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

Is activism completely useless though? I do think most of it, in particular group-focused preaching is probably very close to religion and soccer teams in engagement, with little critical thinking. However, there is probably a role for voicing opinions and even stating publicly (as in "the emperor has no clothes"). Not everyone is fully informed and those networks of opinions can have a significant/important impact I imagine. Then again this occurs inside close circles.

As mentioned elsewhere, I think by far the greatest threat to democracy is groups enclosing themselves, forming rigid identities like has happened to right-wing (and some left-wing) groups in the West: this makes them far easier to manipulate (by tying propositions one wouldn't accept together with the collective identity). This effect has been amplified massively by technology. You can stay insulated by exactly what you want to hear by visiting certain sources exclusively, or worse -- most people are being isolated automatically.

The solution to this seems quite obvious: if technology is fostering isolation, it could instead foster contact with distinct ideologies, by default. Give more weight (through visibility) to long, well thought out arguments instead of short quips and 'likes'; have some kind of diversity bonus (where people a certain 'ideological distance' away are not given lower weight).

The problem is enforcing this kind of structure on social networks. If most people get a large chunk of their information from social networks, we're being controlled by an obscure algorithm that's probably not in our best interest (instead simply driven by simple profit measures). Given how large and impactful Facebook (and Youtube, Twitter) is, I don't think it should be out of question to regulate those algorithms somehow (given repeated failure to self-regulate). We should have a right for seeing the algorithm implementation, have an option to upload a curation algorithm (given some specified API), and if we want select from a few sensible options, like simple chronological ordering, to the aforementioned civil-discourse-promoting ones (which should probably be the default).

I'm glad she was able to help her son disengage from the alt-right movement. Reasonable folks on all sides of the political spectrum ought to be condemning them.

As an aside, I think we need to do a better job of defining what the alt-right is. The term seems to be used increasingly often these days as a club for smacking around anybody right of center. Obviously, racist and anti-Semitic views would put one in the alt-right category, but there was one section of the article in particular that gave me pause:

They insisted that the wage gap is a fallacy, that feminazis are destroying families, that people need guns to protect themselves from government incursions onto private property.

There are plenty of intelligent and virtuous folks that believe gender wage disparities cannot be attributed entirely (or even mostly) to discrimination, that more traditional families will have a positive impact on society, and that the purpose of the 2nd amendment is to allow individuals to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. Admittedly, I've worded these views in a more nuanced way than they were described in that section of the article. However, if the more nuanced version of these views is now considered "alt-right", then I see little hope for unification and healthy debate between people of opposing views. In that case both sides ought to just retreat to their echo chambers and assume the worst about each other.

The thing is, the vast majority of parents do not have the kind of experience with the school system that our parents do. It's unreasonable to expect it.

The system should work well even for those who don't have knowledgeable parents advocating for them, because most do not, and it's a horrible waste of talent for an entire country to throw away most of their potential geniuses through lack of good education that works for everyone. I was in magnet programs my entire public school life from fourth grade, but most of my peers were similarly privileged students, because the average students' parents didn't even know about the admission exams to get into these programs, let alone how to properly study for them. I got a huge leg up on all of it.

Better safe than sorry is an excellent policy when someone else bears all the consequences.

Many things that were once considered "common knowledge" turned out to be nothing of the sort. The idea you're espousing is a damaging one that reinforces the worst stereotypes about Jews.