How to make your child into an alt-right hatebeast.

This lady's kid became an alt-right pig boy but it wan't his fault! And it certainly wasn't his fault. It's that darn internet!

What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right

A Washington family's nightmare year.

WRITTEN BY ANONYMOUS 

 | PUBLISHED ON MAY 5, 2019

The problems had started when Sam was 13, barely a month into eighth grade. In the taxonomy of our local public school, his close group of friends was tagged edgy and liberal

Yes. I'm sure they were ever so "edgy." Nothing "edgier" than a "liberal" teenager.

One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” 

No. No, that didn't happen. No guidance counselor would be that stupid, that ignorant of the law. The guidance counselor may have accused your son of violating school rules or behavioral guidelines, but the law? No way. And, honestly I doubt that the incident happened the way your son told you it did. There is no way a girl just overheard a risque' reference in a private conversation and ran off to report that she had been sexually harassed.  Girls who have actually been sexually harassed rarely report it  for a variety of reasons not the least of which is that the school is unlikely to take their accusations seriously.

If this girl made an accusation of sexual harassment, AND the school took it seriously, your son did something a lot worse than laugh at an off-color joke. I would think maybe something like Jameis Winston did at Florida State. That was based on an internet meme, too.
https://www.sbnation.com/lookit/2014/9/16/6252613/jameis-winston-stood-on-a-table-at-fsu-and-yelled-f-k-her-right-in
And if this had actually happened the way your liar son claims it did, wouldn't she have reported the boy who MADE the vulgar joke? Not the one who merely laughed?

You can not seriously take a 13-year-old boy at his word. If I had gotten into trouble at school (which I never did, I was a fucking saint) I would have lied to my mom about it too.

Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

And you seriously bought this story? Fuck, I wish you had been my mom. I could've gotten away with murder! (Not that I would have. Saint, you know.)

No one called me as this unfolded

And that didn't tip you off? I'm guessing, just by your indulgent parenting some of the other things you write here that you live in a fairly affluent school district. The kind where parents hire lawyers if their precious little angels don't get a passing grade. there is no way they wouldn't have informed you or the boy's father while this was going on. This alone should tell you that this never happened.

No one called me as this unfolded, even though Sam cried for about six hours straight as staff members parked him in vacant offices to keep him away from other students. When he stepped off the bus that afternoon and I asked why his eyes were so swollen, he informed me that he would probably be suspended, but possibly also expelled and arrested.
If Kafka were a middle-schooler today, this is the nightmare novel he would have written.

Yes. Kafka, a fiction writer, might well have written such an implausible scenario.,

At a meeting two days later with my husband, Sam, and me, the administrator piled more accusations on top of the harassment charge—even implying, with undisguised hostility, that Sam and his friend were gay. He waved in front of us a statement from the girl at the table and insisted that Sam would need to defend himself against her claims if he wanted to prove his innocence. But the administrator refused to reveal the particulars of the complaint (he had also blacked out identifying details, FBI-style) and then hid the paperwork under a book. He declared that it was his primary duty, as a school official and as a father of daughters, to believe and to protect the girls under his care.

So the administrator was Joseph McCarthy? You're still expecting us to believe this? And all this, you expect us to believe, was the result of your son merely laughing at someone else's bawdy joke. I mean, you can see why no one believes this, right?

Sam agreed, reluctantly, to write a letter of apology to the girl who’d reported him so that the debacle would come to an end. But no hoped-for resolution materialized. Instead, Sam’s sweet earnestness, his teenage overconfidence, even his tremulous determination in the face of unjust authority drained away, replaced by . . . nothing. He lost all affect. He stopped eating and sleeping, complained of headaches, and regressed in disturbing ways. He couldn’t concentrate, turned in no homework, and didn’t even pick up a pen when it was time to take a test.

 Okay, your son is disturbed. If this is true, and I have my doubts, this kid sounds severely depressed. This isn't funny anymore. You need to get him help.

But the transfer, midyear, to a new school—after he’d been wrongly accused, unfairly treated, then unceremoniously dropped by his friends—shattered Sam. 

Oh my God, he would not have been dumped by his friends for having been mistreated by school officials. That wouldn't happen. Why would they drop their friend if all he had done was laugh at a risque' joke? If anything, they would have rallied around him. You know who would have been ostracized? The girl who made the complaint. No matter how legitimate the complaint was, girls who report boys' bad behavior and get the boys in trouble are usually the ones who face negative social consequences. At least in the real world where real things happen. Not in the made-up world where your son is an innocent angel victimized by cruel authorities over a simple misunderstanding.

 He felt totally alone. I counseled patience, naively unprepared for what came next: when he found people to talk to on Reddit and 4chan.
Those online pals were happy to explain that all girls lie—especially about rape. And they had lots more knowledge to impart. They told Sam that Islam is an inherently violent religion and that Jews run global financial networks. (We’re Jewish and don’t know anyone who runs anything, but I guess the evidence was convincing.) They insisted that the wage gap is a fallacy, that feminazis are destroying families, that people need guns to protect themselves from government incursions onto private property. They declared that women who abort their babies should be jailed.

And your son wasn't intelligent enough to smell this bullshit from a mile away?

Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. 

Really? At thirteen. At thirteen years of age, he prides himself on "subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny." That's what you're going with. That's what you think seems like a reasonable description of your thirteen-year-old son.
Seem this is half the problem. You have this kid believing this shit. You've been telling him forever how special and intelligent he is, what a deep thinker he is, how he's just so much better than the other kids. So now when something doesn't go his way (which I would bet an awful lot of money was entirely his fault) he can't handle it. He goes into a nearly catatonic depression. Then he gets intrigued by the alt-right, because they also tell him that nothing is his fault. It's the feminists, it's the Muslims, it's the Jews. All these powerful forces are aligned against him simply because he was unfortunate enough to have been born white, male and affluent.

Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. 

No, one would actually be correct. If your son had actually been searching out answers, he would not have found only the alt-right "intellectual dark web."

Here's an example. I just now typed "Do women lie about rape?" into the Google. Here are the top three results:

MAAN » Myths about false accusation - Stanford University

www.stanford.edu/group/maan/cgi-bin/?page_id=297

Only about 2% of all rape and related sex charges are determined to be false, the same percentage as for other felonies (FBI).

The truth about false assault accusations by women - BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45565684

Over the past 20 years, only 2-10% of rape accusations (Prof Ford's lawyer says she believes this was attempted rape) are proven to be fake, argue the authors of a 2010 US study.
we should be sceptical of the notion that it is common for women to say they've been sexually abused when they haven't.

False Rape Accusations Are Incredibly Rare - The Cut

https://www.thecut.com/article/false-rape-accusations.html

Almost No One Is Falsely Accused of Rape

By Katie Heaney

You get the idea. If your son had been honestly searching for the truth, using his famed "intellectual scrutiny," he would have found much more accurate answers. If he went to 4chan and typed in something like "why do these b*tches always lie about rape?" then he would have gotten spmething more like the results that he did actually get.

The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.

see, you're almost getting it. You're soooo close to getting it. Confirmation Bias! That's what was going on here. Your son, if he saw an article that said "well, no, women virtually never make up false charges of rape or assault," he disregarded it as it didn't fit in with his preconceived notion that he can never be at fault so the girl must be nefariously trying to harm him because girls are evil. But when he sees an article saying something like, as Rush Limbaugh has infamously said repeatedly, "the concept of date-rape was made up by feminists to destroy the fine art of seduction," well that fits in with his framework of him being the victim And in a way, he probably is a victim. He's probably the victim of your parenting. I mean, I guess I'm going out on a limb here, but I assume you're like one of those mothers you see on Judge Judy who insists that their son would never never do the thing he is accused of doing and he never lies and always tells the truth and then Judge Judy gets him on the stand for about 30 seconds and the kid goes "okay, yeah, I did it." And then at the end of the show the mother still somehow thinks her kid didn't so it.

 Kids who are raised like that are going to have an awfully tough time dealing with the real world when it turns out that they actually can't get away with whatever they want. (Unless they are good at football)

 

Exhibit A. 

(And this was just him dealing with the possibility that he might not get what he wanted)

I did try to clear my own mind enough to understand some situations as he did, such as his belief that the men’s-rights movement restored justice to the world. Sam pledged fealty to the idea of men’s rights because, as he said, his former administrator had privileged girls’ words and experiences over boys’, and that’s how all of his troubles had started in the first place. I’d never in my life backed the “masculinist” cause or imagined that men needed protecting—yet I couldn’t help but agree with Sam’s analysis.

Seriously?
First of all, let's pretend for a moment that the incident actually happened the way you claim it did. Your son had one negative experience where the word of one girl was taken over the word of one boy, and he extrapolates from that one experience that the entire world is somehow biased against boys and you -- a goddamm adult woman -- think "hey, the kid has a point?"
Seriously?

No wonder this kid has issues.