An Australian named Shayne Hunter says he left behind the “cult” of Antifa after four years of involvement and now believes the group is a threat to society. Hunter’s account appeared in an Australian newspaper this week after he spoke to a freelance journalist:

I got radicalised in Sydney. I was originally concerned about Western intervention in Syria. Radical left wing people dominated rallies and I started to associate with them more. My so-called ‘normal’ friends drifted away… I came to believe that war was a symptom of bigger systems at play in society and they were the real enemy, like white supremacy and patriarchy. Antifa believe these systems need to be smashed through a process of ‘de-platforming’ to save the world. People who don’t necessarily agree on everything are united to attack their common enemy — anyone in the right wing of politics… I read that Antifa in the US is training people to shoot and punch. It’s the same here. Antifa in Sydney are doing martial arts to, as they would put it, ‘fight the Nazis’. It’s a paramilitary mindset. It’s more dangerous than ISIS… The radical left of Antifa presents itself as being about compassion and empathy; it’s a Trojan horse. All conversations are about entitlement and rights, not responsibility. When these people talk about freedom, they really mean freedom from responsibility.

Ultimately, Hunter had a realization when a video popped up mocking Social Justice Warriors. He calls it a “cringe video” and says he initially avoided it but when it turned up a second time he watched it:

A ‘social justice warrior’ cringe video appeared on my social media feed. I didn’t watch it at first. A couple of weeks later it popped up again so I pressed play. It was like seeing the entire cult through an outside lens. It woke me up. I realised that everything I had started to believe was wrong. You don’t know humiliation until you’ve left a cult; I wasted four years of my life.

Hunter has a long history on YouTube and if you look through his previous clips, sure enough, he seems to have been heavily involved with anarchists and communists 3-4 years ago. There are several clips in which he’s making arguments against capitalism. But his most recent clip expands on what he said to the freelance journalist. In the clip, he describes his comparison of Antifa to ISIS as “hyperbolic” but adds, “I do think that this ideology is a threat to civilization itself if it is left unchecked.”

Speaking of his own attraction to the group he says, “It gave my life purpose. I had a clear vision. I thought I was being more moral than everyone else and it was a way for me to avoid taking care of the things I should have been focusing on, like my family, my livelihood and the things that would potentially make the world a much better than focusing on a group of fringe lunatics on the right.”

Hunter believes Antifa actually helps empower the very fringe it claims to oppose. “When people who are maybe confused and are leaning to the right or whatever start seeing left-wing people wearing masks attacking people on the f**king street, their response is to go ‘Oh, well, we’ll get violent then,'” he says. He adds, “I believe the True Blue Crew, which was a right-wing group that started wearing masks and hoodies just like Antifa, I believe that was a right-wing reaction to Antifa’s violence against Reclaim Australia.

“I don’t believe that you have the right to crush people for their opinion. People can have bigoted opinions. People have the right to be f**king idiots, alright. I don’t agree with the bigotry of the left but I’m not going to start attacking them physically. I’m going to do the higher road which requires a hell of a lot more effort and ultimately, I think, is a lot more effective, which is speaking out about why they’re wrong. “Look, my generation is a generation that’s never not had freedom of speech or democracy. So we don’t know what the f**k we’re losing.”

Later in the clip, Hunter said, “I hope a lot of people on the left will start speaking out against the obsessive use of shaming as a tactic to try and silence people who people might disagree with and also the more militant, violent s**t that happens on the radical left, like the sort of student unions and universities, anarchists and communists and all that kind of stuff, which make up Antifa.”

“Because I think these people are making us all dumber,” he said.