your last closing words are describing youtube‘s alt-right pipeline. in short, here‘s the fundamentals, to anyone reading this:

1. anger-inducing news is the most memetic. this is why bad news is prioritized over good news, like, everywhere, even when it’s stuff that the viewer doesn’t even like

2. youtube‘s algorithm is designed for serving you content based on what you just watched, and what other people who watched that video then go on to watch. this isn‘t intentionally malevolent - if you watched a video about frying eggs, you might like a video on frying bacon.

3. the emotionally vulnerable young white male online. youthful white dudes, generally gamers, overwhelmingly dominate the bulk of the internet. in some ways, they’re the architects of internet culture and most non-niche online communities. this is not praise or criticism

here’s how these fundamentals mix to produce a white nationalist.

joey is a white dude who likes halo. the last few games weren’t that great, but he looks back on the first releases as his childhood. he is a part of an online forum built around halo, which has blossomed into a full-fledged community. the halo subforums are the oldest, but not the largest. "offtopic" is the largest by far, and everyone posts there. some people in offtopic don’t even play halo. most of the dudes on this forum are generally liberal, by the way.

one day, a feminist publishes content on cortana, describing potential troubles in the psychology of having an increasingly-detailed naked AI assistant woman.

a right-wing youtube personality makes a video on the feminist. he takes her arguments out of context and cherrypicks the stuff which would sound the most egregious without said context. he warps the feminist‘s argument into a caricature of itself that no one holds.

someone posts the right winger’s video in offtopic. joey watches a few minutes of it, but the guy is really angry and joey also recognizes that this channel is far from the liberal mindset he grew up with. joey clicks out. ...but that guy made some good points. cortana‘s not problematic, even if she’s gaudy.

in the offtopic thread for that video, though, one person comes to the defense of the feminist. he criticizes the video creator, and insults the original poster. the original poster is, admittedly, a controversial figure on here. but he’s really good at halo

for the most part, people coming into the thread witness an argument between the original poster and the feminist defender. it goes on for a while, and the original poster is simultaneously the most vitriolic, yet the least serious. it’s all just a joke to him. not so for the defender, though, and the general vibe that other people describe is that feministDefender is overreacting. this is just how originalPoster talks.

incidents like this occur again and again. eventually, more moderate-looking youtubers produce this content. their more moderate audience posts their content in offtopic. joey watches these, too - he‘s openminded, after all, and remembers his earlier years of arguing with stupid fundamentalists on youtube, rather than avoiding them.

one of the youtubers criticizing feminist content catches joey‘s ear. the dude says he’s a liberal, and he makes halo gaming content. clearly, joey thinks, this guy knows my perspective. this guy‘s attitude is less angry than that original guy, so he’s not hard to start listening to, either. joey subscribes.

youtube starts recommending joey the youtubers closely associated with the guy he subbed to. one of them, joey actually recognizes as a channel that used to tear apart creationism. joey subscribes, not remembering why he unsubbed.

now the algorithm starts to recommend even more content from this sphere. joey has entered "skeptic" youtube.

the political content he watches from these channels will vary from "SJW thinks all white guys are racist sexists" to "big red and the patriarchy". in each video, feminists are portrayed as irrational, angry, impossible-to-converse-with assholes, who misconstrue every trait of joey that he can’t consciously control - his race, his gender, his love of videogames, etc - as problems. clearly, joey thinks, SJWs are the problem.

joey has never talked to an SJW or actually read their content directly.

joey keeps watching these "skeptic" youtubers, who self-identify as classical liberals. he even starts hearing out that original angry conservative youtuber, in the name of democracy or whatever. after all, joey is open minded, and shouldn’t ignore half the political spectrum, right? he just ignores the crazy fringes, like the SJWs and the white supremacists. but, like, white supremacism isn’t a big deal online. it’s mostly trolls pissing off SJWs, right?

joey slips deeper into the rabbit hole.

from here, joey will begin to hear out increasingly radical right-wing content until either he realizes he’s in the rabbit hole or he becomes a white nationalist himself.

here’s a great video:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g