I am collecting stories of people who escaped secular delusions, like sexism, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, transphobia, or even, just more generally, alt-right, anti-feminist or “anti-SJW’ worldviews. These are the kinds of delusions that trap atheists. And even when their victims are religious, the stories are still often the same, or similar enough that you will learn from hearing them all out, because when you do, you’ll see a pattern common to them all, merely instantiated with different particulars. And that pattern is your own path to recognizing you are being pipelined and steering clear, or are afflicted with a delusion already and need to get out, or indeed how to get out, and getting well.
Videos:
- Shaun • “White Men” (2018)
- Rashad Crenshaw • “Why I Left The Right” (2024)
- DarkMatter2525 • “Why I Stopped Being Anti-Woke” (2024)
- JimmyTheGiant • “How I Escaped the Alt-Right Pipeline” (2024) & followup (2025)
- Genetically Modified Skeptic • “The Alt-Right Pipeline Almost Got Me” (2025)
- Adam Something • “How I Escaped The Alt-Right” (2021)
- Xanderhal • “How I Fell Down the Alt Right Pipeline and Escaped” (2020)
- Samantha • “Former Alt-Right Member Wants to Prevent Others” (2019)
- Dan Arrows • “How to Fall Down the Anti-SJW Rabbit Hole” (2019)
Articles:
- Justin Brown-Ramsey • “I Fell Down the Alt-Right Rabbit Hole” (2023)
- Katie McHugh • “Get Out While You Can” (2019)
- [ Anonymous ] • “I Became Part of the Alt-Right at Age 13” (2019)
- Teen Vogue • “How These Men Left the Manosphere — and Why Some May Never” (2024)
- Forbes • “Why Men Enter and Exit the ‘Manosphere’—By a Psychologist” (2024)
- What’s the Vibe • “How These Men Left the Manosphere” (2024)
- Studies in Conflict and Terrorism • “Exiting the Manosphere: Analysis of Narratives” (2023)
- Reddit • “Former Anti-Woke People, What Made You Change Your Views?” (2024)
- Journal of Gender Studies • “Swallowing and Spitting Out the Red Pill” (2023)
If you find more examples worth adding to this list, please post them in comments. But note this list only covers secular (“political-cultural”) delusions (even when their victims are religious). If you know of good lists of testimonials from ex-Christians or ex-Muslims or other religions (or quasi-religions like flat earthism or lizard theory), please post links in comments, but not to the examples themselves but to lists of them (if there are any), and I’ll check them out and see if a cross-link here would be helpful. Because in my experience, they share all the same features (how they got trapped, what it was like to be in, what kept them from escaping, and what eventually led them out to safety and sanity).
But there is a reason I want this list here to focus on the solidly secular.
Every delusion is the same, differing only in its vanguard, the outer trappings. But when someone listens to “escaping religion” narratives, they blank on this, and think those concepts and experiences only apply to a “religion” and thus they remain vulnerable to all the same tactics and traps when they are not on their guard because it isn’t a religion. Because in today’s secularizing market its not being a religion gives it the false veneer of being authentic or credible. So you really need to hear these stories, the ones I just listed, because those are the ones that you can’t dismiss or misunderstand as “only about religion.”
And if you fear you may be trapped in a delusion, of any kind, I have a series of advice if you want to know how to find out for sure, and how to avoid its traps and escape:
- A Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research
- The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking
- Three Common Tactics of Cranks, Liars, and Trolls
- A Vital Primer on Media Literacy
- Shaun Skills: How to Learn from Exemplary Cases
Likewise if you want to know where I think you should land and why:
- How Far Left Is Too Left?
- How the Right and the Left Nuked Atheism Plus
- The Left and Anti-Left Both Have Much Still to Learn
Because I wish a good mind to all, with a firm grip on reality, and back in charge of your soul.
⌘
P.S. I am also interested in accounts of people who went alt-right or anti-SJW and describe having been feminists or liberals or SJWs and why they switched—but only if they are serious. Just like I don’t want “preachers claiming they were atheists” like Lee Strobel, who were never really atheists or really all that intellectually so (but were just rolling in the cultural ruts of their parents or peers until they got captured by an ideology), I also don’t want accounts from anti-feminists or the like who were never really feminists or really all that intellectually versed in feminism (but were just rolling in the cultural ruts of their parents or peers until they got captured by an ideology). I am only interested in collecting accounts of persons who, in some way we can tell from their account, were a genuinely informed and intellectually committed liberal of some kind, and still went right. If you know of anything like that (essay or video), describe and link them in comments, too.
I don’t think one can talk about imprisonment of the mind in sects, anywhere on the spectrum of right to left, religious or atheistic or agnostic without reflecting on a world without the written world, perhaps just, trinkets, votives and symbolic pocketable tokens, where the youth of a community would often be sent forth, across the rivers and over the mountains to seek new pastures or hunting grounds.
They would obviously take with them a shaman, several young men, (likely gay men), skilled in flint making and infected into their brains edicts from the elders like, beware of leopards, always keep a fire burning at night, when you leave, have the gay men guard your families so your women will be safe, and have nothing to do with men with straight hair, if you find them you must avoid them or kill them.
These memes were the library of experience, right or wrong they the elderly couldn’t personally bring with them in the serious journey ahead of the explorers. If the explorers didn’t go forth, the community might die out for lack of resources. So memic transmission of the best knowledge they had, gave an evolutionary advantage to the early humans. It was infectious across the community and through generations infectious, quite stable and reliable.
Today, it’s an anachronism as we have books and computers well as rational steps in logic to check out things. But still, we have scientists and engineers who file back to Zindua and be the in the Ganges or Jewish scientists and logicians who fast on Yom Kiplur and won’t drive on the sabbath.
So what would we expect of atheists, well they might think Trump is the savior for America! It it’s menic and primitive and has nothing to do with rationality. They are trapped.
Not sure what to do with that comment. But I’ll leave it here.
You got most of the ones I’ve seen.
The one by the teenager is especially telling. He left because he saw that the arguments fucking sucked. Puncturing these bloviators and making them seem weak and uninformed can work.
It definitely works. Arguments by Egyptian and more broadly Arab liberals and secularists played a huge role in getting me out of Islamism which includes all these alt-right delusions and of Islam altogether.
It’s probably the second most effective tool after conservatives experiencing diverse environments where they deal with and share experiences with the groups of people they target (hence, why they hate large urban cities).
Thanks so much for the insight, Islam! From what I have seen, I agree wholly that your change has been by far for the best for your humanity and conduct.
I’m curious, if you don’t mind: Did you find that what he said was true, that it’s easy for the right-wing radical to sound extremely certain and confident and rational when they’re in their echo chamber and online, but the moment you have to interact with them in a mixed setting you realize very quickly that they actually have nothing but a pretty lame and easily debunked script?
Thanks a lot for your nice words!
I have been actively trying to be and do better since I got out in 2023 as I feel horrified and ashamed of what I used to believe.
As for the question, I will try to be as fair in answering it as possible:
They are split into three categories: the first one which is the vast majority of them fit that description perfectly.
The second one is somewhat better and they can at least have some form of discussion before they start to break.
The third one is rare which includes their minor and major “intellectuals” who are really aware of the arguments of the other side and are willing and eager to have a discussion on an empirical background. I have noticed that the last group are usually very smart people who start from these conclusions usually due to them being religious and use their sheer brain power to rationalize these conclusions empirically (not on purpose, they usually honestly do believe in these justifications and think they are logical).
Islam: That’s really fascinating. I suspect that latter intellectualized group on their own may not be very good recruiters for extremism because they won’t feed that desire for rage, the nuance is too substantial, they expose you to (even weakened) counter-arguments, and they need plausible deniability. They can help to be the person that the extremist cites, the way Sowell is cited even by Nazis. I also suspect that’s going to be more common in established ideologies like Islam rather than, say, neo-Nazism. The alt-right don’t have real intellectuals because they hate intellectuals.
For years I lived and worked at an animal sanctuary run by radical feminists. I would slave away and break my back while the female workers posted the photos I took in between chores. I got through this underpaid torment with the mentality that I was the “man” of this group, and found no issue with the gender roles because I myself knew biological physical differences justified me doing more laborious tasks and enduring brutal weather.
Then one day after severely injuring my spine shoveling the porch of my feminist author boss, I see she had posted an article that she was writing the day prior in the warmth of her house, as I was outside in the cold dark literally breaking my back clearing her property.
I was already in anguish because my back pain was unbearable, and then I begin to read her article, which was titled something like “why vegan men are ruining veganism”, the entire thing was misandrist vitriol, cynical towards vegan men as if all of them are only pretending to care about animals to have access to sex, calling for the removal of all male vegan leaders saying we should all just be doing grunt work as women lead us- since women are victims alongside everyone else besides the specific enemy the intersectional equation solves for (cis str8 white able bodied men who aren’t communists). I then find out everyone besides me including a brand new female worker who had been sexually harassing me was being paid more than I. All of this was such a shock to me, that I had no choice but to be irate towards the word feminism. In that moment I knew there were reasonable feminists, and I wasn’t driven to reactive misogyny, but I could not help but have a year or so of resentment towards the fourth wave (or fifth?) of feminism that seems to strategically focus on what is conducive to power seeking. Ignoring the most extreme cases of sexism we see in islamic/orthodox judaism/fundamentalist christianity etc, and instead attacking things like the wage gap myth, the “glass ceiling” etc. I later realized this radical hateful feminism is in itself reactive to Misogyny, and I must not become a monster in reaction myself.
It’s good to intellectualize such things, but I find if I don’t have a genuine fundamental source of care for a group, I can always get lost trying to philosophize these concepts. If I think about a group whilst genuinely caring about them, I find myself with better answers.
In the same way, trying to fully grasp the creation of Christianity and reading hours of dark Jewish scripture, whilst living with a zionist member of the “elite” brought me to such a dark place that I started simply talking to the practitioners directly. Yesterday I completed an interview with an atheist ex orthodox Jew, And taking in his story and genuinely trying to understand what it’s like to be them, bridges the gap and makes it so that they are no longer some distant concept I’m coldly researching, they are simply human just as I am.
In general, there are bad actors (and hypocrites etc.) in every ideological system or identified group, which is what causes bias and then bigotry: the natural cognitive defect of assuming an experience with a few is indicative of most, and then inferring that a system or identity that mostly generates bad actors must be bad.
The latter can be true (the causal component needs more evidence than just correlation, e.g. Nazi Germans might have all been nice to their dogs, so “most Nazis are nice to their dogs” does not warrant concluding “most Nazis are nice” or that “Nazism doesn’t cause bad actors,” so to argue causation requires more than just a correlation). But the former usually is not (ideologies or identities that reliably generate bad actors are rare, yet all ideologies or identities contain some bad actors; which is why people resort to Nazi analogies do much: it’s hard to find examples of an actual bad actor correlation that people are familiar with).
But this is how we get people thinking all black people are lazy criminals or all Mexicans are gangbangers or all atheists are soulless Randroids: an experience with a few bad actors becomes representative of the entire group. It’s when the experience correlates with a lot of bad actors, across diverse circumstances, that a judgment starts to become reliable (hence we can confirm MAGA is full of bad actors, that it’s not just a few bad apples).
Tty:
My issue is that one does need to actually focus on what gains power. Now, “power” needs to be defined in a useful context (lest we fall afoul of what Freire discusses in Pedagogy of the Oppressed), but the reality is that, when your opposition is trying to hold power over you, you need power back. That doesn’t mean being dishonest, or purely cynical, and it definitely should focus on using what strengths the left has rather than trying to mirror the right precisely which will never work because the right will always be better at their game than we are, but it is a valid concern.
Sorry your experience with radfems was so problematic. I wonder if they’ve become TERFs.
I would like to one day record my own journey, even if anonymously.
Escaping conservative Islam (including Islamism as I was literally a Salafist for years) and Islam itself came with the nice features of also escaping homophobia, transphobia, anti-feminism and even mild antisemitism and mild misogyny, probably even among other delusions.
I’d love to hear that story.
There is probably a better format for her story, but this is Heather Heying talking about her experience as a professor in a liberal college, being silenced by extreme SJWs. The trouble for me with “Left to Right (or less extreme Left)” conversions is there are always fallacies in their reasoning. With Heather, there are less of them, but I find it difficult to look past them.
https://youtu.be/MeKhIxYdsIQ?si=b4shF90fch4dY_0C
I am not familiar with that story and haven’t vetted it. But in my experience, these stories tend not to be true. You should make sure she is a reliable narrator before trusting her on anything. For examples of what I mean see An Anatomy of Contemporary Right-Wing Delusions.
Heying is Bret Weinstein’s wife. She is precisely like him: A liar who was not silenced and just got onto wingnut welfare.
Ah. Then my account of the Bret Weinstein myth is in that link and would presumably apply or at least model how to vet her own myth.
A channel, blog, website etc who went alt-right? How about channels, blogs, websites, personalities that feighn ‘left’, actors and hypocrites, hiding/grafting they are right and or left via situational ethics for greenbacks and status?
MYTHVISION (Derek Lambert)
GNOSTIC INFORMANT (Neal Sendlak)
JOE ROGAN
BART EHRMAN
TIM POOL
BLAIRE WHITE
ALEX JONES
PINECREEK (Doug)
ROBERT M. PRICE
JORDAN PETERSON
ALL of these chans/personalities (and I can list dozens) have at one time or another or still do feighn both sides of the aisle.
Hegels dialectic (left vs right politics) utilizing religion is the easiest con game there is to capture both sides into accepting maliciously fabricated objective morality laws to appease the rulers/controllers lusts. I am reminded of the 1980’s movie ‘War Games’ with Matthew Broaderick when the computer comes to the computational conclusion via a secretly embeded code/game programmed into its software “The only right move is to NOT play the game”.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” – Lucius Annaeus Seneca
I don’t see any coherent argument or proposal here. Your list of disliked people are all different with different positions, politics, and backstories. So there is no coherent throughline relevant to my article that I can see. And none discuss escaping Alt-Right views or ever actually being SJWs and “becoming” anti-SJWs.
What are you thoughts on Derek from Mythvision sort of flipping 180?
Derek Lambert hasn’t flipped anything pertinent to this thread.
I think you might be confusing personal drama about his friend Bob Price and the principle of platforming his scholarship but not his politics, with some sort of “political position.” It’s not. It’s just a position on platforming policy, not a referendum on Price’s racism, sexism, or transphobia. It might be poorly executed or ill advised, but that’s a question in pragmatics. It’s not a descent into Alt-Right ideology. Politically, Lambert has always been pretty centrist, with very little in the way of confident beliefs, rather like Joe Rogan, who also has never been Alt-Right or a card-carrying lefty. I haven’t seen any change regarding that in years, for either of them.
White, Jones, and Peterson make no bones about being at least anti-leftist. They’re dishonest because they’re fascists, but they don’t ever really claim to be leftist: “Classical liberal” is about all you’ll get, and most of them don’t even do that. Pool was a little more cagey but that illusion dropped. Price is openly quite far right and makes no bones about it.
The trick that you’re misidentifying here is people posing as if they are apolitical . That is the right-wing trick: Pretend that your extreme dogma is just common sense and everyone else is just intellectualizing or possessed by a dogma. Project your faults. That’s the trick that essentially everyone besides Neal, Derek, Bart and Robert do on your list.
Fred makes a good point. I missed that “pretense of being apolitical” was being confused for “feminist/SJW.” Of course even legitimately being apolitical is not being “a feminist/SJW.” So I was charitably assuming someone wouldn’t be making that mistake. But it’s indeed worse that those particular examples have never clearly been “apolitical” even if they claimed to be.
I know Price never has claimed that. He has always been a self-confessed conservative, “to the right of Bill O’Reilly” in his own words; that goes all the way back to his critique of Killing Jesus and before—Price’s radical conservatism had been an open secret in the community for decades, and not even a secret since at least 2014. I am not aware of Price ever being a liberal or even “centrist.”
White claimed to once have been a feminist/SJW but is there any actual evidence of that? Or is that another “preacher claiming to have been an atheist when really they were mildly Christian all along” like Lee Strobel, or at best noncommittally agnostic or lacking specific theological beliefs at all, like Frank Tipler? Because White has been rabidly anti-feminist her entire public career. Is there a video or essay from her that credibly describes (not just claims) her previous liberal views and what happened to change them (as in, an actual narrative, not propagandistic bromides)?
And Jordan Peterson has always been right-center so far as I know. But if there is any chapter or video or essay by him that credibly describes (not just claims) his previous feminism/SJW views and what happened to change them (as in, an actual narrative, not propagandistic bromides), again, link it here. Otherwise, I think you should doubt it.
Why do you list Bart Erhman with these people?
Academically, he’s conservative on Jesus’ historicity. But in things that actually matter for real, he’s liberal and has taken liberal positions in his interviews. So not sure why you think hes not?
Yeah. I think they forgot this is a thread about political worldviews and just gave us an unrelated list of people.
Here is a list of ex-Christian testimonials: https://new.exchristian.net/search/label/Testimonials
That’s a good one. Thank you.
“Hey guys you know that isn’t true right?”
“Uhh guys that doesn’t even make sense”
“Come on guys that clearly didn’t even happen!”
“Wait, why do I keep having to say these things?”
That’s pretty much how it went down for me.
I don’t know what this is referring to.
I’m saying in my own personal experience with such delusions, I constantly saw people I agreed with say patently crazy and nonsensical things, and eventually it made me question my worldview.
Just to make sure no one here gets the wrong impression from this thread:
There is a universal principle that all lies are deliberately engineered to sound exactly like the truth (that’s the point of lying); and likewise that all arguments for believing a false thing is true are deliberately engineered to sound exactly like valid and sound arguments (that’s the point of using “argument” as a mode of discourse).
So it isn’t really useful to note that everyone uses “the same arguments” no matter whether what they are defending is true or false. The real project is to discern when these claims themselves are true or false. For example, “Hey guys you know that isn’t true right?” is the same sentence you will hear from a flat-earther about the earth being round as you’ll hear from their critics. So we have to go the extra step of ascertaining who actually is telling the truth when they say that. Spoiler: it’s the flat-earther; but my point here is: you have to figure out how to determine that yourself, since you shouldn’t “just” believe me.
This is the Scary Truth about Critical Thinking and Actually Doing Your Own Research.
I assume this is you recounting basically the process of leaving the alt-right? If so, I’m glad to hear that the cognitive dissonance of having to constantly insist on a totally delusive alternate reality does add up.
Is the MGTOW movement still going strong? And not seen Karen Straun in yonks.
Hard to say. It’s hard to even say if it ever was. Loudness is not a reliable proxy for numbers. And thought-leader content seems to vastly outweigh any evidence of adherence, i.e. MGTOW seems mostly a fringe movement that gets a lot of audience but no real converts. Its content just feeds into general manosphere misogyny generally.
Like how Barbar discovered most of his audience were neonazis: they weren’t really MGTOW, but they loved the misogynistic content of MGTOW and thus cited and used and even funded it, without any interest in the MGTOW conclusion. And the Incel movement seems larger (certainly large enough to produce a lot of actual terrorists). And the Men’s Rights wing far larger (that would be Straun’s crowd). And whatever the PUA movement has turned into seems larger still (like the Tate crowd).
About 1 in 6 men are some variety of “manosphere” in the UK and closer to 1 in 4 in the US. But we needn’t assume they’ve “picked a tribe.” There is a sort of generic manosphere ideology that borrows bits from all the traditional tribes just listed, but arrives at no coherent ideology or any particular ideology. Most manosphere members are not that engaged with any ideology of it, they just cheer and absorb it, like a nebulous subculture.
It’s always funny to keep track of the people who leave wingnut welfare. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQuIuJs7TPw is apparently one of her more recent appearances. What almost certainly has happened in part is that she’s outgrown her usefulness and had the leopard bite her face off. Honey badgers are adorably boring now given the present overt fascism and misogyny. She got made irrelevant by others who were willing to go further.
I’m always curious what happens with those people. Do they find that they just don’t have it in them to play it up that far? Do they realize that continued engagement with the movement is endangering them? Are they just not strong enough of personalities to pivot? Have they put too much effort into a brand that now doesn’t sell?
I was a committed environmentalist, and Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring” was the basis for my commitment. I thought that the law banning the worst pesticides was a victory for science. However, my career in agricultural research allowed me to learn that in the 1960’s, it was well known that the effectiveness of the pesticides was greatly reduced due to natural selection. Thus, the chemical companies did not strongly fight the law because they knew they could not continue selling pesticides that did not work. What they did was to protect their access to overseas markets. Now, the herbicide, “Roundup” is shown to cause cancer, so there is a lot of effort on banning Roundup. However, there are many species of noxious weeds that are now resistant to Roundup. It is only a matter of time before Roundup becomes useless in modern agriculture, and at that time Roundup will be banned because it increases the risk of cancer. The environmentalists will declare they won the battle over Roundup making people safe from cancer. With the current global population of humans, it is impossible to produce enough food for everyone without resorting to pesticides and herbicides. But I don’t want to ingest those chemicals, so I pay more for organic foods.
I don’t understand the relevance of this comment here.
This is an article and thread about radical changes in political alignment and worldview ideology. Not minor adjustments in our understanding of markets and the historiography of environmentalism.
Perhaps you are more interested in my articles tagged “environment”?
It is a very wierd reply to the “environmentalist politics” comment, but totally in agreement with hunting down the sjws’s adversaries.
I don’t understand what this refers to. What was weird? And which comment?
I don’t understand what this refers to. What does “hunting down” mean and what has that to do with this article?
Earle: We overproduce for people now. So are you so absolutely confident that Green Revolution techniques must be used, especially given that we don’t even use all our arable land?
And if the environmentalists weren’t around, Monsanto would still sell RoundUp . Chemical companies routinely find ways of selling things in multiple forms and lying. Because capitalism doens’t work. But public pressure can actually push it back. Monsanto has visibly been harmed by environmental protests and their extreme unpopularity.
So this seems like a really profoundly limited assessment.
“Wow,” I thought, “this guy says such interesting things about ancient texts and philosophical questions; I can probably learn a lot from him.” I read parts of some of his posts, scroll down over the list of titles, look into this and another, earlier-posted, political one (in which Trump’s 2024 victory is ascribed to the racism of those who voted for him), and think, “Oh, I see, he hates me.” It’s hard for people to read stuff by people who hate them.
Facts don’t care about your feelings.
So, maybe it would be better to be a rational person and not let emotions decide what you consider. The last thing you should ever do is decide what to read and take seriously simply because of unrelated feelings about who is saying it. Siloing on mere emotion is the problem not the solution.
To many people, MAGA is a cult premised on hate. People start from what seems like a reasonable premise – secure the border. Then they move into extreme xenophobia. They end up cheering on night time raids on families. Or canceling everyone whose a refugee. or lying about Haitian immigrants. Or erasing memorials to black soldiers of WW2. Gay, trans people are totally the targets of Project 2025 because “family values” means “hetero normative conservative Republican Christian families”. And yeah, if you think Richard Carriers work is interesting theres a good chance you aren’t a conservative orthodox Christian. And the hatred and prejudice that is MAGA will eventually turn on you too.
Just to clarify, I never said what Ezra claims. Which is just one illustration of Ezra’s irrationalism.
I think MAGA is an incoherent coalition and not a monopolitical sect. So, while a big faction in its coalition are anti-immigrationists, not all its factions prioritize that, and some are actually quite opposed to the form it is taking (even while the majority faction is pleased with it).
There is also a difference between MAGA and Trump voters. MAGA comprised about 70% of Republicans at the time (it’s since declined) and a small percent of independents (the extremists who are to the right of the GOP; the rest are mostly apathetic politically), and about half of indies went for Trump in the last election, which was what actually turned the election, not MAGA, which can never win an election by itself.
So explaining “Trump” is a different question from MAGA.
Non-MAGA Trumpers are even more incoherent as a coalition and are best described as emotionalist low-information voters, so for example people who literally did not know what Trump planned or said about immigrants because they literally never read or watch any news at all. Those people are probably the ones who tipped the election, and they include folks like “Joe Rogan said so, so Trump must be best” or “we need change, so I am ticking the box for the other party” and the like, as well as specific ideological pseudo-centrist voters (like sexists or racists) and subliminal voters (people who vote solely their feelings and aren’t at all aware that their feelings are being swayed by unconscious biases against women and/or blacks).
If we get back to MAGA, who are maybe at most 30% of Americans now, they consist almost entirely of hate groups, but vary as to who they hate most, and some are polyhaters (they hate more than one group). They are driven almost entirely by fear (e.g. conspiracy theories, hyperphobias) or loathing (e.g. crush the libs or commies or trannies or darkies or whoever), not by evidence or reason.
But yes. When that fear and loathing turns on you is just a matter of luck and time.
Yes, that is the good news, and probably why we’re seeing rifts. Hopefully independent centrists will come to their senses.
People to the right of that may not all be anti-immigrant, but as you said, they hate other groups. The religious right in particular hates queer people. So as long as there’s enough hate to go around, they are happy. It seems to me that liberals operate on the opposite premise – coalition of people who want to actually make life better for groups of people.
The willingfully ignorant and the “rationalizers” need to know at least that that they are on “that side”. Or at least that’s how they are being perceived by the rest of us.
And the other thing you point out — its dangerous to not listen to something someone says because of unrelated opinions. That attitude might be fueling things like vaccine skepticism and medical recommendations. This apparently even affects doctors:
“That led me to wonder whether these divisions had gone beyond policy and into how medicine is practiced,” he says. The question was particularly intriguing because medicine is widely regarded as a bastion of science where evidence transcends personal beliefs. “Unfortunately,” he says, “that’s not quite what I found.”
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/partisan-polarization-has-crept-doctors-office
Although note, of course, I haven’t done a full analysis on this subject — its an armchair observation. (but now I’m curious about how doctors do their jobs).
People want a single worldview that comes from one source, and that can define their entire lives.
Here is a list of ex-flat-earthers, many of whom stopped being flat-earthers as a result of the evidence produced by “The Final Experiment” (a trip to Antarctica in late 2024, by several flat-earthers and several globe-earthers):
https://www.flerf.info/index.php/Escapees
Handy. Thanks.
Update: Related content: the Huffington Post has an article discussing people who have left right-wing for left-wing Christianity in the wake of MAGA and cites their books and articles on the experience: People Who Left ‘MAGA Christianity’ Share What It Really Took To Step Away.
https://19thnews.org/2020/12/first-came-suffrage-then-came-the-women-of-the-ku-klux-klan/
Can you explain the relevance of that article to the article you are commenting on here?