no one:
20+ year old ‘progressive’ men on twitter: haha did anyone have a neonazi phase when they were 14? god i’m so embarrassed looking back. that’s a thing people went through when they were kids, right? we were so crazy on 4chan! can everyone in the replies please validate that i’m not alone and i’m a good person? please?
Please don’t forget that nazi movements specifically prey on minors, especially teenage white boys, because they know that they can radicalize them and isolate them from friends and family. Grown ass men do this because they spent their childhoods being preyed upon and groomed by actual nazis and want to be able to cope with it and reach out for support.
Acting like every person who escaped the alt-right and is trying to move on is just “fake-woke” or just trying to sweep their past under the rug not only becomes ammunition for these hate groups to use to keep their members radicalized and isolated (”see what the left thinks of you? They’ll never accept you so you have to stay with us”) but also ignores the very real problem that is how often young men are being targeted and groomed into the alt-right in online spaces especially.
You’re right, it shouldn’t be normalized. Being a bigot shouldn’t be considered a normal part of childhood that every kid is just naturally inclined to, and nobody should use that as an excuse to clear themselves of wrongdoing. I will say though that being wrong and having bad opinions is most definitely a normal part of childhood, because when you’re a child you’re easy to imprint on and often change your opinions a lot because you’re changing a lot as a person. I was an antifeminist when I was 13 because I was impressionable and heard my parents and smug youtube people say it so I just assumed it to be true because everyone told me it was. The only thing that isn’t normal is when that part of your life where you’re most impressionable is used to radicalize and brainwash you, which the alt-right often does.
So no, actually there are a LOT of people who went through a “nazi phase” or any other right-leaning phase that they moved on from after finally being able to break free from alt-right propaganda, and there’s no shame in that because they were literal children being manipulated and targeted by grown adults. I’ve seen people in the notes saying that it shouldn’t be used as an excuse for past behavior, and I couldn’t agree more. There is a reason behind it though, and people reaching out to talk about how they were manipulated into the alt-right doesn’t make them fake progressives.
Here’s a really good video explaining this much more eloquently than I could. The phenomenon is often referred to as the alt-right pipeline, or sometimes pewdiepipeline named after pewdiepie and how he became a starting point for many young men’s interactions with alt-right ideology:
Holy shit, that’s such a good take! Nobody’s born “woke”, all of us just get radicalized in one direction or another as we grow up and it’s important to make sure we keep people as possible on our side no matter how far they swung in the opposite direction before they got here