As a nerdy Black woman that’s really into anime and video games, I only share my passions with and join spaces that are dominated by people of color and women. I’m on a discord sever for Black women who love video games and it’s the only server where I haven’t seen or been called a slur.

As a nerdy black man I always found it strange how some nerds would embrace the same mean spirited, holier than thou elitism and brutality that our bullies gave us. You think their experience as nerds would make them more empathetic

I shared a table with a guy in middle school who brought a backpack full of comics to class everyday (it was a multimedia class so it wasn't structured). I thought he was awkward and didn't talk to him for a quarter of the year. Then he noticed me glancing at one of his comic one day and asked if I would like to read it. He was so excited to tell me what it's about, the characters, and the wider universe. He would bring more of the series the next day and share it with me. Eventually, the other 3 people at our table also joined in and we were all just reading comics together. This video made me think of him for the first time in years. I don't even remember his name let alone know what happened to him. I just really hope that he was still the same person he was in middle school, and that he wasn't sucked into these righ-wing rabbit hole of hate. It's a shame how White Supremacy, Capitalism, and Patriarchy can warp people. The world would be so much better if people were more excited to share space and resource rather than hoard them and try to be superior.

When everyone's a self-proclaimed nerd.. *insert Syndrome's laughter* no one will be

having been beaten up for these weird interests growing up, the desire to gatekeep feels intensified, like "this is special and mine, because i suffered for it, you dont get it for free" its a weird, warped sense of belonging im glad im getting rid of, theres joy in sharing the things that make us happy

thank you for calling out how racist fandom is. for so long ppl didn't say anything and im glad ppl started speaking up. also, your drawings are so cute 💙

Words can't even begin to describe how hard I rolled my eyes at "Nerd blackface" .

This video makes me think a lot about Harriyanna Hook's content, which primarily critiques misogynoir in Fandom and media, thank you for furthering this discussion in your video

My favorite is being told by gamers I'm invading "their" space: by men who were born 20 years after I started gaming. Playing Atari with my friends and NES with my dad and brother back then didn't make me a ”girl gamer,” it just made me a kid. Cutting homeroom to play Duke Nukem with my friends did make me a bit different, though. :) Especially since we had to pretend we were "fixing" the school's computers to get out of class. We rebooted or plugged it back in then had fun until the bell. Best of all was the Mortal Kombat machine in my dorm lounge. I used to play against this one dude who I ended up dating. Then marrying. We still game together (with my brother), and the graphics are so much better!

I never thought about how whenever I think of “nerds” I usually picture an annoying white dude yelling about minorities on a show/movie. Despite my friend ground being a diverse group of nerds. I remember trying to look at reviews for this niche magical girl Japanese game and seeing a bunch of videos about how “the Japanese are going woke” in regards to one of the game devs saying they want to cut some fan service from the game to advertise to a larger audience. 😭 looking at all the comments agreeing with the video was jarring. It was kinda like a secret side of the internet I’ve never seen before.

Worth noting that the original fascists (as in the italian aristocrats who founded the ideology) were also basically failson shutins convinced of their own inherent superiority over everyone else. Lack of sincere emotional connection is a very good predictor for violent extremism

I’ve always found it odd that Whenever some channel screams how a bad movie or tv show has gone “woke” they always seem to be blaming the group of people the show has represented inaccurately rather than the bad script or other factors but no it’s always the fault of someone wanting diversity.

Just think how poorly Revenge of the Nerds circa 1984 aged.

I am a female nerd and I almost went down the alt-right pipeline. It happened around the Syrrian refugee crisis when my male nerd friends were preparing to shun me for defending the refugees, and I was shown Sargon of Akkad and crap like that. I stayed for a while out of fear of losing my peer group, but left it all when I started to see just how insanely bigoted all these people were, and I having internalised sexism so was quick to lick the boots of my male betters.

Nerds are often protective of their works without being aware they're doing it. See Tolkien nerds and any alteration from the books (good and bad; the Balrogs, for instance, don't have wings in the books, and Faramir is a much nicer person). Also, several people pointed out (around the time John Boyega was cast in the _Star Wars_ sequels) that the white reaction to the original _Star Wars_ trilogy was incredibly vitriolic, pointing out how the Empire were mostly white men and the rebels was a diverse alliance of people and species, so this kind of vitriol has existed for at least half a century. Fun!/s

This whole convo also rings true for the Tim-Burton-outsider crowd. They’re much closer to the status quo than they perceive and have some of the same reactions when marginalized people show interest in things they like. Luckily they’re a smaller group and much less violent irl compared to nerds

A lot of fandoms and communities have become so toxic I no longer can associate with them. It can be really isolating

I've always found it ironic that Star Wars has some of the most toxic fans when many of the movies feature themes about people from diverse background coming together to defeat a totalitarian regime. Even some "fans" within the Tolkien fandom moved toward more extreme ideologies and have said some really worrying and racist things about the diversity in the "Rings of Power." Despite my love for manga and high-fantasy when I was younger, I have sadly moved away form the wider world of fandom as I just do not feel comfortable in some of these spaces anymore. I hate being told I'm stupid for loving certain shows or characters the "geek overlords" deem below them. I also love playing sports as well and am tired of some rich white-male geeks saying that I'm a just a "fake geek woman."

As a geek who happens to be a woman, this video really hit hard. The misogyny is getting out of control to the point where the trailer for The Marvels got flooded with hate comments and anyone who has something nice to say about it gets called a bot. Though they won't admit they're being misogynists and, when they're called out on it, they'll mention movies like Alien and Kill Bill to insist that they like women-led movies. What's worse is when women and people of color join in with the alt right fascism. Is there any chance you can make a video about that? I'd really love to see your thoughts about women and people of color joining in to discriminate against themselves. Even about how they use certain movies to try to prove to people that they're not racist or sexist.

I'm a nerd who goes way back. I'm old enough to remember when the first Star Wars movie came out. By the early 1980s, I was fully into computers and video games. I remember Revenge of the Nerds. Back then, it felt empowering to have this one piece of media that showed nerds coming out on top, and the group of outcasts of which I was a part all loved it. Now that I look back on it, it hasn't aged well, and I now see it as a festival of cringe even though I still appreciate the validation it gave me at the time. Perhaps because I'm not a cis-het white male, I have always been resistant to the nerd culture to alt-right pipeline, but my close cis-het white male friends from back then have also resisted it, and one of them, who used to lean conservative, has gone far left in recent years, as he saw the alt-right for the toxic disaster that it is. Thankfully, not all nerds have been drawn into this cesspool. A few years ago, I watched Anita Sarkeesian's videos after hearing about all the controversy surrounding her. Though I might disagree with her about some specifics, I think she made numerous valid points, and I don't understand why so many people felt so threatened by her. She merely pointed out some of the troublesome aspects in much of the media that we enjoy. It's still possible to enjoy something while understanding that elements of it might be problematic or cringeworthy. For example, I love the music of Richard Wagner, but I also understand that he was a colossal anti-Semitic jerk and that his repulsive attitudes might filter into his operas. I also love the cartoons from the Golden Age of Hollywood, but many of them are loaded with racist and sexist themes. I can still appreciate the good points and artistic quality while recognizing that they are a product of their time and will therefore include ideas that are repugnant by today's standards. It isn't a threat to my identity if someone points out something icky in a piece of media that I like. It's better to recognize the icky stuff and come to terms with it than to pretend that it isn't problematic in the first place.

I haven't made it to the end but the yugioh card section hit me cause I was that kid in high school. I loved yugioh but got mocked by everyone even my childhood best friend at the time, who also enjoyed the game but was "to cool" around others to like it. Heck, I was even mocked by magic the gathering players because they saw the game "for kids." Though I fell out of the game due to my area no longer supporting it, I still look back fondly on it, I also met my actual best friend from going to tournaments. But as an adult, I've been mocked for liking manga having people refer to it as a "picture book." Also my love of pokemon, drawing, video games and anime has also been targeted more than once. These are just a few examples of being targeted for being enthusiastic about something.

Yeah I like anime, some anime but I have long noticed that there's a lot of anti-blackness in the anime community.

Yeah I remember there with cries of white genocide because there was a black Stormtrooper. And they tried to make Rose the new Jar Jar Binks, maybe they were mad because it was an Asian woman who didn't fall in love with the first white guy she saw.

Will never forget talking to two white dudes about D&D and one of them randomly went, “Yeah well, we’ve liked D&D for a long time, since you’d get beat up for liking it. Before it was cool.” I said, “I’ve liked it since I was a kid, too.” After that, they immediately respected me more? In my head I was thinking _Damn I literally got the shit beat out of me for being disabled._

It's just shocking to me how certain fans of fantasy, Comic Books and Anime could hold so much anger and strife towards other groups of people. I mean, In so many series the common themes are fighting for peace, standing up against the forces of evil, getting along with others who are different, the struggles of a hero or heros who are judge by society just because they are different and so on. With all these themes and messages in basically some form or another in so many series, how can someone not pick up any of it? How can they not realise they are being the "bad guys" In all the stories they read? Are the only things they get out of these stories, flashy colors and cool fight scenes?

On the subject of the controversy surrounding Rue's casting in The Hunger Games, I just want to point out that Yhara Zayd has a very good video going further into it, as well as racism in fandom spaces

As somebody who was on this pipeline years ago back in middle school as the loner kid who desperately wanted to be seen as an intellectual, the primary reason was that i felt inferior in every way to ppl around me and directed my insecurity towards minorities (particularly queer communities). The main reason i feel that i got out of this hole before it became too deep is that somebody, who i initially felt a lot of hatred towards for making me feel insecure, befriended me and, for the first time, i felt like i had been genuinely seen for the first time in my life. I wanna be able to do the same thing to ppl like middle school me and give them the opportunity to feel worthy of being valued as a person.

And then The Boys happened where there was a scene with an isolated nerd who got radicalised by a Nazi superhero until he shot a store clerk because he wanted to be part of power.

I love manga anime and of course art, and as a Mexican American it's really hard to have a chill conversation with fandoms that had the same interests as I because of how bad, toxic or even way too defensive that I had to not mention it at all nor I can like something but not like the fandom of it. Which makes sense and sad since theirs no peaceful moment with this. I'm glad you made this video.

once womens safety is no longer your concern you start the hellscape slide into only you matter.

this is why i regularly check on wtf my little brother is doing online bc ik how the internet likes to prey on little nerdy boys. Anyone who’s been on the internet, especially youtube from 2010-2016, knows how easily they can be sent down the wrong rabbit hole and im not gonna let it happen to him

I feel like "woke" is just being nice to people or caring about others at this point. Also a lot of these alt-right people call themselves "awake." So... is being awake good or bad to them?

I'm glad the only fandoms I consider myself a part of are fairly low key (Muppets and the Planet of the Apes franchise). But it's interesting to look back on what it was like being a "nerd" 30 years ago compared to today, because I felt much more comfortable talking about my likes and dislikes back then. Now it feels like I have to watch what I say in case someone takes it the wrong way (especially online).

Haven't even watched this yet but, based on the title alone, I know this is gonna be a banger Edit: 25:41 "The key in keeping you inside is that you continue to think that you're at the periphery, at the tip of the iceberg, that all of this hateful rhetoric isn't hateful at all, that there's still more to discover; and that, in the grand scheme of things, this is all a perfectly normal way of seeing the world. That's how the alt right ensnares you, and how conspiracy theories work: They make you _think_ that you're in on a secret, that you have the answers, when, in fact, you're someone else's puppet." This hits SO HARD

That always threw me in nerd spaces. People dont talk about their lives, jobs or views, they want to escape into their hobby. I had to learn this the hard way playing magic the gathering with white guys being the only person of color in the room, and even though i was treated different as a black woman, it was never acknowledged because politics and ruining a safe space for them to find refuge in.

When I was 16 I stopped being racist, sexist, and transphobic because I started weightlifting. It gave me a sense of personal strength.

Just about the video itself and not on the content, the thumbnail and title choice were excellent, very eye catching and true to what the video is actually about, nice job!

I used to be big into the Skeptosphere, sort of teetering right on that edge of the alt-right pipeline. Then I eventually came across HBomberguy and a lot of other more lefty video essayists and I kind of saw how weird I was being. How a lot of what I saw as just normal was baked into me as a white teen guy (at the time) living in the deep south. Right around that time, Star Trek Discovery started and boy oh boy the Trek fandom had a schism. Not as publicly messy as the Star Wars one, probably due in part to Trek's overall focus on diversity, but it was again a whole "look in the mirror" moment for me. Of getting mad because I wasn't sure how to feel about something and someone told me to be mad about a black woman. And there's a part of me that wonders if I still would hold the sociopolitical views regarding social justice and equality that I do now if I hadn't been snatched out of that gaping maw at the very last second. Part of it was leaving home, sure, that whole way the world opens up and you gain perspective, but I don't know. Maybe I'm lucky, I got out before I was irreversible.

Man this feels bad man. I've seen personal friends just fall down the alt right pipeline. It just feels like there is nothing you can do about it. On I side note, people like this just makes it harder to criticize something in good faith. Like I actively really dislike the star wars sequel trilogy (and most of Disney star wars in general) due to the nonsensical plot, strange story beats,, and their willingness to just straight up throw away long established lore. I hate it when I try to look up discussions on it, I just get recommended people talking about SJWs and how much they dislike women and "woke" content. Its honestly pretty infuriating.

I’m someone who’s always considered myself a “nerd”. Im a queer, half Asian, likely neurodivergent woman, and I’ve found a lot of comfort in fandom. It really sucks that so much of nerd culture is overwhelmingly white and male.

Ugh. I’m a nerd. I need to think about this

I get called a nerd or geek often for the field I am in (wildlife sciences) and I will admit, it is my favorite thing to talk about. Yet, it seems so very far away from this type of community. The mindsets in my field like this at all are mostly just the old men who people are waiting to die off so we can make changes to legistlation and such... I feel like terms like geek or nerd kind of fall flat surrounding how many things it can just encompass, especially because it so heavily relies on one's community. I knew someone who was obsessed with MMA (he was a fighter) and when he talked to people in my field he was completely out of his element. By the definition of geek presented here, he could debatably even fall into that category.

This is a nice video, thank you. I think to an extent there was a split round about the time Gamergate happened, a similar thing happened with atheist channels which were gaining a lot of traction back then. I am a cis-het white male who stuck with my principles and remained left-wing or left leaning. But even so I found I had a lot of work to do, it became more evidently clear after the death of George Floyd when I saw so many black creators say (directed at white people) "It's good that you support us now, but in a month or two you will forget or turn on us again", and they were absolutely right. It took barely any time before BLM became a 'terrorist movement', and a lot of so called 'centrists' didn't want to associate with it all of the sudden. That was a real moment of growth for me, because I had to admit to myself that although I identified as left-wing, I did gravitate towards that centrist position from time to time. Then I realised I had to put my money where my mouth is, and remember that it's not about me, it's not good enough to simply declare my support and virtue signal, I have to do more and stop being such a coward because it's easier than standing up for marginalised people or accepting my own faults.

It's always funny how these "this is how radicalism works" videos are always almost the same It's always some leftist that have never actually attempted to understand right wing thought explaining why people lean right to other leftist

by the time i got called a slur for the third time (lgbt woman) in discord servers for the fandom im in, i gave up trying to find one that wasn't full of gatekeepers and made my own that was mostly focused on fanfiction. i found more niche servers as well around different creators for different subgenres of fanfic, and these little bubbles that are mostly the artists, the fanfic authors, and the ones who enjoy them just as much as we love creating them are the servers i feel the most comfortable and safe in. the bigger the server the harder it is to manage and pick out the bad apples, but i like being able to have my server and keep it a safe place for all the people i've gotten close to over the years. if you don't feel safe, make your own space, make it to your liking, trust me you will be so much happier.

I almost fell into this rabbit hole. I was the kind of kid that was watching “feminists destroyed!!” Content back when I was in my tweens. Eventually I became a similar way until I realized how bad my mother is when it comes to politics, and that she aligns with a lot of “anti-woke” rhetoric. Simply put, her being terrible at politics is what made me disassociate from the right. Now, I’m practically what you could consider to be “ultra woke Commie”😂

The way "Nerd Blackface" made me criiinge ew lmao

I love how you, Innuendo Studios, and Three Arrows have seperately reached similar observations on how people became radicalized. The one thing people also need to know is that those people can still be brought back from the brink. Its just a matter of approach and respect.

This is literally what happened to my brother. I am a Latino with strong features and my brother is white passing and very pale. He use to be funny and then he suddenly started liking nerdy stuff and eventually he became conservative. He talked about how he hated Disney remakes, our country and thinks it’s dirty, he makes fun of our indigenous people and language that he never once tried to connect with and always makes racist misogynist and ableist jokes. Not a day goes by without him saying the r word or how much he hates Mexicans. Guys if you have a family member into nerdy stuff please make sure they never get into this rabbit hole because they will never get out and you won’t even know who you’re looking at anymore. EDIT: I JUST finished the video and on that note about calling out your loved ones, you can guess why me and my sibling don’t talk to him anymore lolll

Older generations (who used to actually get bullied for this kind of thing) can easily tell you the difference between a geek and a nerd. A geek is pop culture smart and a nerd is book smart. These days people use the terms interchangeably, and I can understand why since being either one could earn you a beat down after school in the 80s. Having actually lived through that era it's strange to see the things I enjoyed in secret go mainstream to the point of oversaturation and even used as recruiting tools for the alt right.

I was one of these guys in college back in the gamer gate Trump election era. What's sad is that the algorithm will never show a video like this to people like these. What helped me was my older brother sending me videos different than my feed that helped slightly modify my algorithm.

I’m Latino, not white, but the way you talked about how nerds get pushed into the pipeline in part 4 of the video kinda hit me like a bus. I’m autistic and so it got me bullied a lot by both boys and girls in middle school. Since you mention how the patriarchy plays a role in this, I’ll mention that I would end up focusing on the girls that bullied me more than the boys that did because I had these ideas that girls are meant to always act kind and never question anything or act up at all. I would internalize these thoughts and it would end up making me resent the girls that bullied me more than the boys that did, so when I started to hear about feminism at around 13 years old I’d dismiss it as just “women wanting to be angry and annoying” when it wasn’t the case at all. I started to get into “anti woke” or “feminist/SJW gets owned” stuff because I thought it would make me feel better about how I was treated by girls, when in reality it only made my perception of many things warped. Fast forward to high school and some friends that I had that were girls would start to notice me acting sexist or bigoted, and so they would start to confront me and call me out for it. I got into fights and arguments several times with them because I still had the idea that these sexist beliefs were correct because I thought that I faced how all women act when it was just a group of bad people that happen to be women. This was when I started to question these beliefs and so I realized that this way of thinking was wrong the whole time. Through this I would end up realizing that I was queer and I would start feeling more positive and happier about myself. I think that it was also the fact that I found myself in a friend group of people that were also neurodivergent and queer that finally made me comfortable of realizing these things about myself and realize how wrong that things I believed in before were. I am glad I found a video like this because it really does explain what caused the alt right pipeline to get as big as it did

This is a very disturbing Truth. Your coverage of this is extremely important.

Problem with adaptation is that it sucks, not because the audience is racist One Piece has a diverse cast and it turned out okay

This is such a well put together video essay -- thank you for making this

I am a long time nerd that is a fan of geek culture (sci-fi, fantasy videogames etc.) but everything you pointed is the reason why I have started to disassociate myself as a nerd and nerd culture. I even stopped considering myself as part of the Star Wars fanbase due to it's recent Toxicity. The sad part of your pipeline is that I was optimistic and thinking the opposite would happen. A group marginalized in their youth because of how social norms treated them. I thought with the rise of the Internet, online communities, and these nerdy properstes becoming more mainstream combined with understanding the feeling of being treated as outcast that us nerds would have been more welcoming, inclusive, and open to ideas and people of different backgrounds and cultures (I mean this is what the Star Trek franchise originally stood for). Instead the exact opposite happened where nerds are are no better, if not worse, than their past so-called oppressors.

I think Witcher fans are a very good example of this. I am a big fan of the Witcher games and the books are incredibly special to me (I highly recommend them). I think the show is enjoyable. However, I think most Witcher fans are quite annoying. They adhere to a political neutrality (like you mentioned in this video) that makes them really miss some very obvious plot point and the over all meaning of the story. This also results in rampant racism, sexism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, etc. in that community (in the subreddit, for instance). White supremacists are among them If anyone wants to learn more about this, I recommend the 4 part KZfaq series by Sophie from Mars about the series, especially the episode about the fanboys.

Your description of "nerds" is just a description of hyperfixations in autism

I saw it all happen in real time. They were the first built in audience for 4chan. Things went downhill very quickly.

I was too busy being a nerd to fall into the Alt-right. That and I am the type.of person happy to see the things he loves get more popular. I see no problem with discussing the things I love and dissecting it. I understand that some people only care about the surface and going deeper into something they love turns them off. Let people enjoy things the way they do.

Having loved video games all my life, I've run into so many men like this. The insecurity that leads to tying one's own self worth to a piece of media can end up twisting someone in wild ways. I had a formerly good friend start treating me like garbage and saying some borderline Incel-like things after I made a couple valid criticisms of a game and stopped playing it (around the time its company was revealed to have done a lot of terrible things, and tbh continues to do terrible things lol). And he wasn't even white! He'd even seen the times I'd been harassed and creeped on in the game's community, so I thought he'd have understood... but now I think I let some of his own iffy behavior slide over the years, *sigh*.

I find it interesting these default "schools" in the example are always diverse, lol. I went to an all black school pretty much until High School and even my High School was pretty heavily black. (Baltimore, MD is a heavily black city, so it wasn't like they were designated that way, they just were....even the teachers were more likely to be black then white or any other race). And so being black really didn't really isolate me the way being a weird nerd (with probably undiagnosed neurodivergency) did. Oh, and I was a fat kid and hadn't quite figured out I was gay yet. That figuring out didn't happen til college. I was teased and bullied for existing. So when I got to college the white kids who actually liked some of the geeky things I did honestly felt like a saving grace. I was actually afraid to mention any geeky thing I enjoyed in black company and the weird thing was it felt most safe to do so in no-black company as I had never been made fun of for it there. And non black company included also a few Asian friends I made in my college/young adult life. It has been weird to see, as geek culture becomes more main stream, that flip for me. In college I also did meet other black young people who identified as geeks or nerds, so 1- I found out they actually exist. 2 - As the whole Geek/Nerd thing went more mainstream, suddenly the white male dominated spaces did start to feel more unsafe. Which they hadn't in college (I'm almost 45, so it was years ago for me). So I feel like I've felt that flip/change in such a different way. And that yeah, as long as certain folks had lead ownership in certain spaces, I was welcome there. But as soon as people of color and queer people started showing more visibly in Geek/Nerd culture media, the community turned rabid. It's been a sad change to see.

I love how we have to hand-hold and babysit white cishet men through life because so many of them just plug their ears and stomp around instead of just, listening and being empathetic.

I would probably call myself nerd-adjecent. Many of my interests overlap with traditionally nerdy things, but I'm not into things like fantasy, coding, or superheroes. As an autistic person, i try to hide my interests and tend to mask heavily whenever I'm not at home. One of my teachers, who is a wonderful person and one of my mentors, told me I'm, "Just like Sheldon Cooper," after finding out that I'm autistic. She meant it as a compliment, but it hurt. I try to be emotionally aware, am not really interested in STEM, and do my best to cover up my 'nerdy' interests. Yet, that assholeish, entitled persona is what people associate most with nerds and autistic people.

This is especially fitting now that John Carmack (co-creator of Doom) participated in a sci-fi convention that is against "woke propaganda"

Your videos are really good and I think it’s important that you directly addressed the group who might’ve needed to hear this the most

"You know those behaviors we have that drove people to fringes? The solution is to double down on it and blame the victims we bullied for it."

Though I'm not nerd, I am aware of many who fit this description. They are definitely at risk of becoming entrapped or enticed to extremism as you have revealed here. The most dangerous of this type of extremism involves the morbid idolization and fascination with *guns*

I really enjoyed this video essay. Many people don't recognize that black men can also be nerds. We are constantly in positions to prove our intelligence, then re-prove our intelligence. This becomes very frustrating over the years.

I think there's a side of intellectual meritocracy kinda vibe there that leads you to things like objectivism, which promotes libertarians, which has become just Republican without the obvious racism.

Great video! Another interesting factor is that this mid 2000's radicalization period happened at the tail end of (ironically) a right-wing moral panic against consumers of nerdy media - starting with the satanic panic and carrying through to the early part of the school shooting era, in which many of the older generation started to associate nerdiness or video games etc with a hidden propensity for mass murder. The mainstream interest and subsequent serious media criticism came right near the end of that era. That satanic panic/mass shooter era had helped prime these people to see outside criticism of their media as that direct attack on their personality that you mentioned... Because the other stuff actually had been a deep and alarming personal attack. The nerd/video game moral panic never really developed into anything other than very very sporadic instances of state violence directed towards nerds, but it was seen by nerds as a sort of looming potential threat. It was very easy for fascists to propagandize nerds in that environment.

Crazy how female nerds go the opposite direction. For them there's a nerd to Wicca to bi-sexual pipeline.

Really interesting video, your points about the ableism, sexism and racism in TBBT were spot on and about how they let Sheldon get away with being as sexist (amd bigoted in general) as possible with no consequences or effort from him to learn/grow and viewers somehow started defending him and taking his side and acting like he wasn't that bad and hating on Bernadette and Penny, proving the sexism of Sheldon, the show and many of the viewers.

I fell down the alt-right pipeline when i was younger; luckily Natalie Wynn saved me from being a total fascist. Nowadays i'm an anarchocommunist with egoist leanings, and i still have intrusive thoughts of fascist talking points etc when i talk with my friends (mostly Black and AFaB) about political/social topics

This is an old problem. My husband says that he got death threats in 1987 for disliking "Star Trek: the Next Generation." He lost several friends from fandom over this one issue.

This is so well done. Also, Jesus gamergate started almost 10 years ago wtf I feel old.

A particular experience I'm always surprised with is I'm a huge X-Men fan. I've been reading the comics since I was a child ;I'm 25 now. I'm also gay and half Puerto Rican. My mother's side is where I get my Puerto Rican from and she's whom raised me so very much grew in an ethnic household. Now Xmen is a big minority allegory. They're literally persecuted regulated in contained due to how they were born. Magneto was a holocaust survivor so whatever for the second time his people were getting met with genocide that's why he snapped and became a radical. So X-Men has always been on top of like showing gay rights and minority rights and just how people suffer because of bigotry. Even on a governmental level. And yet you still have racist white Fanboys who are confused whenever most of the cast of X-Men or women or people have some corn of minority at least not American. And it's like bro obviously you've never read a comic book and if you did do you have any reading comprehension ;because Xmen is all about human rights and everyone being treated like a person. The arrogance and ego that you find within racism that somehow find their way into nerd spaces even more so spaces for the whole concept of the comic. is about minorities suffering ;and overcoming ;and getting stronger together. While maintaining peace with humans to the best of their ability.

Sadly, at this point is not just cishet white abled neurotypical men anymore (I mean bad enough, but then at least you could trust other fandom people). As you said, bigots actively use fandom to recruit people, and TERFs are no different. The amount of white, abled, neurotypical cis lesbians who are the most abusive, biphob, aphob, transphob, ableist and racist person imaginable I met in fandom... As a bi autistic woman I feel super unsafe, because these people made me know very clearly that they don't consider me and who I feel represented by human or worth of any respect. They claim because they are of a marginalized group they can't be bigots, but in truth they use it as an excuse to get more and more aggressive with their bigotry. If they can use their bigotry for a ship war, the better (*cough* She-Ra fandom *cough*). The idea that because you face one part of oppression you can never be oppressive or wrong in any other way is hell of an shield.

Growing up in nerd spaces in the early 00s was rouuuuugh as a half Black person. The amount of ‘it’s just a joke, lighten up’ after dude dropped the hard R I got…shit was exhausting and I only repicked up a magic deck in my 30s

This video is basically a crash course in how to utilise a strawman and utilising master suppresion tecniques against said strawman. Literally assuming secret thoughts, and that theyre just lying and trying to pathologise their diffrence in opinion. Instead, maybe try asking someone what their actual opinion is? Oh wait, they will obviously just lie and secretly cry themselves to sleep at home i forgot. I see you learned from innueindo studios. Its basically just depiciting your oponent as the soyjack but with more steps, and constant lies. I also wanna say to any leftists, it doecent do you any favours to have this distorted fantasy land view of your opponents even if mental masturbation feels good, certainly not in your private life if you meet anyone with remotely diffrent views, or you actually have an interest in understanding an issue or reality in general.

I BEEM WAITING FOR THIS ONE

Sometimes I wonder if people who spew these type of rhetorics have actually engaged with the work itself. Most of the time, those who scream/gatekeep the loudest about something are "protecting" a franchise that has a positive message about inclusivity, justice, love, and not letting hatred take a hold on yourself. It is really sad to see people not acting what they preach

Great video. I think a factor other people forget in the nerd-to-fascist pipeline is the the internet leading to the effective death of in-person meetups and subculture. With the way things worked when I was a teenager, you had to actually go to stores or cons if you were into something nerdy. This brought you into contact with other people and their interests... So even if you just were into comic books, you'd run into a guy with a cool t-shirt and the next thing you know you're asking your local record store to import some South American heavy metal band's first album. Not that there weren't issues in the scenes back in the day but you were at least sort of conditioned to realize there's a degree of diversity. But when the became the main way to do everything, that eventually died. So people more or less obsessed over one thing and almost one thing alone.

This had me thinking of when I became aware of the larger WH40K fandom. For most of my life, I only knew of it from my dad, who is... actually, I don't think he neatly falls into a specific ideology, he ran the philosophy department at a book store for over 5 years, so he has a nuanced left-wing ideology I don't fully understand, that is most closely aligned with left-wing anarchism. Anyway, I grew up thinking everyone knew that the Imperium is deliberately dystopian, and that a lot of what made WH40K interesting was a universe unlike our own where the Imperium actually makes sense, and then found a fandom with a lot of fascists who want to kill the mutant, heretic, and xenos. IE do eugenics, kill everyone that disagrees with them, and if we find aliens, kill them too.

WHAT A MASTERPIECE, I was just thinking about this topic the other day, Good Work Queen👑

Cheyenne your videos are always HITS!! A+ tier video essays every time!

I'm still upset for KMT. Star Wars did her so dirty. I hope she rises + thrives. Thanks for raising awareness & suggesting practical steps, & esp for being trans-inclusive in a time where that needs to be explicit.

As a neurodivergent lady nerd who is Latina and Queer, I getting fucking tired

thank you for always taking up the difficult topics!

While I agree with all your comments about why Nerd/Geek culture is such a toxic stew, I do feel that there is one aspect key to the culture that you haven't pointed out. The reason media analysis is so terrible in that subculture, despite their obsession with a product, is that for whatever reason for years, Geeks/Nerds prized minutiae over actual analysis. An example of this can be seen in the Star Wars fandom, where so many geeks pride themselves on being able to name every character that ever appears in a property, even if they just stood in the far corner for less than a minute, but when you try to explain how George Lucas intended Star Wars to be an allegory for the Vietnam War, with the Empire being the USA and the Rebels serving as the Viet Cong, either you get a lot of blank faces or they accuse you of injecting politics into the story. Never mind how all art is political to begin with. This kind of obsession with minutiae and trivia is akin to bragging about knowing the exact number of leaves on a tree but being able to say nothing about the overall structure or health of the organism. Meanwhile, if someone does come along who can talk about these things, but does the unthinkable like, say, gets the number of leaves wrong, well, that proves they're clearly a fake fan of that tree. If you can't meaningfully take apart and analyze the themes of a story, it becomes much harder to analyze and weigh out the real-world thoughts and opinions of others. Yeah, I've heard of the whole "The curtains are blue" meme, and it can be annoying when the English teacher insists that every aspect of the story is symbolic, but the truth is that every detail that winds up being mentioned is the product of authorial intent, and it's worth speculating on what is behind this intent. It could be as simple as "The writer thought it sounded really cool" with no deeper reason intended, but again, they chose to mention it for a reason, and it's worth speculating why.

As a whyte male nerd I always found it weird that many nerds of similar background and experiences leaned into the ideologies of people who used to bully us. I went the opposite route and leaned into feminism as a rejection of those bullies. Feminism would argue that men don't have to be masculine, men can like playing pretend, men can get emotionally invested, men can like cute things. Bullies denigrated us for all those things because of traditional values, values perpetuated by the right. But feminism (extremists notwithstanding) is accepting of people like me who don't conform to traditional concepts of masculinity. But while you and a lot of other knowledgeable and nuanced people who discuss these subjects have stated that liking something problematic doesn't have to be a reflection of the character of the person who likes it, there are many many random strangers with feminist and progressive values out there who participate into these online discussions and do believe that you can't still like problematic things or else you're a bad person. One of my own friends, for example, recently shared a post basically saying "I better not see any Helluva Boss posts or we can't be friends", and has shared similar posts in the format of "You better not like xyz problematic thing or we can't be friends". And I know at least two people who do that kind of thing occasionally. It's not an uncommon thing in progressive circles to say that "actually yes, you aren't allowed to like these things anymore and we do want to take them away". Ironmouse (a popular VTuber) also recently got attacked on social media for playing Hogwarts Legacy because the author of the Harry Potter series is a TERF. And personally I've been called a "whyte feminist" and a "moderate" by other feminists because I like Steven Universe. Yes that was the only reason, they didn't ask me anything about what I actually believed, they just saw I had a Pearl profile pic and assumed. So there are many feminist-leaning people who do genuinely make that argument, and I think because of those extremists, these men get mixed messages and think all feminists and progressives feel that way. There's an awful lot of muddied waters about what "real" feminism is. And while the right misinterprets it in bad faith, feminists themselves also have a lot of infighting about that, especially when each feminist permutation claims that all the other permutations are not "real" feminism. Inclusionists vs exclusionists, sex-positive vs sex-negative, feminists who say "men can't be feminists" vs feminists who say "men can be feminists", and the ones who say "you can still like problematic things" vs the ones who say "purge all problematic things", each of these groups claims to be the only "real" version of feminism. So I think it's hard for outsiders to conceive that they shouldn't take what one group says as gospel for how the entire movement as a whole feels. True that every political ideology has people within like that who try to "No True Scotsman" the whole thing, so maybe I'm being too charitable towards the alienated right-leaning nerds for not understanding that feminist ideas are a spectrum like all other ideologies. But whereas I used to only experience getting attacked by people with right-leaning values for liking certain things, nowadays it comes both from people on the right and people on the left, and I just think that really doesn't help. I don't know if you'll see this, but if I could ask for advice, what should I say to my feminist friends who say things like that? Should I tell them "The alt-right invented the idea that liking problematic things makes you a problematic person, so when you try to dictate what your friends are allowed to like you're actually perpetuating alt-right narratives"? I mean, I could try telling them that, but I don't think they'll take it very well.

Thank you Cheyenne.🙏 It needed to be heard. Human rights are not up for debate.

I could never get into nerd culture, because I always felt like I was bombarded with insults based on my appearance and people excusing it because they all called each other those names. I feel like people wanted to yell at me for not knowing something and I was always fixated on something that's not nerdy but not cool either. I feel alone as no one really gets me and I cannot share my obsessions and stuff. I do NOT feel like screaming in a library about anime, yet I do not feel like partying and doing sports. I like some pop culture and some nerd culture, but my fixation is Eurovision and Reality TV.

got gamer gate completely wrong. although anita was targetted it wasn't her take on games. it was her inability to properly research ALL games. she was just lazy. then lazy people with lazy commentary came at her and guess what? she disappeared because she didn't put the time in.

This needs to be discussed more. From video games to movies... I've never seen dudes so upset over literally nothing. I'm no nerd or geek but I have loved SW & superheroes like Batman for years...when a Black character comes about in one of this universes as a focal point, not a side character...these cats go bananas. I've distanced myself from a lot of these type of content creators though. It's not that deep to me & I'm damn near 40 years old...furthermore, I can't sit & listen to bigotry masked behind "wokeism" or "love of the source material". 🤷🏾‍♂️

I think there is one element missing from this: people being told they don't belong. What pushed a lot of people I knew in 2012 to the right wasn't the original gamergate story or anything stemming from Anita Sarkeesian herself, instead it was the universal labeling of anyone that might simply disagree with her on any point as a mustache twirling misogynistic villain or as a straight up Nazi. Same thing for the Five Guys posts for gamergate. People are were given false information, and when they tried to act on that false info in good faith they were labeled as freaks who hate women and cast out. The only people willing to take them in were the same people distributing the false information.

I haven't even watched the video but it's pretty simple. Fascism gives people an easy answer to a complex problem. It gives hope to the hopeless. Doesn't matter if it's based in lies and deception but answers it gives with a caveat of inspiration and hope... IDEALIZATION in a sense. The romantization of the idea a strong MEN (it's usually men, a fraternal figure of sorts. Sometimes a strong women is allowed as a second in charge, as long as she knows who's "the man") will point the north and help us "fix" everything we perceive wrong with us. Strengthen us were we perceive ourselves weak. And it's usually brings the simple solution that everything people perceive wrong with them and with society can be fixed by brutalizing [insert powerless group in here]. That "they're all the real cause of all evil and all that's wrong" that in fact our perceived weakness is because of [insert powerless group in here] as well. The idea that "we ain't actually weak and pathetic". (((THEY/them))) "convinced us that we're weak so they could rule us"... It's the demonizing of 'the other' that we all know about, but in facism, the other always being too weak to actually fight against it in any meaningful way. It prays on the weak and insecure, tells them they've been lied to, that they're actually far stronger than they could ever imagine (which is partially true as all good lies are) and then points them their enemy (the ones who were behind the lies they were ever weak). And then tell "if we get rid of them, THEN all the weakness and insecurity you feel will be gone". And it tell then over and over again, until they start wondering if it's true. Fascism is the weaponization of fear and insecurity. And it starts with seeding and feeding anger and resentment while shinning a bright face that can supposedly solve all of those problems.. Supposedly. Of course they can't solve all those problems. No no... Fascism is only good at demonizing and brutalizing of minorities. It can never actually solve anything. It's an extremely poor thought exercise. It's childish at best. Horror inducing at worst.

I'm old. Back when, "nerd" and "geek" were insults, until we wore the terms like armor. A lot of us bled actual blood in the Nerd-Jock Wars. Seeing "nerd" culture become mainstream? To me, it means we won. It also means we have the responsibility to protect and aid the new bully-targets. "Aim here. Start with words. Get it all on camera." That sort of thing.

7:30 - you mentioning this brings up a good point- why is it that female-targeted intrests don't get respect until boys/men get into it? I'm all for guys taking an interest in female-coded things without being ridiculed for it, but why are said things worthy of ridicule to begin with?

I was in this pipeline and one of the reasons I think it’s so effective is because the right actually listens (or pretends to listen) to the problems these people are facing, while the left a lot of times acts as if you can’t have problems if you’re cis white. In these communities it sometimes sounds as if you can only get the thumbs up if you’re LGBT, or a person of color, or disabled. Even this video at times makes it sound as if 15 year olds who like nerdy shit have a macheavelian plan to allign with the ideologies where they can crush the minorities, showing (imo) that you don’t fully understand the internal problems and struggles of people like that, it sounds like you’re prescribing them malice when the cause for their actions can, in a lot of cases, be explaind by other stuff. I dont want it to sound like an attack, I agree with you on your conclusions but this is, to me, what pushes these nerds to the right. A lot of times the left doesn’t want to accept you unless you come with the answers already figured out, while the right patiently teaches you how THE JEWZ R DESTROYING THE WORLD!!1! I got off of that pipeline when I found people and communities that felt like they were actually listening to my problems and didn’t feel like reducing everything to skin color or the conditions of your birth. While at the same time pushing me to more progressive beliefs.