All you lonely people out there, try to be helpful rather than hateful. It’ll take you a lot further in life and life is long. I understand the need to fit in if you’re lonely but don’t follow leaders and watch the pawking meters.
…not much about how they recruit members, just what they are.
Like most other right wing groups, they recruit members by finding lonely men looking for community.
I think the details are pretty telling: about getting recruits to say racial slurs, admit hatred for Jewish people, and adoration for Hitler. Right on the first meeting. Which an NDA to “protect themselves”. NDAs are illegal if they hide illegal activity.
I mean. Ish? I guess when I hear about a hate group, I expect them to do that kind of stuff. Kind of comes with the territory.
I was always more interested in how the recruits get to that point, because I’ve met a lot of people over the years, and the number of shitty people in this world is surprisingly small. Very few people are true pieces of shit. I wouldn’t expect any significant number of people to join this type of group naturally…so why do they?
Personally, I’ve been exploring this topic pretty extensively since gamergate, which laid out a pretty clear blueprint of preying on lonely young men and offering them community and social belonging, while slowly converting them into racist shitheads. Then send them out into the world like those door to door Jesus salesmen, have the world call them racist shitheads, and lovebomb them into staying loyal.
That seems like a much more interesting analysis, compared to such, uh, ‘shocking’ revelations like “this hate group makes recruits say slurs”.
Heck, even some cursory analysis of the reasons behind the rituals would be nice. It’s like how the pride boys initiation involves naming breakfast cereals while being beaten. On the surface, that’s just kind of ridiculous, but there’s psychological reasoning behind it. To me, the why is much more interesting than the how, and the why shows you how to solve the problem. The how is just…meh.
You and me have had very different experiences, and that’s good!
From my experience, the world is full of horrible people who want to take anything you have. It’s my experience that if somebody is taking to me they’re probably trying to scam me, kiss me, or worse.
But how these young men get radicalized is more interesting than that. It often starts with loneliness. It’s a funnel, and many get lost along the way, but at the top is often social ostracization and loneliness. So they reach out- they post on facebook, reddit, wherever, that they’re lonely and cat make friends or meet a girl. They get attacked for this. After all, posting on the internet that you want to improve your social skills for the soul purpose of having sex is cringe- it doesn’t matter that you NEVER SAID THAT, it matters what the commentors online have been conditioned to see- they see an incel.
So now the newly minted incel has learned (incorrectly) that the world hates them for being lonely (again, incorrect, but they learned it anyways). So now, they reach out elsewhere. Not on the clearnet- they’re routed to discord. They get deep into channels where they can vent their frustrations and are met with others who share the same experience. This is where they first feel “at home”.
They’re worked in those channels for a bit, and when ripe with hate they’re picked and invited into worse discords and group chats. They slowly get exposed to more propaganda that warps their mind further and further until all of their family is brainwashed and evil, and the average person in society hates them for illegitimate reasons. Once they reach this point, they’re fairly malleable into violence.
This is happening at scale all across the anglosphere as I type. Boys are in rooms getting radicalized to believe the world hates them, and committing a terrorist act would be “justified self defence”.
There are other parts of the funnel as well, but this is the largest aspect I’m familiar with.
What you are looking for is a psychology study not a newspaper article though, to be fair. Worth scanning Google scholar as i am sure there is decent research done on these questions and extremism.
There is, that’s my point. I have dug for it on my own initiative. The news is meant to do things and synthesize knowledge into decent reporting for other people.
This is here is some tier one surface level shit. They sent it two dudes with fake mustaches. Great. Now, maybe they should take some time to think about it, tier two. Data is great, data + brainpower is a hypothesis and after that, if they test it out, their reporting goes to tier three. Spend some time on the prose and that’s how you get pulitzers.
Idk man. They could have done so much more
Physically fit lonely men! They really emphasize you should have a nice hot masculine body if you want to join their group.
What up! We’re three cool guys looking for other cool guys who want to hang out in our party mansion! Nothing Sexual. Dudes in good shape encouraged, but if you’re fat, we expect you to find humor in the little things. Nothing Sexual.
Glad this was published. So sick of them hiding behind their bullshit act of being small bean gym buddies who happen to share a love of their ‘heritage’. Get fucked, fascists.
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