I first started posting on Reddit when Gamergate began- I was disturbed by how many young men online suddenly started espousing rightwing, trad or just straight up Nazi shit seemingly overnight (though to be fair, if you looked at gamer or nerd culture even before GG, the warning signs were already there.)

I ended up on anti-Gamergate places on Reddit and hung around to track the movement and to partake in communal dunking on their “thought” leaders. This was the time I first stumbled upon people like hbomberguy. Skip forward a couple of years, and Gamergate starts to wane, largely replaced by Trump’s presidential campaign and the newly named alt-right as the main topic of discussion, the latter featuring many famous Gamergate people among its figureheads.

I didn’t really pay attention to the DNC primary or Bernie’s first campaign and I just assumed Hillary was going to get the nomination. At the time, I wasn’t too concerned with leftist politics and and was just more generally opposed to right-wingers, conservative culture war shit, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia. Still, I found myself not fully fitting in with the posters on anti-Gamergate, anti-Trump and other liberal spaces on Reddit.

I first stumbled on cth from the Other Discussions tab on popular news stories, but was initially put off by all the anti-Hillary and anti-Democrat stuff as well as the abrasive language- I couldn’t fit it into my liberal vs. conservative paradigm so chapo posters sounded dangerously close to 4chan guys or the_donald posters to me. I still continued to check discussions on cth, though, finding myself aligning more and more with the chapo mindset as time went on, and some time in January 2017 I just finally got fed up with Russiagate nonsense and limp-dicked #Resistance bullshit on liberal subreddits and swore them off forever. In the past two years, I’ve even started listening to the pod