Fascists provide easy (but often fake) answers to hard problems. Loneliness, the fear of replacement, that kind of thing.
They get to feel superior to vast swaths of the population without doing anything.
I was raised in a left-leaning, progressive, atheist, LGBTQ+/minority-accepting household, but one surrounded by a white, largely conservative exurban community. I was raised to be inclusive of others, to be thoughtful, to be curious, to be polite and empathetic. I had good* parents who supported me, and taught me to treat others well.
In the middle of fifth grade, I transferred to a magnet program focusing on STEM concepts. It took me from a school that was almost entirely white, to a school which was very much multi-racial. I was really small for my age, nerdy, and the new kid. I’d always been bullied at school, but after the transfer it got a lot worse, and got pretty severely physical. A lot of the people who harassed me the worst were black. I honestly never understood the social circles enough to know what their deal was, and it certainly wasn’t only a race thing, but the fact that many of my tormentors were black wasn’t lost on me, to be sure.
When I was 11 or so, I used all the savings from a lifetime of cumulative birthdays, Christmas gifts, etc. to buy a laptop to play games on. Pretty quickly, gaming became all I did. It was an escape, and I enjoyed it. I played whatever F2P games I could. Diablo clones, random MMOs, shitty pay-to-win FPS games, whatever. My parents didn’t supervise my activities very closely, and to be blunt, I quickly became way more savvy than them about subverting any surveillance they tried to put in place anyways.
Eventually I started looking into hacks for games. I found a really large forum (think 25k members) for sharing game hacks, and joined up. By the time I was maybe 13-14 or so, I was one of the highest-ranking moderators on the forum. I hung out in their IRC server (which definitely isn’t the internet chat-rooms you’re supposed to be careful about, those are different) all day, dabbled in making my own (occasionally illicit) software and hacks, and was firmly in the community. These weren’t good people, but I didn’t know that. When I got home from school and got online, they asked me how my day was. They cared about me, they played games with me, they were my friends. I remember I was gone for like 2 weeks when I was seriously ill, and one of them tracked me down and called my house to check in on me. I didn’t think anything of it, because of course they could do that. I’d been in a Skype call with one of them who was screen sharing the array of webcams they had access to through their botnet. I didn’t realize at the time that they were probably blackmailing people, or holding their data ransom. We just hacked in video games, none of that actually serious stuff. The malware I was toying with was just because I was interested in it, and of course, my friends must have been too, right? Just a learning exercise. I figured I might try to go into cybersecurity when I started high school and could actually start taking courses in computer topics. Programming was SO fucking interesting!
My parents didn’t know what was going on. They should have. I was barely a teenager, I can’t possibly have been hiding my tracks all that well. But then, their marriage had started to fall apart, and things were bad a home. I didn’t know anything about that then, I was in my room gaming and running communities for terrible people. The headset kept their fighting far away from me. My parents didn’t know who I was hanging out with. They had raised me well, but now they weren’t doing what they should have been. So when my friends shared hateful content with me, “interesting” videos they’d found about how terrible women were, how violent minorities were, who was I to question it? They were speaking as those with knowledge. They taught me stuff, they knew better than me. And besides, I’d been physically harassed by black people before. I’d seen it for myself, right? My U.S. history teacher was REALLY smart, and she told us (in a MN classroom) that the civil war wasn’t actually about slavery either! That was super interesting to learn! And the women they complained about weren’t me. Just because a lot of the guys I hung out with had bitches for girlfriends didn’t mean they hated women, it was just bad luck with shitty women. Right?
I was a good person. I mean, I was a weird socially outcast nerd, but I wasn’t a bad person. My family was still caring. Still accepting. My Mom’s apartment was always a refuge for any of our friends, even (and especially) the queer ones who had been kicked out by their own terrible parents. They had a place to come and be safe and be themselves with us. So I was a good person too, right? Good people, smart people, they keep their online lives separate from their personal lives. They don’t talk about their online activities with others, and they don’t talk about their personal information with internet strangers in chatrooms. The only people I talked with were my FRIENDS. I ran their Minecraft servers. I discussed the Jordan Peterson videos they shared. He sounds so fucking smart after all. I hardly understand what he’s talking about, but I’m sure one day I will. And the parts I don’t understand, other people can explain to me. I laughed at their racist memes. After all, it’s just a joke. And of course, overt bigotry got stomped on. I was in charge, and I was a good person. I wouldn’t tolerate that sort of thing. But a dog-whistle is just a tool for training a pet, and we’d only ever kept cats.
I eventually joined a different gaming group on the side. We played Jailbreak in CS:S. I got really good at it. Really into it. And I stopped hanging out as much with my older friends. I still kept in touch, but I’d found a new hobby. These people weren’t good people either, but I mean, the fact that they liked my voice on mic wasn’t that they were creeping on a 15 year old who they wanted to fuck, it was because I had gotten a new microphone a few weeks ago and must have sounded good on it. I had gotten lucky though. These people weren’t great people, but they weren’t nearly as bad. They weren’t literally cybercriminals, just asshole kids on the internet. So when I became a moderator in THAT community and started running things, the community actually improved. But eventually that community collapsed, and I moved on again. And again. And again. I ended up with some Brits for a while, and “mate” settled itself into my vocabulary in a deeply unwelcome way.
I’ve been incredibly lucky. I’m 28 now. The last 14 years of my life, I’ve slowly climbed from one community to another, and mostly through random luck each of those have been better than the one I was leaving. I am surrounded now by some of my favorite people. They are TRULY good people. They care about others, and stand up for good causes. Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too. I wasn’t a good person. I fell WAY down the alt-right rabbit hole. I’m sure that I’ve hurt people, and I’ve made countless decisions that sicken me now. But I’ve been incredibly lucky. If I hadn’t been, I have no idea where I’d be now. Or what nonsense I’d still be believing, because everything around me told me it was normal.
You know how they say “Show, not tell” when writing? Excellent job mate, thanks for it
Some days, I even think maybe I might be a good person too
You sound like a good person to me. That level of self reflection rarely / never leads to being a shithead in my experience.
Crazy story but a very interesting read. Thanks for sharing.
Emotions are stronger then intellect, much stronger. And most of these people suffered in bad childhoods and were drilled or neglected into disempathy. (That’s not the necessary reaction to such childhoods but it’s a common reaction.)
suffered in bad childhoods
Just to say, but what causes those things are hate and fear.
The second one doesn’t require trauma.
Fear is a general human trait woven into our existences and should/could be reduced in a loving and supporting childhood. If love and support are missing in your childhood you don’t learn to handle your fears in a mature and stable way.
(I know I’m painting this picture with a very broad brush. It’s to point in the general direction of feelings as the most plausible and applicable answer to OPs question.)
Ok so your telling me since when I was bad in my childhood and spanked with a switch that I can become one?
No. Your response to such childhood is very individual. It’s a very common stance to live your life the opposite way of your parents lifestyle. That’s what produced the 1960s air of change in culture - hippies lived the very opposite of their parents ideals.
I simply point out well researched patterns in childhoods and their influence on character traits. Look up developmental psychology and transgenerational patterns. In Germany there’s a lot of research and publication about “war children” and “war grandchildren” (Kriegskinder und Kriegsenkel) which in general attributes a lot of the countries troubles and shortcomings to the upbringing of kids in a war and post war society with a lot of shame and guilt.
Social media algorithms present different things to different people. So if you fall for a grift, the algorithm will just show you things that support the grift and never show anything that debunks it.
Someone going down a weird rabbit hole will stay on that for a long time, watching many ads along the way. Someone that starts to think “hey maybe there’s something to this thing” then immediately sees something debunking it may conclude “well that last video was a waste of time” and may decide to go do something else that’s a more worthwhile use of their time. End result, they watch fewer ads. Less revenue for the social media companies.
Weird internet rabbit holes are more profitable than seeing contradicting opinions. So the algorithms are tuned to send people down rabbit holes and not offer information contradicting them.
Yes, but it’s important to note that confirmation bias is always present in our views of the world because our brain tends to keep things simple by prefering confirming to contradicting information. It just has been amplified by recommendation algorithms meant to increase engagement by showing you “more of the stuff you like”.
I just confronted a guy I know who told me with a straight face that poor people struggle with budgeting and that’s why they’re poor.
I asked him where he got that info. He then sent me a bunch of YouTubers.
Payday loans sort of suggest this. Bit it’s more how society is biased to keep poor people poor.
Payday loans don’t suggest this. Those are predatory businesses aimed at the poor and desperate.
When you’re one month from disaster and you break a leg, it’s a payday loan or your family doesn’t have a home/food when you work a job without paid leave. And good luck with the disability approval, because even if it eventually comes through, you are on the hook until it does.
Being poor has very little to do with budgeting. I’m sure a substantial portion, if not the majority of them, could figure out how to budget with a $100k income instead of a $30k income.
I agree. My point was that rich people don’t take payday loans, but i recognise that not being able to afford a safetly cushion doesn’t necessarily imply bad planning.
rich people don’t take payday loans
Some do, depending on their circumstances. But when you’ve got a big income it’s easier to get out from under the debt.
Most rich people just use credit cards, though. They’re arguably worse than payday lenders, since the credit limits are much higher. But they’re also very risk averse, so they don’t extend credit to the lower income groups.
Payday lenders and other loan sharks have to spend more on collections and run tighter margins as a result. Far easier to be a credit card company and simply wage a finger at someone’s credit rating to extort payment than to actually execute a repo.
Those are predatory businesses aimed at the poor and desperate.
society is biased to keep poor people poor.
Seems like you agree
One of my closer friends is on a weird path atm. He’s full into Russian propaganda, anti-western stuff, flat earth, anti vaxx and whatnot.
I tried to reason with him. Turns out he doesn’t even know how to verify something he’s read online. Check sources? Nope. Google something you’ve seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.
I came to accept that he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation, propaganda and lies.
Check sources? Nope. Google something you’ve seen in a video that sounds super weird? Nope, just believe it.
Those are hardly panacea, as you need a reliable frame of reference for verification.
I remember during the heyday of WikiLeaks, how conservatives and liberals alike dismissed the info dumps as misinformation and edited images/video. You couldn’t talk about PRISM with anyone over 40, because all the Cable News outlets were claiming it had been debunked. You couldn’t talk about Collateral Murder because it was endlessly getting blocked on social media as “disinformation”.
And that was before the advent of AI generated images and whole books churned out with LLMs. What do you say to the guy who is hip deep in “evidence” from the Heritage Foundation? What do you say to a TERF quoting from the Cass Report? What happens when you get a rebuttal in the form of a Tucker Carlson Interview from Moscow?
Yeah, you can just wave that off as “Fake News, doesn’t count”. But then so can they, and we’re back to Square One on validating any kind of underlying truth.
he might just be too stupid to navigate modern media without being a victim of misinformation
None of us are immune to propaganda. Thinking this is a matter of simple intelligence is the first trap you fall into when evaluating a source.
It’s so easy to tell yourself “I’m smarter, therefore you must be wrong” and work backwards from there.
now, this’n right here kids is a prime specimen of what those highfalutin desk jockeys call a “global citizen.”
Many of these people overreact to good faith criticism and are narcissistic. There are some statistics that people become less self centered as they get older and incels definitely fall into that trap.
As for nazis etc, lots of that comes from like a lack of critical thinking about conspiracy theories. Its fine to think about conspiracy theories but the second you start embracing that like millions of people are conspiring against you to like stub your toe or something thats maybe the time to reign it in.
fascist power structures, provide power to people who follow them, and people like power. Power speaks.
This is why literally every government in the world including the US is susceptible to fascism.
Don’t Be a Sucker
This is an anti-fascism film made by the U.S. in the 1940s. It pretty much focuses on answering your exact question. It’s a decent film too.
The people who claim that women are too emotional to be leaders, are themselves too emotional to make rational life decisions
I maybe wrong in this but has any world leader that is a woman ever gone to war?
In modern times? IDK, but historically female leaders tended to engage in more war as a way to legitimize their rule, whether instigator or not. Kosem Sultan, Queen Isabella of Spain, and Catherine de’ Medici to name a few, but to quote a Quartz article:
“In fact, between 1480 and 1913, Europe’s queens were 27% more likely than its kings to wage war, according to a National Bureau of Economics … And like Isabella, queens were also more likely to amass new territory during their reigns, found the paper’s authors, economists Oeindrila Dube and S.P. Harish.”
External locus of control.
Bad things in someone’s life is not their fault, but the fault of whatever scapegoat.
Can’t get a girlfriend? It’s women’s fault.
Can’t get a job? It’s illegal immigrants.
Can’t afford to do the things you like? It’s the government taking too many taxes.
Whatever problem someone has, they are looking to blame someone rather than make any changes in their own life.
The examined life with all its critical thinking and guarding against bias is hard. The dark side is easier.
That knowledge needs active reaching out, otherwise you’ll just be in the “bigotry is when irrational hatred of group for the sake of doing evil” camp, which can be easily converted with “experiences”, “statistics”, etc.
I grew up in a very prejudiced family, and my family liked to scream off their lungs at me when I called them racists, because racism was supposed to be done for the sake of evil like in a cartoon, and them having “extensive experiences” of Roma wrongdoings against them makes it okay for them to throw everyone of them under the bus, for the illusion of safety.
Feels > reals.
It’s the same as it’s always been. We gravitate towards what we feel.
The internet has just allowed certain groups who wmight be ashamed to announce their true feelings to say the quiet part out loud anonymously. This gets the next generation to not see a problem with it and go from there.
As an example. Take an impressionable young boy (14-18), he has trouble getting dates, doesn’t have a great home life. Little bit of a loner. Before the internet, hed have to figure out a purpose. Maybe he’d start going to a gym or hitting the books harder to be smarter or something… With the Internet he’s able to find “friends”, he finds a community, that community may lead him down dark paths… Where some in better living situations may say “this is too much” and walk away, he doesn’t have anything to walk to… So he gets more and more indoctrinated into the cause.
