'Do you have white teenage sons? Listen up.' How white supremacists are recruiting boys online.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

On Parenting
‘Do you have white teenage sons? Listen up.’ How white supremacists are recruiting boys online.

By Caitlin Gibson
September 17

At first, it wasn’t obvious that anything was amiss. Kids are naturally curious about the complicated world around them, so Joanna Schroeder wasn’t surprised when her 11- and 14-year-old boys recently started asking questions about timely topics such as cultural appropriation and transgender rights.

But she sensed something off about the way they framed their questions, she says — tinged with a bias that didn’t reflect their family’s progressive values. She heard one of her sons use the word “triggered” in a sarcastic, mocking tone. And there was the time Schroeder watched as her son scrolled through the “Explore” screen on his Instagram account and she caught a glimpse of a meme depicting Adolf Hitler.

Schroeder, a writer and editor in Southern California, started paying closer attention, talking to her boys about what they’d encountered online. Then, after her kids were in bed one night last month, she opened Twitter and began to type. ... “Do you have white teenage sons?” she wrote. “Listen up.”

Link to tweet

In a series of tweets, Schroeder described the onslaught of racist, sexist and homophobic memes that had inundated her kids’ social media accounts unbidden, and the way those memes — packaged as irreverent, “edgy” humor — can indoctrinate children into the world of alt-right extremism and white supremacy.

She didn’t know whether anyone would pay attention to her warning. But by the time she awoke the next morning, her thread had gone viral; as of Sept. 16, it had been retweeted more than 81,000 times and liked more than 180,000 times. Over the following days, Schroeder’s inbox filled with messages from other parents who were deeply concerned about what their own kids were seeing and sharing online. ... “It just exploded, it hit a nerve,” she says of her message. “I realized, okay, there are other people who are also seeing this.”
....

Caitlin Gibson is a feature writer at The Washington Post. Since joining The Post in 2005, she has contributed feature stories, essays, long-form enterprise and local news to the paper and The Washington Post Magazine. Follow https://twitter.com/caitjgibson

[malaise]

1. This needs to be seen

Get thee to the greatest page

[Baked Potato]

2. I think that's why Bannon and Miller are there

Bannon helped deliver the Tiki Torchers via the computer gaming community. And, I think Miller helps in that demographic too. Bannon had gaming businesses in the past and had a huge database of young people available to broaden their outreach.

I remember Trump addressing the Boy Scouts awhile back. He got all weird and was tapping into their young brains with sex talk.

[Blue_true]

3. For most people the early teen years are hard.

Kids of opposite sexes go from hanging around to being potential romantic interests, romantic competition with rivals begin, kids notice possessions more - which kids that seem better or worse off economically, kids notice their physical stature relative to other kids a lot more, girls begin to grow breasts, males' penises change in size, kids start to wonder about their sexuality. For me, those years were the hardest. By the time I reached high school, I knew who and what I was, so it was more difficult for someone to pull me on the wrong path.

The Southern California mom did something that I believe is very important, she talked to her sons in a non-judgmental, non-demanding way, and they opened up to her about what they were reading and their feelings on life issues. I sincerely believe that it is parents who don't tune into what is going on with what their kids are reading and dealing with, who end up with kids that take the wrong path. When I think about it from a philosophical level (I am childless), I see parenting as being the hardest and most important job a person can do, that is why I believe that people should deeply probe whether they are cut out to be parents. A parent has to spend a lot of time listening to a child and providing mentoring that the child accepts and work to meet, just giving a child directives no longer cut it because there is so much other competing sources of both factual and wrong information that they can find these days. Also being a true role model is vital, a parent can't tell a child to be an "x" type of person when the child sees the parent(s) behaving as "d" type of people.