I live in the South.

I had a salvation experience after a drug problem in my teens. I was from a broken home and the love bombing was the best experience of my life. I went all in on faith. Worked for the church for a number of years. I think I saw the machinations of the church and politics and tried to talk to people, but the faith bit of the church is actually pretty minor.

Most of my issues with the church, I only have because I experienced life outside of the church first.

It’s a group of individuals just like any other. Among the fundamentalists is a hard line that taught something called young earth creationism. This is the belief that the record of creation in the Bible and it’s genealogy is literal records of individuals and time. This makes all of recorded history and science almost a malicious lie against the reality of the Bible and anyone who believes.

Now, here in the South the church still holds genuine power, so this throws in the racists who primarily are opposed to school integration and education (read wages). Because these are the landowner class that has been able to hang onto wealth for generations they have access to capital they are largely able to shape political policies just with jobs and stuff.

This slipstream (social networking or corruption) can then be used to elevate proper behavior and elect officials (a typical mega church can put out a sign up by the coffee bar for community events and such and get free labor and keep the kids off the street).

My only other real social group was the drug trade which was pretty much merit based lol, but honestly how many people see that another world is possible? If I had a sheltered childhood and a kid at eighteen, I’d better get in line and worry about the morality later. People can’t live off of unconnected wages down here, again real economic power.

This marriage of money power and faith struck me. Once you look at that geographicly it gets ugly. Its why conservatives are so pissed off. They have a working parallel social group that’s actually quite a bit nicer. So, not escaped, but aware.

There’s a cost and it is high. Shunning is real and fucks people’s lives up. It’s much worse in smaller towns where the police are sheriff and therefore good church going evictors are on side. Plus, it’s not stuff that you can really be honest about because people are living their lives and pretty trapped.

I think that’s where the molestation stuff comes in, then it’s a secret and we have to protect the church and stuff and you sort of have to because kids gotta eat, plus his dad owns have the dealerships in the county.

It’s sort of like that bell curve meme: it’s racists > it’s a different but unequal social networking > it’s racists.

I grew up in integrated schools though, even in a fervor there was only so far that I could go with it as id deconstructed some of that already. Plus I was really patriotic, so overthrowing the government seemed a bit much.

What people forget about the South is that these power structures predate and supercede pretty much everything in the South. Even though I’m white, I’m a part of a rebellion that stole generational wealth from them and if I want to reproduce and have my children have any sort of financial independence I need to bend the knee. That’s why all the groveling is just washing over conservatives, it’s just a part of life down here.

My 3 day mood swing passed.

Was a teen.

A guy I worked with was far-right, but drew the line at violence, so not a fascist, per se.

All that fucker needed to cure himself was a passport and to get out of his ends. Soon realised that the vast majority of humans are all after the same basic needs and we have more in common than we don’t.

Grew up in an extreme right wing ‘Christian’ church. It never sat well, even as a kid/teen. I don’t know if I ever considered I was fascist, but certainly had to unlearn a lot of internalised thought patterns. Ended up leaving centralised media a few months ago after realising how much alt-right content was being pushed in my face despite following mostly left leaning accounts and queer creators.

I was sliding down the alt-right rabbit hole, mostly out of loneliness. Algorithms and echo chambers love loneliness.

I think there’s a really important threshold, and I’m ashamed to say I reached it, where you know it’s propaganda. Where you stop falling down the rabbit hole and start walking down it of your own accord.

The first propaganda, you believe. Some people commit crimes, or hate you, or are dangerous. Capitalism is freedom. The stuff an uncurious and uncareful person can believe all of and still be internally consistent, if wrong.

Then there’s the propaganda that requires you to acknowledge the lies you believed earlier were lies. No, it isn’t Hispanic people that commit crimes - it’s Jewish people! Capitalism isn’t freedom - libertarianism, or state capitalism, or whatever buzzword for company towns is in vogue.

And you know the stuff you believed before isn’t true. But you still say it in polite company, you mask and start to pretend you aren’t someone who believes what you do. You know it’s unacceptable.

That’s what got me out. Realizing that I was in a dark cycle of self-isolation and internet addiction, and trying to be deliberately social and empathetic and present. Therapy helps, but you’ve gotta want it.

You don’t have to be an ex-fascist to understand what causes an exit for them.

It’s a very similar experience for anyone getting out of a cult, religion, abusive relationship, gang, etc. Something random in their life, whether a thought or concrete consequence, seeds their exploration of evaluating whether they want to stay, and then they reach the point where hope exceeds the sunk cost and anxieties of change.

There are all kinds of avenues that lead one into harmful ideologies and behaviors, which could be ignorance, self-preservation, community seeking, frustration, or whatever. They invest themselves in various ways through connections and warping their worldview. The human brain is capable of all kinds of compartmentalization/mental gymnastics/self-delusion to maintain the stability of their new reality. Breaking away from it comes at a cost, and the cost is usually realized to be relatively small once on the other side, but before you get there, it can feel huge and insurmountable.

If anyone has had an experience like that, the generalized template described above should make sense, but I’m more interested in the reason for asking. If it’s about whether you can be hopeful that we are on track to put this behind us, there are three realist aspects to keep in mind. (1) It’s on average a slow process for individuals because it stagnates until that random catalyst, (2) we repeat history and there will always be people going in the wrong direction, and (3) not everyone encounters the catalyst that helps them break free.

However, it is eventual. Our rebound from the push toward authoritarianism as a society will either come from a build up of realizing we’re suffering from a thousand cuts or one major catastrophic incident. It sucks that we have to repeat this cycle periodically, but the fallible human psyche just doesn’t seem to permit any other way.

Psychedelics were a huge key for me.

Wasn’t a fascist but was maybe 30% baked into one around 2015. One day I was in my room, listening to a Sargon video, when I was stuck by a moment of clarity and thought “Jesus christ, all these people are unbelievably whiny fucking dorks who never stop complaining about shit that doesn’t matter, and also the bigotry was never actually a joke.”

Then I found CTH and never looked back. Just generally growing up and maturing helped too.

not truly fascist but i was raised reactionary and held these views for a while on and off as a kid.

there weren’t fascism influencers back then, but when i thought of following the rabbit hole to its logical conclusion, the overt racism and swastikas started coming out and that’s what shook me awake. the leftists in my life who talked to me helped a lot.

my country had to project a fascist into the mainstream who openly said the quiet part out loud and i had to see a lot of people around me falling for the rabbit hole i almost fell into myself for me to truly radicalize though. i looked up what that scary phenomenon was, and finally knew for sure what side i wanted to be on.

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.

Not a fascist at any point, but in music spaces you do notice many of these pipelines. It just takes personal responsibility to find artists who reject that from their scene. Electronic music is littered with fascists but plenty of radicals too

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

Happy to be proved wrong though.

I wouldn’t say I used to be far-right but at high school, I have some right-wing opinion which is mostly from YouTubers I used to watch as well as I have internalise my homophobia and ableism because I get made fun of being queer and autistic that I felt like something was wrong with me.

It was around lockdown that I graduated from high school. It made me realise of the times I tried to get validation from my classmates which I never really got. Also, Black Lives Matter was trending on TikTok which made me realise how very shallow right-wing space is with them constantly moving the goalpost and framing certain scenario a certain way to fit to their agenda.

I still hate myself for it and despite I have changed, I still beat myself over it and wish I can cut myself. Better late than never but I wish I wasn’t that desperate for validation that I think even the slight gay representation is too “on the nose”.

Realizing my nation isn’t that great and the official history is a lie. Also, I grew up from puberty.

Never been a fascist but perhaps I can see how it could have gone?

Extreme dislike to being told what I can find funny. Any time some people try and cancel a comedian for example. Who are the people who end up defending it? If you keep following a lot of those people it may lead you down that route.

But then my entire reason for being there in the first place is based on a dislike for authoritarianism, so perhaps that is why I lost interest as they moved towards fascism.