MORROW COUNTY, Ohio

Saturday morning, we were driving across West Virginia, and my wife asked me to find some Christian music on the radio. So I’m searching down on the low end of the FM bandwidth — between 88 and 92, where such stations are usually found — and I come across an NPR broadcast in which a liberal woman is talking about how MEMES on the INTERNET are turning teenage boys into ALT-RIGHT WHITE SUPREMACISTS!

Joanna Schroeder started getting worried when her sons were coming to her with loaded questions.

“One of my kids said: If you can be trans and just decide what you are then how come you can’t just decide to be a penguin?” said Schroeder, a writer and mother of two sons and a daughter, in an interview with NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday.

It may sound like a normal question a kid would ask, Schroeder admits. But she also knew that their curiosities didn’t mesh with the values that she and her husband share with their children. “We’ve talked to our kids about LGBTQ community, we know trans people personally,” she said.

As it turned out, her son’s question had been inspired by a meme he saw on Instagram. “I knew it was time to start looking at their social media use and figuring out what they were being exposed to,” she said.

When she scanned the social media accounts of her sons, she saw an inundation of memes strewn with racist, sexist, homophobic and anti-Semitic jokes that she says grew increasingly disturbing as she went down the rabbit hole of Instagram’s “Explore” page, or clicked “related videos” on YouTube.

What she found led her to forge a troubling theory about how content disseminated online by extremists can radicalize white teenage boys — and how parents can prepare to handle it — captured in a now-viral tweet thread that took off this week.

“Social media and vloggers are actively laying groundwork in white teens to turn them into alt-right/white supremacists,” she wrote on Tuesday. “It’s a system I believe is purposefully created to disillusion white boys away from progressive/liberal perspectives.”

This thread went viral, all right — because liberals have become so paranoid about “white supremacy” in the Trump age that they’re impossible to satirize. Twitchy suspected this might be some kind of Titania McGrath-style parody, but Joanna Schroeder is actually a feminist writer living in the Los Angeles area where she and her progressive husband are raising their sons to hate themselves for being white and male. She writes articles like “18 Easy Ways to Raise Feminist Boys” and “I’m Raising Feminist Boys By Making Them Watch Supergirl (and Read Harry Potter).” She is a clichéd stereotype of the neurotic liberal woman: “In all honesty, I never even imagined myself becoming a mother. My teen years and early 20s were spent just trying to get my act together. I had an anxiety disorder, depression and was married and divorced from my first husband by the time I was 23 years old.” Her sex life? Also a cliché: “Before I met my husband, I dated a bunch of not-nice guys. I peppered in a few nice guys here and there, but I think I was so insecure and unhappy at that time that I either drove those good guys away or grew bored of their niceness.” She and her second husband have already been in “couples therapy.” Not exactly a model of good mental health, and now she’s so paranoid about “white supremacy” that she’s searching through her son’s Instagram account looking for the alt-right memes that might turn him into a 21st-century Hitlerjugend.

It reminds me of fundamentalist preachers 40 years ago who claimed to discover Satanic messages by playing Led Zeppelin albums backwards.

Anyway, that’s what was on NPR this weekend, so I guess all the liberal moms are now poring over their kids’ social-media accounts to find those evil alt-right propaganda memes that will turn their sons into neo-Nazi mass murderers — or possibly even Republicans. The horror!







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