Friend Infected With Right Wing Brain Worms - What to Do?

So you guys are just fake-newsing this? Ok.

no, i dont doubt that her son had this dalliance with the alt right, but anonymous memoir pieces like this are susceptible to distortion

So you guys are just fake-newsing this? Ok.

― DJI, Monday, May 6, 2019 9:37 PM (twenty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol i sure as hell am

the part i didn't believe was the happy ending.

maybe nagle wrote it to sell books to normie parents with shitty sullen teenage boys who won't shut the fuck up about rare pepes

/r/creativewritingprompts

"How I left the alt-right" seems like its becoming something of a cottage industry.

I saw the Faraday Speaks video, half a million views in 6 weeks. It was well done but alarm bells ringing. I've read people suggesting he's a troll/plant - 'be welcomed by the libs to own the libs'?, but I can't see to what end. A more likely reason is he is just a grifter

But also, I don't really see 'right-wing brainworms' and 'the alt-right' as quite the same thing. Overlapping, sure, but distinct enough

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

what

At a meeting two days later with my husband, Sam, and me, the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay. He waved in front of us a statement from the girl at the table and insisted that Sam would need to defend himself against her claims if he wanted to prove his innocence. But the administrator refused to reveal the particulars of the complaint (he had also blacked out identifying details, FBI-style) and then hid the paperwork under a book. He declared that it was his primary duty, as a school official and as a father of daughters, to believe and to protect the girls under his care.

i would be surprised if this really happened like this

but who knows

I absolutely believe that there are overzealous public school administrators who arbitrarily target kids over small stuff. I have an annual tussle with the attendance committee that has been enough to make me joke about voting Republican. However, I'm suspicious about this 'misconstrued meme' - was it as harmless as she claims? I would have appreciated the opportunity for the reader to take it to Meme Court.

it just fits too neatly into the narrative

Everything fits in too neatly, every single reference reads like "I just spent a couple of hours researching this" or even "I just read the Angela Nagle book" - I mean, much of it could be true, but it's so polluted by this bullshit that it doesn't matter.

I mean look at it, is she quoting her 13-year-old son?

“I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult. I was one of them,” he said. “I was participating in a conversation. They took me seriously. No one ever took me seriously—not you, not my teachers, no one. If I expressed an opinion, you thought I was just a dumbass kid trying to find my voice. I already had my voice.”

it would be interesting to read a real account by a parent who lost their kid to 4chan or whatever--and what they did about it.

I absolutely believe that there are overzealous public school administrators

oh for sure. i had a couple of weird encounters w admins and a school counselor in 9th grade that kind of shook my faith in the ability of adults in charge to properly adult. even my folks (who ALWAYS ALWAYS took the side of adults in authority) met with them and were kinda like "eh, keep your head down summer's almost here. they actually do seem kinda crazy."

i've shared this story way too many times but in high school circa 1999 me and a few of my friends shared a website that functioned as a protoblog/livejournal kind of thing, where we (esp me) overshared way too much about our depression and how terrible life was. the website got popular at school and the school counselor and admin decided to tell my parents, along with the parents of everyone involved with the site, that we were all suicidal and possibly homicidal, then contacted the true owner of the domain (my best friend's mom) to make her shut it down, all on the same day

i would be surprised if this really happened like this

I believe it. I’ve shared my story about a very similar situation. It was horrible. Especially since the report was made-up in retaliation.

I guess I lucked out by thinking “some people are bad” rather than “society is bad because of cucks.”

That story gets a little too florid toward the end but the part with school administrators being clueless authoritarians with a heavy hand lines up with my middle/high school experience. That was twenty-five years ago, now, and I'd like to think things are better, but progress isn't evenly distributed across the board.

Kids getting dealt with harshly for small or nonexistent offenses definitely makes them want to push back. I think "my son is moderating an alt-right messageboard" is something that's more of a real offense, though

The reason the story seemed false to me had as much to do with the combination of narrator omniscience (iirc she literally tells us what her son is thinking at one point) and lack of detail (as mentioned, what was the misconstrued meme? what subreddit? who are these people?) as the just-so narrative of the overreaching liberal state Kavanaughing a young person into the arms of the alt-right.

history is just the way we craft events into a narrative to sell good feelings

this story didn't ring true to me at all. the bit about how "the reporters and the nazis needed each other" struck me as especially bogus.

Later, my son and I shared a viewing of Christopher Nolan's 2009 The Dark Knight. "You complete me," snarled Heath Ledger's iconic Joker to his foil and counterpart, Batman (the titular Dark Knight). In a flash of excitement my son paused the UHD 4k Blu-ray. "Mother," he exclaimed, "this is a precise expression of the dynamic we observed playing out on the Mall between a cynical and nihilistic press and the brainwashed cultists I now renounce! I feel like such a dumbass."

(absolutely no trouble believing literally anything about school administrators tho.)

the commentary is off but the spectacle of a bunch of photojournalists clustering around a small number of neo-nazis isn't wrong. nobody's clamoring for coverage a bunch of people dressed normally standing around counterprotesting unless there's a hook

the thing that's not stated is that coverage and unmasking has diminished the number of alt-right/outright nazi people willing to show up to these things. it's been on a steep downward decline

this story didn't ring true to me at all. the bit about how "the reporters and the nazis needed each other" struck me as especially bogus.

lol this is the most believable part

oh i believe the description of the reporters' behavior but not the way the writer turns it into an Important Moment and a Turning Point:

“Did you see that?” I asked, too overwhelmed to offer my gloss on the situation. I was prepared to let it go if he hadn’t interpreted it as I had.

“Yeah,” he answered. Even though that was all he said, his eyes were shining and I could see he was filing away the encounter.

OTM, the whole thing is bollocks.

Even though that was all he said, his eyes were shining and I could see he was filing away the encounter.

before i got to the end i earnestly read this as the kid realizing that if he openly acted like a nazi he could get on tv

To me it sounded like a pretty realistic description of how a relatively smart young person could get sucked up into the right-wing media bubble. It had some overly-florid writing, but I could also see how scary and agonizing it would be if my son got caught up in all that mess, and how that might inspire some overwrought prose.

I'd like to think my kids are insusceptible to brain worms, but I'm not sure. A couple of kids at my son's school reported that they thought he was being bullied. When I asked him about it, my kid responded, "well, some kids give me shit for being white, but I guess I deserve it." :/

It worries me that he's having to deal with this, but it also makes we nervous that he will discover some online community that will use that ostracization to infect him with brain worms.

yo that's fucked up

"well, some kids give me shit for being white, but I guess I deserve it." <<- this part, not the fear that he'll be radicalized because of it. it's bad right now that he's being bullied on the basis of the color of his skin even if he's never radicalized that sucks.

like everyone else, kids would benefit from a way of understanding history and society and racism that is neither the vague apologetic libism of "i guess i deserve shit for being white" nor its probable successor "fuck this i'm a nazi"

^

fortunately, school administrators are there to fill the slack

on further review, i guess i could picture some school admin reading an article on metoo and deciding to just go on a warpath.

i think kids should be discouraged from seeing their daily lives as part of some larger culture war. maybe in high school they can start to unpack their white male privilege, but at an early age i think that message is more confusing than the classic "treat everyone equally and with respect and, if you don't, you're suspended."

oh i meant make em communists

i guess that's what you said

It must be nice to live a life where you can choose whether you are aware of race or not.

i am suggesting choosing a more complete awareness of race, one where white kids have a more complete idea of where it came from and a better chance of helping to redress what it's done

so long as the parents get sent to the same camp

well, yeah

i think kids can be taught about race without being taught original sin. teach them "this is a fallacious + superficial way of dividing people that leads to cruelty and hatred and no one should be judged on the basis of the color of their skin."

I am responding directly to Treeship's dumbass, dangerous opinion here:

i think kids should be discouraged from seeing their daily lives as part of some larger culture war. maybe in high school they can start to unpack their white male privilege, but at an early age i think that message is more confusing than the classic "treat everyone equally and with respect and, if you don't, you're suspended."

1. Kids who belong to minority groups do not have the luxury of living lives where they are not pulled into some aspect of the culture war. Whether on a gross macro level or through a series of neverending microaggressions, you are going to be marked out as the "other" and treated differently regardless of your actual behavior. When you ask "why did I get into trouble for X/Y/Z when my friend (who is white) never does" or the even more classic "why did I get blamed for something my white friend did", you are told how the world works. Your parents do this because it is integral to your survival. There isn't an option.

Meanwhile, well-meaning white families are busy instructing their kids not to see color, which means glossing over/actively ignoring all of the differences in the baseline ways people of different races are treated in various scenarios. Then, when they encounter someone of color, the thing that has been teaching them how to evaluate that person is the racist society that has been feeding them caricature after caricature since they were infants. Unsurprisingly, this feeds directly into the perpetuation of the culture war.

I don't have patience for that bullshit or anyone who even hints at it.

Then they go home to parents who repeat the garbled MLK quote about a color blind society and watch the news complaining about affirmative action and men dressed as women hiding in bathrhooms

xpost

Kids who belong to minority groups do not have the luxury of living lives where they are not pulled into some aspect of the culture war

so otm, aka my life

“Identity politics is bad!” scream the people demonising kids and their families on the basis of skin colour, ethnicity, sexuality...

yes, i agree (xps). i 100% grew up taught the "it's original sin / unfortunate natural prejudice, just try to overcome it personally, ignore color" white lib approach to racism and apart from anything else i think it is defenseless against the hard right.