This article by a mom whose teenaged son joined the alt-right is very interesting and insightful
She writes about how it all started, and how it ended, and what motivated him to join and then leave. I'm the last person to give a damn about white supremacists' feelings, but for those who aren't permanently lost but who joined because of their need to feel like part of a community, it does have some insights.
https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/05/05/what-happened-after-my-13-year-old-son-joined-the-alt-right/
Who was living upstairs in the room with the bunk beds, surrounded by glow-in-the-dark solar-system decals? I couldn’t understand how this had happened. The situation was ludicrously overdetermined, as contrived as a bad movie. My husband and I poured everything we had into nurturing an empathetic, observant child. Until then, it had seemed to be working. Teachers and family friends had always commented on Sam’s kindness and especially his gentleness toward the “underdog.” Then an internet chorus of alt-right sirens sings their song of American History X to my kid and he turns into the evil twin of Alex P. Keaton: merciless, intolerant, unwilling to extend the benefit of the doubt to anyone.
snip
Soon Sam stopped trying to convince me to join his brave new world. He was so active on his favorite subreddit that the other group leaders, unaware that he was 13, appointed him a moderator. Among his new online besties, this was a huge honor and a boost to his cratered self-esteem. He loved Reddit and its unceasing conversations about the nuances of memes—he seemed in love with the whole enterprise, as if it were an adolescent crush.
But as Sam became a courtier among Reddit royalty, it became clear that meme-world was subject to a hierarchy as rigid and byzantine as England’s class system. If users didn’t follow the rules, they got humiliated publicly. The worst offenders were people who posted “normie” memes—pictures with upper-case slogans across the top and bottom. My husband and I started to hear a lot about normies, “normie culture,” and how normies were ruining the internet and destroying what they (meme insiders?) worked so hard to achieve. Sam and his fellow Redditors used language that was often violently hostile: Not only did normies have no right to dare participate in meme-world; they had no right to live. Literally.
snip
I began to see how white supremacists have been benefiting from what the writer Carole Cadwalladr has called the “circular knowledge economy”—how search algorithms feed an internet so ravenous for content that facts are optional. But worse, I discovered how expertly extremists have leveraged the web to prey on young people who are depressed. Search for the term “depression” on YouTube, and the professional-looking white supremacists lecturing on self-empowerment might have you nodding in agreement, too.
(There's a lot about the culture that I didn't know about; it's upsetting but useful to know the world so many of the alt-right live in. Luckily, this story has a happy ending.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
