Yasmine Mohammed ياسمين محمد  🦋

65. I had joined a gaysian social group around the same time & what I heard there was definitely reinforcing the stuff I was reading online but I never joined any antiracist, antifa, or other far leftist orgs.

66. I never attended any Black Lives Matter protests (which was what was big at the time). I was never personally “recruited” by activists. I just went online and read stuff. Reading is educational, right?

67. I read stuff that told me to fear white people and straight people and especially Christians (this was in queer media). I read propaganda that represented the most extreme of these groups (ie: a certain church in Kansas) as representative of the whole.

68. And while in theory I’m a very rational person and my mental illnesses don’t tend towards paranoia, I became more paranoid. I also became more intolerant. And I became more afraid.

69. In the end, I was fortunate to be able to self-deradicalize. I didn’t need to go for any deprogramming and while I did talk with my therapist about the experience of observing and covering the Kimono Wednesdays protests this was outside her wheelhouse and I was educating her.

70. I just spent the week covering the protests at Sarah Lawrence College and have gotten a lot of thanks from people for covering it “objectively”.

72. I don’t agree with their tactics. In fact, I strongly disagree with them. Talking to people who do deradicalization work I know that their tactics are driving mutual radicalization and it’s my belief from social media observation that they increase polarization.

73. I actually thought some of their demands were reasonable while others were not (and some were illegal) but regardless of what I think of their tactics and their ideology, dehumanizing them would only play into that.