Beware of the pipeline
Teenagers like validation.
You don't need me to tell you this. Pretty much any kid from the age of like 13 all the way to... honestly, their early 20s can be absolutely obsessed with social validation. Puberty hits and kids are funneled into conformity at schools that demand they set aside a block of their day towards the same shit over and over again.
When kids are thrown into school, they simultaneously want to fit in and stand out.
If they're forced to whip out an iron every day and throw on a stuffy uniform, they'll wear shoes that slightly push the limits of the dress code. Fuck it, I might be forced to wear a polo and khakis every day but I'm still gonna throw on my Yeezys. At the same time, if someone talks shit about them, they might just show up with a different pair of sneakers just to feel acknowledged.
This is just a normal part of being a teenager. Same thing applies to politics at that age.
The vast majority of middle-class teens in America aren't really endowed with years of experience working and engaging with the real world. When there are really no consequences to strong opinions you pick up on the Internet, it becomes real easy to get sucked into an unhealthy feedback loop of bad takes.
If you're a fucking loser like I was in high school, you probably don't have a lot to boast or show off. Fashion isn't really something some teens (especially those dealing with poverty) care about, and you can't even get academic clout because you're just above average and not top of class. That's a lot of kids, and for a lot of kids, the way they stand out -- the way they feel a sense of belonging with a larger group -- is by seeing smug videos with politics contrary to what they hear around them and following suit.
It's opening YouTube in 2015 to watch Ben Shapiro own stupid latte-drinking college students.
Teens' favorite form of self-validation can often be contrarianism.
I can't stress enough how widespread these corny ass liberal owning videos were (and, honestly still are) back in 2014-2017.
While before I had been around more conservative, white cultures due to where elementary and middle school were located, as well as church, high school was different. If you live in an urban, fairly liberal, black neighborhood and region like I did post middle school, it's really easy to look at the left-leaning beliefs of everyone around you -- parents, teachers, friends -- and respond in turn with "counter-culture" beliefs about how everyone around you is bluepilled.
They don't know that transgenderism is a lie!
They think racism is real... and yet all they talk about is race!
Simple, logical conclusions you can reach from watching too much Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro, pretty mild neoconservative types that got a stranglehold on 2010s YouTube. It's not a coherent ideology, it's just pointing and laughing at people that are framed as silly dishonestly.
Eventually, though, I started to get curious: What exactly ARE these people's beliefs?
What became a matter of sitting down and watching hours of SJW owned compilations turned into looking at conservative subreddits. Looking at Discord while it was in its early days. Just saying shit and being validated by my own friend group which had no real coherent beliefs either but thought the things I was saying were cool.
Feeling out of place in high school, still dealing with puberty, depression, and (in retrospect) gender dysphoria, I found a new thing to be known by. I was the kid that raised their hand in class to debate the teacher. Started out as simple things like fervently arguing against rent control despite never having paid any or worked a job in my life, but eventually, I got dragged into arguing for IQ differences in races.
Scrolling through old /pol/ threads, learning about IQ tier lists where Ashkenazi Jews and Anglos were at top and my own, disgusting, mangy race were at the bottom, sitting in edgelord DMs where I built up tolerance for walls of slurs, and eventually starting and obsessively engaging with threads myself. 4chan, 8chan, Reddit, Discord, YouTube comments sections, I was everywhere.
And it was so fucking EASY to just happen. When you're convinced you know the truth, and when every white bald charlatan with a mic is calling you red-pilled, you don't even question it. That's why I don't understand the surprise and bewilderment at a lot of kids getting swept up into the alt-right. I'm not defending the kind of person I was, I was a dumb 9th and 10th grader with zero work experience or meaningful real-world socialization. But you can see that it's not unreasonable.
Teens' brains are developing and not set in stone.
The main thing that had me turn around was just engaging with the world around me more. As a black person, I'm already accustomed to code-switching around different people -- I'm not using tons of AAVE around white coworkers, but it's a different story with the niggas on my block. Expand that to having to present myself as an innocuous liberal when it came to extracurricular outings or interviews or whatever, and I realized how much more comfortable and genuine I was that way.
I have to admit late 2010s BreadTube was the biggest factor in me turning around. Not a huge fan of how insufferably white they can be, but seeing that same niche, yet engaging media presence on the Internet drew me away from the dredges of Chud City. Broke off a lot of friendships and left a lot of Discord servers, but nowadays I'm able to rest easy knowing I consider race realism some bullshit and actually seek to improve the state of the world rather than hold it stagnant.
I'm not telling ANYONE to engage with dumb, edgy teens. I get that different types of people have different levels of tolerance for that shit. But what I AM advocating for are creating healthier, more interesting communities for kids to feel "weird" and contrarian in. Don't let them act like me.
M.