Okay, this post is going to be a trip.
For all of the faults in TYT, in recent years I've come to realize that they were pretty much the thing that stopped me from falling down what was probably the beta version of the Alt-Right pipeline, probably around 2009 to 2010-ish. That's on top of getting me invested in politics when I likely would not have otherwise, as well as causing me to understand that I have strong left leaning values.
To put it into perspective, my high school years were easily some of the worst of my life. I was alone, utterly miserable, outcasted entirely by my schoolmates, and constantly ridiculed and bullied by my own family for never really being what a teenage girl should be. I didn't turn to racism or bigotry or anything hateful, but growing up Catholic and having parents who loved the Left Behind series, and me having always been a big reader, at some point I began reading their copies of the Left Behind series. I became obsessed with the end of the world and being raptured. I figured that things were so bad that it had to be close to the end. Around that time I also began going on a lot of conspiracy sites, and at first it was a lot of the innocent stuff like the moon landing hoax, but eventually you began seeing things about how Obama was mass producing 'eco coffins' for the death camps he was setting up and how there are cemtrails in the sky and so on and so fourth. I remember the eco coffins the most out of everything because there was this big thread about it with pictures as proof and other weird things. It was wild, and had these people not been completely serious, it would be fun to look back upon now for how crazy the whole thing was.
I don't think I ever fully bought any of it, just that I was in such a bad place that I was looking for any proof that the end of the world was near and that soon I'd be taken away to someplace where I would finally be happy. I still hate that I turned a blind eye to all of the barely concealed racism that I was seeing in these conspiracy theories, calling Obama the anti-christ or stupid names like Obummer. I hate that I didn't see the racism in claiming that the first black president was working toward bringing about the end of the world, or at the very least was working towards killing all of the 'good people'. You never saw Bush or any of the other presidents getting anywhere near the same level of theory crafting about them. The irony that they could never accept the reality of a black president running the country without destroying it and then turning right around and voting for someone like Trump will never cease to amaze me. Especially when he fits the description of an anti-christ far more than Obama ever did. Sometimes I almost want to go back on that site now and see how they spin their conspiracies with 'messiah' Trump at the wheel, but I would also rather just leave that place behind me.
So, yeah. Here's how all of this ended. Eventually I started to buy a little more into all of the Obama hate. That at the very least he was a bad president along with democrats being awful in general and that they didn't need to be demonic for that to be the case. Even if I wasn't willing to believe that he was a demon in disguise or whatever else, I was still becoming way more right leaning. Well, eventually it started to feel like the 'Obama is the devil!' conspiracies began to overtake everything else on that site. All of the fun theories largely went away. There was a noticeable change and yet nobody really commented on it. At some point I began picking up Youtube channels through this site though. The three I remember the most is this one guy who mostly talked about cemtrails that eventually stopped uploading at some point, and I remember finding out that he had been arrested after trying to do something stupid to stop cemtrails from happening, I don't know if it was all faked so that he could come out looking like a martyr, but boy was that a wild time. The next guy was someone who kept uploading his shitty cable feed that was constantly glitching and used that as proof that everyone on TV isn't actually human and are instead unknown entities that are trying to indoctrinate you. Admittedly, I was mostly following these guys for the entertainment value. My heart still wasn't 100% into believing this stuff. The last guy though? He was more of a down to earth guy who I genuinely enjoyed listening to and believed a lot of what he was saying. It really is those types of people who end up reeling you in. I'll talk about him a little more later.
Eventually one of those dudes began uploading clips of Glen Beck and hooo boy did Glen love to peddle the whole 'Obama is coming for yoooouuu!' thing. The fact that he was on an actual news channel and I wasn't aware of how shitty Fox News was at the time, lent legitimacy to what he was saying. I really began eating his garbage up, and I ain't proud of that. He was good at giving his bigotry and performative lunacy an air of legitimacy back then, I suppose. It was while I was watching one of those clips that Youtube recommended me a TYT clip of them taking Glen Beck down. I watched it to thumbs it down and I remember hating what they were saying about him. I think they kept showing up in my recs at that point and I kept hate-watching them to thumb them down. Eventually I found a video of them mocking the idea of things like Cemtrails, how stupid the idea of Obama death camps were, and the one that I think really got to me, was one talking about the rapture and how it's a really shitty thing to want the end of the world to come. How selfish it is to think you'll be spared from it while other innocent people suffer immensely before being sent to an eternal hell for no other reason than not believing in the right god. Before I got rapture crazy, I had already been trending away from faith entirely, and having that laid out in front of me largely put me back on that path.
I began watching more of their clips, and hearing them explain their positions on things instead of only having the strawman of what a liberal is being the only thing I see. I began to understand more and more about where left leaning people are coming from and eventually I realized that pretty much all of my values are considered left leaning ones and that if I was open with them in the spaces I was spending time on, those conspiracy people would hate me for them. It eventually got to the point where I could no longer look at that conspiracy site without getting angry at the people on there. Even all of the fun stuff had been replaced with endless bashing of Obama and liberals in general. I think that because their predictions about what was going to happen during the Obama presidency wasn't coming to pass, all they could do was double down until it pretty much consumed the site entirely.
For all their faults, I'd rather have TYT around on Youtube over yet another right-wing channel clogging up the recommendation. If their existence pulls more people out of the alt-right pipeline, then that's a net positive. I like to think that even if I hadn't stumbled across them while spiraling down the crazy part of the internet that eventually I would have found myself anyway and realized where my morals lie and that they are incompatible with conservative morality. On the other hand, it worries me to think of what might have happened if I hadn't figured myself out and kept letting myself be brainwashed, especially when all of this shit really started to kick into high gear around when GG happened and just before the 2016 election. I like to think I'm better than that, but you never know. Back then the conspiracy people were crazy enough to keep me from really buying what they were selling, but eventually all of that got refined into something far more palatable for a general audience to buy into. I still remember that one dude who knew how to talk well enough to almost get me to start believing in a lot of his conspiracy garbage. He did it calmly, logically, never showed any hysterical anger or paranoia that was so common with these types, and he spoke with a level of kindness and empathy toward his viewers that was comforting and fresh at the time. He would say things like 'we're all going to get through this together' and 'we have each other no matter what comes next'. He was a true believer, but different in a sense. While it felt like a lot of these guys just wanted their Rambo fantasies to come to life so that they'd have a bunch of people they could shoot without going to jail, this guy seemed like he genuinely wanted to be the one to help as many people as possible when the collapse came. He'd be the one with a safe house and a meal cooked up for anyone who needed it. It's...strange to think about now. All of it makes me think of what this evolved into and how the right uses their selective empathy to reel in lost and hurting men.
On that note, I'll end it here by saying that this all makes me think about how men and woman are socialized differently. Girls who are outcasted seem to internalize that pain and turn it into self-loathing and self-destructiveness, and while boys often do the same, they are far more likely to externalize their feelings into aggression and anger while seeking an 'other' to take that aggression out on and use as a scapegoat to blame all of their problems on.
This post went places LOL. I kinda wish I still had my original Youtube account. It's probably still subscribed to all those people I talked about and I almost want to see if any of them are still around, but I seriously doubt I'd ever be able to get back into it at this point. I can't remember the names of these channels anymore either. It would be interesting to find them again but I don't think it would be worth the effort now. It's probably best to leave it in the past. Reality is insane enough now. LOL
