As mentioned on the original KIA a few times, it was a serious redpill for me.

Back in the day I was a blogger for DailyKOS and Little Green Footballs. I moved away from DailyKOS to LGF because an IRL coworker and friend was on LGF. I was a pretty far left guy, even though I flinched away from the truly crazy Communist types. Or so I thought -- they actually were using overton manipulation and purity spirals to try and drag people like me off the Marxist Cliff, so... yeah.

LGF had early culture war stuff popping up here and there. I don't remember the timeframe, but Female Thor, for example, was announced and discussed as something important... when I pointed out it was just pandering and would be undone in a few issues, I was heavily downvoted until my replies vanished. It was at that point I discovered what "brigading" is, as people were going into the daily megathreads, linking my comments in other posts to get people to come over and attack me or downvote me. If you disagreed with the groupthink on LGF, you were attacked, relentlessly, until you agreed or were silent.

Anyway, when GamerGate started bubbling up, you started seeing your LE SMUGGY LEFTIST assholes popping up doing what I would later know was virtue signaling. One of them was "God, Gamers are such little fucking Shitstains." I didn't know this was because of GG pushing back against their "betters" on the left at that point. I replied something like "Hey, that's not fair, I'm a gamer."

"I meant what I said, you fucking little shitstain."

Which lead me to look up what GamerGate was. This was early on so the forced narrative meme wasn't in stone, and Google didn't know to fuck with the search results, so I found some timeline by an actual GGer, I read actual gamers instead of soycuck journalists, and realized what was going on. There was some article about how GamerGate was just "politics coming to Gaming" on a ... green on white styled website? Forget. That explained it very succinctly. Either way, I realized what was going on, but attributed it to accidental ignorance, not malice.

When I tried to correct people on LGF and Wikipedia, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was wrong, my lying eyes and "lived experience" was wrong, and that in fact Gamers were Neo-Nazis and the like. That I needed to understand that people like Zoe Quinn were victims, that diversity is our strength, that the gaming industry was going to change for the better and if the gamers didn't like it then they would just have to die, because their "betters" on the left were fixing things and they'd just have to accept it.

Well, ok.

That got me on the radar of some of the "alpha" users of the site, which I would later recognize as authoritarian SJW types. The NPC programmers. From then on out, if I ever disagreed with them, even slightly, they'd swarm and try and gaslight or emotionally manipulate me, all while some of the simpering newer users would try and attack me for goodboy points. It was a hugbox that was kept intact via social pressure, not software, and I was sand inside of it.

Worse, I noticed that a lot of the sites that I had taken for granted were "reputable" were blatantly lying about GamerGate. And in easily verifiable, repeatedly corrected ways. Which made me realize that the left's "actual news sites," like Salon or the Guardian, could be wrong. Worse, they could be intentionally lying for politics.

... What else had they lied about? A lot, actually.

Later on, they discovered my Twitter page, and did a deep dive of my following list. And they were not happy with what they saw. Roosh V. Cernovich. Milo. Tut, tut, tut, how dare I escape my programming? Don't they know they are unpersons? Enemies of the party!?

So they demanded I explain myself. More importantly, they demanded I give them the right to censor my following and followers list on Twitter. They demanded to have the right to decide who I associated with outside of their blog. I refused, which upset them further.

Eventually I got banned out of the blue. I don't recall the final reasoning, but I seem to remember it was around the time the LGF admin had tried to join a dogpile on Milo, and Milo had BTFO'd all comers, including the admin. Which, given I had retweeted or posted something in support of Milo, had gotten me on the shitlist. CJ couldn't beat the shit out of Milo, but he could ban me for my crimes against the party, so he did. Petulant little cunt.

For YEARS after this, I would occasionally post something on twitter and suddenly get a FLOOD of harassing stupidity. Every single time It happened, I'd go to the latest LGF megathread and find my tweet had been posted with some variant of "go get him" or "oh god look at the wrongthink!" It finally took me going through and blocking a bunch of "dead" accounts that were following me to get this to stop -- they were using a fake sock account to track me and share my posts with the hive.

Somewhere around this mess, I realized that I had been lied to by the left. A lot. That I had taken them at face value, that I had been socially conditioned to reject conservative views out of turn. So I turned to sites like KIA and /pol/, and mentioned the above in a briefer way.

I didn't get the hate I expected. Instead, I found understanding. "I know that feel." "Yeah, the left doesn't like it when you question things they can't defend." "Yup, they lied to you. Sorry man." That sort of stuff. Turns out that in their purity spiral, the nu-left had pushed a LOT of moderates and center-leftists out of the way, expecting them to follow them off the Marxist cliff.