Ex-SJWs

[Haunter]

Thinking more about this thread, a book @gengar and probably some others on this site might be interested in is Anti-Gay by Mark Simpson, a collection "of essays from "non-heterosexuals" who do not conform to the popular images of gay people" criticising the modern gay community.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

Yep, same here. I had a pretty similar experience to you, in that I was shocked when I realized how many center-to-right-leaning people weren't evil fascist monsters who wanted to cause LITERAL VIOLENCE against me.

Is that literally how SJWs really think? I always thought that was deliberate hyperbole to drive a carefully constructed narrative to achieve personal gain.

 

[OG 666]

Is that literally how SJWs really think? I always thought that was deliberate hyperbole to drive a carefully constructed narrative to achieve personal gain.

Yeah, popular leftist narrative says that violent acts against vulnerable people are a result of oppressive attitudes that exist towards those people. Stereotypes and bias lead to prejudice, which leads to discrimination, which leads to acts of violence, which leads to systemic violence, etc. Therefore, dissenting opinions that challenge the experiences of "oppressed" people build the foundation for LITERAL VIOLENCE.

In reality, I never actually experienced violence simply because anyone disagreed with me. Obviously.

But when you hear this sentiment repeated by everyone around you, you eventually assume that it has some merit, and a lot of people honestly begin to believe that they are seriously, genuinely threatened by those who don't share their ideological views.

 

[Wallace]

Is that literally how SJWs really think? I always thought that was deliberate hyperbole to drive a carefully constructed narrative to achieve personal gain.

Yeah, pretty much.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

Yeah, popular leftist narrative says that violent acts against vulnerable people are a result of oppressive attitudes that exist towards those people. Stereotypes and bias lead to prejudice, which leads to discrimination, which leads to acts of violence, which leads to systemic violence, etc. Therefore, dissenting opinions that challenge the experiences of "oppressed" people build the foundation for LITERAL VIOLENCE.

That is literally a snowball fallacy.

A whole school of thought was built around a fallacy.

Help me.

 

[OG 666]

That is literally a snowball fallacy.

A whole school of thought was built around a fallacy.

Help me.

Yeah, this concept has been referred to as the "oppression pyramid" and a lot of pseudo-intellectuals have written about it at length. Here are a few diagrams that show some different variations of it.

 

[GethN7]

I dipped my toes into the SJW pond early on, seemed like they had some decent points on the surface, and I've always been a fierce anti-bigotry advocate.

I started to very quickly apply some critical thinking to their views when I realized the people involved were slimy hypocrites, and I've never had any respect for the "rules for thee but not for me" types, and I became an enemy of these types when I realized behind the thin patina of respectable rhetoric about combating bigotry and racism were the most hypocritical, racist fucknuts on the planet, they just had different targets, doubletalked their own bullshit to explain away their contradictory behavior, and believed they could act as bad as the people they hated, just so long as their vileness was aimed at the right targets.

I became an intense advocate of repudiating their bullshit when I realized practically every SJW with any recognition whatsoever was a hypocritical shitstain.

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

I like how under "victimization" that mostly includes verbal offences, literal "verbal abuse" is not listed as one of them. It's not under "degradation" either. I can't blabbermouth about something that's a secret but I can totally call you a piece of shit and tell you to off yourself and it's fine.

Love that under "individual acts" I can't just choose to avoid the thought police, I have to absolutely deal with you and ace the conversation with the charisma of God.

 

[Scratch This Nut]

I had the opposite problem. I'm an ex-anti-SJW (boy that's too many hyphens). Basically picking fights with high schoolers over hating men until I realized how stupid it all was and stopped. Plus there are some literal neo-Nazis who identify as anti-SJWs and I wanted nothing to do with that. So I hate both groups now.

 

[Marsaudiac]

Plus there are some literal neo-Nazis who identify as anti-SJWs and I wanted nothing to do with that. So I hate both groups now.

I can relate to this. Although I hold views (mainly economic ones) that people would see as aligning me with "SJWs," it's not really entirely about views; it's also about attitude. I can't imagine having the hyper-negative mindset that comes with being either a radical social-leftist or an extreme reactionary. It's not healthy.

 

[Eto]

I had the opposite problem. I'm an ex-anti-SJW (boy that's too many hyphens). Basically picking fights with high schoolers over hating men until I realized how stupid it all was and stopped. Plus there are some literal neo-Nazis who identify as anti-SJWs and I wanted nothing to do with that. So I hate both groups now.

Same way here, except I was dipping my toe into the SJW water before I became anti-SJW. After a while, I noticed that they’re cut from the same cloth. I don’t see SJWs gaining any sort of political power, other than obvious pandering. Why focus and get angry over people who are shrieking harpies, and calling any opposition fascist? It’s not worth engaging, and I have better things to worry about. I’ll talk to an SJW, but the moment it gets into making accusations about my character, I’m out.

Both sides are pretty hypocritical, and it’s depressing. Same arguments, no substance. It’s pretty much why I’m apathetic about a lot of political shit.

 

[OhGoy]

I always knew these fuckers were insane, but I was always on the outside looking in. To read about firsthand experiences that people have had with them is... well... it's interesting, to say the least.

gud thread

 

[Unfiltered Red]

I can relate to this. Although I hold views (mainly economic ones) that people would see as aligning me with "SJWs," it's not really entirely about views; it's also about attitude. I can't imagine having the hyper-negative mindset that comes with being either a radical social-leftist or an extreme reactionary. It's not healthy.

It's not. And life a lot more relaxing when you don't paint a whole group of people as the enemy who is out to get you (cough the 46 million Trump voters cough).

My biggest change is less views themselves and more attitude. I think what gets lost in translation is that very few people actually have a malicious end goal in their views. We all want people to live happily and safely, we just have vastly different ideas about how to get there. That goes for the far left too. I haven't just flipped around and now view SJWs as the one great evil. They're extremely well-intentioned and I have a lot of sympathy for their ideology.

Anti-SJWs are often very reactionary, yes. Anyone on any side who declares themselves an anti of something is more often than not a reactionary.

 

[Reynard]

I used to be a moderate leftist back in middle school and early high school, but I'll use the fact that I didn't really understand the world completely as my main excuse. I never became a part of the LGBT community or any movement with a sort of political agenda, so I can't comment on anything there. I think I ended up leaving left wing politics because as I got older and more mature, I just sort of realized more and more that both sides of the spectrum are full of shit. In a sense, I thought I leaned left until they sort of pushed me away with their ways that were exactly what I disliked about the right wingers. I found out both sides hate your freedom and free will equally and have the same end goal of their complete control over the general populace; they simply use different excuses to try and guilt you into either agreeing with them or to the point where you can't fight back without feeling like a piece of shit. The right in America in the past have used religion and order as their guise to control you, while the left as of late uses things such as equality and free thought as their weapons of manipulation. In the end, both sides have a disgusting "us versus them" mentality that is the exact opposite of what either of them claim to stand for.

 

[AF 802]

I was (slight) SJW between 2014 to late 2017, though I think part of it was because of the people I was hanging out with. The first group of people I hung out with were giant anti-GamerGaters, though they were less on the "obvious pedo" side and more on the absolute fucking psychotic side. The one guy that I suspected of being a pedo drew pretty brutal furry porn, and he was the one most pissed about GG, so it's kinda obvious.

2016 came along and I was initially on the anti-Trump side, but after Sanders lost the nomination, I finally just lost faith in the Democrats and went full Libertarian. I ended up voting for Trump, and I'm damn proud I did.

The other group of people I hung out were your run of the mill bronies, and as you'd expect, pretty decent progressive and celebrating socjus. I just got tired of it, wrote a post that I was (basically) a Trump supporter and just watched them sperg out. Then I joined Kiwi Farms and got better.

 

[Broseph Stalin]

I wasn't the hardcore "KEEL WHIETYYY!!!" #BLM supporting type, but for a time I was kind of leaning toward that area. I bought into the whole Kony 2012 bullshit back in the day, let my emotions get the best of me over logic, and even supported Bernie Sanders.

I was balls-deep in the radical leftist queer community for several years before I decided to leave it behind, and this experience is a huge part of what drove me to KF in the first place.

See, KF is what sort of "saved" me. Yeah, I liked poking fun at Chris Chan and various other oddities that would get me a few sneers from anyone I mentioned a lot of lolcows to because I was oppressing retards or some shit (Though some fairly liberal people actually do follow Chris Chan's antics and encourage the trolling, believe it or not), so I guess this is what kept me from going full SJW. A lot of posts on this site redpilled me and brought me to a more right-libertarian way of thinking (Also taking a government class with a fairly unbiased professor -- and his hatred of Socialism -- helped a lot too).

Why did you decide to leave?

Oosh, this one's gonna be a story, methinks...

It started after joining KF and seeing a lot of the threads about SJW insanity. Realizing that these people were on the same side of the spectrum as me left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, but I had myself convinced that it wasn't THAT bad. Now like I said before, I supported Bernie Sanders. I thought the guy had good points, and I come from a family that has fallen on hard times. A lot of Sanders' rhetoric appealed to my dad and I. Then Bernie said his infamous, "When you're white you don't know what it means to be poor".

That was when I started to hate the guy.

Even after he "explained himself" I couldn't quite buy it. Then another came when I got the whole story on when he had his speech interrupted by Black Lives Matter. I had assumed that it was just a minor interruption and he went about his speech undeterred. I watched the full video, and after seeing him let them take the stage unchallenged and then back out afterwards, I came to the conclusion that he was a weak milksop that would just let himself be trampled no matter what.

There was also the Refugee Crisis which...yeah, I was on the Refugees Welcome side for awhile. More on that later. But the Bataclan attack, San Bernadino, Pulse, Nice Truck Attack, and a string of other attacks hardened me and made me go against the so-called "religion of peace" and the invader hordes pouring into Europe. Couple all that with the New Years Eve mass rapes in Cologne and I started to realize just how batshit insane the Refugees Welcome crowd was.

What were some of the difficulties you had when you decided to get out?

Well, some difficulties I had were changing my world view and getting a bit more redpilled. The redpill is pretty tough to swallow. Finding out just how anti-white and radical the Left was becoming got me worried because at the time, I thought the Right barely had a chance in hell. Reading some articles painting the lunatic rhetoric of Nation of Islam in a positive light made my stomach turn, and seeing all the overt shit aimed at whites as the media projected a Hillary victory made me start to rethink a lot of the shit I had been told about how these people were "oppressed" and were the "good guys" because they weren't really violent lunatics and that was all just because of "muh right wing propaganda".

I had also started to have some strained relationships with my friends (Mostly acquaintances instead of actual friends, though, but that doesn't mean that some of my real friends weren't affected as well). The more I started to call them out on their shit, point out fallacies, debunk conspiracy theories and rumors touted by the left, they started to ask if I was a "Nazi or something", even though at that point I hadn't really discovered the wonders of /pol/. I guess when I had gone libertarian they thought I was a left-libertarian that advocated for open borders and smoking weed everyday while getting welfare from the government. The main difficulty in dealing with them was that they just repeated talking points from VICE, CNN, etc. and relied heavily on emotion rather than logic, facts, and reasoning. Every time I went against the grain they'd bite my head off, but I did have a couple of left leaning friends who would have friendly debates with me.

It wasn't so much as my political views that pushed my more radical leftist friends away from me, but rather theirs. Funnily enough, I have actually made more friends now than I did when I was still on the Left, and the ones lost weren't really anyone I would truly miss.

Do you think we will see more people leaving these communities as time goes on?

Oh, abso-fucking-lutely.

But there's a catch to my optimism. We're not going to see a flood of people abandon these communities. It'll be a steady stream, sure. But their recruitment will slow to a trickle and then a near halt. Normies will continue to resist this insanity, and once the SJWs realize that their efforts are in vain to win the support of the general public, they'll start to go into decline. There will always be the hardliners that remain in the movement, but they'll either be shouting into the void or keeping their head low until the next flare up of social justice happens. Yeah, it happened back in the 90's, apparently, but wasn't as big as it is now.

What sorts of crazy things did you do while you were still into it?

I didn't really do a lot of "crazy" things. More like cringe worthy things. Time for ol' papa Broseph to step into the confessional, lads!

- I wrote a paper on militias in America for my intro to English class in college, painting them all as gun toting rednecks, domestic terrorists, and Christian extremists. This was before I came to realize that not all militias are bad and a lot of them are made up of citizens as well as former military who want to protect their communities but see the government as being ineffective or untrustworthy. Hell, some actually do patrol the border and offer aid to illegal migrants in need. "Past Broseph" would have thought these guys were the second coming of the Waffen-SS and shoot the illegals on sight rather than give them water, medical aid, etc. while waiting on the border patrol to show up.

- I said before that I was on board with the whole Refugees Welcome crowd. Yeah, not my proudest moment. I thought that they were all just poor brown people coming over to Europe to escape war. I even screeched autistically when a journalist was filmed kicking refugees as they fled. Nowadays I would have called her "FUCKING BASED" for her work.

- I legit thought about doing ANTIFA style shit. Dressing in black, getting into riots, LARPing as a revolutionary, that kind of shit. The camaraderie was what really appealed to me, I guess. Since coming over to the Right, I found out that camaraderie isn't necessarily exclusive to the Left.

- I bought into the Kony 2012 horse shit. I blame my girlfriend at the time.

When you left it behind, did your ideological views swing to the right, or did they simply become more moderate?

They swung into general libertarian territory, then right-libertarian territory, and for a time I found myself in bed with the Alt-Right. I'll admit that I still hold onto some of their views, but after the Charlottesville shitshow, finding out how much of an attention whoring shill Richard Spencer is (Big thanks to Weev for redpilling me on that shit), and the movement going more toward National Socialist territory at the time, I grew disillusioned with the Alt-Right and abandoned it.

Now I'm a paleolibertarian and AnCap that believes commies and socialists need to be thrown from a fucking helicopter like the good ol' days in 1973, just as Papa Hoppe implied.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

I was never a SJW in the usual sense of the word (I always thought that trannies should do something about all the crazies in that group, I never really bought the whole "systemic oppression" argument of POCs/women), but I was a Trotskyist until a few years ago. The most SJW I got was believing that Islamophobia was a major problem and Muslims only committed terrorism because of racism and imperialism. I disagreed with BLM only because they were too focused on race and not class. I used to support strict gun control too.

I stopped liking Islam so much after all the terrorist attacks in Europe in 2015-2016 and how every single time, people kept doubling down on "refugees welcome, Islam is good" sort of shit. Since I always hated fundamentalist Christianity, it wasn't too far of a leap to figure that even these moderate Islam is a garbage religion ("a moderate Muslim won't cut your head off but he'll cheer on the fundamentalist Muslim who will cut your head off") and that importing more fundies into a country is never a good thing no matter what religion they are.

I also thought Antifa (the European ones) were pretty cool. I probably would have went to an Antifa protest here when they started, but knowing me, I would have taken one look at the people around me and left immediately since I've never liked being in a crowd full of weirdos.

I also thought that Donald Trump was one of the most evil politicians in American history and was terrified by the prospect of him winning. But then again, I always hated Hillary too, and once she got the nomination from Bernie (I voted for him but was afraid he'd "sell out" to the Democrat mainstream), I was dreading election day regardless (I thought that Hillary was going to win).

But I always knew how to laugh at myself (even back then I read ED and laughed at their articles on Bernie Sanders, socialism/communism, etc.) and especially now I take things a lot less seriously even if I'm still a socialist who needs to be tossed from a helicopter. The way that people went utterly crazy starting mid-2016 drove me away from most all left-wing activism. From reading ED and laughing at spergs and trannies and weirdos like Brianna Wu (speaking of Wu, she's part of the reason why I started to distrust the media), it wasn't too hard to learn to laugh at /pol/ memes instead of being horrified by them (at least the ones dealing with Jews, I always loved a good Hitler joke).

 

[Thelostcup]

The thing with the SJWs is that they hardly even understand the actual classic value system of the left. A lot of them are very right wing in their thinking (wanting society to prioritize their individual liberties over that of the group), and don't understand that half of the shit they rant about and think they fight against is unadulterated neoliberalism.

I tried getting into the whole scene because of girls I was interested in years past, and I would end up getting into vicious arguments with people purely because I would question their batshit insane approach to inventing their own versions of reality to cope with hard facts that went against what tumblr had been feeding them. I just can't jive with wingnutters on any end of the spectrum. Even though my personal views count as libertarian, I can't even identify with that crowd because the most vocal ones are on the same degree of retard as tankies and ancaps.

 

[BroccoliBrain]

A classmate really wanted me to join Tumblr and made me an account. This was around 2011. Eventually I relented and ended up using it, and the next few years turned me into a very anxious, thin-skinned person.

Spoiler: spoilered for length

I was one of those socially awkward, unpopular teens; I began to spend most of my day on Tumblr outside of school and reblogging memes/fandom shit made me feel like I fit in. I made friends and they felt genuine. Said friends led me down the rabbit hole of gender stuff and over a few years I was convinced I was transgender. I truly believed in everything I discovered so far and I did shit like look up all the flags for fun. I was convinced all of my personal problems were because of gender politics (and not because I made 0 effort to 'clean up', socialise or learn any people skills). There was no reason to believe that all I needed was some character building, not when I could blame all my issues on 'society' and 'cis-people'. It's a way to say the world is unfair (like all teens think), yet still have a way to fight against it (smash the patriarchy by signal boosting this post!) in a way that lets you feel good about yourself by keeping the moral high ground.

The real life friends I had shared the same Newgrounds and *chan humor background, but drinking the Tumblr kool-aid made it feel like I 'realised' how 'wrong' it was, and that's why I started watching what everyone said and getting passive-aggressive if they said whatever Tumblr deems un-PC. Looking back on it now, it was fucking crazy, there were moments when I would stop my own thoughts in case my mental monologue said the wrong thing. I was clearly becoming unhappy and withdrawn again for no apparent reason but I doubled down on what I was convinced was the right way, the SJW way.

Another thing I doubled down on? The transgender thing. I was going to graduate school soon and never had a strong career goal in mind so transitioning filled that void instead. It was 50/50 between explaining why I hadn't gotten my shit together and also a reason to put off getting my shit together. Instead of looking for a degree to do, or a job, I was still looking up articles about HRT and surgery and joining in fandom-wank. Speaking of which, and this is very related to the SJW Art thread, I felt compelled to make my characters LGBT in some way or another. It was an actual pressure, stupid as it was, I didn't really want to make one of my characters a FtM trans and ambigiously brown but if I didn't, I felt like I'd stick out in the wrong way and be dogpiled by users who knew me, leading to real feelings of uneasiness and (mild) fear.

What led to me turning around was a number of small realizations. The first being that this transgender rabbit hole was endless. I started finding people believing in ideas where...being trans didn't involve transitioning at all. I thought, isn't that the point? I didn't know what TERF or tucute or truscum meant (and still don't) but seeing these terms pop up, and the in-fighting between them, made me doubt this 'cause'. Who is trans when you can just say you are, who's just an icky cis liar? Why am I seriously considering transitioning when these people just change their clothes and it counts? Eventually, I got a new job, and met new people with it. Transitioning suddenly seemed like a very bad idea, I realised it would cost a lot of money, time and possibly disfigure me instead of making me look like the opposite sex (but hotter!). Which is shallow, but true. And for what? I realised I didn't have gender dysphoria. For some people, it's worth all that effort because nothing else will solve that feeling (disregarding my opinion on transexuals), but for me, I'd just let myself go under the knife because of a website and politics, not because I had to. Besides the job, one day I bumped into the same classmate who made that Tumblr account for me after years of not seeing each other; despite blogging about transgenderism for that whole time, here I was, with the same hairstyle, clothes and name. We were mutuals, so he could've seen what I posted. The moment made me feel very foolish.

Okay, I'm going to powerlevel hard(er) because I want to make a point.
I am female and I'm a total weeaboo. Before doing some thorough research, there was an extremely high chance I would've turned into the fake-bois you see in the Tumblr forum. I specifically said I was nonbinary and wrote my made up pronouns on all my profiles, and dreamt of becoming an androgynous bishounen through the magical power of testosterone... Fortunately that research taught me a few things about human biology and it was a major argument against "major surgery because I feel vaguely bad about myself".

I have no doubt that most of the genderspecial people on Tumblr have a similar background (aaand are girls). In real life, where they can't kin with their favorite anime character or hide behind "do not follows", they're probably unpopular. Maybe depressed, unable to deal with the pressure of school life. But instead of getting the help they need to overcome normal hurdles, they get trapped in Tumblr's echo chamber because it's made being LGBT into this fashionable trend where what's in your pants makes you cooler and interesting than boring cheerleader Stacie.

Finding Kiwi Farms redpilled me even more and now I begin to despise this 'movement' because underneath the pride flags, there's groups of vulnerable girls exacerbating their own mental health issues and being talked into doing permanent damage to themselves.

 

[ghostmice]

Spoiler: Long version

I was a full-on tumblr SJW communist far-left "agender, asexual, aromantic, autistic" for a good number of years, probably around 6? Almost entirely because I joined tumblr at around 12 and it really shaped who I was in a terrible way. It was a slow descent for me and I've honestly developed huge issues befriending and trusting people because of stuff like callout culture. I was absolutely terrified of other people taking my words out of context and ruining my life and its hard getting over that as an older person and it's not the kind of thing you can seek help for because it is honestly absolutely ridiculous as a concept "I have issues with trust because I think people on the internet will be mean to me" It was only after breaking up with a very abusive "tumblr uwu twans-boi" that used a lot of sjw terminology to fuck with me that I was able to sit back and think "This is incredibly fucked up and I shouldn't be so impacted by shit on the internet." Coming on here was really the thing that helped me most, mainly because its anti-sjw but in a neutral way.

Why did you decide to leave?

I realized after a breakup that the overall sjw culture is toxic as fuck and rewards witch hunting and manipulative liars.

What were some of the difficulties you had when you decided to get out?

Definitely transitioning into a new friend group/keeping all of this secret from old friends.

Do you think we will see more people leaving these communities as time goes on?

YES! I think people will start realizing how fucked up it is and will slowly leave, after time only the true exceptional individuals will be left.

What sorts of crazy things did you do while you were still into it?

Oh there's a laundry list here, for starters I got super into mogai stuff, I dated around three people only because I was afraid of being labelled "transphobic" for not dating them, I refused treatment for mental issues because I was afraid of being called a traitor, there's more but its more sad than funny.

When you left it behind, did your ideological views swing to the right, or did they simply become more moderate?

I became very moderate with a "Just leave me alone to sit in the woods on a small farm" kind of attitude. I think people should overall be able to do whatever the fuck they want outside of hurting others.