Me crawling out the other side bloody and bruised but smiling, now a socialist after realizing “wait, people just want to live their lives. What’s the actual problem here?”
I want to say in advance that I am happy for everyone here who exited this pipeline, especially if you were just a kid. But I gotta say - it is creepy to me how many people there are who think so little of women that the gamer gate arguments could convince them at all. As a little kid I thought that someday men and women would all realize that we’re in this together and we’d learn to respect each other as human beings. I was so wrong.
My best friend had this happen to him. Except he’s over 30.
He now worships T×m P×ol, El×n M×sk, and J×e R×gan. He also thinks that Tr×mp is “the ultimate epic troll”.
He finally started saying that c×vid is fake & trans folks should be “purged”. He also still thinks that you can catch AIDS from a toilet seat or a handshake.
His critical thinking skills have eroded to the point where I don’t even recognize him anymore. He just parrots talking points from grifter podcasts.
We are no longer friends. I miss the “old” him everyday.
Got into the Atheist youtubers, then they moved onto anti-SJW and I stuck around. Thought I was being an enlightened logical centrist, “both sides are bad” and all that. So I figured modern feminists were overreacting.
Then the MAGA movement ramped up, now abortion rights are gone. Also since then I discovered I’m trans and now LGBT rights are at stake.
Yeah, I was on that slide for a bit, probably around that age as well. Luckily I was too socially awkward to ever bother anyone with it, just kept to myself and watched that garbage.
Wanna know the slightly embarrassing thing that made me reevaluate? One of the channels I watched, which up to this point had almost exclusively made anti-feminist videos, suddenly made a video bashing furries in the same way. I wasn’t a furry, but I had friends who were and it’s usually a very friendly space for a harmless hobby. So I thought, “this is stupid, why would he make a video bashing these people who aren’t harming anyone?” and then it clicked. Took a break from that space and never went back.
I’m a little older and found my path to atheism earlier than atheist youtubers.
I remember absolutely hating Ayn Rand and thinking “Why would an atheist think the best thing is to be completely selfish and shit on community?” Then Richard Dawkins, who I had previously respected, started running his fucking mouth, and then Sam Harris came along and shat things up some more, and then came the edgy youtube atheists.
For fucks sake man, made me legit embarrassed to admit my atheism for a while.
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