i went into a pro sjw arc because they had cooler hair

My college education included some philosophy, So aside from the blatant fascism, it always made me cringe that the alt right was convinced that philosophy meant you could just say whatever with conviction and that was "your take on philosophy" pure anti intellectualism, Jordan Peterson was a pioneer on this shit and he ruined a generation across the isle.

Could never be me, the aesthetics are too unappealing.

I was 35 in 2015 and was already firmly an ancom and hated the anti-SJW bullshit

I probably could've fallen into the anti-sjw thing because I did think they were cringy but it was always the same joke and I always felt that even though they were cringy they at least meant well so I didn't see the point in watching a dumbass sjw cringe compilation.

I have always considered Social Justice Warriors to be reformist libs to my right and attack them only on those grounds.

I've had (and have) all sorts of bad ideas but this isn't one of them. Was too busy organizing IRL during gamergate to know about it. Had the vague impression that there was something going with sexism in video games, correctly surmised it was fash in origin/trajectory. It was in the context of a larger misogynist resurgence that I had personally been aware of for over 10 years prior so I saw in that context, rather than in the online context as others here. I've had to watch/listen/read multiple "explainers" to now have a grasp on the story there.

Despite my trash-tier politics for much of that timeframe, I didn't fall for the anti-SJW pipeline because they're just an offshoot of G*mergate and I didn't fall for G*mergate because:

1. I actually played Depression Quest before the controversy. The controversy is nonsense when you realize Depression Quest is a free-to-play Twine game that took an hour to play. Whether the review is biased or not is less important than the fact that the entire game cost an hour of your time at most and that people who don't like VMs would only waste like 5 minutes. You didn't even need to run an .exe file since you could just play it online.

2. Speaking of game made from Twine, the talking point of pre-G*mergate g*mers was how VMs and walking simulators like Dear Esther weren't real games^TM^. All that talk about VMs being fake games went out the window when a certain Twine game got involved because suddenly g*mers would look really fucking stupid to mald about games that aren't even real games^TM^.

3. Game journos being shitty at playing videogames and corrupt isn't remotely news at that point. There's Nintendo Power being glorified ads for Nintendo games. There's game journos defending the crappy color endings of ME3. But perhaps the most infamous of all was Jeff Gerstmann getting fired from Gamespot because he gave Kane & Lynch a mediocre review. So of course, it's sus as fuck when the straw that broke the camel's back was a positive review of a free online VM that took only an hour to complete instead of journos shilling for AAA slop that cost people real money.

I didn't like how they talked about trans women

Too old for that shit

I was definitely in the pipeline, being the prime demographic for this type of stuff as a socially awkward teenager in the suburbs and I ended up in some pretty awful online circles. There's a lot of different factors that all combined to get me out. One thing was the fact that I'm not white so I had to have this conversation with myself where I realized "Why the hell am I as a non-white person defending white people so hard?" Also, once I realized that these channels and sites were part of an entire industry that profits off of making people like me mad about things that don't really happen in real life, dismissing this whole thing as slop became a lot easier.

I like to joke that being an Undertale fan as a teen saved me from completely going down the pipeline but honestly it's kinda true. I think deep down, I was uncomfortable with the cruelty and the layers and layers of irony that people like Leafy covered their content in - I realized that punching down actually didn't make me feel that good and that browsing KiwiFarms always left me feeling really gross about what I had just spent the last hour of my life doing - and the games taught me that it's ok to be genuine and kind. I didn't really internalize those messages until a few years later, but having them in my mind helped.

Also I stopped being 16 and learned how the world actually works

I was fortunately already a communist and an when GamerGate took off, so at that point I could immediately see through all the bullshit.

But during the direct pre-cursor of that era, the so called New Atheism era (2004-2014), I did go down the "militant atheist" pipeline, which was rife with islamophobes and sexists. That era ended up spawning both the reactionary anti-SJW pipeline and the progressive ones that were in opposition post-GamerGate.

I think what probably helped me avoid the anti-SJW pipeline, is that despite considering myself a militant atheist and a progressive lib from the late 2000s to the early 2010s, I was still very critical of capitalism. I just didn't know anything about socialism and communism yet, as I went to a few Occupy protests to show solidarity. I also remember spamming Facebook with infographics criticizing capitalist greed, and articles about the destruction in Syria at the beginning of the civil war, because the MSM was ignoring it. It took a few years before I realized I was not a anymore, which coincidentally happened at the same time as GamerGate and the whole reactionary backlash to progressive politics began.

So yeah, I guess I was lucky. It makes sense that becoming more class conscious and anti-imperialist helps you become more resistant to reactionary trash.

I remember being subscribed to sargon of akkad for a little bit. Maybe I thought he was doing history videos because of his name? I was a hardcore liberal by the start of gamergate, and didn't know very much about the world as I was basically a child. I eventually realized his videos went against my politics and stopped watching. There was an intermediate phase where I watched 'breadtube'. By 2020 I was deep into the chapo/MR/TMBS/hasan ecosystem. Shortly after my views solidified into what they are today (correct about everything and grounded in reality of course)

I only had access to the internet from 2014 onwards, and during my first few years online, I didn't have much time because I shared a computer with five siblings. I actually spent most of my time watching Naruto episodes on YouTube, in terrible quality and with each episode split into ten videos. internet contracts were far too expensive for my family before 2014. That's probably why I didn't notice any of this. Thank god.

I did, but sort of eventually just noticed that all the "jokes" were really repetitive and didn't actually seem to be jokes. Plus I listened to one Sargon thing and was like "this guy is whiny as hell", which kind of put me on the the fact that all these people were dorks whining endlessly about people (furries for example) who weren't actually hurting anyone. Then gamergate happened and I was like "holy shit, these people are unbelievable no-lifes"

I fell into the "New Atheist" "anti-feminist" pipeline a little bit in college, but I was also getting into academic philosophy at the time. This was a mistake of a different kind, but it did at least let me realize that those people had terrible arguments and that the feminists and commies were actually the ones making sense and putting forward reasonable claims.

Briefly in 2015 I stumbled upon a blog that covered human biology, and then a couple more interlinked. Kinda got a bad feeling after an hour of reading it, kept on hate-reading it for another few days, realized "yeah, these are racists, bye". Went back to the Wokemon fedbook page and anarchist online spaces.

When Gamergate was happening, my biggest concern with games was "all the people with the best stats are the ones who can afford better PCs and premium subscriptions and other ingame store items". Not having a predictable income to amply support myself made me start to radicalize through my online gaming experience. I think it was on a gaming forum that I was linked to Capitalism and other Kids' Stuff.

i was raised in a polish catholic household. my father pointed at black people in public and said "look at that monkey!" - my father told me homosexuals are disgusting. my father midgendered a family member who transitioned at every opportunity with a mocking tone. i got severe brainrot from that and my underage ass had unsupervised internet access... you can figure out how that went. i had all these brainworms, was active on 4chan and posted stupid shit like "haha 13/52" - as soon as i turned 18 and experienced freedom i realized i was queer and was coping all my life. due to my job i also got a sense of community with people of different races and backgrounds. i never approved of my dads overt racism (thank god), so i didn't alienate my new community. that's when i realized the media landscape i surrounded myself with was against me and the people who positively influenced me. from there on it took like 2 years to get "healed". i probably have skeletons in my closet and ongoing brainworms - but i learned to accept my past and my influences. and i learned to change my mind and question my own opinions. i'm not a saint tho but i'm willing to learn :3

I have to admit the first time I watched a Jordan Lobster Peterson video around 2015 I found it funny how he made left wing liberals mad although I disliked his pseudoscience and anticommunism from the start.

I grew up evangelical so I was just kinda raised to be that way. I fell into the Peterson self-help stuff as a 19 year old with no direction and some of his misogynistic stuff just echoed what I was raised with so I took it at face value. His vitriol towards trans people was what turned me off to him and the whole alt-right as a whole.

I had a trans coworker/friend in high school and the way he was treated in our town was horrific. I was a “I disagree with your lifestyle but I defend your right to do it”-type teenage boy. My politics could be summed up as “leave me alone” like a lot of young men and no one would just leave him alone. That was probably the catalyst for me not being a chud. It was all just too mean for no reason. I ran into him a couple years back and he is married and very happy.

I was raised to treat people with love and empathy and I really internalized all of that. So when I came of age and had to deal with the disconnect I chose my values of love and empathy over dogma. From there it was very easy to shift left. Solidarity with all marginalized people goes hand in hand with love and empathy.

Its not the sjw pipeline or anything but back in the day I fell for ancient aliens until I decided to look up the shit they were talking about.

I came out of the Bush years as a liberal atheist skeptic teen and voted for Obama in 2008. Obama disappointed by 2012 and the libertarian stuff seemed kind of appealing. After all I was a very rational, logical person and didn't understand why people in charge didn't want to do the rational, logical thing. By 2014 I realized the libertarian thing was another dead-end and went back towards something more liberal. Gamergate was not appealing at all. I hated all that shit being spammed on 4chan and reddit. It always came off as sexist and manufactured. I did struggle with the ideas about privilege but not enough to join that clown show. By 2015 I was with Bernie. By 2016 I was jaded. My material conditions degraded enough to make me very angry. Luckily it was also around the time there was plenty of socialist rhetoric in the right places. I simply got lucky in the internet social media paremovedo machine. I bounced off the right pegs to place me in a position where I wanted change and socialism could provide it.

Then I kept finding footholds on bits of theory and history, slowly learning more and more. Podcasts helped out with some of that. Thanks to Trump enough shit kept happening to provide ample examples of why capitalism and liberalism is failing. Then COVID broke everything and that was it.

I think watching the internet be taken over by social media companies and then this engagement through outrage machine being built is kind of like watching industrialization take over the world. One minute you're an artisan in 2003, in IRC, in AIM, on a php forum. The next you're on the street outside of the "this totally real issue that's really important and everyone should pay attention to because it's why your life sucks, not us" factory. In retrospect it's so obvious what all of it was for, even going back to 2008 and Ron Paul's meme machine. The game was rigged from the beginning.

Why is James Rolfe there?

What shook me out of my alt-right funk was poverty, rehab, and mental health issues, quickly made me realize that those people I had been shitting on? They were my friends not my enemies.

back in 2014 I used to be really mad about anita sarkeesian and feminism in general. Would religiously watch new atheist youtube channels like the amazing atheist and thunderfoot, who were all on the anti-feminism train back then. Wouldn't describe it as a "pipeline" - I was just a dumb kid who thought being an atheist made him a genius

What made me change is, ironically, watching a few sargon of akkad videos. The guy was consistantly dishonest about what feminists actually believed which was clear to me even back then. Also he was an obvius right-winger despite claiming to be a "left-wing liberal". I always thought of myself as a left-wing person and the prevalence of right wing grifters in the new atheism space made me question everything I previously believed about feminism

This was also when "breadtube" started to take shape and these people helped me understand why I was wrong about things I thought. To anyone who still remembers Libertarian Socialist Rants, Kevin Logal, Kristi Winters - you are my people

Let's seeee, I'm from a very conservative country, I was raised to be polite but that didn't mean not being racist or everythingphobic lol , kids pick up all kinds of brainworms from their environment, I had a lot of free time and I was a teenager, I loved gaming and having stuff to watch in the background on my phone, already a recipe for disaster.

Eventually I found all these conservative sloptubers who compalined about this and that being woke in gaming or in movies or comic books, and since I was already predisposed to that garbage I just went "yeahh that makes sense" I was watching all kinds of hogs like the Critical Drinker, a fucking loser who roleplays as a jaded alcoholic even though I bet a drop of rakia would instantly kill him, E;R, an actual staright up self-admitted nazi, other hogs who I don't remember the names of, basically none of them were good.

I was never into the more "presentable" talking heads like the Ben Shapiros and such (I thought he was a boring smarmy gay loser or something along those lines lol)

I never had a label for myself, I believed in a random mix or lib shit and unhinged nazi shit (a lot like the average American I guess) again I was a teenager and all that edgy garbage was very appealing to me (think old Filthy Frank and Idubbbz, also two massive losers), it was like a secret club of online dorks who weren't "afraid to offend anyone" you can clearly see why that would be appealing to loners with too much free time.

Oh and one more thing, there was never anyone to tell me no, be it family members, people irl (who were all extremely conservative and would easily agree with everything had I shared my thoughts) or my online friends at the time, who were a random mix of mostly Americans, all of them some shade of "apolitical" people or just straight up liberals

How did I get out? I'm not too sure, I think one day I was just hearing the same rediculous arguments on repeat, over and over again, I guess what was my limit and I snapped, I was genuinely too angry at these sloptubers and such for being too terminally online losers (even tho I was also one lol ) so I decided to look around for other slop to consume, this is where the libbed up Breadtubers came in, they were the other side of the coin, I was checking their dedicated subreddits and hearing ahh they are so good and smart, you GOTTA check this and that person out! (🚩)

Then I watched a fuckton of the "classic Breadtubers", I liked how they dunked on the conservatives, but when it came to their actual politics I was rubbed the wrong way, things just weren't clicking, I remember watching Contrapoints a lot (🚩🚩🚩) and if you know anything about what she's done throughout the years you'd understand why I was again feeling tired and angry (one example, the disgusting transphobic comments she made about another trans woman who was being recorded after yelling at a cashier for being misgendered, that was from the Cringe video)

I didn't want to believe that this was it, there had to be something more out there, and well in time after searching here and there I stumbled upon actual leftist spaces, took a bit to deprogram myself from both the hog and lib strains of

So who is to blame? Well I think that sadly a lot of things aligned in just the right way and I got caught up in the pipeline, my upbringing, the lack of different alternatives at a first glance, the YT algo pushing that garbage so much, nobody telling me no, and honestly I blamed myself a lot as well, but I'm bit happy with where I am now, took a while but I try when I can to nudge things in the right way by talking to people when I find it appropriate (be it online or rarely irl when I get the chance) I don't want to see young people repeating my mistakes, guarding against brainworms seems like a neverending process lol.

I guess the moral of the story is to never get too comfy and to keep on trying to improve yourself and learn new things.

Fortunately by that time, I already fell out of the libertarian pipeline, after realizing it was just fascism with extra steps. The rise of the anti-sjw stuff then pushed me away and made it clear they were never serious about supporting gays with guns growing weed.

Sidenote: It's fucking insane how my early views on American empire were informed by Ron Paul. He was the only person who would bring up CIA coups in Guatemala and Iran, or how the US supported Saddam du8rring the Iran-Iraq war. He talked about the drug war, and how much violence that spread through latin america. He was the only person saying that Al Qaeda had political reasons for terrorism, it wasn't just random anti-western violence. I learned the term "Blowback" from him. I think I even read Manufacturing Consent because of him. But I conveniently ignored all of his christofascist views, since that could be chalked up to "states' rights". Yes, I was dumb

I grew up before that. I grew up in a conservative church household. That was more easy to fall off the pipeline. I have a touch of tisim so the programing simply failed to take. I don't think it is through any virtue of mine. Just like rascism is obviously wrong you know? In that the this new conservative movement exists, I dunno if I would have naturally fallen out as easily. It has much more market tested hooks. Some early anti-sjws were scientists and queer people. So my brian would have had to develop alot more before I feel out of it.

I was in the gamergate muck and on the kia subreddit back in 2014, but I had been a leftist for a while then. I built some credibility in the community when it still had the thinnest veneer of being apolitical (lol) and did my best to keep people from falling into the obvious right wing reactionary pipeline. That was a losing proposition so eventually I pulled out.

I would browse the tumblrinaction subreddit when I was like 14 but it sort of radicalized me in the Tumblr direction lol. "Wait a minute they're making some good points here" type shit. Then chapotraphouse turned me stalinist.

i was a kid and was just starting to understand english, and fell through the pewdiepie pipeline. i don't think i sincerely believed anything it was just entertainment for me, but it was poisoning the assumptions i would hold about the world. anyway i stopped when i got recommended a video from paul joseph watson talking about 'no-go' zones in sweden and how filthy muslims are. safe to say after realising these guys are racist as fuck and how smug and pathetic they are i stopped following them.

i cannot say i was radicalised, but i was definitely passively consuming their bullshit narratives. i think the important factors for deciding to cut them off for my adolescent brain was that a. i realized how uncool and spiteful they are and b. i was part of the group they hated.

I think the only reason that I didn't fall for it with Oneyplays is because DD&J would largely mock him for it, though he and Zach had already curated anti-sjw audiences with sleepy cabin so that's just a thing I get be aware of any time smiling friends comes up.