I thought about this a lot in 2017 as a guy who grew up on the Internet. I don’t think I ever got a reasonable conclusion then because I was thinking about it in terms of Something Awful and 4chan, but now that I’m older I think the answer is that I didn’t go Nazi because my parents raised me well.
As someone who grew up pre-internet, my parents also raised me well. But I still might have been susceptible.
I had this crazy thing called “a mixed gender and ethnicity peer group”. We used to joke about being a Captain Planet ass friend group. Only now that I that I have kids do I understand how much work our parents must have put in to create that situation. The push to segregate is so omnipresent.
I regret some things my parents did and said as a child. They made the right big decisions: Where we live, where I go to school, church (for a while), their couple example, fear of debt, adults as distinct from children and others. I made my mistakes, not due to them.
I also got off the Internet quite a bit. There's something to be said about the attitude you developed when the Internet wasn't constantly on and easily accessible. You realize there are two worlds, online and offline.
I think about a lot of the MAGA guys I grew up, and their fathers were bad, dumb, or absent. I don't actually know any manos, but I'm older than all of you.
I think about this a lot too because while I was instilled with values like "treat everyone with respect and kindness", most of my family was pretty blatantly racist. Even as a teenager, it was glaringly apparent how incompatible these two ideas were, and that their racism was unacceptable.
Yea, sorry, the manosphere stuff isn’t new! This stuff has been on the internet the whole time!
yeah like there but for the grace of god i could have gone, but it was good for me that i joined SA as a very young adult at a time when it had become socially liberal and its mock thread scene had focused their guns on how dumb and bad the proto-manosphere guys are
when I was a college freshman an older friend tried to get me to read some pick up artist book and I think not doing that was probably a turning point in my life
Teenage Me read one of those books and thought it was pretty cool. But a week later, the absolute worst kid I knew also read it and wouldn't shut up about it. And lemme tell ya there's a big difference between reading words and listening to a future sex offender approvingly say them out loud
somebody should tell that to ayn Rand fans
me and a friend of mine read the game at the age of 16 and when we finished were both like “yo this shit is ass what the fuck”
Also keep in mind that Covid shut the world down for about a year and which led to a lot of these boys having little to do but scour the internet, social media, etc.
A lot of “gifted” 90s kids ended up going down that rabbit hole too, even though they should have been more resistant to it. I chalk it up to being unable to grapple with the fact that their intelligence alone wasn’t enough to give them the life they expected/were told was their due.
i did a similar path & i would also ascribe it to the nazis being villains in every movie/video game, but also star wars being a clear analog, and also not identifying with the empire. there's a thing about your parents raising you right but also there's a thing abt just not identifying w/ baddies
I always found the “Something Awful > 4chan > Nazi” pipeline kind of dubious too. I was on 4chan and SA a LOT (not necessarily proud of this) as a weird kid in the 00’s and the “un-seriousness of everything” turning into “we actually believe terrible things” felt more a product of the outside world…
SA is more the dirtbag left, I left when everyone became communist including someone who made detailed sexual threats to me and wasn't banned
The "not taking sexual harassment seriously" problem is absolutely a problem on the left too. More in a brush it off way than a "screw women" kind of way, but still - Sorry you had to deal with that.
Specifically, I'm a historian, and it was "If this were the past you love so much, you'd have been [REDACTED]." Thank you for the sympathy, but it was more gross and baffling than a real threat.
Historian here too (by education at least, not occupationally) and yeah, I've seen that angle many many times before. Baffles me too. Just because things were once worse doesn't mean we shouldn't always fight to make them better.
These people think we advocate for our topics of study
Studied antisemitism in the Middle East, and I get called out a lot for being antisemitic about the Middle East… checks out!
I study 17th century warfare
Yeah, a lot of Nazis have those sites in their history because they were trying to find community and didn't find it there. They ended up Nazis because the Nazis were the first place it "clicked" for them and they found their community. We need to discuss why they failed to find community elsewhere.
4chan’s biggest fault was likely that there were so many not all that serious Nazi and self-hating communist references that I’m sure it seemed like “home at last” to so many young little Nazis posting 100 things a minute and that’s how the flip happened so suddenly.
Yeah, it's a self-selection process where some percentage of people posting ironically realize they unironically agree. I don't think it so much creates them as accelerates the discovery process. It takes what for a lot of people would have taken decades to figure out and compresses it into months.
In my opinion, with no real evidence of course, I’m just convinced that the “people posting ironically realize they unironically agree” crowd is very small, if it exists at all.
I think it's small because the vast majority of people who were online back then posting ironic shit didn't end up anything more than embarrassed now but I do think that a small percentage of them did find that community with each other and have formed the core of what has now become a huge problem.
As someone who studied history for so long, this might be my biggest gripe with 4chans anonymity, I can’t go back and see if the unironic Nazis were new, and different people, than the older posters trying to be ironic.
And also a lot of gore and gross porn. That shit was never funny though… Although I’m sure the “edginess” of it (being gross isn’t edgy btw it’s lazy, real “edginess” needs some effort) clicked with people who were just mad at the world in a whiny way.
Obviously there were people who reveled in insensitive BS, but public chat on Xbox Live circa the Halo 3 launch felt way more ACTUALLY racist than 4chan at the time. It feels like someone flipped a switch ~10 years ago and then those places became magnets for people who were already raised to suck.
There's a big difference between my high school friends who spent a lot of time on SA or 4chan (some of whom are still shitheads, but in the South Park way) vs. the friends who giggled along to racist/antisemitic Xbox Live chat, who are Trump supporters to a man.
Absolutely. For one, I’ll cringe a lot over how much I laughed at things like the “twin towers smoking a joint while they’re on fire” meme, but the guys I grew up with who eventually started saying things like “9/11 was a globalist plot by the Jews” weren’t on 4chan much, if at all.
My parents ensiled in me a set of values about respecting other people and treating them well and it worked to inoculate me against some of the bullshit that would have pushed me down that path. That doesn’t mean that I was immune, I was a teenage boy, but that did enough to prevent the worst.
the weird part’s when they did that and now they’re still republicans
I consistently have to tell my mom that the things about my politics that drive her nuts are directly traced to the values she taught me from tiny.
My parents instilled good values in me and are now fox news pilled hardcore MAGA 🤷♂️
Yeah I think the same is true for me. I spent a ton of time online, but I also kept close to my real life friends, and I was brought up Methodist (so a big focus on showing God's example by your actions toward others) and my grandparents constantly hosted international students.
Having real-world roots in knowing that we're all fundamentally human and all deserve the same basic rights *and that it's our job to help ensure that happens* was a big dose of immunity to individualistic, fear-driven right wing propaganda
It’s not a particularly satisfying answer if you’re thinking about it as a political problem, but I know there’s a lot of dads who follow me who are probably worrying about their kids constantly, I know I would be, and I hope it makes them feel a little better.
In my head it’s like how the single best thing you can do for your child’s education is to read to them, and yet some parents just don’t do it. The older I get the more shocking it is how easy and pervasive bad parenting is.
Once again - it’s the parents! The parents matter! The fascist shithead who went to my high school who conned a blind veteran into running against a Democrat on the Legal Weed ballot line also had a dad who sucked ass and fantasized about hurting Black people.
Getting a liberal arts BA was arguably not the best financial/career decision, but I firmly believe that I’m a saner/better person because of it.
I was raised pretty conservative and I reject a lot of it
That’s good, but what about the people who didn’t?
Wish I had a better answer than 🤷♂️ It took me until my 30s and getting out into the greater world beyond my hometown. My general guess is people need to experience a broader, wider world than whatever narrowly defined version of it they get from dad
As a now middle aged parent if i see a kid do or say something fucked up I immediately start to suspect their parents. It’s not 100%, but it’s much more hit than miss. I’ve also realized that some of the worst things I internalized when I was young were things I heard my dad “joking” about.
parental connection is a major factor missing in this whole thing, you're right
I truly believe you need a good role model who looks at a Rogan podcast and says, "This is loser shit."
I think about my friend who watched Loose Change on YouTube (9/11 conspiracy doc) and his dad called him out for being a huge idiot for believing that. Shut it down right there.
He's really a bozo. He's not even humorous!
Some of us are old enough to ask why anyone needs to pay attention to the dude that was eighth on the call sheet on News Radio.
I was thinking about it in the shower and I realized that the common factor across most of my friends was that they have a good relationship with at least one of their parents. The ones who don’t who still turned out great are fascinating mysteries to me.
some people can surprise (complimentary)
Yup. I also can’t help but think about it in terms of the Trump supporters who say “Daddy’s home”, which is a dead giveaway that their relationship there was turbo fucked.
That's generational rot. Decades of bad, abusive in some form or neglectful, family lineage
Yeah, I talked to my dad about this when I was home for his 75th birthday and he said the one thing he knew about parenting was that he wasn’t ever going to hit me and he figured the rest out from there.
I should probably blog all this
You should. Happy bday dad
Think about this too. I was around some kids and coaches on sports teams where a lot of racist things got thrown around. My folks had some old and stupid views on race. I knew it was wrong at the time and I honestly think public tv/sesame street type things helped me develop better values
For me, it was college. I was absolutely on that road and then in college I discovered a bunch of kind, caring people who challenged me including some of the most patient profs you could ask for. I often think about them and wish I had written a letter or something to thank them.
An enormous number of early millennial media experiences showed it to be virtuous and manly, in fact the height of these virtues, to *kill Nazis*