…huh. I didn’t see that coming.

Honestly better left wing than right wing I think, even if they’re stance on the wing is… questionable, to say the least. Though I say that with the benefit of hindsight.

I’m not proud of it, but long ago I myself fell into some of those spaces actually. And not to get into all of it now but I can absolutely see what leads one to have those perspectives, and I also think to some extent I am uniquely qualified to challenge those perspectives becaus, and ofc this doesn’t go for everyone, but for many I’ve associated with the hardline posturing comes more from a defensive paranoia perspective than any will to opress or subjugate anyone. That was certainly always true for me, I’m trans ffs, I never wanted to opress anyone. But the opinion you’ll run into at the heart of the authoritative left wing is that control is necessary to secure freedoms and prevent the new society from collapsing from outside influence. If you can challenge that core assumption (and also misinfo about Soviet Union etc. but that’s a whole other topic), you can actually make meaningful dialouge.

But by far the thing that kept me in those communities for the longest time was the sense that anyone on the outside would not accept us for our beliefs and could not be trusted, and when all my friends and social connections were in those spaces it was in my interest not to deviate from the line, leading to a kind of spiraling of radical opinions in an echochamber. The thing that brought me out of it was an anarchist extending her hand and us just getting along well on a fundamental level, and not judging me for the beliefs that I’d fallen into or calling me stupid or anything else but just challenging them on an intellectual basis and having evidence to back up her arguments.

I suppose the best takeaway from all of this is that if any time you push someone away, you simultaneously push them closer towards the group that is influencing them. And I get it, sometimes it really isn’t worth the energy to deradicalize people, especially those who are truly fargone. But I think it’d be a mistake to ostracize everyone from the outset.

Sorry for the long response, I got a lot more vulnerable here than I was really planning on 😅

Thanks for listening to my ted talk lmaoo