What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right

Added on May 8th, 2019 by tiki bot | Report Post
Tags:alt-right, Internets

A Washington family’s nightmare year.

But for the grace of there being no real internet at my house, this could have been me at that age.

What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right originally appeared on Internet-D on May 7, 2019.

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Brevity Truta (#948)

4 years ago

“Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff.”

Skimmed through, jumped the longass middle section, will read properly when I’m not flipping around in between work stuff (been using ticks in my dot points today, aha). It’s far too neat a narrative (that arc hits all the beats just-so) to have really happened quite that way, plus the happy ending not real sure it’s not mollifying the intended audience, “anonymous” author and all, but certainly well-thought out and speaks to some concerning matters in society. Thanks Tiki, will likely end up sharing this one elsewhere.

Kept thinking it could have all been averted if someone had a sense of humour and the ability to cut through the shit (about memes also), at the school in the first instance, parents included :/

tiki god (#1) (MCS+)

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Reply to Brevity Truta

4 years ago

The largest takeaway I had from the piece was that he was a kid struggling to grow into an adult, which is a journey that every single one of us had. In his case, he was exposed to the hypocrisy of the bureaucratic system at a young age, then not taken seriously as a maturing person by the people that needed to take him seriously. he turned to the internet where the “wrong kinds” of people took him seriously and treated him like an adult that value and had a voice that could be listened to and respected.

All the while, his parents were unable to hide the fact that they were laughing at his ideas and mocking him behind his back.

This same kind of shit happened to me around that age, but I just fell out of the church and started to realize how much bullshit everyone just accepted and didn’t think about critically. I’m sure that I said and did some totally edgy things that I wouldn’t agree with now, but it was the lack of adult support that really made me rage.

Brevity Truta (#948)

Reply to tiki god

4 years ago

Your largest takeaway is incredibly important – it’s like you’ve come in and put the point of view in the right place, with Sam (where it wasn’t and came off as too “pat” a piece); thank you for sharing a little of your story. There I was all critical/big picture read, but what is that against what you’re pointing out. I missed that the parents were laughing at him and mocking him, yikes. Didn’t imagine teenaged me online when reading it. So long ago. If my teenage self got online it’d be … a lot. Cannot imagine. just know it’d depend a lot on who I met and ran with and definitely those would not have been contended conservative people. You turned out OK Tiki, it seems, though of course that doesn’t have any bearing on your experience getting there.

Hard for me to find the words to describe my messed-up, here, don’t think I need to, but I feel ya.