The Deprogram Podcast

I was pretty homo-phobic and passively racist up till I got "class woke" but always I hated all those dweebs.

I can't point to one thing that broke me out of that thinking but it overlapped my "come to ~~jesus~~ Marx" moment. A large part of it was reading theory and coming to realize that "equality for everyone" means "everyone" and "equality for all the people like me" is called nazism... and as a poor masking ND I'm on the block after the queer people.

I fell into it for a short time around the pandemic and started becoming reactionary, starting off with the basic SJW owned compilation and Daily Wire stuff, but later on got into some 4chan /pol/ and incel weirdo shit

Eventually I snapped out of it when I realized that mixed-race people like me were seen as subhuman by most of those people

Their whole "fake news" and anti mainstream media thing stuck with me tho and made me question if mainstream media was lying about DPRK, China, Cold War history, etc, which lead me to becoming ML/Socialist

I listened to Joe Rogan tapering off by 2016. In the middle days of the podcast, there were occasionally interesting guests, and the discussions were good, but after a while, it just turned into Rogan's moronic ramblings and the guests barely holding on. He also stopped pushing back against the dumb guests, probably as an effort to keep those dumb guests coming back. At a certain point, I remember thinking "Wow, all he says is 'huh huh huh what if the monkeys just get stoned...do you think that guy would have done DMT?'", and that's when I stopped listening altogether.

I never fell for the anti-SJW stuff, because it always seemed pretty obvious that it was anti-anti-asshole advocacy. "The LGBTQ+ Agenda" was only ever a struggle to survive.

One book of JP is a big hit in germany. Not sure what its called. Its about life advice i think. And that pipeline i got sucked into BIG TIME. Not because it helped but because i was still in the sphere of young entrepreneurs which is one of the most naive, careless and frankly stupid situations one can find themselves in imo.

I did figure out that he is a huge {insert string of slurs}. In any case, I got out and walked a different path, ultimately leading me here.

TBF, I was 8-14 during that time

Only slightly, and still thought most of these people were losers

I did get sucked into the thunderf00t sphere for a while which I think is a gateway to anti-SJW shit but I got out eventually.

I kinda watched h3h3 too but never really was a steady follower or anything. Same goes for Pewdiepie. They were mostly just the people well known in that era of YouTube.

Tbh i never completely fell into it. I was fully primed to become a huge piece of shit, but just...didn't?

Basically i was bullied and girls hated me and found me ugly between the ages of 13-19 and i stopped going to school for years. So i was a bullied incel that had no one to hang out with and nothing but internet access with which i went unto 4chan and various other meme sites that posted racist, misogynistic and otherwise bigoted things, but i never engaged with writing comments or posting my own "content" and mostly just chuckled at some of the memes.

And eventually i stopped going to those pages because i didn't feel like these were my people either. I just went "there are too many women reporting the same thing. They can't possibly be this organized across multiple continents to lie about the same shit that men do against them. These men are over exaggerating" and "my opinions on women are to be considered wrong by myself until checked again"

And that "men are over exaggerating" slowly turned into "just believe women and stfu" after i checked my opinions again.

I did however also turn the "they can't be this organised" towards the men as well because "they can't be this organized to be this shitty towards women" so i never went into white savior radlib feminist mode either because i also didn't vibe with the reddit radfems as i always saw the men lashing out in a sad pathetic way rather than a hateful way like they viewed it (if y'all get what i mean. I am autistic and feelings and describing them doesn't come easily to me)

This allowed me to still view the men as shitty, but also have empathy towards them (and myself) because "there had to be more to it" so i was never on the hate train against my own gender either.

Eventually i found communism for myself. My education never really mentioned communism and besides just a general rejection of communism "in the air" there was not much that indoctrinated me against it. I basically immediately laid down all my liberal opinions or considered them "wrong until further notice" just like i did with my feminist opinions. And the thought of "these men can't all just be born hateful, there has to be more to it" turned into "there is more to it, it is called materialism and it shapes the thought of the people" and then just accepted that the radfems might be wrong, but that it was because of the liberalism and not the feminism part.

Funnily enough, this also makes it hard for me to fully buy into materialism because how the fuck did i escape it but all these other men didn't? I was prime incel material! And now too, how the fuck did i go through this journey at that young of an age and was easily able to figure out that "there has to be more to it"? Is it just the lack of anti-communist indoctrination? There was plenty of pro-lib propaganda, but not that much of the anti-communist variety.

It is hard for me to have gone through this journey of being prime incel material, through laying down liberal opinions a couple years later towards steeling myself with marxism-leninism at that age and then see that my current peers still have to go through that journey.

My 15 year old incel gooner brained self had it more figured out than my inteligent and empathetic peers a decade later? Hard to buy, not gonna lie.

Even at age 13 i remember telling my mom that i didn't want to work my entire life and lose 8-10 hours of every day and that everyone is stupid for following along with it. I even said that it was unsustainable and eventually something will break lmao. That is actually exactly the point i stopped going to school and went unto my years of the great isolation.

So in the end i still don't really know how i did it besides just doing it. Would love y'all thoughts on this tbh

I never bought into this far right shit, but I used to access content that was meant as right wing propaganda. I used to browse 9gag a lot, just to have some laughs. But then I started thinking the memes were becoming less funny and more racist, until I stopped going there and instead went to Reddit. Suddenly I discovered socialist subreddits and got hooked into the theory.

I consider myself lucky this didn't exist when I was younger and susceptible.

Growing in a comprador country with reactionary politics makes you tend to Anti-SJW rhetoric, even though your country have much bigger issues before the culture war stuff -like blatant human rights violations.

Then, I realised I don't really interact with the contemporary media much; even when I do, the SJW stuff don't bother me (except BG3, every NPC trying to get in my pants was very annoying). I stopped following the mainstream accounts, and grew out of it.

I had a cringe 12 year old Call of Duty player phase that I'm not really proud of. However, even before I knew anything about socialism I always felt a sense that there was something sleezy and dishonest about most the people shown here.

Zerohedge lead me to look at alternative left websites. Although now Zerohedge since become much more mainstream conservative since I stopped looking it.

I remember being in the atheist online space back in like, 2009-2012 and there was a lot of the anti-SJW stuff then in that space. I mostly stopped going to those spaces because I always saw myself as a feminist and most of my friends at that time were women. So when I realized that they were just being shitty I just stopped listening to them. I replaced the atheist drivel with science education content, which has its own problems, but at least it wasn't blatent misogyny. So, long story short, I didn't get into this pipeline back in 2015, but I found the precursor and almost had issues with it.

At the time i was reading Bookchin and was a staunch libertarian socialist. So maybe my moments were back further.. I never got into meme sites until later, avoided online almost entirely from 2010-2014, out of circumstance (living in tents while trying go to school and such). I think my pivotal moments were based on: reading increasingly reactionaty books and finding their problems (my "put down in disgust" points were ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, as well as Atlas Shrugged, specifically when the copper baron has a tirade about altruism). But in general growing up, i was in–closet trans in male dominated spaces, so my own identity and femininity and increasing preference for femme spaces and friendships helped keep stopping me from taking the red pill/black pill.

closest i got was the internet atheist shit
when they started transitioning from dunking on creationists over to attempting to dunk on feminists i noped out

I was an "Anarcho-Capitalist" one time. The main thing was that, in bigoted opinions, I didn't necessarily agree with them, but didn't see them as a problem. The main channel was PragerU, and I specifically watched the video talking about public schools being misandrist because I was a school kid, and I was learning about all these topics that I couldn't do anything about.

Really, I had an... Obamanist (since it wasn't left-wing, but not right-wing in the usual way, I considered it from the president at the time) education where there was this deal of teaching kids about "cognitive bias". I don't exactly know how to define how it was taught; the teacher would announce that the class would be doing something, or completing a project, and it was these quanta that I learned about most things. Altho it seemed reasonable in hindsight, and altho minorities suffer greatly under the United States, I was just a schoolkid, and it felt like I was being called to do something that I couldn't do. It had a lot to do with the subconscious, an idea that greatly upset me, because I was only a kid. The whole idea of the subconscious felt belittling, self-contradictory, complicated, confusing, and it was an enormous factor in an education that was just imposed on me, with grades for doing it right. I learned about the "pink tax" and the wage gap, and while these ideas were certainly correct and needed to be solved, I was just a kid and felt helpless at these grown-up problems leveled at me. It was like I was told to solve a problem that I couldn't solve, or that I was brainwashed. So when I was told that this was a bad idea, I naturally latched on to PragerU with their video about schools mistreating boys, and then Carl Benjamin, Armored Skeptic, TL-Deer, the works.

School was still hell. I eventually got out of it due to, funnily enough, researching Anarchism on Wikipedia after an economics simulation. It is a very long story, a complicated story, a traumatic story (maybe, I suppose others have it way worse), and one that I have still to dig up. Maybe I shouldn't even post this because this has a lot to do with my childhood, and it might be out of context and misremembered.

Is that James Rolfe? How did he contribute to the pipeline? I just watch his game reviews.

I was in 8th grade in 2017-18, had a friend that was super anti-woke, he put me on to "SJW owned compilation" videos. Though I didn't fully believe in everything they said, i felt compelled to externally agree as it was what most my peers would parrot. Not to mention, i was an avid viewer of the "edgy youtubers" like idubbz, filthyfrank, leafyishere, etc. I was lucky enough to have a very close friend who was fairly progressive and he kinda just showed me how dumb people like Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, etc. were. Also, since I'm a person of color and immigrant, i saw their anti-immigrant rhetoric as cringe and stupid but liked how they were "speaking the truth" (being purposefully obtuse and prejudiced). To sum it all up, I was a cringe kid that wanted attention and thought being edgy would get me there. I was chronically online and basically no parental supervision.

In around 2014 I was a loner and impressionable kid who was drawn towards edgy memes and "SJW Meltdown" compilations. Then when I entered highschool in 2017 and made new friends, my radicalization slowed down as I interacted less and less with far-right echo chambers, though I still had various right-wing views like anticommunism, supporting US intervention and supporting the Hong Kong protests.

And then the pandemic hit, and nationwide lockdowns occurred, leading to the replacement of face-to-face classes with online classes, which I struggled with due to shitty internet which, in my experience, was actively throttled by PLDT (one of the oligopolies in my country controlling internet and telecommunication services) to attempt to pressure us into paying them more. (Thankfully we use a different service now)

Long story short, I also observed that The Right was actively discrediting science and pushing anti-vaxx nonsense in favor of consuming literal horse dewormer (ivermectin) instead, which lead to me fully leaving The Right and becoming a centrist/socdem. By the middle of the pandemic (around early 2021) I got tinnitus (but no apparent hearing loss based on hearing tests I was given) which fucked my sleep cycle, and my (highly religious) family decided the solution was to pray, which I did, to no effect, leading me to become atheist.

I became disillusioned with liberal democracy's incompetence with dealing with the pandemic and fighting against the rampant misinformation and the cults that peddled them. Eventually I ran into Stalin's works (Specifically, Anarchism or Socialism and Dialectical and Historical Materialism) and later Lenin's, Marx's, etc. works, and by the middle to near end of 2021 I fully accepted Marxism-Leninism.

Funnily the thing that always stuck with me from my anti-SJW era to now is my skepticism towards so-called human rights and Rule of Law, but the big difference between then and now is why. Back then, I supported then-president Rodrigo Duterte's war on drugs and extrajudicial killings (he's in The Hague for that now lol) and believed human rights only protected criminals from punishment for depriving their victims of those same rights (in other words I believed in "an eye for an eye") while nowadays, I find human rights in their current (Liberal) iteration to be deeply contradictory and hypocritical since Capitalism, by design, actively deprives the workers of their rights to their labor, and actively relies on constant exploitation to not simply collapse under its own weight, and only Communism can sufficiently guarantee these rights. And Rule of Law is just a tool by the imperial core to decry non-imperialist countries as "rogue states".

Not me. Being LGBT myself I could immediately see when these people are started to shift from attacking the crazy types to just attacking leftists in general, and I was off the train immediately. Watched everyone else go down it in real time, though.