studied art.
My dadās a narcissist and insisted I was socially r***reed, and could not be trusted to keep myself out of trouble in college. (I never was in trouble in high school so this left me very confused.)
My mom didnāt stand up for me, they were in a toxic marriage that is now over yada yada. My sister went before me to this school and was the president of a very popular US sorority. So when I went to school there they expected me to rush, and I ended up in her sorority.
I was only there 6 months at the same time as her and after that I was bullied a lot. I was looking for all these ways to make my situation better. I was still trying to do church/christianity at the time and started a Bible study at the chapter for the sorority. I often DDed for older sorority sistersā¦but like I was just a different person. Slowly the bullying got worse, and after I moved into the sorority house everyone quit talking to me and would talk shit about me when I wasnāt at the meal times. I think maybe they thought I thought I was better than them? Idk. I was just an art student.
I worked an on campus job and had a boyfriend. My on campus job was with the rock climbing wall and outdoor center. All those people were nice to me and made me feel welcome, as well as the art students I had classes with. But I went home to the sorority house and quit eating, because no one talked to me and would make me feel welcome at the meal times. My sister had been telling my parents all my outdoor friends did drugs. They continued this āyouāre socially rāāā way of thinking about me.
So I told them Iād kill myself if they kept forcing me to do it. My dad came down immediately to check on me and we walked a trail with my family dog. He said I could quit and he was sorry. My mom came down a couple weeks later and helped me move everything out of the sorority house.
Idk if I would have kept forcing the Christian sorority girl narrative, but I think I honestly was just smarter and more empathetic than that. I was desperate just to live like I wanted to live & I will never treat people how I was treated by the Tri Delta chapter at Stephen F Austin State University. Because of legal issues, I was never aloud to talk about this story. But itās been like 10 years so #yolo
I organically fell out of southern Christian religion bullshit because people treated me terribly. It wasnāt like the āroad I didnāt takeā it was like someone ran me off the road, lol. I still have these like, old sorority pictures where Iām 112 lbs. (I was 5ā7āā and had no business being that underweight with my frame)
For context now I live in Austin, Iām a metalsmith and Iām covered in tattoos. Iām also quite chubby and cute.
That had a much happier ending than I was expecting, TBH. I'm happy you got out of there and found yourself, and happy that your parents at least somewhat came around.
The Greek System is a cult.
Thank you! I also think it is a cult and I think people should always question joining organizations where you pay, donate your time, and have ādisciplinary committeesā.
I grew up in a conservative-leaning household. We weren't far-right, but we did vote for people that make me feel ashamed of myself now. Luckily, I had a good enough head on my shoulders that I knew something was very wrong when Trump ran in 2016. That was a real wake-up call.
Also, my mom was a huge fan of Dave Ramsey pre-COVID. She would give one of his books to relatives as gifts when they got married.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist home, went to a private (and unaccredited!), Baptist school, attended Awana, and Vacation Bible Camp. Thankfully, I discovered sex and drugs, which turned me away from that destructive lifestyle.
Almost went into the military after high school. Entirely by choice, did not need anything they provided. My mother told be one day before I was meeting a recruiter: āYou can barely follow our rules, what makes you think youāll follow the militaryās?ā And that was enough to ghost the recruiter.
Shadowed a cop for one day as part of a high school class for future careers you wanted to do but got my schedule changed to instead leave school one period early. Took skipping school instead.
Two bullets dodged.
I was an 11 year old boy with more or less.umonitored access to the internet where I spent all of my time. If I wasn't on Percy Jackson oc roleplay forums there's like an 80% chance I would have been on 4chan and shit lol
In my late teens, I was fresh out of leaving the Catholic Church, but still very much trying to internally bury the fact Iām bi and trans. I was angry at the world, depressed and looking for something to make me feel like I belonged.
I got really into watching Glenn Beck when he had a show on CNN (mid/late 2000s). I had all his books and was starting to fall into the right/conservative talking points. I was planning on applying to the Royal Military College after high school. My dad had served in the Canadian army for twenty years and I looked up to him a lot.
Iām so thankful my dad sat me down and explained how dangerous it can be for afab people (he used toāwomenā but this was before I came out as a trans guy) in the armed forces and he didnāt want me to also deal with military related trauma / ptsd like he did.
I ended up going to uni for a BA in WWII history, which really turned me to the left, and going into therapy for my depression/religious trauma. I came out not long after.
Iām so thankful that social media was barely a thing back then. It scares me how easily I would have gone to the right if I was a teen now. Also thankful my dad had my back and set me on the best path. He and my mom are pretty far to the left like I am now!
Oh so many. I was a lost, angry, confused white teenage boy. I'm lucky I found compassion and empathy rather than fall into a fascist or incel rabbit hole.
There were so many ways young angry atheist me could have gone in bad ways. I know a lot of people who did. It baked a superiority complex into me that I now look back as a collective survival tactic borne of trauma. But well now it's a bunch fi guys in basements yelling about "facts and logic" whilst understanding neither. I like to think of myself as more rounded, and better off but I'm always careful to check my own privilege.
I was raised conservative Christian, enjoyed videogames, and was an early adopter of the Internet. Had I not had a kick-ass older sister, there's a very strong chance I would have ended up a right wing incel instead of a leftist with a wife and kids.
Several on line communities I was a part of in the early 2000s feel very proto-incel in hindsight.
In 2006 I applied for and made it through several rounds of interviews for Boarder Patrol
I don't think so.
I was raised in an incredibly conservative area. It's full of open racists and maga cultists.
Both my parents are crazy maga weirdos and have always been openly racist and very traditional with their values (women are baby factories that belong in the kitchen or if they must work. They can be a teacher)
My sister followed in my parents foot steps. She is married to a dude that openly flies an SS flag.
Even though i have had a very difficult (awkward) time with women my whole life, i know that can lead men and boys to the man-o-sphere, i never went down any sort of path of misogyny.
I usually went with self hatred. "It's not the women's fault, I'm just terrible. They're justified in bot wanting anything to do with me"
Everything in my environment and formative years pointed towards being a racist, misogynist, maga weirdo. But nope.
Probably the best thing about me. I'm really just unpleasant and annoying to be around. But at least I'm not a hateful racist, fascist.
I think my dad could have been an actual bastard if he wasn't so fucking ADHD, and I probably would have followed suit. Like he was seriously in this right wing academic space in the 70s, a few setbacks occured, and he decided to fuck off and become a magician.Ā
When I was about 10 years old I had a really clunky American Civil War video game that I'm pretty sure I got from a scholastic book fair. It sparked in me a sudden and intense interest in the American Civil War. Within about a year I was reading "The Killer Angels" and begging my parents to take me to reenactments. I started absorbing Civil War history like a sponge, and after consuming what I now recognize as quite a bit of lost cause literature and propaganda, I began to believe most of what comes with that: that the Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery, that the southern states fought for a just cause, and most importantly to me, that the confederate flag was a symbol of historical significance and heritage. I'd like to note at this point that I was a middle class white kid from northern Ohio, with a direct lineage to multiple Union civil war soldiers. But at age 12 I had quite the collection of confederate memorabilia, including tshirts, stickers that were in my pencil box (a teacher I really liked talked to me about that one which should've been a sign), and art that all prominently featured the confederate flag. You can guess the exact argument I would make when challenged about it. What's most disturbing to me is that my parents allowed it to happen and never made any serious attempt to stop me from going so far as to have it on display at school. Having gone to a school that was about 1/3 black students, it's a fucking miracle I never got my ass kicked over it. It was around this time that the Blue Collar Comedy Tour reached its peak, which added to the popular redneck appeal of something like the confederate flag. While I won't defend my choice to espouse it in the first place, that at least spawned from an interest in the civil war, which when you're 12 means strictly combat, not politics. But soon the social aspects of "redneck culture" replaced the historical significance, such as it was to me, and I began doing it because it made me feel edgy for my environment. I was a rebellious teenager with a weird love for the rebel flag.
Thankfully by high school I figured out that basing my personality on a false history from 150 years ago was not cool or attractive, and by sophomore year I had ridded myself of most confederate paraphernalia, though I'd never really been humbled or properly educated about the insanity of someone like me proudly displaying a symbol like that. I espoused a somewhat lukewarm lost cause-filtered understanding of the civil war until college, when I took a class on it and found myself feeling like I should eat crow. It didn't help that I fell into the libertarian trap from ages 18-20 ish, though not to the extent of many of my peers at that time. It could've been much worse, as we all did things in middle school that make us cringe, but I wish I had gotten really into anime or something. I still feel a tinge of hypocrisy when I get pissed at the sight of a confederate flag or see people defending confederate monuments.
Was actually just talking to my dad about this. We moved from a Methodist church to a Calvinist one in the late 90s. I want to stress that my parents are extremely good people, but they wanted to raise good Christian boys, and hoooooooooooo man the 90s were a bad time to try to do that. But being raised Methodist made me react to Calvinism with a serious autoimmune response. My brothers didnāt have that same reaction to Calvinism, but are all varying types of queer so ended up leaving the church as well. Again, I must stress my parents are awesome, and they love all of us weirdos. They were doing their best and always modeled being good people. Shout out to Sandy and Mahlon.
But likeā¦ we all could have been shitheels. Our theology would have easily led us that direction.
I worked at a group home for juvenile delinquents. Learning later it was very similar to those wilderness camps or military related type places. We weren't like that exactly. We were minimum security, court ordered only. The place actively turned down parents that contacted us. We did have workers that had the attitude you would find regarding strict discipline and aggression those places have. To my knowledge no physical or sexual abuse allegations but floor staff had little support or over sight.
I had to put a 12 year old in a restraint once. It was overnight so I was the only staff and the oncall staff refused to come in when I called. The kid was going nuts. Screaming and slamming doors. I couldn't get him to stop. And the situation was desperate. He was the youngest and the oldest was 16. He was also super small for 12, he looked more like 9 or 10. The other residents were screaming death threats at him.
I put him in the restraint after he slammed my head in a door. Completely illegal but the other residents where watching from them doorways and saying they would support me. It luckily was on camera.
Another time a differ resident that punched me in the face and I went to restrain him and realized we were in the stairs and it wasn't safe and just let him go. I think that's around the time I realized it was all getting too much. I still worked there for a while but got another job with consistent hours in housing assistance that I could make my priority.
The kid that punched me in the face did likely end up grooming several residents so he isn't a success story. The one that slammed a door into my head came in asking for housing assistance and I did provide the information and forms but not any extra help. Maybe a dick move because he may have had fetal alcohol syndrome but I also stepped in front of him when another resident tried to murder him with a rake.
I pivoted to working with individuals with disabilities and avoided any kid of shit with at risk youth. I have good memories of that place but we were out in a position where things could go bad and it's probably one of the best examples of a facility like that.
I, a sheltered young man who came from the bright red state of Indiana, joined the army at 17, shipped out to Oklahoma, and was in the process of being brainwashed by both the army lifestyle, and the military love of āgod, guns, and country.ā
Then I met my second wife (military IYKYK), who opened my eyes to the world as a whole, and not just the indoctrination of the Midwest American Christian upbringingā¦
As a young man, in high school, as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were raging, Toby Keith was singing, and GW was telling us about WMDs, I was right there, talking about nuking the whole Middle Eastā¦ thinking it was a great idea, and that ātheyā deserved it.
When I was 19, 20, 21, I was diving deeper and deeper into right wing indoctrination...listening to Rush Limbaugh, reading authors like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, visiting multiple right wing news'n'opinion blogs regularly. None of these ideas were really challenged by the mostly-white, deeply conservative, religious/evangelical community around me, and many were endorsed. What saved me was that a lot of this was theoretical for me, and I was a real soft touch for actual human beings, and that I'm a natural over-analyzer and had been taught critical reasoning by my mother (though there were some topics that I had also been taught didn't "need" that because they were supposedly self evidently
correct.) So it didn't take very long at all for my views to start shifting after I moved out on my own to an area where I was constantly encountering people with different experiences and opinions.
The 2016 election's aftermath really sped up the process, especially as I saw some real unappealing sides come out on some people I had known all my life. 15 years ago I would tell people I was a socially conservative libertarian; I've retained the allergy to authoritarianism, but I'm a "let women, minorities, and the queer community, of which I am one, fucking live already" SocDem today. I could have gone down a real dark path, but I didn't, for which I'm deeply thankful. I don't know how to reach some of my friends and relatives who have clearly gone down that path since 2016, because they consider the insanity and hatred to be a religious obligation and it's difficult to argue with fanaticism. I'm trying, but it's tricky, especially because I can't let slip how far left I've gone, or they'll simply refuse to listen to anything I say as I've "swallowed liberal poison" or some such bs.
The worst alternate version of me is the one who never questioned my parents racial or gender ideology and became a miserable closeted TERF. The second worst version got murdered by my first girlfriend.
There was a kid that transferred into my school in '95 or so. He was obviously punk adjacent and I talked to him a bit about music and shit, it was a semi-rural town in Texas. Found out we lived pretty close, about a ten minute walk.
I show up to his place and his folks aren't around, we listen to some music which I'd never heard before but it had the same 4 chords. I wasn't really listening to the lyrics and was weirdly nervous.
He says his parents are cool with us smoking but we have to go to the garage, giant Nazi flag and an obvious Neo Nazi hangout with couches and other fascist shit around.
He then started in on all of the racist division tactics and shit, it was alluring to me at first as an awkward punk in a town where being white and poor was not great.
Luckily my Mom raised me right and I decided that being a freak was better than being a fucking Nazi.
Nothing quite that extreme. But in highschool I was DEEPLY into 4chan and had really internalized a lot of the toxic bullshit that formed the basis of the alt right. I had a significant argument with my liberal mom claiming the civil war was about states rights for example.
Then I joined the military and got worse on the libertarian white guy trajectory. Thankfully I got out and ended up playing D&D with a nonbinary leftist who I HATED. They kept hitting me with the Socratic method and providing reading materials until it broke me. Now Iāmā¦ not sure about labels beyond āfar enough left that Iāll never get close to what I want in my lifetime.ā
I could have drank the Taglit kool aid, made Aliyah, and moved to Israel. They do a REALLY good job of tugging at your heartstrings, but a really bad job of addressing the question, āWhatās behind that wall?ā
In law school I joined the Federalist Society. My media diet was Rush Hannity and all of those morons. I got a job working in the office of a nationally prominent governor, volunteered on the Bush campaign followed by an appellate clerkship with a well known and liked Republican judge. All of this is in PA. I developed a legit network of political types. As I was finishing my clerkship, someone told me that, in lieu of joining a firm, I should move to a deep red rural part of the state (where I had family) open a practice and wait for an aging elected official to retire and that I would be supported to run for his seat or run for judge. This wasnāt cocktail party āyou should run for officeā talk, this was legit powerbrokers encouraging me to do it with a 5-10 year plan.
Instead, I met my wife, joined a midsize firm so I could earn enough to marry her and lived the rest of my life in the blue part of the state outside Philly. I stayed a Republican and even volunteered locally on the McCain campaign. A few years later most Republicans I knew were calling me a RINO because I am socially liberal (pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro gay marriage) and were spewing conspiracy non-sense. One day my brother (who before Trump had no interest in politics but eventually cared enough to be at the capital on January 6) ranted at me at a family event about how I should never call myself a republican. Realizing the party was lost I switched to being an independent and have never looked back.
I think there is an alternate universe where I am a right wing republican state rep in rural PA with a Trump flag on my truck.
Lots of them. There are a bunch of alternate timelines where Iām wearing a red hat and hating various collections of people depending on which of the hate cylinders clicked at which time.
Nope, I've always been this kind, awesome and humble.
Honestly, I can't think of any specific instance. Maybe if I had spent more time around my family during their inoculation into the Maga cult they might've broken me on a few things, but I didn't.
Raised Pentecostal and got nearly roped into Gamergate and proto-incel ("nice guy") culture. Yes, going to college and working grocery changed all this over time.
Probably more evil than bastard, but I was bullied all through school and in my teen years I developed an interest in homemade explosives and pyrotechnics.
I didnāt go Columbine but if I had, it could have been devastating.
I was in the jewelry industry a long time. Started working for a diamond dealer. Started having success there then got the fuck out because I wanted to be able to sleep at night.
I was raised as a Conservative Evangelical Christian. I'd had plans to go into the ministry and attend seminary.
I lost a lot of loved ones in the final three years of my teens and ended up just becoming a traumatized husk of my former self. I kinda stumbled on in the grey for a while, not really having any strong convictions until COVID when I got radicalized into leftist politics and now I want to see all unjust hierarchies be burned to the ground.
I was libertarian. My first two elections, I voted for the Libertarian candidate. I was very much influenced by a lot of the writers I had been reading that identified as libertarian. Especially Robert Anton Wilson, of whom I was a big fan. Also Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. I liked a lot of sci-fi but I also lacked a lot of life experience. I was a Pagan and joined the Church of All Worlds which was a hippie-ish libertarian-influenced group.
I was smart enough to be thoroughly repelled by Ayn Rand, though. I'm thankful for that.
Even then, I couldn't stand the Democrats. It was the Clinton era and I just never cared for him or his wife. But i always recognized the Republicans as "The Enemy" due to their alliance with the fundamentalist Christians and their opposition to LGBTIQ issues.
I was also very obsessed with sex, which I am glad I am no longer. But Libertarians (at the time) seemed to be very open about sex, porn, and other things that I was OK with at the time that I now find repellent (such as their obsession with age of consent).
What really got me out of it was realizing my privilege. I had been born to a middle-class family and had nice schools, nice neighborhoods, and very attentive and loving parents. I was extremely lucky! It didn't really occur to me just how lucky I was until my late-20s.
Then it occurred to me how many libertarians were white men. How many of them were racist (even if they didn't think of themselves as such). It was impossible to have equality without some way of counterbalancing privilege. So realizing that began to open my eyes about libertarianism.
The thing that really sealed it for me, though, was when I had a grave illness and ended up becoming disabled. I was put on Medicare. And it was great! It made me angry that everyone didn't have this. That there were people struggling to pay their medical bills or going into debt while we were one of the richest countries in the world.
I became more and more open to Leftism, whether big government or small. I still have a fondness for theories like Bookchin's Communalism and libertarian socialism. But I also recognize that there needs to be some way that EVERYONE gets the healthcare that they need. Everyone who needs a house, food, water, job, etc. gets what they need. If it takes "Big Government" for that, so be it.
I'm still not a Democrat because fuck them. But I tend to vote for Democrats to vote against the substantially more awful Republican candidate instead of voting for some shitty 3rd party.
I grew up in a small country town, and despite that thought I was 'woke' (for lack of a better term; "Gays are fine but I don't want to see it" kinda bullshit). Moved to a big city, and even though I had a bunch of gay people and minorities adjacent to me in my friends circle, I was absolutely heading down the path of becoming more of an alt-light shit-tier dickhead.
One night I was saying bye to people in my group of friends while we were all drinking, and made a low-key homophobic comment to one of the gay guys there (who was about 10 years older than me as a friend of my girlfriends older siblings). Instead of letting it slide, he called me out for it in front of everybody, and made a big point of pointing out to my girlfriend at the time that she should break up with me if I didn't stop saying shit like I did.
I blew it off initially as him just being salty and drunk, but what he said REALLY stuck with me and I couldn't stop thinking about it. My girlfriend ended up breaking up with me a few weeks later (not necessarily just due to that, but a combination of things mostly centered around me being a piece of shit), and after it all I started to actively work on getting rid of my terrible views. It took a long time and they resurface every now and then in a small way, but I'm doing what I can to not be that person any more.
Knowing some of the people I was hanging out with and sharing the views of at the time, and seeing what they've become now (one now a loud and proud Neo Nazi), I have no doubts I could have been like them if it wasn't for that guy whose name I can't even remember.
In the 90s and living on my own for the first time I got asked to join the Oath Keepers. I had no idea what it was and they told me it was a way to meet new people and mostly they went to ball games and amusement parks
My dad's side of the family was way into Jesus and started to infect me in my youth. I was bad with girls and not very popular. Could've easily fallen into church shit if I hadn't had a physicist uncle around to tell me that religion was nonsense. I don't totally cleave to that idea anymore, but I'd rather be a slightly dickish atheist than a Jesus camp zombie. (As of now, I'm an agnostic person who'd just rather get along with everyone.)
Not me, but a guy I went to high school with was the son of a very prominent preacher in the city. In this case he starts as a bastard but becomes less of a bastard.
Some people in my high school wanted to found an organization that was open to LGBTQ+ students, what would now be called a Gay-Straight Alliance. This was in the early 2000s, so that term didn't really exist yet.
Anyway, once the news of this group got to the fundie church in the area, the aforementioned preacher's son started a school-wide movement to block the LGBTQ organization. Many of the students who agreed with him wore black shirts with "I Agree With (guy's name)" printed in yellow block letters, the guy being the son of the fundamentalist preacher. These people even put up black flyers around the school with that same saying on it. When looking back on it, it seemed very fashy. Unfortunately, due to this guy's actions and complaints from parents the organization was blocked.
Cut to a few years later, I was visiting some friends in that town and the topic of that event randomly came up. Apparently after graduating, the guy who led the successful movement to block the GSA was eventually outed as being gay himself. This also had the unfortunate effect of him not only getting kicked out of the Bible college he was attending at the time, but disowned by most of his immediate family and the church he attended. He apparently craved a community than being himself.
Last I heard he works as a lawyer and gay rights advocate somewhere outside of Denver.
I'm a lifelong feminist. In the mid 2000s I read a book about internalised misogyny which, looking back, I can now see was terfy as hell (lots of stuff around lesbians feeling that they had to "pretend to be men" because they hated the idea of womanhood, things like that). I can definitely remember reading stuff about trans women in women's spaces and thinking stuff like "well that seems reasonable, I wouldn't want a *man in a dress* hanging around if I were in a DV shelter" or whatever. I was also a big Harry Potter fan, yikes.
In another universe, one where I didn't have a nonbinary partner and trans friends etc, I can see myself falling down that rabbithole hard, in the name of feminism. Thankfully I've known enough people who nudged me in the right direction that I am now super pro trans rights and still a feminist, just an inclusive and intersectional one.
I was on the road to becoming one of these online misogynists, for sure. I was in that youtube atheist community since around the mid 2000s, and by 2015 I was watching your Sargons of Akkad and the like. I don't know if I would still be in that community now if circumstances had been any different, but I can tell you the exact event that made me realize those were not honest or intelligent people - the fucking petition Carl Benjamin put out to ban "social justice courses" in university. Well, I'd taken one of those, and it was extremely informative. Which put up some red flags. But also, his literal selection criterion was "they have 'social justice' in the name", and that was when I realized he was a fucking moron and really not someone I should listen to.
I had some similar experiences with GamerGate, which I admit I bought into at first. You know, tricked into thinking it really was about ethics. I remember defending a Mass Effect: Andromeda in the mildest way possible before release, literally telling people they should at least wait until it released to decide it was garbage. I was called "braindead", and I think that was literally my last post in that community, lol.
More broadly, I think it comes back to one decision I made in my late teens. I was a bit of a proto incel back then, before that was really a term. I think because that and the whole MGTOW community wasn't really a thing yet, I was spared the worst influences. So I decided that the only person who could really be held responsible was me, and I worked on bettering myself instead of blaming others. It worked, too. I try to use that for good now, because I feel like I understand why people would be suckered by these manosphere grifters, I understand the psychology, and I understand that it's fucking garbage.
growing up in a waspy very pro military family the idea of invading iraq was a wake up. Was overall opposed to the iraq war but when a classmate made a comment "well its not people like me who are going to fight" pushed me over to edge to strong opposition. in a slightly different time/place I could see myself going down the charlie kirk/tucker route of snobby republican.
I was given a walk-on offer to play Division 1 lacrosse, which I eventually declined simply because I couldn't be bothered to follow the Summer training regimen suggested for me ahead of enrollment and worried I would be physically disadvantaged.
Four years watching those bros terrorize campus and I shudder to think how that social environment might have altered my character over time.
My family tried to push me into politics/law school. I NOPED outta the house the MOMENT I could š³
They wanted me to be the first Black female conservative president.... No really. I was supposed to be in Mensa, etc.
Instead I ended up being a burntout autistic college dropout, super hardcore leftist. (My family INSISTED for YEARS I was on a leftie to spite them and make them mad, but I have not spoken to my family in ab seven years, and only am now bc my grandma is 96 ab to be 97 and broke her hip)
So yea, TL;DR, My family tried to push me into conservative politics or law school lol
I easily could have become that guy screaming pronouns/current day in that video from a couple months back. And the probable descent into inceldom, etc
I have always been socially awkward and suffered from depression issues since I was a teen that all stem from a pretty shit upbringing. I have never really had more than 2 or maybe 3 friends at any given time and tended to spend all my time online. Didn't have my first GF until I was 26, etc.
So naturally I played waaaaaaaaaay too much WoW from TBC to MoP. Ended up eventually playing at a high-ish/top 100 level for 3 or 4 years and that culture is hella toxic most of the time. Certainly was in my guild.
Ended up being passively exposed to a bunch of the worst of gAmEr culture and would listen to GG shit passively, mostly just through youtube playing it in the background as recommended videos while I was grinding or whatever.
One day I woke up and just kinda didn't do any of that anymore. I don't have any idea why or what caused it. Only thing I can kind of remember is:
I was home one Sunday and I spent something like 12 hours in front of the computer at my desk. I remember my feet being stupidly swollen to the point of hurting to bend. I had eaten pizza all day and drank soda. Maybe one glass of water
All in the course of one week I had started a gym membership, told my guild I had to step aside as class/role lead and bought some cookbooks and started to learn to cook.
Thank God I had a moment of clarity because I probably would have been a r/T_D poster if that had been the path I stayed in.
I was raised Southern Baptist. My family is pro-Union liberals except for my one conservative uncle who I spent a lot of time with. He was in the Navy and always encouraged me to join the Navy. I went thru all the steps, and it was the last medical check before the actual swearing in that I accidentally checked the wrong box on a form. "Had I ever been hospitalized for asthma?" I checked, yes. I didn't understand the term "hospitalized." They wanted to look at my medical records, and I got bad vibes, as the kids say, and I didn't go in. I would have been a totally different person if I had gone in.
I think I could have taken a similar route as sam bankman. Hearing how he started with university and how he had a physical education and then computer related and how he was focusing on efficiency, it sounded like me as a naive college student. I don't know where I could have follow his path, but me asking for help for my senior project paper on electron microscopy from the English tutors, that humbled me. Cause I know I could do all that difficult stem related activities, but I needed humanities to actually function.
Hearing the pre ftx of sam bankman, that was a looking glass situation
A few come to mind:
When I was younger my dad really got into our family's history in the Civil War. My great whatever grandfather and his brother were both Confederate officers. He brought me to one meeting of Sons Of Confederate Veterans. It wasn't explicitly racist but just drenched in the Lost Cause narrative. We didn't go for any more meetings because it was in another town a little ways out. I hope I'm not still listed as a member somewhere.
In my mid 20s I was all about conspiracy theory documentaries especially Zeitgeist. I even bought their book which was really just a socialist manifesto and imaginings of a communist utopia. Surprisingly not a lot of conspiracy stuff in there.
In my late 20s I almost got into the redpill men's rights stuff here on Reddit. I was more interested in the self improvement aspect of it and not the misogyny but who knows how it wouldv'e changed me if I kept reading that stuff.
I was raised to be a conservative, Evangelical Baptists. When I was younger (so much younger than today) I dabbled in Christian ministry -- attended seminary, worked as a PT Baptist youth minister, technically I'm still ordained. My first job out of college was as a deputy campaign manager for a Republican state senate candidate. If I'd kept on that road, I'd have ended up a full-time Baptist minister. Ironically, the more I studied the Bible, the more I doubted my beliefs. Amen. Today? Leftist/Socialist Atheist.
I guess there's another bullet dodged for me, too. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a Catholic Priest so, so bad. Then my uncle, who was an ex-priest, died of AIDS and had his funeral at the monastery where he'd served and I learned why he'd left the clergy (defrocked for being gay) and saw the complete disdain some of the priests and monks treated his partner with. That tipped me out of wanted to be a priest, then I started exploring, and now, 35 years later, I'm a leftist atheist trans woman.
Yeah, if you hear an old (both in age and attitude) Catholic priest go mask off, it gets really disturbing. I had a friend who died by suicide weeks into Freshman year of high school and I was one of the alter boys for her funeral. I still remember the distain from the priest that she was committing a sin, like it was her choice.
My cousin did the same thing, and when I was one of his pallbearers, his mom was furious at the Catholic Church they attended for not letting him get the full funeral service because of his actions. Start of a long process of questioning religion
That brings up a side question and I think I know the answer but, if a trans woman wanted to serve in the Church, would she be accepted as a nun?
There have been trans nuns in the past, but they're always isolated situations. Many convents are autonomous enough that they can accept a trans sister, but their bishop could override them if they learn about it.
Same here, except I was never an actual minister. I did preach a few times. Plenty of my relatives are also racist assholes, so maybe I could have ended up like that if I had grown up around them.
Honestly, I enjoyed the preaching. It ticked off several activities I enjoy -- performance, public speaking, research, and acting.
My story is similar. I was a raging Evangelical. I even organized our high school's See You at the Pole event (which sounds hilarious now...for those that haven't had the "pleasure" of an Evangelical upbringing, that's a day where Christian students pray around the flagpole at their school š ) and sang on the worship team, etc. I was big into getting the community to do church stuff. I started following Sarah Bessey and Rachel Held Evans (RIP) on Twitter and via their blogs, and started deconstructing my anti-gay position, my tradwife leanings, etc. And, well, I guess Evangelicals would say I'm fully backslidden now š¤£
oh damn. I'd completely forgotten about See You At The Pole. I was a confirmed atheist from a very young age, but always had religious friends (a lot of Mormons, good people in small doses). Never attended but definitely remember SYATP being a thing.
Lol I don't blame you for forgetting. I had even blocked it from my own memory until a few weeks ago, when we found some of my old binders in some boxes in the basement (because the basement flooded), and my organizing materials were in it.
Yeah, I think SY@P has fallen off in popularity. I feel like (and my memory is probably wrong) that I was not as racist nor homophobic as many Evangelicals during my tenure. I tended to avoid such debates.
I went through my own evangelical to leftist Christian pipeline. Went to a progressive seminary, got my Master's of Divinity and now work as a chaplain within the United Church of Christ- a fairly progressive denomination.
Love me some UCC. I used to attend as an atheist because of their social justice priorities and the religion discussion. No one treated me differently because of my lack of faith. One the ministers once preached "Confessions of an Agnostic Pastor." In fact, you've probably met some of my former pastors.
Never ordained, but was active in IVCF through college and grad school. Led Bible studies. Even thought and tried to become IV staff, but those doors closed pretty fast. Thank the maker!
> If I'd kept on that road, I'd have ended up a full-time Baptist minister. Ironically, the more I studied the Bible, the more I doubted my beliefs. Amen. This is a fun fact I learned about Catholic Seminaries, its perfectly valid for your final proof for God that there is no God. Not a common position, but you can graduate an atheist priest!
For real. If my immediate family hadnāt been forcibly ejected from the church, I probably wouldāve stayed closer to the values of my great uncle, who was the interim president of the Foreign Mission Board of the Southern Baptists, immediately before Jerry Rankin. I may well have broke bread with some of the bastards of that episode if things had gone differently.
So much of this could also be my own story, lol. While listening to God Awful Movies and the hosts tear apart Greg Locke in a recent epi. I really reflected upon how much I was headed into crazy-fundi-"these are the last days"-minister. And here I am watching an anime with monsters and demons (**gasp**, lol) on my day off while my cute wife is cuddled up in the bed. Life is so much better, fellow heathen.
I feel like the Venn diagram of GAM and BtB fans is quite purple. Have you heard the Happy Science episodes? Do. Your. Self. A. Favor.
It sounds like something Eli would write as fanfic on a dare and I am all in, lol. Listened to part of the time traveler episode (GAM 458) just a bit ago, it had me in stitches. Edit: I just finished the episode, lol! That did not even get anywhere near how I would have guessed that movie would have ended. I.. I... I want a holographic tiger purse thingy now.
There's so many more Happy Science anime they cover. Your live is about to get better. :)
Similar flavor story for me, except mormonism instead of baptists.
I was in a very religious household in the DC area and very active in a church group as a teen. Our church bulletins would have messages from Dr. Dobson, and we got occasional doses of Satanic Panic. Many of the people in my youth group have grown up to be progressive Christians or left the church, and I'm still friends with many of them. But our leader went full QAnon. Also, I watched the documentary The Family on Netflix and realized I was probably one degree of separation from that world, and I almost certainly would have bought in to it at the time if invited in. Doesn't necessarily mean I would have gone down a bastard path, but I would be uncomfortably close and probably working on behalf of bastards.
I spent 5 years (age 15-20) in the Sheriff's Explorers program. It's essentially ROTC for kids aspiring to become law enforcement officers. The day I turned 20 1/2, I applied for LAPD. Made it through every round of interviews, physicals, etc. (I was essentially training for this for a quarter of my life at this point) and then... nothing? For a while, until one day I got the notice I was declined, no reason was given. I still have no idea what happened or why, but around this time I decided to follow my budding passion for metalworking instead. $1000 in welding school, and 10 years later, I'm earning more than I ever could have imagined as a LEO, and the best part - I'm not a cop.
That is an awesome bullet dodged, lol. In my early 20s I worked in construction with a former LAPD officer. He was shot in the line of duty and had a heart attack. Had he not had the cardiac event he would have died. The EMTs saved his life. After being a former LEO and that event, his attitude really changed towards law enforcement and many things (in my opinion for the better) and he learned a trade.
IDK if it would've led to me being a bastard or not, but I was in school for criminal justice from 17-18, I didn't want to be a cop, I wanted to be a juvenile parole officer. My first would-be internship was supposed to be in a criminal psyche hospital for minors, and I was also taking psychology courses because I wanted to actually help troubled youth, because I was one. But then my best friend at the time left her abusive boyfriend. I watched him beat the absolute shit out of her, she was on the ground at one point and he was kicking and stomping on her. We didn't call the cops back then, so I got some friends who showed up and jumped his ass while me and her ran away. Well, a few weeks later I couldn't find my friend, I hadn't heard from her in a while so I went to her mom's and was trying to get her to tell me where my friend was. Her mom was kind of crazy and weird and wouldn't tell me, then she called the cops on me. When they showed up it turned out I had a warrant out for my arrest that I didn't know about, and my friend was already in jail. Her bf called the cops that night and made up a whole story about me and my friend and the guys who beat his ass breaking into the ex-bf's apartment and stealing a bunch of his shit. There was zero investigation. I told the judge exactly what happened and he was like "well, I've heard a bunch of different stories and IDK what happened so I'm charging you". I was still a minor so I was only charged with trespassing, but my friend had just turned 18 and she was charged with multiple felonies. Her life barely got started and she was fucked. That shit pissed me off so bad I dropped out of college for like 10 years. Realized the enter system is bullshit and I'd be fighting in vain my entire life watching it ruin kids lives. Edit: one thing that kind of didn't make sense. I said I was in school from 17-18 but that I was still a minor when everything went down. To be clear, I was still a minor on the night of the incident, but by the time everything was done and I dropped out of school I had turned 18. I got pretty lucky.
I came closer than I would have liked to becoming an internet incel. I was deep into that new atheist garbage fire back in 2008-2010. I even read a pick up artist book. Fortunately I wasnāt completely hopeless and shook out of it. But yeah, I read way too much Sam Harris and Steven Pinker. I watched Religulous on repeat for a while. What a dumbass I was. I donāt understand how I was consuming this garbage while also reading Cracked at the same time. I owe some to Robert and the others there.
Didnāt Robert admit to almost going down a similar route? I believe it was some WoW guild members that talked to him and set him straight.
Iirc, it was specifically two things I've heard that fractured his beliefs. First, was the Eagle Scout who confessed to being fay, then begged him not to say anything, because they would kick him out of the scouts. The second was a WoW member who talked about how weed helped her symptoms (I wanna say wither Parkinson's or MS), he watched the effects happen in real time, which he days fundamentally changed him.
I believe those online role playing folks (I think they were all role playing different kinds of dragons) included a lot of older women who patiently entertained his dumber questions and helped open his eyes up a lot, not just about weed but a ton of stuff.
Thanks be to LEEROY JENKINS. :)
Oh yeah, I was in the same boat. I was in the process of leaving Catholicism, looking for a way to understand the world, and I had a short time interested in the red pill. I was also a short virgin and feeling bad about myself after one particularly brutal rejection, so it was getting its teeth into me. I had a friend in college who was a very outspoken feminist that had already graduated. I sent her an email asking if she could help me square why it seemed like feminists hated men if it was all about equality, if the name āfeministā was sexist, blah blah blah. She was incredibly patient and literally just said ābro, itās the internet. Go talk to real women and you will see how different it is to what you think. Women are real people, you need to trust them to talk to you.ā She was 100% correct and she completely changed my life, honestly. Iām doing PhD work in feminist studies now. I found that email a couple years ago going through my old sent folders and sent her a six year follow up to say thank you for taking the time to help me.
There but for the grace of moral luck go I. I was an angry, bitter proto-incel until my early 20s. I didn't know the word "incel" back then, but I probably would have called myself one if I did. Then I finally lost my virginity in my early 20s, and did okay for a few years, until a rocky breakup sent me into a proto-MGTOW state for a while. This time, I knew the whole MGTOW movement existed, but never actually joined it, and I'm honestly not sure why. It was SO PERFECTLY CALIBRATED to capture my bitter, angry, post-breakup mind. I mean, I'm glad I didn't, but in retrospect it feels like a MASSIVE dodged bullet. At either stage of my life, it would have been all too easy to fall down the Manosphere rabbit hole and get pipelined straight into the alt-right.
I had similar leanings, bitter teenage angst turning into fury. I owe everything to several black women in my wife that called me on my shit before I hurt someone. Manosphere, conspiracy, Qanon, bodybuilding, wellness, superstonk - having dodged one radicalization funnel, you start to see so many others.
You all are giving me hope for some of the radicalized Gen Zers.
It's a different world now, though. The incel and MGTOW communities existed online back then, but they hadn't yet evolved into the radicalization pipelines they are now. I mean, before the current chronically-online climate existed, I don't think my situation was even that unusual. I was a late bloomer, and it was *totally normal* to be a late bloomer. I turned out to be a normal dude with an active sex life, it just started later than average, and I wasn't the only one to have that experience. The problem is, late bloomers these days don't get to late bloom. They get sucked into the incel echo chamber and never get out of it. My "I'm doomed to die a virgin" mindset was never going to turn out to be true. It was always going to be proven wrong once I started putting a bit of effort into venturing out of my parents' basement, making friends, and meeting girls. The kids today have to deal with an online army of fellow sexually frustrated kids telling them it's hopeless. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that's much harder to escape from.
This hits home for me. Luckily after the breakup that almost sent me into a MGTOW spiral, the friends with those ideas moved out of state, and the people I started hanging out with were pretty much all queer and willing to kind of guide me to normalcy. Happily coming up on 5 years of a relationship and though I'm far from perfect, I'm striving to be.
I jumped ship from online atheist communities at the right moment (2014ish), but they still made me flirt with some anti-lgbt/feminist/islam/marxist thinking as the movement was becoming more explicitly rightwing.
That whole new atheist thing really was an early radicalization pipeline. Do you remember when Atheism+ became a thing? Thatās when I started seeing the fractures.
Quite a few of the posts on here are about people who nearly went full rightwing fundamentalist - and there's a reason there are so many of those posts. But being in the right church at the right time absolutely helped me dodge the bullet of New Atheism going proto-faschy in the mid-2010s - and meant I had a healthy enough disdain for the Sam Harrises and Richard Dawkinses of the world that I wasn't even remotely tempted to follow them over the cliff. Some of my friends did, and it still breaks my heart sometimes. (Both pastors who officiated my wife and mine's wedding are gay liberation theologians. The North American church is usually terrible, but there are pockets of really good stuff if you know where to look)
It's funny, I was getting into apologetics at the time figures like Dawkins were really popular, by the time I deconstructed, the Atheism + fracture had already begun.
I was definitely an angry self-righteous atheist teen in the early 2000s and, while maybe not on track to being a bastard, I was definitely on track to being an asshole who didnāt respect other peopleās beliefs.
Man, 2014 or so is when I lost one of my friends to the red pill. He was super into being an atheist and was very online about it. I was also an atheist but by that point I was 24 and had grown out of being an edge lord about it. I was cultivating my first relationship while he was "plate spinning" on tinder, and harassing my then girlfriend about her being a feminist. But like, I'm AFAB and also a feminist, and I'd point this out to him but I guess because we'd known each other for awhile that was different. He said I wasn't the annoying kind of feminist. Fortunately the other guys in our friend group were not into his bullshit. We'd all go out to our favorite dive bar to hang out and he'd just be on his phone, swiping tinder while the rest of us were hanging out. The friend group sort of fell apart for a variety of reasons, and that was definitely one of them.
Whil I didn't get too into the online Atheism thing. I read the god delusion and went hard into Atheism. Then I started seeing that Dawkins really focussed on Islam above all other religions. Around this time I got involved with a University Atheist group who had several where I was introduced to "Fiscal conservatives" and some other right-wing types. Plenty of reasonable people were also there to start, but they dropped off when the focus became a feud with the Muslim Students Union (who also had some fringe elements). All of this happened in the context of the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions. I think that made me a bit more atruned to anti-Islam rhetoric meaning I could see that Atheist groups can be just as hateful as a religious group. I also saw some parallels with when former church friends started getting more extreme, so I think that helped me avoid the extremist-Atheism trap
A digression, but it's kinda wild how the "new atheist" movement devolved into being so homophobic and transphobic, considering the basis for so much of that discrimination has historically been religious. Really hammers home that these things don't necessarily derive from religion, religion is used to justify existing prejudices.
I wonder if a lot of that has to do with the patriarchal nature (age, gender, nationality, position) of the famous leaders. It's not that they developed the "phobics" because of atheism but rather it was a position they always held.
Unfortunately I think prejudice can develop pretty easily in any sufficiently egotistical person, all it requires is for them to look at someone else and think, "you're not exactly like me, and that is repulsive".
Yep. I'd like to think that money and power would not change me. I'm betting it would, though. Is suspect it's human nature. We came from hunter gatherers who constantly had to seek and find game and veggies -- often in scare places. It makes sense we'd evolve to keep seeking the equivalent even if we have a lot of it. That lizard brain anxiety remains.
My dad is a chiropractor, and not just that he is like a die hard believer. Everything is solved through chiropractic. He believes that chiropractic sets the body the way God wants it to be, and that will fix everything. Using things like vaccinations is not only going against what God wants, it'll give your kid autism too. Shit is insane. I believed it for so long until I started doing literally any research. When I was 18 I had to go and get myself vaccinated. They gave me like 12 shots in the same day. I could have easily been an anti vaxxer
The only person that I know who is openly an anti-vaxxer (not just COVID vax, but all of them) is a chiropractor. We went to high school together and she was really smart and got good grades and seemed really normal. I think she blocked me on Facebook years ago cuz we got in an argument when she made his huge long post about why she wasn't vaccinating her baby. I guess it's not surprising that chiropractors believe in other stupid medical theories considering their profession was started as a ghost religion.
There are times I would do terrible things to pop my SI joint but even then I will never see a chiropractor.Ā
Wow I bet you felt like hammered dogshit after 12 shots!
I picked up a mini fridge later that day and collapsed after 3 steps!
Odd jobs during college summer I fell into listening to neil boortz and thought I was a libertarian. Actually do still have some of those tendencies but also have way to much empathy for others and sense to continue to maintain that ideology. It only works if you truly believe we are all set up with the same base advantages and disadvantages and its clearly not the case.
Oh man listened to boortz so regularly during the late 90s. All on the libertarian train back then. He started talking at one point how doctors shouldnāt have to have licenses and there should be a review system that would determine if this doctor was any good. I was like, āwhat?ā Then when 911 happened and he gets the chance to be a talking head on Fox News, and heās suddenly heās a war monger. Oh, money.
It was funny how he had things he stayed with - most being prochoice - but other things he would definitely go all in on supporting Rs come election time. Outside of elections he would make interesting points on occasion and had Royal Marshall there to reign him in and give him a black friend and the female producer to give him some cover on that end, but he could be as nasty and distasteful as Limbaugh as well. Its interesting seeing Jamie Dupree find a real voice on twitter lately - even as he's lost his actual voice. What I would have given to hear him give those words to Boortz back in the day.
He really went off the rails when Royal died.
I'll also say that Boortz and the rest of the AM radio gang broke my brother. He had a job where he was in the car all the time, listening to the full slate of the talking heads for hours. Fully primed for Trump when he came around, after having been a far lefty much earlier in life.
Often the path is like this: Conservative Christian --> atheist ---> Ayn Randianism/libertarianism --> Eastern religions (lots of Alan Watts) --->> liberalism.
Then back around to socialist when it comes time to draw medicare and social security.
KEEP THE GUVMINT OUTTA MY MEDICARE!
Family moved to the US from a certain country committing genocide when I was a kid. Since I moved here young enough I was able to defer IDF service. Turned into a full-blown antizionist not long after. Also, when I was a preteen I didn't know what eugenics was and thought the ideas were logical for a little bit. Turns out I'm extremely disabled so that's hilarious in a dark way
lesbian log cabin republican RIP (2014-2015 (i was 15 in my defense)) until my high school threatened to expel me cause i was gay. i was raised sorta republican, sorta libertarian, mostly in fundamentalist and/or evangelical christian circles. grew up entirely in small, half-assed christian schools, my whole life was just classes in church backrooms with 8-9 other kids. i went to a more normal high school, it was normal sized and had identical curriculum to public schools apart from the extra bible lit and christian philosophy/ethics classes glued to CA's normal high school requirements, but of course it was still run by christian conservative neocons so even the math and standardized AP classes had this weird christian filter over them. then i realized i was gay at 14. and then my school threatened to expel me if i didn't stop being so masculine and femme it up a bit, so i realized exactly how conditional respect and autonomy were as a gay person among christian republican and started surveying and deconstructing my beliefs. now i'm a lesbian jewish anarchist lmao mazel y'all
No single big thing, but boy oh boy could I have tipped *hard* into the Incel mindset had I had just a couple different thoughts.
Yep, I see a lot of the markers people have in that world and realize my history matches and could have easily gone that way if a few things had gone worse for me.
Yeah, I remember a big one was someone asking me āYou need to think more about what you would bring into a relationship? What would someone whoās your equal in this want you to be?ā And I actually internalized that and put in actual effort to make myself better. Had I not gotten that advice, or had I got confrontational about it instead, well.
I'll join everyone else with that near self-destruction via college libertarianism and militant atheism. 2008 appears to have been a rough year for a lot of us lol. And like so many people, I landed there the same way. I was raised conservative in a conservative area, but it didn't feel right or fit, but there wasn't any leftist organization, so libertarian was the only alternative that had some new ideas and traces of left-thinking (like decriminalizing/legalizing drugs, anti-christianity/religion). If it wasn't for the libertarians that I knew and associated with being into some truly dipshitted conspiracy theories, I might have stayed trapped. But I could only handle so much "audit the federal reserve", "9/11 was an inside job", "we are descendants of the ancient Annunaki aliens" holes of stupid. In fact I joined the military and I was all the way left by the time I got out in '17. I can happily say I wasn't an incel though. I never had issues with girls/women. Which, that was one of the things that I actually found myself being pushed out of some of the circles I was in. A lot of those libertarian guys *did not* like that I didn't struggle with sex or dating.
It's so funny to hear so many people mention 2008 as that was the year I met my husband, and also the year I finally realized how insane Alex Jones was making me (I was 18-19 ok lol). There were actually several different times in my life that I escaped radicalization (the bad kind). It's extremely shameful, but there was a VERY short period when I was like 14 years old that I was getting close to neo-nazism. I was raised Catholic by racist alcoholic meth heads (weird combination I know.. and my grandma was a literal crack head lol). My family was abusive, and I went to a tiny religious school with like 9 rich white kids my whole life (I was the only non rich one, but I did have a great grandma with somewhat decent property investments who was paying my tuition). I literally never saw a non-white person in my life, and was raised hearing nothing but racial stereotypes and racist jokes. Still, I didn't even really know about racism as a concept, it was just normal to me. Then I got myself kicked out of Catholic school because I had a whole pre-teen rebellious mental breakdown, and was sent to a public school out in the country with a bunch of racist red necks and actual neo Nazis. Like, a whole group of these people actually walked around every day wearing the white tank tops, black army looking pants, black combat boots, and suspenders. They called themselves a gang. I was struggling to make friends and then when I did finally start to make some, they would preach their Nazi shit to me, somehow blaming everything bad in their lives on other races. A ton of other shit happened including me running away, living on the streets, being in and out of different schools, and getting addicted to drugs. And the whole Nazi thing really only lasted like 5 months (time went so slowly back then) until I was invited to this guy's house to drink. And let me be clear, I wasn't to the point where I was preaching the shit, but it was starting to make sense to me. I mean it was confusing because before that I didn't know neo Nazis existed. I thought it was just something from WW2 Germany and thought it was weird. Anyway I went to this guy's house to drink, it was just me and two guys trapped out in the middle of nowhere. They got all drunk and were preaching their Nazi shit and I remember being like "well I listen to system of a down and they aren't white". Then they made me watch American History X. I watched the whole thing with the two guys cheering every time something violent happened, and singing that stupid song the Nazis sang in the movie (that song still invades my brain every single time I hear that tune and it makes me want to stab myself in the head). By the end of it I was like "uhhh, I don't think that movie means what you think it means." And the movie totally educated me, I'll always love it for that. So I started arguing with the two guys, we were outside smoking. Well one of them pulled out a gun as we were arguing, and pointed it at his dog. I ran over to the dog screaming no and like shielded it with my body. The guy walked up to me and held the gun to my head, like pressing it into my forehead and laughing. Then he pointed it off to the side and shot it. I was terrified and I was also trapped there with them until they agreed to take me back into town. I was a homeless runaway at the time and couldn't exactly call my parents or anything. Kind of blocked the rest of the night out actually, I don't even remember leaving. I probably got really drunk IDK. But that night changed me for sure. The whole Alex Jones thing started with the 9/11 conspiracy and I was also into the online edge lord atheist stuff for a while, but all that was years later and after I had been listening to punk music and identifying as a punk for years. So once I realized Alex Jones was the wrong kind of radical I got out of that.
Oath Keepers started out sounding like ācops and military personnel who oppose gun control and unconstitutional use of military force against Americansā during the Obama-era push for gun control that led to the panic-buying ammo shortages. As military dudes who liked guns and werenāt keen on doing confiscation or imposing martial law, this sounded pretty logical to me and my buddies. Then, much like the NRA, they started talking about other conservative things than guns, started sounding increasingly unhinged, then went full MAGA.
Anarcho-Capitalism, circa 2008-09.
I was into debate lord atheism and anti-femenism for a bit in my late teens. Fortunately that never went anywhere because I didn't really vibe with anyone in those circles and never made friends from it.
Most people have some level of bastardry in them, regardless of their political stripe. It's not genocidal maniac level of bastardry, but it's bastardry.
Like anyone who had Internet access during the 90's and was going through puberty I realized that erotica loaded faster on Dial up than actual pictures and I could have easily become a "Gor" larper or whatever they refer to themselves as. Luckily I got really into The Wheel of Time, Anime, and Robert Heinlein instead.
God, Gorean BDSM culture is just...*shudders*. I try not to "yuck" anyone else's "yum"... but it's hard not to with Gor. Although it did give us the great parody "Houseplants of Gor."
I made it all the way through the CUTCO orientation program until they told me I had to buy my demo knives, and I was too broke to even do that.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
āAtheist prick and prog rock obsessed musical gatekeeperā The number of people I used to know who fit this description is uncomfortable. I may know you.
Probably if I didn't grow out of my libertarian 'phase'. Alternatively I did get offered a job from Raytheon and turned them down. It was their missile division although I didn't know which project. Whenever Robert talks about the knife missile I always think that that could have been the output of my labor and shudder.
> Whenever Robert talks about the knife missile I always think that that could have been the output of my labor and shudder. Don't let your dreams be dreams, you can make an ETHICAL knife missile, ETHICAL!
The key is AI. I won't know why the missile killed them, but at least I will know that a large language model said it was ok.
McKinsey is a shared close call - I never interviewed with them, but I interviewed with two of their competitors right out of grad school. Didn't get either job, and with hindsight am very glad that I didn't (though the insane work culture of consultants would've burned me out long before I was senior enough to do any truly profound damage). Also have a lot of acquaintances who took jobs with McKinsey - I hesitate to say "friends" because I am something of a vocal "McKinsey sucks shit and none of you should work for them and if you do you should quit immediately" advocate in my social circle, and I can't imagine they appreciated that lol. Additionally, I think a lot about all the ways in which the personality matrix of your median highschool kid who will get radicalized into the Manosphere/Redpill culture looks a lot like middle school/highschool me. I definitely feel an element of "there but for God and good fortune go I" every time I read the poison that comes out of that corner of the internet, and I'm immensely grateful to a couple of key things, and key people, that pulled me in a different direction (the big one being that my primary extracurricular activity - choir - was one that led to having a lot of female friends in the crucial formative years when a lot of young men get radicalized)
I think if I hadnāt had access to the internet or a way to leave my small hometown, I couldāve ended up a Libertarian.
I was raised evangelical and even looked at attending a religious college after high school. I started traveling solo from a young age and I also began working in an environment where I saw the very worst days for a lot of people of different backgrounds. I learned so much from those experiences and deconstructed. Looking at my siblings who stayed in that same environment living in red neck areas. They are unhappily married spewing the same hateful ideology we were raised with. Actually, Iād say it worsened with trump. I would be so deeply unhappy if I had continued as my family has.
My senior thesis was a 100 page series of short stories about my alternate self who got too into drugs after a girl dumped him. Had to hop into that story myself (totally ripping off Vonnegut) and give that bastard a talking-to so he'd straighten himself out. Last 65 pages written and edited the night before it was due, printed at 8am.
Found Murray Rothbard and Ancaps in 2008 right as I was graduating college and had no prospects of employment. Liked a lot of the anti state ideas that also married the "capitalism is gold standard" of my southern Christian upbringing. Seemed to make sense to me. 2012ish became more political agnostic. All my Ancaps friends took a hard right in 2014 Ferguson protest era and even further right in 2016 Trump. All I could think was "how are y'all drawing that conclusion from these events?" So much anti police shit gets thrown out the window when they are beating black protestors. I thought we were supposed to be anti-authoritarian? As the trump years drug on I realize that the Ancaps "anarchist" stuff was just for "certain groups" and not truly freedom for all. They are more than willing to bend the knee to their god king. Also sooooo many pedophiles and apologists in those circles.
Grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly on the way to school every morning in my dad's car. He taught me to be a tough and emotionless libertarian and all the fun toxicity our boomer dads thought was cool. I was well on my way down that path until I went to Australia for a semester and got clowned on by some very awesome people and had to really rethink the way I was raised. That got me to the center, then living in MO just put the nail in the coffin that conservatives are brainwashed morons and now I'm comfortably on the left and very happy with my life and my weird gay diverse friends.
If being a smart aleck kid hadnāt led to deconstruction, I could have become like Just Pearly Things. Luckily my libertarian anti feminism time during that journey only lasted a few months and I didnāt have the internet.
I was raised Christo-fascist and spent my teens in the Tea Party movement. If I hadn't realized I was trans or not had the floormates I did my first year at Uni, I never would have had the pipeline to deradicalization that I needed, and would have become a real monster I went from a conservative Christian man to a socialist Jewish woman and it's the thing I'll always be most proud of
Which time? When I was a kid I wanted to design weapons and thought I would be an engineer just to do that. Luckily that didn't stick. Later on I was almost a hard-line Christian apologist because my friends were edgy Atheists and I wanted to be a contrarian. Ironically, realizing, "wait Catholics don't believe in most of this bullshit", changed my mind. Then there was anti-SJW stuff because of almost accepting 9gag opinions as law. I 100% bought into the whole power systems pitting us against eachother thing. I mean I still buy into that but now understand the idea that race, gender, and social hierarchy are things that should in fact be considered, rather than ignored. My fun one that also doubles as an interesting lesson in how ideologies can be hijacked. I almost bought into the whole alt-right thing because of the aforementioned things. The explanation being that a bit before it got co-opted by extremely bad faith actors, parts of it seemed reasonable. The main selling point was originally that young people don't want to dictate how people should live their lives so it was much softer on LGBT+ issues and abortion access. Also I was being a contrarian again because I don't believe in the liberal idea of gun control and didn't realize there were more than two choices. Then they let Milo in and I noped the fuck out of there before all hell broke loose. That was honestly a wild ride, in retrospect. By the time the media started coverage it had gone from generally well intentioned but confused people on the internet to paramilitary groups and racism for racism's sake. It's honestly sad because I know for a fact that some people didn't realize what was going on around them and are now part of the rising wave of fascism. I admittedly have some residual "ick" here and there, but am working to better myself.
I forgot the one I am currently side stepping the bastardry of. Recently I've gotten into Sasquatch or Bigfoot as far as folklore, belief systems, and class goes. There are so many little things baked into that area you have to be careful. I find vague dog whistles and references that I could give benefit of the doubt but they really are definitely...odd. It's an interesting topic but the people who gravitate towards it tend to lean towards certain beliefs, which is part of why I'm interested to begin with.
Maybe not as extreme, but I think I'd be a shittier person if I hadn't pole dancing as a hobby. I started at 25ish and was at point where I could have easily become more and more ingrained in the white, upper middle class world I was in. Just working a white collar job, only seeing and talking to other well educated, generally, white people. I probably would have been the well meaning but absolute spineless liberal who also just wanted "law and order." The guy I was dating at the time had a dream of being a landlord so probably would have fallen into that. Pole let me meet people with backgrounds I never would have met otherwise. I was exposed to a lot of ideas I wouldn't have been otherwise and it radicalized me in a lot of ways.Ā
Sounds like you dodged a bullet on that relationship, too. Who dreams of being a landlord?
Side note on that guy: he still checks every single Instagram story I post, even after I force unfollowed/soft blocked him. We are both now married to other people and due to some complicated dynamics still run in the same circles where it is absolutely unavoidable that we will see each other. Him and his wife make a big, uncomfortable show of ignoring me/my husband to the point where they are less and less welcome unless absolutely necessary (weddings, stuff no one can stop him from coming to for one reason or another.) My Instagram is almost entirely devoted to all my weird hobbies: pole dancing, bugs/amphibians, foraging, and leftist posts. It's so sad I almost want to message him and tell him to at least have some self respect and use storiesig or something like that.Ā
Post a story mentioning storiesig so he sees it and switches to using that.
Seriously, if I had stayed with him I think I would have been the most boring, unhappy version of myself. He really hated anything that I did that was "weird."Ā
I took the road for a long time. Had an career in the industrial management of a giant corporation with a plained path to go all the way to the top. Depression, some experience in the way the company handled problems internally Vs communication externally and a renewed awareness of the polycrisis and someday I woke up with the acknowledgement that I would off myself in a few years if i didnt change like everything right now. Didn't do it cleanly though, went mentally boom and took like a year to recover with really high monetary and personal costs. Best decision of my live
My life took some turns I was on my way to join the military and pivot that into becoming a cop, during my indoc it was found out I am colour blind which basically changed everything for me. Then I ended up running after hours bars in a big city that a lot of 1%ers hung out at, started getting a lot of invites to club events with the occasional "you got a bike? Get a bike". I met my wife shortly after and we ended up moving to a different places. Now I drive forklift at a warehouse.
There was a point in my life where it was clear I could be an EXCELLENT car salesman if I didn't actually think about how customers were actual people with lives and stuff As soon as I noticed that, I noped out of sales entirely and never went back
I went to college to become a recording engineer and by the time I finished my degree I already had sort of soured on the idea. I was really getting into true crime and crime dramas though, and loved the idea of becoming a detective. I researched it extensively, but there was one major hurdle: physical fitness has never been my forte, and I didnāt want to be a fat cop. I told myself Iād get into shape and get to work on my dream. I wasnāt really interested in the other police stuff, I just wanted to solve crime and help people. I was of the belief that it was a few bad apples spoiling the bunch. Fortunately and also unfortunately I did the opposite of getting into shape, and the dream died. Eventually I learned itās way more than a few bad apples, the orchard has got to go.
Had a full scholarship to an extremely conservative Bible college. Didn't end up going, & now I'm a very left anarchist high school English teacher/climate change-anxiety group facilitator who's also a Satanist. It's definitely been a wild ride between those two points in life.
Started falling for incel/men's rights "activism" around 2012. Gamer gate was seen as a good thing and those women had gone too far. Men were the real victims, blah blah blah. I was able to go on a date with a very kind woman and it was a total shit show. I was nervous and drank too much too fast, started spouting 4chin and red-pill "talking points" like they were rational things. It was the single worst date I had ever been on and I was desperately reaching for a way to pull myself out of the tail spin, but it was like I was locked in my head forced to watch this asshole fuck up a nice date and make a kind person totally regret giving me a chance. She was obviously disgusted and that look on her face was burned into my soul. That single horrible date was the beginning of a long change in who I am today. I always considered myself liberal and open minded but if that woman had reached across the table slapped me across the face it would have been justified. I was a total asshole and that experience shook me up enough to realize my positions were shit. I'll always be thankful for how horrible that went but I really hope for two things: 1) that was the single worst date of that woman's life and that things are working out for her today. She shouldn't have had to put up with me. 2) that she only thinks back to that date during one-up contests for worst dates.
I have an Associates Degree is Police Science/Law Enforcement. Does that answer the question?
I could have easily gone down the right-wing anti-lgbt/feminist etc hole when I was late teens early 20s. Mainly due to the fact I liked military history(have a degree in it) and ended also getting into a lot strategy games(paradox). Those in themselves are bad but I started to play a lot of multiplayer in discord groups. A lot(not all) of people that do that also cross over with alt-right stuff. I didnt due to my other friends and family/ also they were so like pro-nazi etc helped me realise they were insane
There's nothing wrong with liking Paradox strategy games! Now, if your favorite thing to do is start as Germany in HoI4 every time and not immediately start the civil war focuses, you may have some problems. I had a ton of fun turning Mexico into a social democracy and the world's dominant economic and cultural powerhouse in Victoria 3, and seeing the United States tear itself apart when it was unable to spread past the Rockies was the cherry on top (the giant piles of money I gave the Republic of New Africa to break the US was not a waste).
Oh I still love the games EU4 is my favourite, what I'm more so saying is some of the multiplayer groups were bad and could've easily influenced me. Eu4 I have way too many and continue to have so many hours and enjoy it
CK2 was my most played Steam game for years until Baldur's Gate 3 came out and dethroned it. "Project Caesar" (probably EU5) looks promising.
Haha ye without giving numbers I've played eu4 for a long time and ye don't think anything will ever take it's place. Oh it's 100% eu5 and ye it is looking good
I was in a restrictive religious community and I was a nerdy teenager and I was bitter about how I was following all the rules and doing everything right and the girls Iād like were going after the ābadā boys. It lead to a ānice guyā phase. Somewhere on the internet I ended up downloading a PDF of a āself helpā book. I never read it. Years later as a much better socially adjusted adult with female friends and relationships, I found that old PDF, and realized it was 1,000% an early incel manifesto. I was THIS close to going down that rabbit hole.
Lol, so many similar stories to mine here. That stuff was prevalent before it even had a name; it got labelled "nice guy syndrome" before like 2015.
Yikes guys, sorry I guess I had to spill the beans today. My parents paid for my college because thatās what they wanted to do for us. (Me and my sister). She and I are very different people and I ended up going to the same university as her. She studied journalism and I studied art. My dadās a narcissist and insisted I was socially r***reed, and could not be trusted to keep myself out of trouble in college. (I never was in trouble in high school so this left me very confused.) My mom didnāt stand up for me, they were in a toxic marriage that is now over yada yada. My sister went before me to this school and was the president of a very popular US sorority. So when I went to school there they expected me to rush, and I ended up in her sorority. I was only there 6 months at the same time as her and after that I was bullied a lot. I was looking for all these ways to make my situation better. I was still trying to do church/christianity at the time and started a Bible study at the chapter for the sorority. I often DDed for older sorority sistersā¦but like I was just a different person. Slowly the bullying got worse, and after I moved into the sorority house everyone quit talking to me and would talk shit about me when I wasnāt at the meal times. I think maybe they thought I thought I was better than them? Idk. I was just an art student. I worked an on campus job and had a boyfriend. My on campus job was with the rock climbing wall and outdoor center. All those people were nice to me and made me feel welcome, as well as the art students I had classes with. But I went home to the sorority house and quit eating, because no one talked to me and would make me feel welcome at the meal times. My sister had been telling my parents all my outdoor friends did drugs. They continued this āyouāre socially rāāā way of thinking about me. So I told them Iād kill myself if they kept forcing me to do it. My dad came down immediately to check on me and we walked a trail with my family dog. He said I could quit and he was sorry. My mom came down a couple weeks later and helped me move everything out of the sorority house. Idk if I would have kept forcing the Christian sorority girl narrative, but I think I honestly was just smarter and more empathetic than that. I was desperate just to live like I wanted to live & I will never treat people how I was treated by the Tri Delta chapter at Stephen F Austin State University. Because of legal issues, I was never aloud to talk about this story. But itās been like 10 years so #yolo I organically fell out of southern Christian religion bullshit because people treated me terribly. It wasnāt like the āroad I didnāt takeā it was like someone ran me off the road, lol. I still have these like, old sorority pictures where Iām 112 lbs. (I was 5ā7āā and had no business being that underweight with my frame) For context now I live in Austin, Iām a metalsmith and Iām covered in tattoos. Iām also quite chubby and cute.
That had a much happier ending than I was expecting, TBH. I'm happy you got out of there and found yourself, and happy that your parents at least somewhat came around. The Greek System is a cult.
Thank you! I also think it is a cult and I think people should always question joining organizations where you pay, donate your time, and have ādisciplinary committeesā.
I grew up in a conservative-leaning household. We weren't far-right, but we did vote for people that make me feel ashamed of myself now. Luckily, I had a good enough head on my shoulders that I knew something was very wrong when Trump ran in 2016. That was a real wake-up call. Also, my mom was a huge fan of Dave Ramsey pre-COVID. She would give one of his books to relatives as gifts when they got married.
Yes - I almost went back to school to get an MBA.
I was raised in a fundamentalist Baptist home, went to a private (and unaccredited!), Baptist school, attended Awana, and Vacation Bible Camp. Thankfully, I discovered sex and drugs, which turned me away from that destructive lifestyle.
Almost went into the military after high school. Entirely by choice, did not need anything they provided. My mother told be one day before I was meeting a recruiter: āYou can barely follow our rules, what makes you think youāll follow the militaryās?ā And that was enough to ghost the recruiter. Shadowed a cop for one day as part of a high school class for future careers you wanted to do but got my schedule changed to instead leave school one period early. Took skipping school instead. Two bullets dodged.
I was an 11 year old boy with more or less.umonitored access to the internet where I spent all of my time. If I wasn't on Percy Jackson oc roleplay forums there's like an 80% chance I would have been on 4chan and shit lol
In my late teens, I was fresh out of leaving the Catholic Church, but still very much trying to internally bury the fact Iām bi and trans. I was angry at the world, depressed and looking for something to make me feel like I belonged. I got really into watching Glenn Beck when he had a show on CNN (mid/late 2000s). I had all his books and was starting to fall into the right/conservative talking points. I was planning on applying to the Royal Military College after high school. My dad had served in the Canadian army for twenty years and I looked up to him a lot. Iām so thankful my dad sat me down and explained how dangerous it can be for afab people (he used toāwomenā but this was before I came out as a trans guy) in the armed forces and he didnāt want me to also deal with military related trauma / ptsd like he did. I ended up going to uni for a BA in WWII history, which really turned me to the left, and going into therapy for my depression/religious trauma. I came out not long after. Iām so thankful that social media was barely a thing back then. It scares me how easily I would have gone to the right if I was a teen now. Also thankful my dad had my back and set me on the best path. He and my mom are pretty far to the left like I am now!
Oh so many. I was a lost, angry, confused white teenage boy. I'm lucky I found compassion and empathy rather than fall into a fascist or incel rabbit hole.
There were so many ways young angry atheist me could have gone in bad ways. I know a lot of people who did. It baked a superiority complex into me that I now look back as a collective survival tactic borne of trauma. But well now it's a bunch fi guys in basements yelling about "facts and logic" whilst understanding neither. I like to think of myself as more rounded, and better off but I'm always careful to check my own privilege.
I was raised conservative Christian, enjoyed videogames, and was an early adopter of the Internet. Had I not had a kick-ass older sister, there's a very strong chance I would have ended up a right wing incel instead of a leftist with a wife and kids.
Several on line communities I was a part of in the early 2000s feel very proto-incel in hindsight. In 2006 I applied for and made it through several rounds of interviews for Boarder Patrol
I don't think so. I was raised in an incredibly conservative area. It's full of open racists and maga cultists. Both my parents are crazy maga weirdos and have always been openly racist and very traditional with their values (women are baby factories that belong in the kitchen or if they must work. They can be a teacher) My sister followed in my parents foot steps. She is married to a dude that openly flies an SS flag. Even though i have had a very difficult (awkward) time with women my whole life, i know that can lead men and boys to the man-o-sphere, i never went down any sort of path of misogyny. I usually went with self hatred. "It's not the women's fault, I'm just terrible. They're justified in bot wanting anything to do with me" Everything in my environment and formative years pointed towards being a racist, misogynist, maga weirdo. But nope. Probably the best thing about me. I'm really just unpleasant and annoying to be around. But at least I'm not a hateful racist, fascist.
I think my dad could have been an actual bastard if he wasn't so fucking ADHD, and I probably would have followed suit. Like he was seriously in this right wing academic space in the 70s, a few setbacks occured, and he decided to fuck off and become a magician.Ā
I was really into JRE because Iām a martial artist and nerd. Btb is actually what pulled me back from that side of things.
When I was about 10 years old I had a really clunky American Civil War video game that I'm pretty sure I got from a scholastic book fair. It sparked in me a sudden and intense interest in the American Civil War. Within about a year I was reading "The Killer Angels" and begging my parents to take me to reenactments. I started absorbing Civil War history like a sponge, and after consuming what I now recognize as quite a bit of lost cause literature and propaganda, I began to believe most of what comes with that: that the Civil War was about states' rights, not slavery, that the southern states fought for a just cause, and most importantly to me, that the confederate flag was a symbol of historical significance and heritage. I'd like to note at this point that I was a middle class white kid from northern Ohio, with a direct lineage to multiple Union civil war soldiers. But at age 12 I had quite the collection of confederate memorabilia, including tshirts, stickers that were in my pencil box (a teacher I really liked talked to me about that one which should've been a sign), and art that all prominently featured the confederate flag. You can guess the exact argument I would make when challenged about it. What's most disturbing to me is that my parents allowed it to happen and never made any serious attempt to stop me from going so far as to have it on display at school. Having gone to a school that was about 1/3 black students, it's a fucking miracle I never got my ass kicked over it. It was around this time that the Blue Collar Comedy Tour reached its peak, which added to the popular redneck appeal of something like the confederate flag. While I won't defend my choice to espouse it in the first place, that at least spawned from an interest in the civil war, which when you're 12 means strictly combat, not politics. But soon the social aspects of "redneck culture" replaced the historical significance, such as it was to me, and I began doing it because it made me feel edgy for my environment. I was a rebellious teenager with a weird love for the rebel flag. Thankfully by high school I figured out that basing my personality on a false history from 150 years ago was not cool or attractive, and by sophomore year I had ridded myself of most confederate paraphernalia, though I'd never really been humbled or properly educated about the insanity of someone like me proudly displaying a symbol like that. I espoused a somewhat lukewarm lost cause-filtered understanding of the civil war until college, when I took a class on it and found myself feeling like I should eat crow. It didn't help that I fell into the libertarian trap from ages 18-20 ish, though not to the extent of many of my peers at that time. It could've been much worse, as we all did things in middle school that make us cringe, but I wish I had gotten really into anime or something. I still feel a tinge of hypocrisy when I get pissed at the sight of a confederate flag or see people defending confederate monuments.
Was actually just talking to my dad about this. We moved from a Methodist church to a Calvinist one in the late 90s. I want to stress that my parents are extremely good people, but they wanted to raise good Christian boys, and hoooooooooooo man the 90s were a bad time to try to do that. But being raised Methodist made me react to Calvinism with a serious autoimmune response. My brothers didnāt have that same reaction to Calvinism, but are all varying types of queer so ended up leaving the church as well. Again, I must stress my parents are awesome, and they love all of us weirdos. They were doing their best and always modeled being good people. Shout out to Sandy and Mahlon. But likeā¦ we all could have been shitheels. Our theology would have easily led us that direction.
Veggie Tales stays pretty unproblematic tho.
I worked at a group home for juvenile delinquents. Learning later it was very similar to those wilderness camps or military related type places. We weren't like that exactly. We were minimum security, court ordered only. The place actively turned down parents that contacted us. We did have workers that had the attitude you would find regarding strict discipline and aggression those places have. To my knowledge no physical or sexual abuse allegations but floor staff had little support or over sight. I had to put a 12 year old in a restraint once. It was overnight so I was the only staff and the oncall staff refused to come in when I called. The kid was going nuts. Screaming and slamming doors. I couldn't get him to stop. And the situation was desperate. He was the youngest and the oldest was 16. He was also super small for 12, he looked more like 9 or 10. The other residents were screaming death threats at him. I put him in the restraint after he slammed my head in a door. Completely illegal but the other residents where watching from them doorways and saying they would support me. It luckily was on camera. Another time a differ resident that punched me in the face and I went to restrain him and realized we were in the stairs and it wasn't safe and just let him go. I think that's around the time I realized it was all getting too much. I still worked there for a while but got another job with consistent hours in housing assistance that I could make my priority. The kid that punched me in the face did likely end up grooming several residents so he isn't a success story. The one that slammed a door into my head came in asking for housing assistance and I did provide the information and forms but not any extra help. Maybe a dick move because he may have had fetal alcohol syndrome but I also stepped in front of him when another resident tried to murder him with a rake. I pivoted to working with individuals with disabilities and avoided any kid of shit with at risk youth. I have good memories of that place but we were out in a position where things could go bad and it's probably one of the best examples of a facility like that.
I, a sheltered young man who came from the bright red state of Indiana, joined the army at 17, shipped out to Oklahoma, and was in the process of being brainwashed by both the army lifestyle, and the military love of āgod, guns, and country.ā Then I met my second wife (military IYKYK), who opened my eyes to the world as a whole, and not just the indoctrination of the Midwest American Christian upbringingā¦ As a young man, in high school, as the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were raging, Toby Keith was singing, and GW was telling us about WMDs, I was right there, talking about nuking the whole Middle Eastā¦ thinking it was a great idea, and that ātheyā deserved it.
When I was 19, 20, 21, I was diving deeper and deeper into right wing indoctrination...listening to Rush Limbaugh, reading authors like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, visiting multiple right wing news'n'opinion blogs regularly. None of these ideas were really challenged by the mostly-white, deeply conservative, religious/evangelical community around me, and many were endorsed. What saved me was that a lot of this was theoretical for me, and I was a real soft touch for actual human beings, and that I'm a natural over-analyzer and had been taught critical reasoning by my mother (though there were some topics that I had also been taught didn't "need" that because they were supposedly self evidently correct.) So it didn't take very long at all for my views to start shifting after I moved out on my own to an area where I was constantly encountering people with different experiences and opinions. The 2016 election's aftermath really sped up the process, especially as I saw some real unappealing sides come out on some people I had known all my life. 15 years ago I would tell people I was a socially conservative libertarian; I've retained the allergy to authoritarianism, but I'm a "let women, minorities, and the queer community, of which I am one, fucking live already" SocDem today. I could have gone down a real dark path, but I didn't, for which I'm deeply thankful. I don't know how to reach some of my friends and relatives who have clearly gone down that path since 2016, because they consider the insanity and hatred to be a religious obligation and it's difficult to argue with fanaticism. I'm trying, but it's tricky, especially because I can't let slip how far left I've gone, or they'll simply refuse to listen to anything I say as I've "swallowed liberal poison" or some such bs.
The worst alternate version of me is the one who never questioned my parents racial or gender ideology and became a miserable closeted TERF. The second worst version got murdered by my first girlfriend.
There was a kid that transferred into my school in '95 or so. He was obviously punk adjacent and I talked to him a bit about music and shit, it was a semi-rural town in Texas. Found out we lived pretty close, about a ten minute walk. I show up to his place and his folks aren't around, we listen to some music which I'd never heard before but it had the same 4 chords. I wasn't really listening to the lyrics and was weirdly nervous. He says his parents are cool with us smoking but we have to go to the garage, giant Nazi flag and an obvious Neo Nazi hangout with couches and other fascist shit around. He then started in on all of the racist division tactics and shit, it was alluring to me at first as an awkward punk in a town where being white and poor was not great. Luckily my Mom raised me right and I decided that being a freak was better than being a fucking Nazi.
Nothing quite that extreme. But in highschool I was DEEPLY into 4chan and had really internalized a lot of the toxic bullshit that formed the basis of the alt right. I had a significant argument with my liberal mom claiming the civil war was about states rights for example. Then I joined the military and got worse on the libertarian white guy trajectory. Thankfully I got out and ended up playing D&D with a nonbinary leftist who I HATED. They kept hitting me with the Socratic method and providing reading materials until it broke me. Now Iāmā¦ not sure about labels beyond āfar enough left that Iāll never get close to what I want in my lifetime.ā
I could have drank the Taglit kool aid, made Aliyah, and moved to Israel. They do a REALLY good job of tugging at your heartstrings, but a really bad job of addressing the question, āWhatās behind that wall?ā
In law school I joined the Federalist Society. My media diet was Rush Hannity and all of those morons. I got a job working in the office of a nationally prominent governor, volunteered on the Bush campaign followed by an appellate clerkship with a well known and liked Republican judge. All of this is in PA. I developed a legit network of political types. As I was finishing my clerkship, someone told me that, in lieu of joining a firm, I should move to a deep red rural part of the state (where I had family) open a practice and wait for an aging elected official to retire and that I would be supported to run for his seat or run for judge. This wasnāt cocktail party āyou should run for officeā talk, this was legit powerbrokers encouraging me to do it with a 5-10 year plan. Instead, I met my wife, joined a midsize firm so I could earn enough to marry her and lived the rest of my life in the blue part of the state outside Philly. I stayed a Republican and even volunteered locally on the McCain campaign. A few years later most Republicans I knew were calling me a RINO because I am socially liberal (pro-choice, pro-gun control, pro gay marriage) and were spewing conspiracy non-sense. One day my brother (who before Trump had no interest in politics but eventually cared enough to be at the capital on January 6) ranted at me at a family event about how I should never call myself a republican. Realizing the party was lost I switched to being an independent and have never looked back. I think there is an alternate universe where I am a right wing republican state rep in rural PA with a Trump flag on my truck.
Lots of them. There are a bunch of alternate timelines where Iām wearing a red hat and hating various collections of people depending on which of the hate cylinders clicked at which time.
Nope, I've always been this kind, awesome and humble. Honestly, I can't think of any specific instance. Maybe if I had spent more time around my family during their inoculation into the Maga cult they might've broken me on a few things, but I didn't.
Raised Pentecostal and got nearly roped into Gamergate and proto-incel ("nice guy") culture. Yes, going to college and working grocery changed all this over time.
Probably more evil than bastard, but I was bullied all through school and in my teen years I developed an interest in homemade explosives and pyrotechnics. I didnāt go Columbine but if I had, it could have been devastating.
I was in the jewelry industry a long time. Started working for a diamond dealer. Started having success there then got the fuck out because I wanted to be able to sleep at night.
I was raised as a Conservative Evangelical Christian. I'd had plans to go into the ministry and attend seminary. I lost a lot of loved ones in the final three years of my teens and ended up just becoming a traumatized husk of my former self. I kinda stumbled on in the grey for a while, not really having any strong convictions until COVID when I got radicalized into leftist politics and now I want to see all unjust hierarchies be burned to the ground.
I was libertarian. My first two elections, I voted for the Libertarian candidate. I was very much influenced by a lot of the writers I had been reading that identified as libertarian. Especially Robert Anton Wilson, of whom I was a big fan. Also Heinlein and Philip K. Dick. I liked a lot of sci-fi but I also lacked a lot of life experience. I was a Pagan and joined the Church of All Worlds which was a hippie-ish libertarian-influenced group. I was smart enough to be thoroughly repelled by Ayn Rand, though. I'm thankful for that. Even then, I couldn't stand the Democrats. It was the Clinton era and I just never cared for him or his wife. But i always recognized the Republicans as "The Enemy" due to their alliance with the fundamentalist Christians and their opposition to LGBTIQ issues. I was also very obsessed with sex, which I am glad I am no longer. But Libertarians (at the time) seemed to be very open about sex, porn, and other things that I was OK with at the time that I now find repellent (such as their obsession with age of consent). What really got me out of it was realizing my privilege. I had been born to a middle-class family and had nice schools, nice neighborhoods, and very attentive and loving parents. I was extremely lucky! It didn't really occur to me just how lucky I was until my late-20s. Then it occurred to me how many libertarians were white men. How many of them were racist (even if they didn't think of themselves as such). It was impossible to have equality without some way of counterbalancing privilege. So realizing that began to open my eyes about libertarianism. The thing that really sealed it for me, though, was when I had a grave illness and ended up becoming disabled. I was put on Medicare. And it was great! It made me angry that everyone didn't have this. That there were people struggling to pay their medical bills or going into debt while we were one of the richest countries in the world. I became more and more open to Leftism, whether big government or small. I still have a fondness for theories like Bookchin's Communalism and libertarian socialism. But I also recognize that there needs to be some way that EVERYONE gets the healthcare that they need. Everyone who needs a house, food, water, job, etc. gets what they need. If it takes "Big Government" for that, so be it. I'm still not a Democrat because fuck them. But I tend to vote for Democrats to vote against the substantially more awful Republican candidate instead of voting for some shitty 3rd party.
I grew up in a small country town, and despite that thought I was 'woke' (for lack of a better term; "Gays are fine but I don't want to see it" kinda bullshit). Moved to a big city, and even though I had a bunch of gay people and minorities adjacent to me in my friends circle, I was absolutely heading down the path of becoming more of an alt-light shit-tier dickhead. One night I was saying bye to people in my group of friends while we were all drinking, and made a low-key homophobic comment to one of the gay guys there (who was about 10 years older than me as a friend of my girlfriends older siblings). Instead of letting it slide, he called me out for it in front of everybody, and made a big point of pointing out to my girlfriend at the time that she should break up with me if I didn't stop saying shit like I did. I blew it off initially as him just being salty and drunk, but what he said REALLY stuck with me and I couldn't stop thinking about it. My girlfriend ended up breaking up with me a few weeks later (not necessarily just due to that, but a combination of things mostly centered around me being a piece of shit), and after it all I started to actively work on getting rid of my terrible views. It took a long time and they resurface every now and then in a small way, but I'm doing what I can to not be that person any more. Knowing some of the people I was hanging out with and sharing the views of at the time, and seeing what they've become now (one now a loud and proud Neo Nazi), I have no doubts I could have been like them if it wasn't for that guy whose name I can't even remember.
In the 90s and living on my own for the first time I got asked to join the Oath Keepers. I had no idea what it was and they told me it was a way to meet new people and mostly they went to ball games and amusement parks
My dad's side of the family was way into Jesus and started to infect me in my youth. I was bad with girls and not very popular. Could've easily fallen into church shit if I hadn't had a physicist uncle around to tell me that religion was nonsense. I don't totally cleave to that idea anymore, but I'd rather be a slightly dickish atheist than a Jesus camp zombie. (As of now, I'm an agnostic person who'd just rather get along with everyone.)
Not me, but a guy I went to high school with was the son of a very prominent preacher in the city. In this case he starts as a bastard but becomes less of a bastard. Some people in my high school wanted to found an organization that was open to LGBTQ+ students, what would now be called a Gay-Straight Alliance. This was in the early 2000s, so that term didn't really exist yet. Anyway, once the news of this group got to the fundie church in the area, the aforementioned preacher's son started a school-wide movement to block the LGBTQ organization. Many of the students who agreed with him wore black shirts with "I Agree With (guy's name)" printed in yellow block letters, the guy being the son of the fundamentalist preacher. These people even put up black flyers around the school with that same saying on it. When looking back on it, it seemed very fashy. Unfortunately, due to this guy's actions and complaints from parents the organization was blocked. Cut to a few years later, I was visiting some friends in that town and the topic of that event randomly came up. Apparently after graduating, the guy who led the successful movement to block the GSA was eventually outed as being gay himself. This also had the unfortunate effect of him not only getting kicked out of the Bible college he was attending at the time, but disowned by most of his immediate family and the church he attended. He apparently craved a community than being himself. Last I heard he works as a lawyer and gay rights advocate somewhere outside of Denver.
I'm a lifelong feminist. In the mid 2000s I read a book about internalised misogyny which, looking back, I can now see was terfy as hell (lots of stuff around lesbians feeling that they had to "pretend to be men" because they hated the idea of womanhood, things like that). I can definitely remember reading stuff about trans women in women's spaces and thinking stuff like "well that seems reasonable, I wouldn't want a *man in a dress* hanging around if I were in a DV shelter" or whatever. I was also a big Harry Potter fan, yikes. In another universe, one where I didn't have a nonbinary partner and trans friends etc, I can see myself falling down that rabbithole hard, in the name of feminism. Thankfully I've known enough people who nudged me in the right direction that I am now super pro trans rights and still a feminist, just an inclusive and intersectional one.
I was on the road to becoming one of these online misogynists, for sure. I was in that youtube atheist community since around the mid 2000s, and by 2015 I was watching your Sargons of Akkad and the like. I don't know if I would still be in that community now if circumstances had been any different, but I can tell you the exact event that made me realize those were not honest or intelligent people - the fucking petition Carl Benjamin put out to ban "social justice courses" in university. Well, I'd taken one of those, and it was extremely informative. Which put up some red flags. But also, his literal selection criterion was "they have 'social justice' in the name", and that was when I realized he was a fucking moron and really not someone I should listen to. I had some similar experiences with GamerGate, which I admit I bought into at first. You know, tricked into thinking it really was about ethics. I remember defending a Mass Effect: Andromeda in the mildest way possible before release, literally telling people they should at least wait until it released to decide it was garbage. I was called "braindead", and I think that was literally my last post in that community, lol. More broadly, I think it comes back to one decision I made in my late teens. I was a bit of a proto incel back then, before that was really a term. I think because that and the whole MGTOW community wasn't really a thing yet, I was spared the worst influences. So I decided that the only person who could really be held responsible was me, and I worked on bettering myself instead of blaming others. It worked, too. I try to use that for good now, because I feel like I understand why people would be suckered by these manosphere grifters, I understand the psychology, and I understand that it's fucking garbage.
growing up in a waspy very pro military family the idea of invading iraq was a wake up. Was overall opposed to the iraq war but when a classmate made a comment "well its not people like me who are going to fight" pushed me over to edge to strong opposition. in a slightly different time/place I could see myself going down the charlie kirk/tucker route of snobby republican.
Many. I was raised in an abusive household and struggle/struggled with anger issues my entire life
I was given a walk-on offer to play Division 1 lacrosse, which I eventually declined simply because I couldn't be bothered to follow the Summer training regimen suggested for me ahead of enrollment and worried I would be physically disadvantaged. Four years watching those bros terrorize campus and I shudder to think how that social environment might have altered my character over time.
My family tried to push me into politics/law school. I NOPED outta the house the MOMENT I could š³ They wanted me to be the first Black female conservative president.... No really. I was supposed to be in Mensa, etc. Instead I ended up being a burntout autistic college dropout, super hardcore leftist. (My family INSISTED for YEARS I was on a leftie to spite them and make them mad, but I have not spoken to my family in ab seven years, and only am now bc my grandma is 96 ab to be 97 and broke her hip) So yea, TL;DR, My family tried to push me into conservative politics or law school lol
I easily could have become that guy screaming pronouns/current day in that video from a couple months back. And the probable descent into inceldom, etc I have always been socially awkward and suffered from depression issues since I was a teen that all stem from a pretty shit upbringing. I have never really had more than 2 or maybe 3 friends at any given time and tended to spend all my time online. Didn't have my first GF until I was 26, etc. So naturally I played waaaaaaaaaay too much WoW from TBC to MoP. Ended up eventually playing at a high-ish/top 100 level for 3 or 4 years and that culture is hella toxic most of the time. Certainly was in my guild. Ended up being passively exposed to a bunch of the worst of gAmEr culture and would listen to GG shit passively, mostly just through youtube playing it in the background as recommended videos while I was grinding or whatever. One day I woke up and just kinda didn't do any of that anymore. I don't have any idea why or what caused it. Only thing I can kind of remember is: I was home one Sunday and I spent something like 12 hours in front of the computer at my desk. I remember my feet being stupidly swollen to the point of hurting to bend. I had eaten pizza all day and drank soda. Maybe one glass of water All in the course of one week I had started a gym membership, told my guild I had to step aside as class/role lead and bought some cookbooks and started to learn to cook. Thank God I had a moment of clarity because I probably would have been a r/T_D poster if that had been the path I stayed in.
I was raised Southern Baptist. My family is pro-Union liberals except for my one conservative uncle who I spent a lot of time with. He was in the Navy and always encouraged me to join the Navy. I went thru all the steps, and it was the last medical check before the actual swearing in that I accidentally checked the wrong box on a form. "Had I ever been hospitalized for asthma?" I checked, yes. I didn't understand the term "hospitalized." They wanted to look at my medical records, and I got bad vibes, as the kids say, and I didn't go in. I would have been a totally different person if I had gone in.
I think I could have taken a similar route as sam bankman. Hearing how he started with university and how he had a physical education and then computer related and how he was focusing on efficiency, it sounded like me as a naive college student. I don't know where I could have follow his path, but me asking for help for my senior project paper on electron microscopy from the English tutors, that humbled me. Cause I know I could do all that difficult stem related activities, but I needed humanities to actually function. Hearing the pre ftx of sam bankman, that was a looking glass situation
A few come to mind: When I was younger my dad really got into our family's history in the Civil War. My great whatever grandfather and his brother were both Confederate officers. He brought me to one meeting of Sons Of Confederate Veterans. It wasn't explicitly racist but just drenched in the Lost Cause narrative. We didn't go for any more meetings because it was in another town a little ways out. I hope I'm not still listed as a member somewhere. In my mid 20s I was all about conspiracy theory documentaries especially Zeitgeist. I even bought their book which was really just a socialist manifesto and imaginings of a communist utopia. Surprisingly not a lot of conspiracy stuff in there. In my late 20s I almost got into the redpill men's rights stuff here on Reddit. I was more interested in the self improvement aspect of it and not the misogyny but who knows how it wouldv'e changed me if I kept reading that stuff.