Ex-fascists of lemmy, what made you escape the alt-right pipeline?

This is a great question and I wish I could distill the main take-aways into tangible things that could be used to effectively guide people away from fascism. Here’s my experience:

• Went to a decent university. Met people all over the political spectrum. Made friends with other far-right people and found them to be bitter, weird and kind of dense over time.
• Studied abroad for a semester, getting first-hand experience on what life in a foreign country could be like. Got help from a lot of decent folks.
• Met people from groups I used to hate. Realized they were just ordinary people and not sinister demons out to get me.
• Moved away from my far-right family.
• Got fucked over by other far-right people, who used shady tactics and unfair practices they were accusing other groups of.
• I used to love debating, so I had lots of discussions over a few beers with incredibly patient and validating people from other parts of the political spectrum. These arguments made the first cracks in my belief system.
• My country shifted from a left-wing government (in name, at least) to a right-wing one. I thought the left-wing government was corrupt and incompetent. The right-wing government quickly turned out to be that and more. When they started to agitate people against people fleeing from war-torn Syria to win the next election, I did a full 180, volunteering to help and going to protests, remembering the time when I was trying to get by in another country (as a privileged brat, not an asylum seeker).

I think that’s it, but there are probably many more minor bits that contributed. Ask me anything.

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I was raised fascist and bought into it. But the inherent unfairness of capitalism can’t be hidden. My first thought was that the people who said “capitalism is the only way” weren’t wrong but just outdated, that even if capitalism had been a go of system it was obsolete. This cracked open the door to Marxism which lead to a whole transformation over time.

I share this because I think it provides us some hope: even if the fascists won their ideas would only last so long before their own children became anarchists.

I feel like the Venn diagram of Lemmy users and (current or ex-) fascists has very little overlap.

Happy to be proved wrong though.