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What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

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Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#201

Post by RickJWagner »

It's going to be such a long slog until the election.

Already, there is an increase in the number of articles meant to subtly smear people. Call them racists, neo Nazis, extremists, etc. On the other side, photos of Antifa, anarchists and other extremists will be shown.

Please do your best to look for the truth. The vast, vast majority of people are good. (To be sure, there are some bad ones. But they do not dramatically increase in number as an election draws near!)

It is completely evil to sow the seeds of fear, doubt and hatred in this manner. Please look to the good in people. Turn away from the hatred.

Edit: I am in no way excusing neo Nazis, alt-right, alt-left, Antifa, etc. I am saying that these nutballs are few and far in between. Almost everybody you meet out on the street today is going to be a decent person.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#202

Post by [deleted] »

klodolph wrote: post #53

What resonated with me is how impossible it is, as a kid, to make sense of being in the school system. The interaction with an administrator was school discipline gone awry... but it could have easily been something else. (Discipline is the most likely, there are tons of misguided zero-tolerance policies.) I'm lucky that my parents were advocates and organizers and that they knew people in the school administration.…

[deleted]

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#203

Post by drak0n1c »

deanCommie wrote: post #158
alexandercrohde wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I don't know if I think a middle-aged man who goes to a rally to hold up a sign saying "NO TRUMP. NO KKK. NO FASCIST USA," is progress over the alt-right. To me it's the exact same thing -- an overly zealous person who takes politics as a tribal game and has no sincere intention of changing anybody's mind.

"KKK" and "No KKK" are exactly the same thing? FFS...can we stop with the false equivalence? When one side is preaching intolerance, and the other side preaches intolerance to intolerance THEY ARE NOT BOTH EQUALLY INTOLERANT .

The parent comment was not equivocating "KKK and anti-KKK", it was simply pointing out the false equivalence on that guy's T-shirt. All-caps claims that Trump, the KKK, and Fascism are equivalent is part of the problem and exacerbating tribalism.

The anti-Semitic terrorist in Powey wrote that he felt personally betrayed and furious at how friendly Trump is with Jewish people and his support for Israel. The media, and protestors, making such extreme claims aren't just misleading people who oppose bigotry, they are misleading people who support bigotry and making the conflict bigger and more confused than it otherwise would be.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#204

Post by orf »

api wrote: post #142
eropple wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google-related, but I'd submit that YouTube is one of the prime culprits. Kids like stuff like video games. Video game recommendations devolve into chud territory in two hops - fascist in three or four.

Targeting gamers is neo-fascism's bread and butter strategy since they proved the concept with "GamerGate." I remember seeing all that stupid GG nonsense and having no idea I was watching the beginning of a massively successful propaganda offensive.

Not sure why you are being downvoted, it's completely correct. Andrew Auernheimer (weev) says:

> the man is talking down to gamergate which is by far the single biggest siren bringing people into the folds of white nationalism. More people have been converted in the past year by things like images of Anita Sarkeesian being rendered as a happy merchant than were in the three before it.

https://archive.is/fOprk#selection-3605.0-3605.511

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#205

Post by tropo »

krapht wrote: post #69
sarcasmOrTears wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think you're using the word "alt-right" wrong. When other people use it, they're talking about the people who marched in Charlottesville, and lurk on freerepublic and Stormfront. A free nation for a certain pale skin tone, and those blacks and yellows can go be proud Africans and Asians on their respective continents. But not red people, we already took their land, so they can suck eggs.

He is using the original meaning, which has since been hopelessly slandered by those who compete with the alt-right. This competition isn't just with the left; there is a fight for control of the republican party. (hence "alt", meaning neither the religious right nor the globalist libertarian right)

That original meaning may be a lost cause. The same happened to the word "hacker", though that seems to be recovering after a quarter century of having a criminal connotation. For years and years Richard Stallman would insist on the older meaning, while the general public mostly thought it only meant people writing computer viruses and invading mainframes.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#206

Post by mirimir »

tathougies wrote: post #149

Sams response to his treatment -- that men ought to have the right to be presumed innocent -- seems the only reasonable reaction. The mother should be ashamed of herself for believing that men should not have rights. The father too i presume

Well of course it is. And the system really put him through hell. He had to change schools, and lost all of his friends.

But you're being unfair to his parents. They did all they could to fight it. And they paid a lot to put him in private school.

Still, he did overreact. And he eventually agreed with his parents that he overreacted.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#207

Post by stevenwoo »

chii wrote: post #156
bytematic wrote: post #65

That was a great article, I think this is a big problem right now. I'm not sure how I would handle it as a parent. Two things that stood out to me were the principal/officers at the public school and how they dealed with that situation, or even the girl that reported Sam. I wonder if they know what they created. Also this part: "I liked them because they were adults and they thought I was an adult. I was one of them,…

Every kid goes thru the phase where they want to be acknowledged, and their views verified by others (despite that they don't actually know their own views, and is still absorbing). Those who would want to prey on this can take advantage. It's the role of the parents and public institutions like schools, to teach right from wrong. In this story, the school failed, but the parents tried and got lucky. But you can imag…

No need to imagine, here's a headline from late 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/teen-char...

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#208

Post by austincheney »

This article sounds like a mother immersed in social media not parenting her child’s social media access. There is probably some level of gullibility and influence from each of their online habits.

I don’t have any sympathy for the problems here, and I can say that as a parent of two teenagers. Parent your damn children and stop relying on media to form your opinions for you. The cliche some of friends use to explain this failure is: You’ve made your bed, now sleep in it.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#209

Post by anigbrowl »

crsv wrote: post #167

It’s a very well written piece, but it just feels too well written, to the point of feeling to precise, too calculated, too... contrived. Aside from the opinions expressed, the ideological concerns, the relevance to the current political landscape - these are all relevant and interesting explorations, but the whole narrative is just too picture perfect and too close to a screenplay. It just feels like good fiction.

It's a sort of standard form for human interest articles. Much like a movie, it might be better if it were were more open-ended or reflected the untidiness of life, but many people want reassurance and a minimum of loose ends. The unusually young subject makes it more of a parenting article than a political study IMHO.

Re: What happened after my 13-year-old son joined the alt-right

#210

Post by woofie11 »

iron0013 wrote: post #114
ukulele wrote: post #13

> He would be offline for a month and would need other mods to cover for him. To ask for help, he had to out himself as a kid. I wonder to what extent the alt-right actually is a young teen movement, with adults mixed in (being the ones who show in person). Is there any at least semi-reliable data on this?

Regardless of how it started, it’s seemed pretty clear to me that the alt-right has been a very deliberate vehicle for the radical right to recruit young people for quite some time now.

The damning thing is the alt-right is very occasionally right. This one stuck out at me:

> I trained myself to freeze my facial expression into something neutral so that when I countered Sam’s remarks—“Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective.

A big chunk of the alt-right is precisely divorced dads drawn in, or people drawn to their stories, and the insane racist, sexist, and other baggage comes along. Much of the far-left is precisely people drawn to horror stories from LGBTQ members or African Americans who join a community and bring along similarly insane baggage for the ride.

I'm pretty convinced that unless the left manages to find a way to dive into alt-right ideology, with an open mind, and bring in the very few sane pieces, and change their opinions about the places that their reasoning is wrong, the alt-right will be able to keep recruiting.

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