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

> “Feminists keep divorced dads from seeing their kids” was a favorite—it would seem as if I’d actually considered his perspective.

Except that feminism actively derides both the gender norms that say mothers are better caregivers and the US court system's bias against fathers in child custody rulings. There is literally decades of literature and other sources on these points.

A old, common talking point and accusation is that feminism is equivalent to female supremacy, and antifeminist groups recruit men who feel emasculated by women[1]:

> A second set of texts presents varieties of the contemporary masculinist response. Like its earlier incarnation, contemporary masculinist response is split between efforts to dislodge women's supremacy in the private sphere and support for men who are "wounded" in the struggle to exude an aura of masculinity in the public sphere.

> Men's challenges to women's perceived parental monopoly come from men's rights groups such as the Coalition for Free Men, Men's Rights International, and Men Achieving Liberation and Equality (MALE), as well as numerous fathers' support groups. These groups often deny that men have power in society, arguing that male supremacy is an illusion, along the lines of the illusion of the chauffeur: "he's dressed in the uniform and he looks like he's in the driver's seat," noted Warren Farrell, "but from his perspective someone else is giving the orders" (cited in Woldenberg 1986, p. 10). Masculinist texts claim that women and men are "equally oppressed" (Baumli 1986) and rail against perceived institutionalized female privileges, such as exemptions from the draft and advantages in alimony, child custody, and child support (Goldberg 1976; Haddad 1979). One critical review of these texts summarized their claims as follows:

> > Men, they say, are emotionally and sexually manipulated by women, forced into provider roles where they work themselves to death for their gold-digger wives, kept from equal participation and power in family life, and finally dumped by wives only to have courts and lawyers give all the property, money, and child custody to the women. (Messner 1986, p. 32)

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/189564

If you have the option of a Sudbury school nearby, you may want to look into that for your kids. The students and staff run the school jointly and students get down to the business of living life instead of doing bs work. Students are part of an accepting and just community which gives them all a compassionate and tempered view towards others. The price is giving up the gold stars (academic metrics of success) and simply accepting that a child has an inherent drive to find a successful path in life if given the opportunity to pursue it in a supportive environment.

The community as a whole is responsible for deciding on the rules and what to do when they are violated, including possible expulsion (student) / firing (staff) though, being a community, such things happen only as very last resorts. Everyone gets to tell their side of the story and the community decides as best it can with no one in a position of needing to do a knee-jerk response to cover themselves. Compassion and limits coexist.

Maybe so. I don't recall seeing his name, back in the day, but Wikipedia tells me that he's done lots that I would have agreed with. Biosphere2, for example, SF fan that I am. And that movie about Ronald Reagan. But the rest of it is batshit insane, like something out of Hunter Thompson. A right-wing Wavy Gravy.

What do you mean by right-wing? Does right-wing automatically mean something negative? It seems to me that to you right-wing means something bad. I don't have that kind of association.

To address your first point, I disagree it's a strawman. My personal opinion and what I'm arguing here is that yes, it is indeed an (unhealthy) obsession. I'm an expat. I lived outside my home country longer than I lived there. I bounced around Europe, Asia and US. I've never heard much Nazis except the constant coverage from US media that emerged in last few years.

I agree that comment was only tangential to the article. But every time someone says Nazis I raise my eyebrows and think "who are those Nazis they speak of"? I've only been to New York, DC, Bay Area and few other places in US and I've never seen a Nazi.

I'm happy to concede that what I've said was somewhat off-topic though.

To address your second point, while the bulk of the article talks about alt-right, Nazis and American History X are mentioned, and I think that makes discussing them fair game. Because this article does not exist in vacuum.

Thank you for taking the time to explain your downvote though.

I think I could substitute "obsessed" for "preoccupied" in the future :)

I have a son this age (and some familiarity with his encounters online) and I found it eminently believable.

I think I'll have him read it.