Weaponized Insecurity: The Far Right, 4Chan, and Teenage Boys

I recently sat down to chat with a friend from back home.  I met him in high school when I admittedly thought he was a pretty weird guy- anti-social, extremely self-deprecating, always trying to make the edgiest jokes, and self-identified politically on the right.  Since then, he has gone through major changes as he had to question his beliefs and values- just as any small-town American moved to a university has to do. Throughout my years of knowing him, I had never known the extent that his beliefs had gone.  He wishes to remain unnamed in the telling of his story (for this reason I will not be uploading a picture in this post), but he believes it is an important one nonetheless.  

Middle school is generally a terrible time for most.  It’s awkward, everyone feels like an outsider, and kindness can be hard to come by.  Friendships are difficult to form and maintain, so a sense of loneliness is inevitable for some during this time in their lives.  However, for my friend, let’s call him Joe, making friends wasn’t actually that hard. He never had to sit alone at lunchtime, but he also didn’t really invite many people over to his house after school.  Even in a room filled with people, he still felt lonely through the fake smiles and superficial jokes. “I guess I didn’t really know how to genuinely interact with people. I was weird and awkward, and when you’re that young you don’t realize that everyone is going through the same stuff as you.  You feel very alone in this struggle,” he reflects.  

Joe would wait for the school days to be over, just so he could race back home and get on his computer.  He would spend hours a day on websites like iFunny and 4Chan, laughing at seemingly harmless memes. He shares them and gets positive responses from other people he met online- they had the same sense of humor.  Joe finds it easiest to connect with people this way, behind the mask of the screen. He can say whatever he wants and no one can call him out or tell him he is wrong. With three older brothers, that’s a pretty nice thing to get away from.  “I was meeting people I would never have met in our little town. I even had a gay friend that I met online who was a part of our community. It made me feel like some of the things we were saying, that I knew were homophobic were okay, because here is a young gay boy validating them.  I later realized that internalized homophobia played a big role in this boy’s life,” Joe states. The more time he spent online, the more cynical and edgy jokes became. It started off with a few Anti-Semetic memes here and there. “You chuckle about it at first because you can in the privacy of your own computer,” he elaborates.  But then, you give it more thought. You think that this must be a stereotype for a reason, and therefore maybe it’s true. Then, you see a racist meme, laugh about it at first, but then wonder if there is any truth to that as well.  

Soon enough, you are laughing about racism, homophobia, and sexism as if it doesn’t exist- as if you are the victim to this society. Your fear drives your xenophobia.  You start to feel that you really are alone and that your very way of life is under attack. “I know it’s not logical, but my loneliness started manifesting in a really toxic way.  It was like the white, cis-gendered, straight male was being oppressed, that’s what these memes made me believe” he contemplates. This is how the far-right hopes to influence the beliefs of young men. Joe recalls seeing a post one day outlining a poster’s plan of attack against a gay teen who he had attempted to lure into dating through an online dating site.  This post gained a little bit of traction and people within the community thought it was a joke. However, days later when the story of a brutally murdered gay teen broke, it was no longer a joke. The person who had posted the meme was making an actual plan to murder someone out of their hatred for them, and succeeded.  “He’s thankfully in prison now, but that moment is when it all became too much for me,” Joe shudders, “that is when I had pulled my head out from underwater and realized that I was being groomed for radicalization, as were so many of my friends”. 

This is not an uncommon story.  Most extremists in America today are actually white supremacists, and in the age of social media, these ideologies continue to be spread to a new generation in a very casual and alarming way.  Young men of America are radicalized through the internet every single day, and many perpetrators of mass shootings this year in America and around the world have even broadcast their acts or created a manifesto to share online.  However, there are ways out of this cycle. For one, Joe says the thing that helped him separate himself from this community was encountering real kindness in high school and forming meaningful connections with friends. However, that is not very attainable to those who have been radicalized too far, meaning they “begin to associate their ideologies to their most meaningful relationships, and fear that breaking these ideologies will leave them lonely again,” as Joe explains.  If you or anyone you know has fallen into radicalization by toxic online communities, you can find more help and information through the non-profit organization Life After Hate ™, or through the following link: https://www.lifeafterhate.org/