Your experience was part of a coordinated effort by the right to infiltrate and radicalized online forums as they recognized internet communities were ripe for recruiting young disaffected men. I’m sure there’s research out there showing the scale and breadth of this social engineering operation, but for a plain English telling of it go check out innuendo studios alt-right playbook. Specifically the “how to radicalize a normie” video. It covers this explicitly. You are Gabe. Well… you could have been.

You are smart enough to recognize it when it started happening, but all the people that didn’t leave were the frog being boiled. It was on purpose, and they all knew what they were doing.