How I Escaped the Alt-Right Pipeline
Reply via email: me@absurdpirate.com
I wanna take you back to a time at the peak of my adolescent ignorance. I was about 17 at the time, and Trump was making a run for presidency in 2016. I wasn't really engaged politically, mostly getting my political takes from my libertarian (that's the only way I could describe her political views) mother.
She was talking about Trump coming in and "shaking the tree", how loathsome Clinton is, etc. She despised Clinton mostly for her corruption, Benghazi, and the email fiasco.
It was around this time I was getting exposed to anti-SJW content. The Anita Sarkeesian takedowns, "liberal gets owned" videos, and various other commentary channels.
I had a friend who identified as non-binary, I had no idea what this meant and really neither did the rest of my friend group (who were mostly composed of liberals or social democrats). I was told by one of them that our friend, whom I'll call D, didn't use the he/she/his/hers pronouns. Fucking what?
To me this didn't make much sense, "So what does she go by, 'it'?". I wasn't trying to be a dick, I genuinely didn't understand. To which I was corrected that the pronouns D went with was they/them. Further confusing me, as they/them to me were plural pronouns.
I started getting fed more and more anti-SJW content, seeing videos from the usual suspects, Shapiro, Peterson, Crowder.
It was around this time in my life that I was for the first time being seen as the "hot" guy. I basically had a new girlfriend every other week. Full on fuckboy arc.
I would occasionally make jabs at my friend, C, she was a TOTAL Bernie supporter. I had a crush on her at the time and we had one of those will-they/wont-they relationships. For some braindead reason I thought teasing her by being a contrarian was a good idea. Openly supporting Trump just to piss her off.
Fast forward to my senior year of high school, I had moved from my school in California to a religious red state. I was an outcast from day one since I'm an atheist. To compensate, I generally just hung out at the library, which had a plethora of self-help/business books. At the time I considered myself a temporarily-embarrassed millionaire, so I ate that up.
Trump got elected, my mother was emotional, I had no effing clue what any of it meant for the country.
I later graduated high school and got to work in insurance. The anti-SJW/anti-liberal grift was in FULL swing. I had just broken up with a girlfriend at the time, and that's when I started hearing all these horror stories from these men going through painful divorces. You probably know the ones, poor guy marries a woman, she cheats on him, they divorce, she takes his money and the kids, man gets raked over the coals financially in the courts. It was at this point I had landed fully into MGTOW territory.
I got the idea that most women were leeches who only wanted superficial things. Ironic that I came out of it only wanting women for superficial things. I was now 18, and the fuckboy arc came in full swing with the use of Tinder. I would match with these girls, we'd hook up, and basically use each other as nothing more than masturbatory aides.
My ideology became this:
- Most women only want money and good looks
- Liberals tend to be unreasonable and dumb
- Gotta grind to be successful
- There are only 2 genders
I was enthralled by Shapiro's takedown of unprepared college students half his age, the success wet-dream of Tai Lopez courses, aesthetics gymbro culture, the manipulated image of a Crowder "change my mind" video. Knee-deep in the neoliberal lie.
Then, the tower began to crumble. It started with a takedown piece on Lopez by h3h3, fully cementing him as a fraudster whom I always was at least somewhat skeptical of. A critical look at the flaws in Shapiro's arguing style and choice of opponent, seeing him fail in his debate with Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
I then had an interaction on Reddit with someone when I was defending Ronald Reagan. The person sent me a multi-paragraph response detailing many of Reagan's fuckups, from closing of various psych wards, the deliberate attack on black communities with the war on drugs, the shitshow of Reaganomics, the list goes on.
The tower crumbled further.
I then met the woman who would become my wife. She fundamentally dismantled my MGTOW idea of women and some ideas that I realized were totally sexist. I also realized that what I was saying about women completely flew in the face of all the women who helped raise me, my mom, my aunt, my nana.
I began seeing more and more come out against these talking heads, seeing the facade for what it was. I stopped watching Crowder after he started making a mockery of Bruce Lee in the most stereotypical Chinese depiction he could muster. I stopped watching Shapiro after his debate with Tyson and after a critical analysis completely debunking half of his talking points.
I used to hold a pro-life stance as it was ingrained in my head since I was teen by my mom that you are responsible for the children you put into this world. She probably should have given me a more nuanced take, as she was pro-choice and was basically trying to tell me that I get to sit with whatever decision the woman of the relationship made over a fetus and not "abortions bad". So, over time I became pro-choice understanding that men shouldn't get to dictate what a woman does with her body and a government SURE as hell shouldn't get to invade that either.
I stopped the whole "only 2 genders" thing after I started watching content from trans youtubers. As I had finally understood the difference between gender and sex (to which even sex is kinda a grey area), and understood what gender expression was all about.
I stopped supporting Trump after seeing him mocking a disabled person, his Muslim ban, his comments about veterans, his criminality, the list goes on with that one. At some point, you can't keep being an apologist.
I realized that what I was becoming was not the kind of person my late father would want me to be.
I now considered myself a "centrist", but that ended during 2020. I saw the damage of Trumps inaction during covid, businesses being close, families going into poverty, then George Floyd happened, then Breonna Tyler. I saw cops brutalizing and killing people, then proceeding to get away with it.
This was when I became more politically active, going to my city counsel members with hundreds of others to demand the police be de-funded. It ultimately didn't succeed, but I became a full supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement.
There was some questioning when I discovered the head of the BLM organization was a "trained Marxist", whatever the hell that meant. I started looking into what Marxism actually even was. The philosophy behind it, the more I looked at it, the more it started to make sense. I began to see the revisionist history and white-washing, with MLK being particularly surprising hearing that there was more than just "I have a dream". I began to see the billions spent to rape South American countries trying to push back against the exploitation. The more I learned about what was really going on outside of American-exceptionalism propaganda.
The more things change the more they stay the same it seems. The anti-SJW grifters became the anti-Woke grifters, grindset culture went from Tai Lopez being the face to Andrew Tate, Dan Bilzerian became Andrew Tate. Not much has changed really since 2016. The figures change, but the underlying factor became the same. Young, naive, and lonely men are having their insecurities and uncertainties preyed upon by these charlatans.
I am now a completely different person. I do my best to protect others, give back to my community, and support marginalized groups. I have firmly identified as a socialist for a few years at this point. I do my best to be the man my daughter would be proud to have as her father.
I look back at my old self and realize how lost I was. I had allowed people who wanted nothing more than to be a pawn in their game to manipulate me into being against other people who weren't too different from me. It came clear to me the irony of the party of "family values" seemingly always did what actively hurt families. The party of "Christian values" coward to the 7 deadly sins in human form, who was about as close to being Christ as Mussolini. The people who claimed LGBTQ+ people were pedophiles were getting ousted for molesting kids, hell even their great leader is buddy buddy with Epstein and has been proven to have gone to his island (make of that what you will).
Maybe I should have seen this sooner, seen through the lies, realized what my morals were, but I can't change the past. I now work to overcome my mistakes and be better than I was. As PartySnax once said:
What is better: to be born good or to overcome your evil nature through great effort?
I now do my best to fight for my friends, people I don't know, my family, and my daughter's future. See ya at No Kings for my U.S. readers!