It's not a nice thing to have to embrace, but it's true. When Vera Papisova spent a year undercover dating right wing men, this was her takeaway, too. That part of the reason they get so radicalized is because rational people have a very hard time wanting to even try to see good things in them and socialize with them at all. Yet that isolation promotes exactly the radicalization we'd like to see less of in our society. Continually saying "no, fuck them" feels right but builds more and more echo chambers where these people are only talking to other highly toxic people in a spiral of enabling terrible thought-patterns.

It's extremely valid to feel like "why would I waste time on these monsters?" because they are indeed monstrous. Yet, we have to have a growth mindset and believe people can change, and not just believe that, but give them opportunities to change. Continuing to isolate them in right wing communities where the only viewpoints they are exposed to continue to radicalize them is not working. When they say "the liberals gave me no choice but to turn to the right" what they actually mean is no liberals or leftists would take the time to talk them down from their own idiocy, so they continued to lean into it out of pure spite, not reason. They like to call people on the left "snowflakes" but these people are so fucking broken and hurt inside and so deeply just want to be accepted that they will chop off their own limbs in an attempt to somehow teach us a lesson, as long as we get hurt, too. Desire for acceptance is literally what drove them into the MAGA Cult. They are broken and hurt because we did not accept them, despite the fact that they are too stupid to see how their own behavior is why they are not accepted.

I know many people here think the solution is to go whole hog and crack down harder on this than we did on the South during reconstruction. Unpopular opinion around here, but I disagree. I think that will create more young conservative people, because what they will see is a wide swath of people being vilified and potentially put to death by the state for their political views. They won't think "gosh those views were so dangerous they must be snuffed out" they will instead erroneously think "they must threaten the broken system that is hurting us to be snuffed out, therefore they must have had some positive ideas." We don't live in a system where people trust the decisions of government or of large groups in general. Putting them all to death (especially without trial) will just radicalize a whole generation of young people who will question why the things those people thought were so "dangerous." That doesn't mean there doesn't need to be consequences for being a part of this, there absolutely has to be, but the penchant for retributive violence on the left is going to harm things more than it will help things, in my personal opinion. It's like the US War on Terrorism. Did killing people indiscriminately win hearts and minds of the Iraqi people or did it radicalize a whole generation against the US? Because I am pretty damn sure it was the latter.