This is something I’ve been concerned about for a long time, honestly. I’m not doing horseshoe theory here, but this is how people go off the deep end. It’s important to keep in mind that people who become radicalized are often not in a good place mentally, and while 99% of us just say these things for laughs, we have to consider that eventually, there will be people who take it seriously, for whom being part of the in-group becomes part of their core identity

This is what I have been intuitively feeling for a while and you articulated it perfectly. I saw the same thing happening on 4chan when GamerGate took off. I was like "hey these people keep saying more openly fucked up shit" and by 2019 people who split off on 8chan were going on mass shootings. Like, when I was still new I didn't really understand how or why some of the more fucked up shit like how the Japanese Red Army killed a shitload of their own people or Pol Pot but I kinda get it now. Maybe this is wrong but I sometimes thinking taking theory too seriously is a bad thing. Even Mao said so. Like, you have to open your eyes every now and then or you're going to wind up in a Peruvian village boiling babies.