If I didn’t suffer under minimum wage for 6 years I’d still probably be an enlighten centrist.

I found one of those laugh-at-right-wingers subreddits and it probably saved me from becoming an unironic fascist.

My best friend in highschool was a nazi, despite not even being white. I was going along with everything, justifying it as being just jokes and edgelord stuff and whatever. I was mostly interested in doing crimes and making jokes. I didn’t actually believe any of the nazi stuff for most of that time, but I eventually did start believing The Bell Curve-type stuff, and only about black people.

Someone on a forum that I was on posted something about racism being unscientific, and that you’re an idiot if you’re racist. I did internet research and was like “holy shit, I’m an idiot for believing any of this. I have to stop being an idiot”.

There were two other guys at school who seemed like they were just funny and edgy guys. Since I was always drawing comics during class, they asked me whether I could draw a picture of Hitler for the back of their zine. One of these guys wasn’t white, so I again didn’t take it seriously. They had also given me The Communist Manifesto to read earlier, so I didn’t think that they were nazis. Before I’d finished drawing Hitler, though, I looked through the rest of their zine, and it was legit nazi stuff. I was super creeped out, but finished the Hitler drawing anyway because I felt a bit of pressure. Then I never talked to them again.

A little bit after that, I was at my friend’s house, and we were trying to get rid of an animal that was in his garage. It wouldn’t leave, so we poked it so much with broomsticks that it was bleeding out of its eye (even though we didn’t poke it in the eye). It didn’t really have anything to do with naziism, but it felt like it did, and could see where being friends with this guy was leading. I got freaked out and said “I’m going” and ran away to my house. I never talked to him again, even though he had been my best friend… Except for 2 years later, when I wanted to buy weed and he was the only one I knew who sold weed. He tried to get me to stay and hang out, but I made an excuse and actually never talked to him again.

After that, I defaulted to being a libertarian, not realizing that being right economically was racist too. I always had doubts about it, though, because my favourite teacher had made fun of my friend (a different friend) for reading The Fountainhead. It was easy for me to get out of libertarianism on my own and become a social democrat. I eventually got better after that, but that’s the story of how I avoided right wing indoctrination.

I’ve been mostly left economically my adult life but I was almost duped for a while: even though I’m older I somewhat bought into the whole gamergate nonsense (though to be honest, I still don’t understand what actually happened), SJWs being problematic, and the work place mentality that feminism is destroying the functionality of working men in modern society.

Almost.

At some point about 5 or 6 years ago, someone said, why does everyone hate SJWs? Who doesn’t want social justice?

That forced me to rethink things. While I still believe that many of our social issues are rooted in bad economic policy, advocating for social justice can lay bare all of the problems social inadequacies touch. And people wanting fair and equal treatment isn’t bad; in fact, it’s never bad.

Anyhow, that’s how I ended up almost thinking like a right wing dipshit in the modern age for a little while. I have to hand it to right wing propagandists: they know how to frame an argument. The lack of response from the Left in popular culture is shocking because being Left is fucking logical as it gets. But much like our elected body, there are only 2 trains of thought in the media: the right wing attack line and the limp-dick liberal all-sides-are-equal semi rebuke.