How Did I Get Here?
a two-part essay that examines the sources of the alt-right pipeline
Part One: Misogyny as an Emotion
The truth is, I’m not entirely a man-hater. There’s a distinct difference between hating men and hating people who perpetuate and sustain the patriarchy. Because of the large numbers of men who uplift the patriarchy, it seems like I do hate all men. Like how I don’t hate all white people, but I hate the people who support white supremacy.
The mainstream feminist movement (also known as White Feminism or Western Feminism) is inherently individualistic. Individualism is a Western concept that primarily stems from Capitalism. One must put themselves and their immediate family first to gain power, status, and money. In western activism, we also put ourselves first. Rather than thinking beyond ourselves, we ask what will help me gain more privilege. For this reason, it seems like Western Feminism is women vs. men rather than everyone vs. the patriarchy.
Because they feel excluded, men will say, “Well, men have issues too! Our lives aren’t easy either, but you don’t see us complaining about it,” The first “men’s rights” issue that is brought up is the inability to express sadness among other emotions.
But why? Why aren’t men allowed to show what they’re feeling? Why do we shame men when they cry or roll our eyes when they express how someone hurt them? Why is vulnerability so wrong?
The answer: you guessed it! The patriarchy! To keep this brief because this isn’t new information, the patriarchy is what stigmatizes mental health problems in men. Being emotional is seen as being feminine or girly. You tell a boy to man up when he’s complaining. You tell him he’s acting like a girl when he cries. Emotional vulnerability is reserved for women (even though women face shame for every emotion, it is expected.)
Even in male friendships, men can’t express their appreciation for their friends without being called soft. Men learn to express love through mean comments and insensitive jokes. Regardless of if they like the jokes, they feel like they must laugh or fire back another insult.
While I could rant on about how vulnerability is feminized and yada yada yada, there is a different point I want to make. Our list of emotions has been failing to address one emotion lately. A lot of times, we leave the most dangerous and common emotion out there, anger.
I don’t think we recognize anger as an emotion enough, especially in men. Rarely, men are accused of being emotional when they yell or scream at their video games, or when they’re fuming and punch a hole in the wall. We’ve reserved the term “emotional” for sadness or a woman’s anger, but not for men’s anger. The one emotion men can express without repercussions is anger and rage, and it starts at the ripe age of middle school.
Some of the angriest and most hateful people I’ve met are boys aged 11-17. We won’t get into the alt-right pre-teen boys of my middle school years, but let’s just say it was not fun. The common denominator in a lot of these boys was that they were constantly angry to compensate for the fact that they hated themselves and their life.
I would almost feel bad for them if they didn’t torture and project their self-esteem issues onto others, but I understand that they acted this way because seeking help for their mental health and internal struggles is against the cultural norm. When you’ve been made fun of and ridiculed for seeking help, it seems easier to just suffer in silence or find a different release for your emotions.
When you’re angry at the world but don’t know that what you’re mad at is the patriarchy and its idea of masculinity, you’re looking to find something to validate your anger. The first thing young boys find to hate and source their anger in is, you guessed it, women. This violent and overt hate for women is a display of emotion. Boys learn to hate women usually through the alt-right pipeline.
The process can go like this: a young boy, aged 12, has a crush on a young girl in his grade. He pulls her hair and makes fun of her because that’s the only way he knows how to express his feelings. The boy’s crush is exposed and the girl he likes obviously doesn’t like him because he was mean to her. Embarrassed, the boy says that he never even liked the girl, saying that she’s crazy and ugly and stupid. He then goes home and uses the family computer to search up, “How to get over a girl” because he needs to stop feeling weak and vulnerable. This is when he is first introduced to the alt-right pipeline. This beginning stage of the pipeline preys on young boys’ vulnerabilities and emotions.
Part Two: The Pipeline Progression
Because I’ve been on the internet for so long, I feel like I’m older than I actually am. I recognize millennial jokes from 2013 and I saw YouTube drama in real time that people have crash courses on TikTok now to inform the youth of what happened back in the day. So, when I talk about the alt-right pipeline, I recognize streamers like PewDiePie and Onision as two major players in starting the pipeline for my age demographic.
The alt-right pipeline describes the way that something seemingly harmless, like video games and internet memes, can lead to people believing in extremely misogynistic, racist, and homophobic things. After stumbling through the entirety of the pipeline, people are more likely to believe right-wing politics and support fascist politicians such as Donald Trump.
A lot of people argue that PewDiePie isn’t racist or misogynistic, and I truthfully rather not start that discourse up again. The biggest thing to understand about Youtubers and influencers like PewDiePie is that they enable racism and misogyny, whether or not they are explicitly bigots. The jokes PewDiePie made and the memes he shared with his impressionable viewers were from right-wing sources. Felix and many other gaming streamers would complain about social justice warriors on their channels, pushing their viewers to right-wing politics. So even if you think PewDiePie himself isn’t a bigot, he is not innocent of the influx of young boys into the pipeline. PewDiePie is a classic example of the introduction into the alt-right pipeline.
And this isn’t even me exaggerating how fast it took me to get down the pipeline. As I wrote this, I decided to go on a private tab onto YouTube. I stumbled on a gaming video quickly, then found a PewDiePie video. I then went to Reddit from PewDiePie because I was so interested in his Reddit meme review. I searched “dank memes” as Felix did, and I was brought to a subreddit that had anti-liberal posts and Ben Shapiro references. So, like any young curious mind, I went to Ben Shapiro’s YouTube Channel. Now I’m getting video recommendations that are pro-gender-binary. Then, I got anti-vaccine content. And now, I’m watching Joe Rogan videos that spew a right-wing political agenda.
Just like that, I am subjected to right-wing views. And these views are fundamentally misogynistic and filled with racism. Arguments for traditional women and people saying the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. Through one video on YouTube, I’ve now been exposed to edgy memes that make fun of the Holocaust, social movements like Black Lives Matter, and sexual violence. Pepe the Frog is dressed as Hitler or wearing a Trump hat. A young and impressionable person is bombarded with serious topics dressed as jokes, so they believe these things are funny. This brand of dark humor becomes all they consume, and they eventually repeat it in classrooms and get their other friends to stumble down the pipeline.
Back in my day, (literally only 6-8 years ago) the alt-right pipeline used to take a few steps, but a new player has risen to fame. Andrew Tate himself is the full pipeline.
I know I’m a little late to the Andrew Tate hate train, but I’ve been brainstorming this for a while. If you don’t know, Andrew Tate is a violent misogynist who is loved and praised by young boys and men for being a real, “alpha male”. Tate’s videos consist of telling men that they need to hustle and grind for what they want. Tate flexes his fancy cars (that he rents) and his nice house. Young boys want to be him and live his lifestyle because Tate says that he is the epitome of what a strong, masculine male is.
What’s dangerous about Tate is that he lures you in with content that preys on boys’ insecurity surrounding their masculinity. After getting rejected by a girl, or feeling like he is not “man enough” because he is overwhelmed with emotions, a boy might find Andrew Tate and his videos giving advice on how to be a “high-value man”. Tate is building up boys’ confidence through the idea that they need to be an alpha male who takes control over any and all situations.
So once these young boys trust Andrew Tate enough and believe in his cause, they start finding his more overtly misogynistic videos. Tate slut-shames women for their body count. He says that high-value men don’t chase women and they don’t take disrespect from women. Tate explicitly describes how he treats women, grabbing them by the neck, telling them to shut up, then he says that’s what turns women on. He degrades and abuses women and he still gets to fuck them, which gives the greenlight to young boys to do the same and fantasize about doing the same.
By explicitly stating his behavior, this tells young boys that they can do that too. They think that abusing women is how you keep them because that’s what Andrew said, and obviously they trust Andrew. The language Tate uses also shows how little he thinks of women. He calls women “females” and “chicks”, while he always refers to men by that title.
Even if the boys didn’t believe they were misogynistic before, by following what Tate says, they believe in some capacity women are objects to be used. You don’t hit and disrespect someone if you believe them to be equals.
And then you dive even deeper into Andrew Tate’s videos, and you find him “debating” modern women. He flies women out to talk on his podcast to discuss gender roles. But again, he is using his power, money, and fame to lure these women onto his show. He promises the girls money and fame when they fly out, but instead, he makes them look like a joke by asking gotcha questions that are leading towards an answer he can actually debate and refute. Tate makes himself look intelligent, gaining more respect from boys who are just learning to hate women. Now not only are these young boys thinking women are dumb, but they also view them as less than because of the sexualization and degradation found in all of Tate’s videos.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record because the whole internet has been talking about Andrew Tate, I want to shift this conversation from just explaining how violently misogynistic Andrew Tate is to his true effect on internet culture.
While trying to combat his misogyny and stand against it, TikToks have been made, calling Tate gay for hating women so much, and others have just made Tate seem like some absurd guy who is the only person who could think so crazy.
But the truth is, hating women so much that it seems like you only respect men is not gay. It’s just misogynistic. Anytime there’s been someone violently misogynistic or homophobic in current media, everyone wants to call them gay and say they’re just trying to hide their true self. The reality is that it’s just homophobic to call Tate gay. It’s not productive and you’re just reinforcing the stereotypes you claim to be trying to break.
This response to Andrew Tate digs a deeper hole and adds more fuel to the fire. His followers are the definitions of trolls and instigators. They might be homophobic, but they know exactly how to spin the gay accusation back around.
Andrew Tate is not absurd. A good percentage of men believe what Tate says whether they voice it or not. Men like Andrew are not uncommon. So, when you paint Andrew’s misogyny as absurd and outlandish, it completely minimizes how much work we still need to do to combat misogyny. Andrew might be the one who says it in a loud and obnoxious way, but the men in your life are the ones who like his videos and follow him.
Trying to shy away from the seriousness of Andrew Tate and other misogynistic influencers do not do any good. Joking about Andrew doesn’t change how misogynistic he is but avoiding the conversation completely like Cody Ko and Noel Miller did is also harmful. If two male “feminists” with social influence can’t try and calm down the young Tate fans who also watch their content, what are they really doing? The boys who like Tate obviously won’t listen to women and their opinions on him, so this is the time when men really need to advocate for women.
It’s not fair. We don’t hold these young boys accountable or try to veer them away from the pipeline. We only say something once the damage has been done. Male violence has been excused for so long. People forgave PewDiePie after his apology for saying the N-word, but he still continues to be a gateway into the alt-right pipeline. And as of now, Andrew Tate has been banned from Facebook and Instagram, but people are still platforming him without any repercussions.
At some point, we all have to decide to be fucking for real. The same boys who fall down the alt-right pipeline are the same ones who play devil’s advocate in 7th-grade civics class. They’re the same ones who make other students uncomfortable because they are verbally racist and bigoted. They’re the same ones who send threats to schools and sometimes even act on these threats. But we chalk this up to “boys being boys” and we don’t recognize what happened until too late.
This pipeline is why there needs to be a bigger push for Critical Race Theory in schools. If people were taught how brutal and violent racism and antisemitism are, they would be more aware that these “memes” and “jokes” are not okay. An intervention by any adult in these formative years could change so much for all parties.
Here's the thing: the alt-right pipeline is a feminist issue. If we destigmatize being emotional, especially for men, they will have healthy outlets for their emotions instead of being angry and finding even more hateful men that are angry at women. So many girls are hurt by boys who have gone through the pipeline. I’ve seen girls in groups with boys who were in the pipeline suffer from the antisemitic jokes. They sit there and take abuse from these boys because they want to be accepted in their circle.
Simply banning Andrew Tate from social media platforms doesn’t change the fact that the root of these emotions comes from the patriarchy. But men rather suffer consequences for the benefit of power than dismantle the system that is actually harming them the most.