In my experience, people don’t like to be on the wrong side of an issue. When confronted with evidence, people with reactionary ideas tend to get very angry and go bad faith. I guess that would be the cognitive dissonance playing out. I think we’ve all seen many a lib get ultra shitty when clear facts are ruining their ideology.
So here’s my history:
Around 2020ish and the protests after the George Floyd murder, many BIPOC activists were calling out the bullshit of white and/or men amongst the liberal and left crowds. For a small amount of time, maybe two months, I played around with the ideas of stupidpol and class determinism. I was probably butthurt for being silenced, which doesn’t actually really happen anyways. The funny thing was that as COVID went on, it was a masterclass in how terrible white/male progressives are. Also Hexbear became big as lockdowns happened, and my thinking has changed to “white guys fucking suck, and if a marginalised person argues with you, you’re better off just shutting the fuck up”.
I gotta go way back in time to find the previous instance. When I was maybe 13, before the internet was a thing, I just to get really damn upset at my older sister calling out her brothers’ sexism. It was a long ass time ago, but I remember feeling red hot angry at feminists. If 4chan or TikTok existed, it would probably channel me into shitty manoshpere ideals. Thankfully I was mostly occupied with WarCraft2 missions and Sim City. It’s far too long ago to remember who was right.
Unrelated to what happened in my teen years, but I’m sad to report that my sister is now an insufferable lib.
I accidentally showed up to a tea party protest once. It wasn’t explicit in its purpose and I think it was meant to trick a lot of people into showing up. I know this isn’t the express point of the question, but it was an interesting experience. There were people there from Scandinavian countries talking about how evil socialism is. That was my first sign I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. The second sign and the thing that made me cut and run was:
(CW: Racism) a guy was on the phone with a friend and he was yelling into it “yeah man! We’re tea bagging the black house!” This was during Obama’s administration.
Our Republican state representative was there gladhanding and I walked up to him and said something like “make sure you’re doing your job” or some other libbed up “own” and he laughed it off. I didn’t put 2 and 2 together that he was there to gain support til I had already high tailed it out of there.
I was still in my early twenties and the most leftist stuff we were able to do in our small town was some libbed up anti bush and occupy type protests. At the time, it seemed like it had some power. Now I realize how many Saturdays I wasted.