| Ideas

My Journey Through the Alt-Right Rabbit Hole, and How I Got Out

As a gullible teen entering politics, I was slowly snared by increasingly radical beliefs through the internet.

By Hector Miranda Plaza, March 2, 2021

In 2015, I was decidedly apolitical; I saw the news that was on the TV as little more than the hobby of adults dissatisfied with a world whose most egregious faults I did not see at the time. I had moved from Puerto Rico to New Mexico, and at the time I felt very lonely; coming from a different culture and being used to speaking a different language, I felt alienated from others and didn’t have many friends, if at all.

Enter Donald John Trump, businessman extraordinaire, a man whose bombastic personality swung a wrecking ball into the entirety of the American political landscape, and whose political career can only be properly described, in retrospect, as a violent eruption of reactionary sentiments well festered since the end of the Cold War.

At the time, however, his rhetoric betrayed this analysis. He was one of the only candidates to speak directly to the masses during the 2016 election cycle, and he spoke with a great brashness and bluntness that attracted millions to his “telling it like it was”. This demand for rhetoric that “exposed” societal truths extended further than elections to the culture war as a whole.

At the same time of his entry into the political sphere, exaggerated videos of conservative pundits “owning SJWs” and “leftist meltdowns” went viral online and were shown in recommended feeds by platforms such as YouTube to impressionable young people like me.

Whenever I was feeling down or coming back from school, I’d throw myself on my bed to watch those compilations back to back for hours; I was hooked, and they were my respite from life. The more I watched, the more similar videos the YouTube algorithm recommended to me, the more I watched. I wasn’t the only one affected by this, though, as I remember these videos and complaints of “sensitive snowflakes” being discussed in many conversations. 

After a long while of my recommendation feed being almost entirely composed of these videos, I began to see slightly different videos on there as well. These were from many that were a part of the so-called “intellectual dark web”, such as Sargon of Akkad, Jordan Peterson, and Dave Rubin.

They railed against what they saw as pervasive political correctness, identity politics, and “cultural Marxism”, broadly stating that such phenomena would lead to the demise of freedoms of speech prized in western democracies. Unlike the comparatively lighthearted “SJW cringe compilation” videos, though, these content creators were much more serious and comprehensive in their views.

They presented themselves and their videos as objective analyses of society, and led to my greater engrossment in politics as a whole on the right. Simultaneously, I became increasingly convinced of the fact that institutions and social media were biased against the right, and a subtle paranoia concerning my speaking out on my beliefs for fear of reprisal from friends, family, and others set in.

Once more I was hooked, and once more I would slip deeper.

Eventually I was recommended videos by creators whose denouncement of the aforementioned cultural Marxisms extended into the physical world. People such as Black Pidgeon Speaks, Paul Joseph Watson, and others thoroughly condemned the evils of “mass immigration of Muslim refugees to Europe” as a threat to “Western Culture” and the “European Identity''.

Similarly, they spoke out against “mass migration from Hispanic countries to the US'' under a similar guise of “Saving the West''. Of course, in retrospect it is glaringly obvious that terms such as “western culture” or “European identity and culture” were but proxies for a more sinister white identitarianism, as neither Europe nor the West has a unified identity or culture.

The presentation of the videos was professional, which made them as much more convincing as digestible. Regardless, I saw no fallacy in the idea of a supposed cultural invasion. I saw myself as one of the “good Mexicans'', those that spoke out alongside our European brothers against the perceived imminent cultural liquidation of their countries.

I was active in the comment sections of these videos, and they in turn validated and praised me for my misplaced solidarity. The extent of my indoctrination was not just limited to the video format, however.   

On Instagram, I liked to read greentexts, a type of format that originated in 4Chan to tell stories of all types, be they humorous, serious, lengthy, etc. However, another far-right phenomenon uses the website: QAnon. I was recommended 4Chan posts made by conspiracy theory’s alleged government insider Q on my explore page.

Known as “Q Drops”, these alleged that there was a secret war between Trump and a Democratic pedophile shadow cabal which controlled Washington, and that there would come an event known as “The Storm” in which the military would capture, prosecute, and execute all the members of this supposed cabal under Trump’s digression.

Although I was not too far gone, I still bought into it. No, this is not a joke. There was a point in time when young, impressionable me believed with at least some conviction in the existence of a sort of nefarious deep state. Luckily, my relative skepticism of the theory saved me from my full absorption into it, but the far right rabbit hole did not stop here.

One day, I was recommended a video by a Cascadian white nationalist of some renown, James Allsup, and from there the rest of my recommendations followed suit. Him and other creators such as Stefan Molyneux stripped bare the essence of the daisy chain of creators that had led me to them: an unadulterated white nationalism.

In Molyneux’s videos, he espoused a race realism which sought to prove the inferiority of other races through “scientific means”, such as comparing IQ scores of different ethnicities, and proported the existence of a conspiracy of white genocide. Allsup, for his part, was no better; he unapologetically participated in the Unite the Right rally of Charlottesville, was a member of the neo-nazi Identity Evropa movement, and expressed support for the views of eugenicist psychologist Richard Lynn, whose studies have been frequently refuted and found a connection between economic development and IQ, and from there IQ and race.

Despite their unabashedly white supremacist character, they never called themselves white supremacists. Naively seeing this as actual proof that they weren’t white supremacists, I kept watching, egging myself on with the belief that the pseudoscience presented was irrefutable.

One would think the cognitive dissonance that would emerge from a Hispanic person supporting white supremacist pseudoscience would be untenable, yet for me it held for some time. I attribute this in great part to my simply ignoring the question that naturally emerges out of my physical appearance and beliefs: if it is true that the “Hispanic race” is inferior to the European and Asian races, what did that make me?

Here, my heritage saved me. As this question became increasingly unavoidable, I turned my focus to learning more about my nation’s history. The history of Puerto Rico is one of both great uprising and achievement, and of crushing defeat and oppression. How is it that a people who were supposedly inferior have shown such nobility and valor, and have upheld their culture in the face of assimilation attempts by the strongest nation in the world for more than a century? This ultimately served as the straw that broke the identitarian camel’s back, and I slowly turned away from white supremacist content.

Of course, the road to recovery would be necessarily long, and I didn’t shake off many of my beliefs for a while. My recommended feeds gradually shifted from cryptofascist commentators to figures on the left, and they exposed many problems with my beliefs. I attribute them in great part for my transition to the left.

In addition to this, I began to see how effective Trump was in initiating change in the right direction; that is to say, not at all. The core problems that plagued America still persisted, but now the country was more divided. This perceived failure helped in changing my beliefs. Slowly, I was raised up from the depths of darkness.

Although I look back at my experiences with a sort of shame, I would not be who I am today in my beliefs if it were not for them. I familiarized myself very intimately on how the right thinks, from moderates to literal white supremacists. Such knowledge is invaluable in communicating with conservatives, and is crucial in swaying them to the left. 

I only fell through this rabbit hole in the first place because I was vulnerable, and had no sense of community. My life situation made me open to such ideas, which offered to me a narrative and a greater purpose. It is this quality of the rabbit hole that makes it so appealing.

Those my age do exist in a world whose only observable meaning is derived from an endless stream of consumerist consumption. In such a society, it should be no wonder that many seek a greater meaning in the narratives most accessible to them. In my case, and in those of many, it was this community that provided it.

I have written this in the hope of not only documenting my own story, but also to show a lesson to those on the right, and those on the left.

To those on the right, If there is one thing to observe for my experience, it is this: be careful. It is as easy to get caught up in the alt-right trap as it is hard to escape, and you must be vigilant in ensuring that you never slip down the path of bigotry. On my way down, I have met many arguably good conservatives, and I only hope that they didn’t end up like me. Do not let it happen to you.

To those on the left, I implore you to remember what our ideas represent: a united front. We are the only group which fights for those marginalized by the capitalist order, and there is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that those that fell through the pipeline are indeed marginalized by the capitalist propensity of stripping all meaning from life other than consumption.

Therefore, we are implored by our beliefs to be ready to help raise up those still trapped when they emerge. There are still many more people like me, and it is those people that are, in my opinion, the most fertile recruitment demographic for our movement.

Do not mistake my acceptance for approval. Where fascism rears its ugly head it must be purged without hesitation or excuse, and the fact that many proponents of this ideology in the modern day are victims of capitalism is no reason to tolerate it. However, when someone in the far right shows signs of defection, we should ensure a full conversion to the left and expose to them the true root of societal ills: not any machinations of a religious, political, ethnic, or cultural minority, but rather the capitalist mode itself.

My spiraling down to the alt-right is most tragic in its not being unique. There are more like me; some are on the way down, some are at the bottom, and some are on the way up. Regardless of where they may be along the way, we must be ready to aid in their weaning off of fascism, their eventual reintegration into society, and lastly, their integration into our united front.

Hector Miranda Plaza is an author for and co-founder of Young Patriots Magazine.