Episode Transcript
17.1 Understanding the Boys and Men of 4chan w/ Dale Beran pt.2
[00:00:08] Matthew Remski: Welcome everyone to Part Two of Episode 17, Understanding the Boys and Men of 4chan, with Dale Beran, on the Anti-Fascist Dad podcast. I’m really grateful for your support, and I hope this project brings some joy and hope and utility to your work and your days.
Now, if you haven’t listened to Part One and you’re on the main feed, it’s a little bit back in your feed. If you’re on Patreon, you’re hearing it at your earliest convenience. And thank you again for your support.
The short review of Part One is that Dale and I plunged into the afterlife of the online far-right subcultures that he documented in his 2019 work on 4chan meme warfare and the alienation of young men that helped propel Trump to power. I was interested in whether this demographic paradoxically lost power after gaining it, and Dale said that while the specific 4chan cohort has aged out or fragmented, alienated young people with few prospects and heavy online lives are still, of course, a thing, and there are still vulnerabilities there.
The uncanny part of Dale’s book is that he’s gotten to watch 4chan ideas, tactics, and personalities that he once assumed would fade actually go mainstream with the help of Elon Musk, who normalizes shitposting and Nazi memes and bad-faith politics at the highest levels of power.
So we discussed whether the chans could have fostered an antifascist politics in an alternate universe and how that might have happened, and whether it would be effective for antifascists to learn this same medicine to be able to meme as hard as the fascists do. So today I’ll be picking up my conversation with Dale Beran with a question about how the old 4chan crew is doing today.
So turning to the subjects you wrote about, you lived among and you studied and you followed several key figures in that early chan board movement that had such a great impact. Have you kept in touch with any, or kept tabs on any of those guys?
[00:02:38] Dale Beran: As of 2025, I don’t think I’ve messaged anyone this year. I think less and less, though I should check in on a few folks.
A lot of people that I met reporting on this I really liked, and I did do a documentary that’s on Netflix with my friend Arthur Jones and another director, another friend, Giorgio Angelini, that was partly based on my reporting.
It’s called The Antisocial Network. And so when we did that, it was really a continuation of using those sources and that reporting. So unlike when I was writing the book, where I would call people, have a long talk with them, or stay in touch with them, I got to fly out and meet them, spend a lot of time with a lot of folks.
[00:03:30] Matthew Remski: Right. Wow.
[00:03:31] Dale Beran: And so I really got to know them as people.
And yeah, that was really enlightening, really interesting for me. It was a really great opportunity to actually learn more about what I was reporting on and doing. And yeah, I definitely got to really deepen a lot of those relationships. So yeah, in that sense, I have stayed in touch with a lot of folks.
And yeah, I think to see people grow and change out of it, certainly.
And the lessons they’ve drawn from being like, “Okay, well, I was online for a really long time,” or “I was involved politically in this part of the movement,” and like, “How do I process that?” That was really interesting to see as well.
[00:04:12] Matthew Remski: Yeah, well, that’s where I want to go to next, because so many of the figures that you write about were just really brutally, brutally honest about their station in life when they were participating in that culture.
And I think it makes a certain amount of therapeutic sense that if that’s where they are and that’s the honesty that they can express, that maybe they can see their own situations a little bit more clearly and find their way into happier, more connected lives. And I’m wondering if you’ve seen that happen with some of these folks.
[00:04:56] Dale Beran: Yeah, I think so, for sure. I think certainly you can have a phase of your life where things are going well and you’re spending a lot of time online, and that phase can end for sure.
There are other people I met that, you know, hackers in particular. There was a hacker movement on 4chan—Anonymous—for a long time. And a few of those folks, if you’re, you know, they’ve had a relationship with computers since they were young, been online since they were young, and that’s just part of their life.
And it feels like, okay, well, that’s never really going to change. They’re going to be someone that’s always going to be sitting in front of the screen.
But yeah, I think, like, in general, on a more abstract level, computer use and the internet, I kind of just regard like—maybe the best metaphor is gambling, or cigarettes, or alcohol. Something that in moderation is kind of fun and it’s okay. You’re like, okay, well, you drink a little bit. But if not a lot of stuff is going on in the rest of your life—if you don’t have family or friends that are around, or a career, anything to look forward to—if all of those things disappear, then your susceptibility to get addicted to that and just live in that gets higher and higher, and the problem gets worse and worse.
So it’s more like that, where it’s like, okay, well, do you have other stuff in your life? How much are you using the internet? Is it positive use or is it really negative? And yeah, that’s really been on a spectrum depending on all sorts of factors.
Sometimes I’ve definitely seen people who are just really smart who were stuck there, and they—because they were so smart—they just worked their way out of it. They’re like, “Wait a minute.” They can kind of set aside their way of thinking and be like, “Well, if I think from this different, totally different perspective, actually, I was stuck.” And that’s really hard to do. But there were a lot of smart people stuck in that position.
[00:07:04] Matthew Remski: Yeah, well, I wonder too if there’s a transitional threshold confusion that some of them have to face as they come more into their, I guess, their real—or not online—lives, where they’re no longer anonymous, they’re no longer isolated as much as they were. And I’m wondering if for some of them, it feels like, “Oh yeah, that was a weird dream.”
[00:07:34] Dale Beran: Like, what was that? Yes. Yeah, for sure. Definitely.
Writing the book and the documentary, I definitely met a lot of people who were like, “No, I’m done with that phase of my life. I’m out of it.”
And yeah, it was something I did when I was young. Yeah, like something. I was just online all the time being a goofball or breaking the law or posting all this crazy antisocial stuff or something.
And yeah, they’re just sort of done with it, which is a pretty healthy attitude.
But yeah, I mean, it does feel like a theme of the internet where you can really build these elaborate fantasy worlds online and then get stuck in them. And you see that all the time. People have these elaborate value systems, or elaborate belief systems, and then they meet online and they have these—the same people of the same belief system—and it sort of crystallizes, and you’re there.
And of course it’s all totally unreal in a sense that it’s just—it’s there because you can live on the internet, and so the system can exist there. It’s like a fiction you live in, but then you log off and it all can just vanish.
So that’s just something that online life has given us.
And yeah, it’s gratifying to know that there are plenty of times you can just step out of it.
And yeah, I guess the other half of that is that the people that are really successful online—it’s a pretty miserable existence a lot of the time. Like, seeing that up front, making the documentary, where someone—like, you can be successful online if you’re just online all the time. If you’re just posting all the time, streaming all the time. But oh man, it’s not great. It’s like you don’t get to do very much else.
[00:09:31] Matthew Remski: You know what it reminds me of, actually, is structurally—and maybe socially—it’s very similar to people getting together on a Minecraft server and creating a world. Right?
[00:09:43] Dale Beran: Yes.
[00:09:45] Matthew Remski: And it has a particular aesthetic to it. They might argue about its contours, or what kind of vehicles or rules it’s going to have, but it can be incredibly, incredibly engrossing, absorbing. And then you know what happens when you leave it: the facility to make a world like that out of touching grass is very different.
[00:10:12] Dale Beran: Yes. Yeah, for sure. That’s a good metaphor.
[00:10:15] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:10:15] Dale Beran: Where it can be a Minecraft world that’s totally abstract and a set of ideas, and there’s actually kind of a spectrum between meeting online and building an online video game world and spending all your time in the fantasy world of the video game, and then spending all your time in an online set of ideology—like an ideological fantasy world.
[00:10:42] Matthew Remski: Right.
[00:10:43] Dale Beran: And yeah, there’s actually not too much space between those two things. And that—that’s just something that I don’t think we realized when the internet arrived and we were like, “Oh, it’s this interesting grand experiment and you can exchange information.”
That was one of the things that we didn’t realize was so possible, and that was going to be at the forefront: that you can just kind of get lost in that way.
So yeah, it was definitely part of 4chan and the far right. But yeah, you can kind of see it replicated all over the place on the internet in different ways, and certainly in social media. It’s like that’s what social media is made of: those little pockets of idea-space that you’re occupying forever.
[00:11:31] Matthew Remski: You know, I can hear a kind of antifascist voice in the back of my head listening in on this conversation and noting that it might seem like we are, in a way, offloading some responsibility for the chaos that the group of 4chan trolls actually created onto the economies that they came out of, or the technologies that they were incentivized by, or the fact that they were socially bonding and perhaps not as politically aware as they could have been. And they just happened to find right-wing provocations funny to begin with, before they became real.
And I know that we’re not doing that, but when we talk about how some of these guys have come out of their past lives, what types of accountability or feelings of guilt or amends do they have to deal with at some point?
[00:12:45] Dale Beran: That’s a good question. I think in the documentary we addressed this a fair amount, because what had happened a lot of the time was we went back and found folks who had started 4chan, or had been an early troll, or had started another website that kind of played this key role in something really bad happening—like a mass shooting or whatever.
And people were dealing with it in different ways. In some ways it felt like, okay, well, some of these people were kind of best-intentioned, where they’re like, “Well, I was doing this because,” you know, there was a far-left hacktivist movement on 4chan for a while. So we interviewed a lot of those guys, and a lot of them felt guilty that, okay, well, all of these techniques that we were using—like spreading misinformation online, using trolling to trick people and then maybe spread a politically expedient message, creating this fictional character called Anonymous who was like a super-hacker—all of that got picked up later by the alt-right, and then you create a fictional super-spy called QAnon who’s spreading politically expedient misinformation.
And they felt like, “Oh man, I didn’t expect it to snowball like this,” because who would have?
And yeah, I mean, they were dealing with it in different ways. And it was very layered, right? Like, a lot of the Anonymous guys—the FBI busted them up in 2012—so a lot of them had PTSD and were reckoning with the idea that, like, oh, some of their friends went to jail. We interviewed Jeremy Hammond, who had gone to jail, who had just gotten out of jail, spent the better part of a decade in jail.
And yeah, so it was different depending on the person.
And it also is sort of like, well, if things kind of ping-pong around and then end up knocking something over that’s really valuable, you’re like, “Well, the ping-pong hit me for a little bit,” and then like—how much am I responsible? Or is it like, okay, was I doing something really wrong and am I really accountable? Do I have to really reckon with that?
And it really depended on the person and their role.
But yeah, of course, the way the system works is like: oh, you were really obnoxious online and you did some really crummy things online. Well, in a sense, there’s no accountability, right? You can just log off, become a different person.
And that was sort of—that’s another difficult thing about the internet: that when you’re anonymous, you can act really antisocial. And so people are encouraged to do it because there’s no community, no one—you’re not accountable to other people.
[00:15:41] Matthew Remski: I mean, that’s the huge leap, right? I mean, suddenly you’re not in that world and then—wow—there are social relations and they have names and faces and—
[00:15:52] Dale Beran: Right.
[00:15:56] Matthew Remski: It’s such an incredibly strange environment to have been able to throw several generations of kids into.
[00:16:07] Dale Beran: Yes.
[00:16:09] Matthew Remski: With no training wheels, with no support, with no parental oversight, with nothing going on at school that would give them a sense of, “Oh, well, what is good internet hygiene?” Not that that necessarily ever works, but there’s—it’s just not. It was really thrown in at the deep end. Right.
[00:16:32] Dale Beran: Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I mean, I’m old enough to remember when all of this was kind of brand new and people were very optimistic about it. They were like, “Oh, we’re exchanging information and we don’t know what will happen. We don’t know how it will grow.”
So there was sort of this grand sense of experimentation. And yeah, only much later—right—like 2015, 2016, when people started to look back and be like, “Oh wow, there are all these externalities, there are all these negative things that we hadn’t thought about that were actually forming in the online space.”
So in retrospect, you’re like, “Wow, yeah.” Now today you have a group of people—and I’ve heard this described from younger 4chan users or Gen Z folks—who are like: they grew up online that was really toxic, that had all these toxic parts to it, and they feel—yeah—a lot of people express that they felt really traumatized or damaged, there’s something they had to kind of recover from.
Different experience than myself growing up online in the 90s, early 2000s.
But that’s very true: now the internet—between how predatory the corporations that run the social media platforms are, where they try to make them as addicting as possible, and then how people have really refined how to be toxic online in a variety of ways—means that the space is deeply toxic.
And so it’s a totally different thing to say, “Okay, well, give the kid the internet and be like, okay, well, here you go. Do what you want on there.” Doesn’t feel like the right move or necessarily the most responsible move to just do that.
[00:18:23] Matthew Remski: Well, here’s my study—my anecdotal study—my N=1 study, or N=2 study, because we’ve got two kids at home.
[00:18:31] Dale Beran: Okay.
[00:18:32] Matthew Remski: And I can say, Dale, I don’t know if you’ve gotten this feedback or this accolade yet, but understanding the basic narrative that you tell about how this type of online activity exploded and became contagious and really fed on a kind of, you know, politicized and aggressive kerosene that was floating in the culture—being able to communicate the basics of that to kids who are now nine and twelve, just at the kitchen table, it’s really inoculatory, right?
It’s not—I think in a very short period of time, because of your book and the work of other people, we have a kind of observational clarity, or some of us do anyway, where we can go to kids and we can say, you know, this is the type of thing that happens online in certain pockets.
And if you feel yourself getting into social situations in which X, Y, or Z happens, then, you know, let’s take a moment and see how it feels, right? Let’s see how absorbed you get. Or let’s see how it—let’s see how it feels.
And so, I mean, I think that we’ve gone into a kind of normalization, in some way, of 4chan aesthetics and trolling in mainstream media where, you know, we can have a run of two years where all we see on TikTok is Andrew Tate.
But at the same time, it does feel like we have some distance, or there’s the possibility for some distance. And so I just wanted to throw that out there. That’s not a question. That’s great.
But I’m wondering if you’ve—maybe the question is: have you heard that from anybody else?
[00:20:40] Dale Beran: No, but thank you. That’s very gratifying to hear. I appreciate you sharing that.
I’m mostly interested, when I make something, that it’s useful to other people. So to hear, okay, well, the book you wrote was useful for this reason—that’s great.
And it does make sense that when these strategies were new, we didn’t really have a defense mechanism.
And now, as people understand them a little bit more, you can inoculate people, grow a little more wary about them, and say, okay, well, if this sort of dynamic is happening online—if you say that to your kid—you can warn them a little bit, and make sure that if that’s happening, they don’t fall all the way down the slippery slope.
That makes sense. That’s good to hear.
[00:21:30] Matthew Remski: I mean, I think it’s a combination of: the internet is just like the world and it is governed by capitalist incentives and the attention economy, which is not a difficult idea to communicate to kids, and the online aspects of it really can amplify pretty common and easy-to-see dynamics of bullying that often begin with a kind of sideways humor, and then they become a little bit more serious.
And then suddenly you are in a schoolyard and you have this creepy feeling that there’s a certain group of people who have a lot more power than you, and you’re not quite sure how it happened.
And the question for you is: how do you want to orient yourself toward them? Do you want to try to participate, or do you want to hang back and form different networks of relationships?
[00:22:37] Dale Beran: If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you’re describing that if you’re a young person going to school, or a young kid, then there’s the social world of the school, and then there’s like a meta-social world of what’s happening online, and balancing that is now part of being a kid, which is interesting.
And it makes sense that now parents would give advice to kids about, okay, well, how do you navigate that? How do you feel like, okay, well, if there’s a bunch of kids acting obnoxious online and then you come to school, how would you negotiate that?
But yeah, it makes sense that it’s not just something that is going to be a problem forever, that people are resilient and adaptable. And there’s a silly irony where oftentimes the people that are most pulled into far-right addictive social media or extreme alarmist ideas are really older people who have no defense mechanisms.
So sometimes I kind of worry more about my parents’ generation hanging out on Facebook, getting notifications. That aggression of the social media networks—of saying, “Hey, this is addicting. Spend a lot of time here. We want you to spend all your time here”—kids are susceptible too, but they’re very adaptable and they evolve defense mechanisms.
When I spoke to college classes about my book a few years ago, it was a group of Gen Z kids, and they were like, “Oh no, we know this. We hate it about online life.”
And they were like, “That’s why we’re wary of it.” But they were also like, “Yeah, we still have TikTok,” or whatever. So there was this feeling: they knew, they were exhausted, and they were navigating it.
[00:24:50] Matthew Remski: Well, it’s a great point to make, actually, that the boomer mom on Facebook—who are they going to take advice from, really? Like, who’s monitoring their internet use?
[00:25:04] Dale Beran: Yeah, exactly. Right. It has to be their kids. Right?
[00:25:08] Matthew Remski: Because they’re using their interest in Facebook QAnon memes to actually be protective of their kids, right? It has a—it not only is an indulgence in conspiracism, or a certain type of fantasy life, but I think what is perhaps even more intractable about that kind of toxic online life if you’re an older person is that you might take it on as a kind of responsibility, you know, to be well-informed on behalf of your kids.
And that’s a lot harder to break out of, I imagine.
[00:25:52] Dale Beran: Yeah, I guess that is an irony: they’re being sucked in because they’re protecting their children, but in fact they’re vulnerable themselves—or that’s how they feel, at least. Yeah, for sure.
And that’s also a common sentiment. You hear that all the time: “Oh no, my parents are on Facebook,” right?
Or they’re like, “Yeah, they’re fighting Trump by posting or reading Facebook.” It doesn’t make any sense. You’re like, wait a minute—what are you talking about? How does that do it? No, you’re helping Facebook. I don’t know what else that’s doing.
[00:26:31] Matthew Remski: Okay, well, let’s leave that generation to themselves and end by seeing if—I mean, I’ve talked about kids and I think I’ve informed you that there’s this impact of your book that you weren’t aware of.
But I also just wonder if you go back into your own twelve-year-old self and then sort of project that kid into the current day and think about how they’re now starting to explore the internet beyond games and YouTube.
What kind of advice would you give to your twelve-year-old self in the present day for staying sane and perhaps even a little bit hopeful?
[00:27:13] Dale Beran: Oh man. Yeah, that’s tough. It’s hard to reach that far back. Yeah, I would just say: make real friendships in real life. That’s important.
Go outside and try to spend as much time as possible hanging out with your friends and having fun in real life. If you find yourself hanging out with friends online—if they’re nearby—can you change that into real-life hanging out? That would probably be the most important.
[00:27:51] Matthew Remski: Can you go to the stoop?
[00:27:53] Dale Beran: Yeah, exactly.
And then the other thing—which was true when I was a kid—is that I always felt like the internet was divided into ways to learn something or better yourself, and then ways to distract yourself and fall into a dissociative haze like you were watching TV.
And I really like the half of the internet where you can learn a ton of things. It’s still there and it’s better than ever.
That is one of the positive aspects of the internet. You know, I teach college classes. I’ll teach animation and illustration along with writing and other things. And the quality of the work has bumped up because students have those resources.
Professionally, you have to look better than even ten years ago because the learning resources are out there. So actually the quality of everyone’s work has really risen.
So things like that: if you’re spending time online, use it as a tool to better yourself. There are all these great things you can learn and teach yourself. That’s how a lot of programmers learn how to program, right? The difference between, okay, are you playing games, or are you programming them? That’s just as engaging and interesting, and all of those resources are at your fingertips.
When I was a kid, programming was complex and there was no one to explain it to you.
[00:29:24] Matthew Remski: It was really hard.
[00:29:25] Dale Beran: Yeah. And now ChatGPT will explain any complex term at any level you want.
So yeah, there is a positive side.
[00:29:34] Matthew Remski: It’s a great reflection. I think that is not necessarily about direct political confrontation or having to have an analysis on board, but recognizing that becoming preoccupied with learning something interesting is antifascist in a way, because it does not lead to this cul-de-sac in which your own frustrations and resentments are magnified and then inevitably turned outward against other people.
You know, the twelve-year-old here is a big gamer, but also does an incredible amount of artwork and is doing a lot of exploration and starting to look at game development.
And I just came across this course run by like five developers from Epic Games who are basically taking eighteen weeks to unpack how Unreal Engine works. And it costs fifty bucks a month to subscribe to this course.
And it’s not like going to college or anything like that, but it would displace some YouTube time, it would displace some scrolling time, with something that is really richly engaging and not particularly like school in the sense that you would do it by choice. And it’s very current and it’s going to fit into, you know, at least this kid’s special interest really well.
And so I think it’s a really great thing to keep in mind that there’s a sunny side to the internet—that, you know, it didn’t all come from something awful.
[00:31:29] Dale Beran: Yes, for sure. Yeah. Yeah, like I definitely—YouTube—I used to learn all the time. Yeah.
And it’s funny because there’s that aspect to it where it has an AI algorithm and it’s like, “Hey, do you want to watch twelve hours of this really addicting thing, this comforting thing?” And then the other thing it’s suggesting, it’s like—I’m like, “Oh wow, I didn’t know someone was even explaining that. I can learn that.”
So it’s a funny duality that exists. But yeah, it’s not all doom and gloom, for sure.
[00:32:03] Matthew Remski: Dale, thank you so much for your work. Thanks for keeping up with this culture.
I wish you all the best. And you know what? The book is really helpful in probably a lot of ways that you’ll never hear about, so maybe that’s a happy thing too.
[00:32:18] Dale Beran: Yeah, that is nice to hear. And yeah, thanks so much for having me on. Your questions are always so thoughtful and insightful. It’s just always a pleasure to be on and talk to you.
[00:32:29] Matthew Remski: Thank you, Dale.
I want to end on a brief, somewhat informal report on how online engagement and support is going on in our home with our two sons.
I have to admit up front that in this zone I’m coming from a fair amount of privilege from at least two angles.
First, I’ve spent the last six years now as a full-time observer of internet culture. And so I have a lot of fluency in this zone.
Second, as our nine-year-old autistic kid is schooling at home, we have a lot of contact and supervision going on, especially given that I work from home myself.
So in everything I describe here, I’m aware that parents and caregivers—painfully aware—don’t have as much time for supervision. They also might find online content disorienting beyond their scope of knowledge, beyond their pay grade. It might be difficult to navigate, and a lot of people will have tougher challenges than I do.
But that said, maybe some of the attitudes I describe in what follows might be useful. And I think that the guiding attitude I have is that when an internet question or weirdness comes up in conversation and the kid offers an opinion or a feeling about it, I never express defensiveness or criticism or judgment—or at least I try not to.
If it’s a feeling, I reflect the feeling and then describe my own feeling in response to the content.
If it’s an opinion that I feel can use some guidance or context, my opening phrase is usually, “Yeah, and,” and then I follow up.
So we haven’t had to put any tech filters in place yet because we have virtually full open dialogue about whatever comes across their screens. And because both of them are naturally sensitive to materials that convey even cloaked references to racism or sexism, they tend to have trained their algorithms in a fairly workable way.
Now, part of this rises out of having talks independently with each of them when the time was right, that were very much like the talk you would give to the kid venturing out into the neighborhood on their own. Like, you’re crossing over the threshold into an enormous world filled with wonders, like things that you can’t yet understand, things that might not be correct for your age, and also people who might, for whatever reason, attempt to hurt you.
And so there was a feeling from early on that the internet was a portal between the home and the globe, but that we’re always on the home side of it and our arms are open and we’re there to support you if you need.
And so the goal is—or it has been, I’m not sure it’s always achieved—is that everything is brought to the table for discussion.
And a lot of those discussions begin with one of two opening questions. The older one will typically describe a political analysis that they came across from one of the YouTubers he follows. And these are people he’s connected with through anime fandoms or art-nerd communities.
And he’ll run it by me with a question like: “Does this sound solid or legit or plausible? Do you believe that this makes sense?”
And usually that initiates a dialogue about sources, citations, common narratives that might have propagandistic roots in a particular culture.
But the core understanding is that the YouTuber can be respected or interrogated—or both—about their opinion. But we can’t ever forget that without going through a real process of citing sources, the minimum you’re getting is opinion. The person is giving you opinion.
And in the absence of evidence, the YouTuber probably has to be more personally convincing or charismatic in order to hold your attention. And so that leads into a discussion about how performance can displace or cover up for lack of substance. And I think that just that field of discussion is really gold.
Now, with the younger one, there’s often an ethics check, like: “Is this video sexist? Is it racist? Do you think they’re making fun of fat people? Do they understand what autism is like? Would they respect people with autism?”
And this leads to conversations about intentions, impacts, the nature of humor, and when it’s being used to mock or scapegoat people.
And that lets us talk about scapegoats in general: like why scapegoats are chosen, isolated out of a population, and targeted for ridicule or abuse.
Now, we have some in-real-life examples of neighborhood kids whose behaviors we can refer to, who—while they are not necessarily physical bullies (there is some of that)—these kids might be pretty consistently in that zone of excluding others through mockery or put-downs that edge up close to the line of bullying.
And that allows us to speak pretty clearly about why they might feel they need more social power, and how they organize their little cliques to get it.
But one thing I’m always careful to do is to make sure that we don’t slide into caricaturing the nascent bully as though they created themselves.
Sometimes we are able to witness their interactions with teachers or caregivers, and we can discuss whether the kid feels seen and supported or not.
And this thread can build out into a picture of intergenerational community care that says no antisocial behavior is individual or genetic. You know, kids are supported or not, and they respond accordingly. It makes sense. When they lash out, they’re actually defending themselves, most likely.
Now, because our boys have not been fully accommodated at school—there are differences between them, of course—it means that we can also have an ongoing discussion about what happens for kids when school or society more broadly is overwhelming or terrifying, and why they might struggle to self-regulate.
There’s a difficult story about one kid at the neighborhood school who flew into a rage every day and had to be removed from his class. But his yelling and slamming into the lockers in the hallway and tearing the art down from the walls was audible to every class on the floor.
Now, I remember being a kid in the 70s, the 80s, and watching meltdowns like that.
And the worst thing about not having a good contextual framework for understanding that behavior as a kid is the default of the “problem child” trope, which eventually could be weaponized against you.
So that’s kind of what I had to go with. As I considered kids who couldn’t hold it together, there was something specific and uniquely wrong about them, in themselves as they were. They were a problem child.
And that has so many bad downstream effects, that frame of mind.
Because if the kid’s behavior isn’t understood as a series of responses to stress, it’s very hard to imagine how they would ever heal or improve or find a better situation.
And then equally bad is the fear that you yourself might, for whatever reason, suddenly show yourself to be essentially and inevitably bad. Because after all, doesn’t it just happen to some people?
Isn’t that why some people pray, “Don’t let that happen to me”?
All of which is to say that the same encounters with acting out in the schoolyard, in the neighborhood, with cruelty—these will all happen just the same way online. And our understanding of that can migrate between the two worlds.
Now there are disruptors of anonymity and speed and erasability that make it a different experience. And perhaps it makes it heavier in terms of intensity at times, but also more ephemeral, more superficial.
So with the nine-year-old, I feel a lot of it is about walking the line between the confidence to see bullies for what they are doing, while also steering clear of blame and exclusion. Because I think if you don’t do that, you bolster a world in which people can be cut off or emotionally disposed of.
That’s not a secure place to be unless you’ve developed to the point where you trust your own care network enough to know that you will never be thrown away if you start to act out, if you are in suffering.
And I find that a really hard line to follow. It seems like it’s written in the wind, and I imagine it’s moving and different for every kid and parent.
But growing up into antifascism means that at some point you realize that you cannot continue to abide fascist people or behavior. You have to draw a line, and once you do, you won’t necessarily have the time to empathize with them.
But I think it’s really worth the struggle, because somehow we always have to be thinking of people as individuals and as parts of structures, and neither one reduces to the other.
And I think the parenting sphere sets us up better for the first way—the psychological way, the interpersonal way—because we’re modeling it in our bodies.
So leaping to the structural part is a challenge, which is why it’s so useful to have lots of games to play in which the structures of the world are modeled, and lots of stories to watch and discuss—especially like Andor.
Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care of each other.
