It’s my opinion that like if a white supremacist/Nazi is going to be reformed. They need to do so willingly. The only times I’ve heard of successful rehabilitation of fascists is when they made the conscious decision to no longer be one anymore and seek atonement. People who try to like hug and change fascists that don’t want to change are fucking morons
Correct. I was crypto-facist for a few years, and the people trying to hug me didnt change me because at that point I wouldnt have listened. It was only when I started to see the movement for what it was that I was finally able to listen.
I’m not derailing your addition but I’m horrified you’re only 18. When did you become a fasc?
Yeah trust me it *is* horrifying. I’m ashamed of who I was and I think my only atonement is to talk about how damn easy it is to become one when you’re young.
This is gonna be a long post.
For a little bit of background, I am a mixed race person, half brown and half white. I was raised in a Muslim family and am still closeted around them.
I started to have issues with Islam at around 12 or so, when I first started to get the idea that I might be gay. Now I never would have admitted that was my reason. If you had asked me I probably would have said “logic” or something. Because of that I went hard into atheism and atheist circles.
Now people hate to admit this but ex-Muslim spaces are predominantly right wing. Ex-Muslims often see the left as “too tolerant” towards a religion that hurt them. This was the only community I had though, and I read through everything. I was 13.
The other thing that people hate to admit is that, especially when you’re young, being mixed race is so damn hard. If I acted “too white”, following my mother’s German/Austrian traditions, I was accused of hiding my true nature. But if I acted “too brown” I was just another camel jockey. So I hid my “Indian” customs from others and tried passing as white. Especially online.
So I’m not saying this is all youtube’s fault or anything. I was raised to believe that the brown half of my family was lesser and stupid. And with my hatred of Islam, I believed it doubly.
Then came Anita Sarkeesian. I was watching pewdiepie and from there my recommendations were all set. If I’m remembering the pipeline it was pewdiepie – Philip Defranco – Chris Ray Gun (sp?) – Thunderfoot – Sargon – etc. But I was pretty much acquainted with all of the right wing youtube of the day.
Funnily enough, I found her through Thunderfoot. That got me into antifeminism, and more specifically, GamerGate.
I was primarily on the subreddits KIA (Kotaku In Action) and TIA (Tumblr In Action). Both made fun of the SJWs. I kid you not, I would gleefully wait for “Sanity Sunday”, where the people would talk about how feminism is disgusting, cultural appropriation is fake, the wage gap isnt real, etc. I would scroll through this tag for hours.
I got most of my youtube recommendations from those subreddits. This led me from GamerGate to more fascist lines of thinking, such as watching videos about why BLM is a terrorist organization, why all muslims were evil rapists, and why I was fundamentally right to reject my Indian heritage and follow my “correct” heritage.
From here I delved into “race realism”, and I believed it all. I had to. This was the only community I had felt safe in. One of the fash guys even offered to shack me up at his house if my parents kicked me out for being atheist. I was 15.
To say that again, I was 15 and believed that white was right, blue lives matter, “we wuz kangs”, etc. I never would have called myself a fascist or a Nazi. How could I? I used my brown skin as a token, so that people could point to me and say: “See, we aren’t misogynistic and racist! We have this brown girl right here.” But I believed in all the things the Nazis did. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I will never pretend I didn’t.
But then something happened. I admitted to myself, and to a few others, that I was gay. And suddenly, the homophobia that I had molded myself in, it didn’t fit right. I happened to, by accident, click on the reddit thread of GamerGhazi, the opposition to GamerGate. And after a long bout of introspection I found out that they were accepting of gay people, that the things I had been experiencing were common, that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need a white ethnostate.
I don’t want to be dramatic but that accidental click saved my life.
From there it was a road of recovery. I deleted all my old accounts, made new ones, and started to read leftist theory. I found better friends, cut out old people. So now, just about two years later, I’m healing.
I think that’s everything. I probably got some times and dates wrong because I’ve been trying to move on from it. But if you need more info or anything like that, please let me know.
Reblogging for anyone who’s struggling with being an ex-fascist. Feel free to message me as well, I know how scary it can be.
This is a fascinating read if you’re interested in just how the alt-right works, and how it recruits people.
It’s also fascinating to me because I was an atheist long before New Atheism appeared. And at first I was happy about it, because omg! people talking about this weird thing I usually kinda have to hide! And there was a lot of content on youtube that was, like, “how critical thinking works” or series about why way out there things like creationism sound hard to argue with when master manipulators talk about it. And I loved all of that.
But that eventually led me to stuff like–as this person mentions–thunderfoot, and I remember looking at it and just being baffled. We were supposed to be rational, and here this guy was ranting about feminism.
And like… I’d been in culty feminist circles, even. I liked the idea of debunking or reexamining concepts like “privilege” or “shut up and listen” or “people with this identity get to talk more.”
But it just seemed so weird and mean and off point. I wonder now why I was resistant to it, when some folks aren’t.
Tag: radicalization
It’s my opinion that like if a white supremacist/Nazi is going to be reformed. They need to do so willingly. The only times I’ve heard of successful rehabilitation of fascists is when they made the conscious decision to no longer be one anymore and seek atonement. People who try to like hug and change fascists that don’t want to change are fucking morons
Correct. I was crypto-facist for a few years, and the people trying to hug me didnt change me because at that point I wouldnt have listened. It was only when I started to see the movement for what it was that I was finally able to listen.
I’m not derailing your addition but I’m horrified you’re only 18. When did you become a fasc?
Yeah trust me it *is* horrifying. I’m ashamed of who I was and I think my only atonement is to talk about how damn easy it is to become one when you’re young.
This is gonna be a long post.
For a little bit of background, I am a mixed race person, half brown and half white. I was raised in a Muslim family and am still closeted around them.
I started to have issues with Islam at around 12 or so, when I first started to get the idea that I might be gay. Now I never would have admitted that was my reason. If you had asked me I probably would have said “logic” or something. Because of that I went hard into atheism and atheist circles.
Now people hate to admit this but ex-Muslim spaces are predominantly right wing. Ex-Muslims often see the left as “too tolerant” towards a religion that hurt them. This was the only community I had though, and I read through everything. I was 13.
The other thing that people hate to admit is that, especially when you’re young, being mixed race is so damn hard. If I acted “too white”, following my mother’s German/Austrian traditions, I was accused of hiding my true nature. But if I acted “too brown” I was just another camel jockey. So I hid my “Indian” customs from others and tried passing as white. Especially online.
So I’m not saying this is all youtube’s fault or anything. I was raised to believe that the brown half of my family was lesser and stupid. And with my hatred of Islam, I believed it doubly.
Then came Anita Sarkeesian. I was watching pewdiepie and from there my recommendations were all set. If I’m remembering the pipeline it was pewdiepie – Philip Defranco – Chris Ray Gun (sp?) – Thunderfoot – Sargon – etc. But I was pretty much acquainted with all of the right wing youtube of the day.
Funnily enough, I found her through Thunderfoot. That got me into antifeminism, and more specifically, GamerGate.
I was primarily on the subreddits KIA (Kotaku In Action) and TIA (Tumblr In Action). Both made fun of the SJWs. I kid you not, I would gleefully wait for “Sanity Sunday”, where the people would talk about how feminism is disgusting, cultural appropriation is fake, the wage gap isnt real, etc. I would scroll through this tag for hours.
I got most of my youtube recommendations from those subreddits. This led me from GamerGate to more fascist lines of thinking, such as watching videos about why BLM is a terrorist organization, why all muslims were evil rapists, and why I was fundamentally right to reject my Indian heritage and follow my “correct” heritage.
From here I delved into “race realism”, and I believed it all. I had to. This was the only community I had felt safe in. One of the fash guys even offered to shack me up at his house if my parents kicked me out for being atheist. I was 15.
To say that again, I was 15 and believed that white was right, blue lives matter, “we wuz kangs”, etc. I never would have called myself a fascist or a Nazi. How could I? I used my brown skin as a token, so that people could point to me and say: “See, we aren’t misogynistic and racist! We have this brown girl right here.” But I believed in all the things the Nazis did. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I will never pretend I didn’t.
But then something happened. I admitted to myself, and to a few others, that I was gay. And suddenly, the homophobia that I had molded myself in, it didn’t fit right. I happened to, by accident, click on the reddit thread of GamerGhazi, the opposition to GamerGate. And after a long bout of introspection I found out that they were accepting of gay people, that the things I had been experiencing were common, that maybe, just maybe, we didn’t need a white ethnostate.
I don’t want to be dramatic but that accidental click saved my life.
From there it was a road of recovery. I deleted all my old accounts, made new ones, and started to read leftist theory. I found better friends, cut out old people. So now, just about two years later, I’m healing.
I think that’s everything. I probably got some times and dates wrong because I’ve been trying to move on from it. But if you need more info or anything like that, please let me know.
Reblogging for anyone who’s struggling with being an ex-fascist. Feel free to message me as well, I know how scary it can be.
I found growing up authoritarian, with a too strict set of parents and rules that at least partly have no connection to reality but are enforced by will, having to hide and/or perform or allow performance of is a common factor of people leaning to the right and going to hate groups. Heck, with this you even end up in an authoritarian left leaning group and destroy it from inside by unchecked vicious mockery…
I’ve grown up like this, luckily not religious, but it took me AGES to shake off and many of my similarly afflicted peers did not. They are stuck in what they’ve learned to see as trustworthy, which is top down, snide, demanding and excluding. Arbitrary and rationalized rules, domination both physically and mentally.
Watch out for the signs if you’re afflicted and if you really want to help destroy a Nazi, show them mental freedom, not debate politics and who gets to live. Please don’t be mad at me, but I’ve turned some borderline MRA with this, with having strong opinions on how they were treated as children. Didn’t even need to like them personally.
I’m not absolving people from personal responsibility, but you should know that behind almost every asshole is a child who was taught trauma, pain, shame and learning to suppress harmless urges and emotions is a normal childhood.
I Lost My Son to the Alt-Right Movement – Anonymous As Told To Alexa Tsoulis-Reay
My son was in Charlottesville. He probably went with his friends, but I don’t know for sure because I haven’t talked to him in about three years.
Maybe some alt-righters were born into racist families and then they just follow along, but we weren’t like that. He grew up in a big, multicultural city. When he was a kid, he was very accepting — his friend group was ethnically diverse, we often hosted overseas exchange students. He was dating someone who wasn’t white. He was a responsible kid. I mean, he would occasionally drink and smoke pot and stuff like that, but he wasn’t getting into trouble or anything. He had a few close friends, but he was not that great with getting girlfriends.
He was a good student, smart, sweet, and we were close. He always told me he loved me. But over time he began to change. I was worried it was drugs or depression. He started treating me like shit. I remember one time I went to hug him and he nearly ripped me a new one just for touching him. He said, “We have nothing in common.” I was hurt. That was just the beginning.
When he was in his late teens, he started listening to this podcast FreeDomain Radio. After he told me about it, I googled it, and from that point forward, my life was never the same. It was founded by this guy Stefan Molyneux, who I later learned is a major figure on the alt-right. He spews horrible things. I heard him listening to the podcasts in his bedroom. My son started saying things like, If we could just get the Asians out of here it wouldn’t be so crowded. I realized he was getting into really dangerous stuff. He was beyond the point where we could have a rational discussion. Not long after, I told him I thought he should move out.
(RELATED STORIES: Men’s-Rights Activism Is the Gateway Drug for the Alt-Right)
After he left, we stopped talking and he pretty much alienated his closest friends. The only way I could keep track of him was by watching his online presence on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (I remembered his nicknames from when he lived at home). I saw that he was questioning the Holocaust, and tweeting about Trump, white supremacy, and all this horrible stuff about women. On his YouTube account, people were commenting that women don’t need to have education because their place is at home having babies. I panicked and approached a local religious group that’s very knowledgeable about cults and they said, Just wait it out and take care of yourself.
These days, I check up on him whenever I’m on the computer — it’s constant. I’ve got all his social-media pages pinned on Google Chrome. Sometimes he removes posts quickly and sometimes he makes things public and leaves them there. Maybe he wants me to see? I make sure I’m not logged in when I look at his accounts because I don’t want him to block me.
I recently saw him on a video, he looks healthy. Taking good care of yourself is all part of the white-supremacy thing, right? They have to be in good shape in case there’s violence, and they have to be fit so they can make good white babies. My thinking these days is God forbid he should have kids.
(read the rest at https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/charlottesville-white-supremacy-parenting-alt-right.html)
#this is literally how people describe losing their children to terrorist organizations
^^^
And what makes it worse is that any community support for deradicalization is being actively eroded by the government.
If you’re a parent and your teenager starts obsessively watching beheading videos and researching plane tickets to the Turkey/Syria border, I’m not saying you’re lucky by any means, but at least you’ve got to know there’s a serious problem. There’s nothing like that for white radicalization because it blends in so seamlessly to “acceptable” right-wing activities in white communities…
President Donald Trump initially condemned “hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides” for the tragedy, later placing the blame on white supremacists after a storm of backlash. But those words haven’t been backed up by policy—in June, the Trump administration dropped funding for one of the few organizations devoted to countering and de-radicalizing white extremists in the United States.
Founded in 2009, Life After Hate is run by former members of racist extremist movements who now work to counter and reform white nationalists. Under former President Barack Obama, the organization received $400,000 as part of its Counter Violent Extremism (CVE) program—the only anti-white nationalism group given funding under the program. After Trump’s election, Life After Hate reportedly saw a 20-fold increase in calls for help from those reporting signs of radicalization in themselves or others.
Life After Hate could really use your donation, if you’re looking for a way to put dollars into anti-racist efforts.
I never realized the alt-right is a cult until today. Jesus.
Reminder
if you post someone’s address, job, full name, personal details, anything that’s doxing, there are only two things that you want people to do to them:
1) really mess with them to an insane extent, like ordering gay porn, perfume samples, religious books and hundreds of pizzas sent to their house and try to ruin their personal lives/get them fire
2) kill them
so don’t fucking do it
don’t dox people
i want Nazi’s to get fired or worse
i get this but there has already been one instances from last week were people got the wrong person and it could fuck up his whole life for something they didn’t do
two instances, actually.
they got one of the wrong guys twice.
do you get that?
two people that are categorically NOT nazis got accused of being nazis by some half cocked dipshit on social media.
also fucking with nazis or trying to get them fired is categorically A Bad Idea.
I keep seeing this sentiment in the notes but don’t fucking do it
don’t feed into their victim narrative.
that’ll just push them further into extremism.
like, do you really think someone racist is gonna change their fuckin mind if they get fired because 5000 “undesirables” according to nazi doctrine get them fired?
do you think they’re suddenly magically gonna get a good attitude towards minorities that nazis have historically persecuted?
getting someone fired from a fucking hotdog job where they’re clearly miserable, probably not making much money in the first place ain’t gonna help.
not bein able to pay their bills will not teach them some sort of lesson, or the kind of lesson that would lead to them not being a fuckhead.
it’ll teach them
“these subhumans want you starving, want you to be unable to feed your families and want you dead”
WELL DONE
YOU JUST RADICALIZED A DUMBFUCK EVEN FURTHER
HE’S GOING TO GO DEEPER INTO EXTREMISM THANKS TO YOU, IDIOT
DON’T DOX PEOPLE
This is a major problem we as a society have with deradicalization. Like, you can’t exile someone from society and expect them to reform, it just further radicalizes them. People are social animals and need a network of healthy relationships so as to deradicalize. If you cut people off from the opportunity to build those relationships, you’re ensuring that the problem will never ever get fixed
This is a major problem we as a society have with deradicalization. Like, you can’t exile someone from society and expect them to reform, it just further radicalizes them. People are social animals and need a network of healthy relationships so as to deradicalize.
So one thing I’m not seeing mentioned much but that I think is really important to acknowledge is: not every member of a hate group is equally radicalized.
See, a lot of our rhetoric re: dealing with them assumes that every member is a hardened lifetimer. But there are always many, many lackeys to every kingpin. Not every terrorist sympathizer is Osama bin Laden. Cultlike movements are largely composed of people who are isolated or gullible or otherwise vulnerable. Their leaders know this. They capitalize on an underlying dysfunction and turn it into something monstrous. In any such movement, there will be people who have doubts but fear being crushed for their dissent. And those are the people it’s critically important to reach out to.
I think a lot of people assume that compassionate outreach is about, like, nicely asking hardened leaders to stop. It’s not! I frankly resent seeing pacifism strawmanned so badly. It’s about undermining those leaders’ bases. It’s about getting through to people who aren’t yet in too deep. When we write them off as exactly as bad as the people recruiting and manipulating them, we’re implicitly yielding ground. We’re ceding a huge number of potential allies to hateful causes, and I am not willing to do that. I want as many people on the side of good as possible. To do that, we have to be willing to get in and help deradicalize.
It’s laughable to expect that someone like S p e n c e r will just wake up one day and realize he’s wrong. It’s not impossible, but it’s not worth banking on. But what about an eighteen-year-old flirting with dangerous ideologies? Isn’t giving up on him implicitly ceding him to S p e n c e r ‘ s side? Do not conflate the psychological profile of someone who’s just beginning to become radicalized with that of someone who’s been entrenched for decades. That difference matters.
This is… my own position as well, honestly. I’m seeing an absolutely terrifying lack of nuance on here and more than a few times I’ve felt the blood run cold in my veins. Radicalization and edging toward extreme views and measures aren’t something that solely the people who dwell to the right of the center had and have a monopoly on. I’ve got half a murdered family for political reasons as testament enough to that!
Deradicalization is as much of a key-word as resistance and direct action and at this point, I feel that none of these can properly work without the other two in play. I worked for years as a journalist and an adviser for one of the MPs in my country and one of the side-projects I dedicated my time to was compiling data and resources on burgeoning anti-radicalization and deradicalization programs here in Europe, aimed at at-risk youth, particularly those who had joined Daesh, then returned to their homes, for whatever reason. I also wrote news-stories on these programs, in order to help spread knowledge and awareness of them. Programs such as the one spearheaded by the Danish authorities in 2015, aimed at working with former Daesh fighters, some of whom could have done unspeakable things while in Syria or Irak.
This ties in to the rise of various populist and far-right groups both here and in the US and the way in which an entire generation of youths is being radicalized by members of these groups, through the Internet. I’d always known there was a connection, but it became clear in my mind when a researcher studying the phenomenon wrote that when we speak about radicalization through the World-Wide-Web, we mustn’t speak only of actions taken by groups such as Daesh. We need to also look at the users of forums like Stormfront, who disseminated their ideas like viruses through subreddits and gaming forums, drawing in a dangerously high number of youths, preying on their uncertainties, their biases, lying to them and stoking their fears and their bigotries, encouraging ‘us versus them’ polarized thinking and creating what this researcher outright called ‘a radicalized generation, taught to lie to their own families about their extremist sympathies.’
I want to be clear, because sometimes I feel that people on here read posts while wearing Misunderstanding Goggles. I’m not saying ‘poor widdle baby bigots who need butt-patts’. I’m saying that a society where a significant proportion of youth ends up radicalized is a society that is, frankly, FUCKED and that’s something we need to handle and we need to fix, with pragmatism as much as with passion and a commitment to resisting extremist policies and extremist thought at every opportunity. I’ve dedicated years of my life and will dedicate many more to supporting and promoting deradicalization for people who ended up in nightmares like Daesh and who have a chance, however small, of getting out and fighting against extremism. I’d be one hell of a hypocrite if I didn’t do the same in other cases as well.
Keep in mind always that the son of the guy who runs The D/aily S/tormer left white nationalism because an Orthodox Jewish classmate in college started inviting him to Shabbat dinner.
No, really. This is true. Look it up.
There are a lot of ways to get this job done.
Siyanda Mohutsiwa on the rise of the alt-right.
[Screenshots of a series of tweets from Siyanda Mohutsiwa (twitter user SiyandaWrites) on 9 November 2016:
If people followed the alt-right groups on Reddit, they would know that young white Americans were told to hide their support of Trump.
Many young men are told to keep their anti-POC, sexist views from their “libtard” family and friends. Hence this surprise from mainstream.
Just because folks weren’t yelling their support of Trump off the rooftops doesn’t mean they didn’t have it. They were told to hide it
When we talk about online radicalization we always talk about Muslims. But the radicalization of white men online is at astronomical levels
Many of these radical white men were raised by single feminist mothers. Internet groups radicalized their sexual frustration into bigotry.
These online groups found young white men at their most vulnerable & convinced them liberals were colluding to destroy white Western manhood
I’ve seen this happen w/ a FB friend who lives in a tiny 100% white town in Finland. He started posting about “flawed multiculturalism”
How could a guy who goes months w/o seeing POC be so adamant about failings of “multiculturalism”? Online radicalization
Young men came to these online groups for tips on picking up girls & came out believing it was up to them to save Western civilization
I’ve been following these online alt-right groups for three years and watched them evolve from PUA forums to hate-fueled organizations
And not all these young men are “stupid”. Men who boasted STEM degrees from elite institutions were taught how to intellectualise hatred.
By the end, many were using every ounce of college-level “logic” to argue that liberals aimed for the destruction of Western civilization
These college educated young men were then ripe enough to be sold idea that Trump represented a return to Men Being Real Men
There are even entire posts training young men to parrot “libtard” ideology. To say the “right thing” to keep safe in “hostile (PC) spaces”
They are told that feminism is why they can’t get girlfriends, that “feminization” of schools is why they didn’t do well in high school
They truly believe that it is feminists, globalists, anti-racism activists, liberals who are the “true fascists” in the world.
+Those who don’t believe he is sexist, think the accusations of assault are proof of how society rewards women for “lying about rape”]
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 