Hah, I'd be up for that. This could be dissected so much further. As for my own situation, I have been watching for a while. I didn't know I was, until the pan

Hah, I'd be up for that. This could be dissected so much further. As for my own situation, I have been watching for a while. I didn't know I was, until the pandemic hit and all the alt-right and conspiracy talking points all of a sudden got brought up by my peers in real life. I had seen the same troll posts on 4chan and propaganda Telegram channels months prior. They don't know what these things are, and they were repeating the same things, convinced they came to their own conclusions. I watched Occupy rise and fall on 4chan over a decade ago, then in the run up to the 2016 elections I saw the whole Trump thing unfold in real time, not thinking any of it. I'm not from the US so the connection to my personal life was never there. In 2019, during the height of the climate protests, a Telegram group I was in got raided by right wing trolls posting nazi imagery, antisemitic memes and then some. The obvious response was to try and get to the bottom of that and join as many right wing channels as I could, which I did, to the point that I joined their social media platforms for the sake of interacting with people who had fallen into the hole. To push and prop, and to see what falls when I shake the tree a little. Nothing about it is scientific, of course. I was just sating my own curiosity. What I ended up seeing was a lot of misinformation and fear-mongering, a lot of projection, hate, and non-solutions. As well as a lot of people that are more emotionally than rationally inclined in their decision making, their judgement of what they see, and their response. This also seems to be something studies are showing. [1][2] What I describe in the GP is my attempt to come to a conclusion in my endeavors. Why people end up in the hole. What I had hoped to find an answer for is how to get them out, but I came up empty-handed. I have since lost multiple peers to this behavior and ideology, and alt-right populists have gained a lot of ground politically, here and everywhere else. What I had also hoped to learn is who is helping dig the hole, and why. The answer to that seems to be that there is simply an alignment of interest among many parties, that all benefit from some aspect of it. To what degree they may or may not collude, I don't know. Those are the things where someone smarter and/or more dedicated would have to take over to find good answers. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3867439/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3867439/ [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12706 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/pops.12706