I’m not sure how to begin this, but I’d like some help from people who’ve gone down the Red Pill rabbit hole and come out the other side.

To start, I’m an ex conservative Christian, but I’ve been a liberal atheist vegan for a decade or more. I’ve voted for Bernie Sanders in two primaries, and I have a lovely long-term liberal girlfriend who I get along with wonderfully. We live together with the two cutest dogs on earth. For the 8 years we’ve been together, our opinions have largely aligned, though I tend to align farther right or center on most issues, and I regularly play devil’s advocate as a rhetorical device, but also because I’ve always hated when ideas are scare-crowed when there isn’t an earnest defender of the idea present. It just feels like an injustice. Of course, that has started some real arguments, even though they aren’t positions I actually hold, but the disingenuous attacks on those positions might be the first thing that started pushing me farther towards the center.

Over the last couple of years though, I’ve felt a change in myself. Increasingly, I’ve been feeling like the Left has gone insane. While I despise Trump and anyone even remotely like him, I feel like the left has become increasingly authoritarian, it’s rhetoric has become based almost entirely on identity politics, and so many of the flat out disingenuous arguments I hear come from the left, rather than the right. From the outright hatred of white people, particularly white men, to transgender ideology being all but forced on everyone, I just feel a growing divide, that’s becoming more and more difficult to reconcile, and now this divide is forming between my girlfriend and I. I will generally stay quiet whenever she says something I disagree with in order to keep the peace, but I’m not seeing light at the end of the tunnel. And I really do feel like my natural masculinity is demonized in a way that isn’t fair, and I feel the need to defend it and even celebrate in it, but it’s a feeling that simply is not shared on the left.

Now YouTube, which is one of my favorite sources of entertainment, has picked up on this shift, so the reels it’s algorithm recommends are tons of red pill stuff. At first I just watched it because I wanted to understand it, as is only fair minded, but now even f*****g Andrew Tate is making sense to me often times. The worst part is that I think they’re not even wrong, but that they’re just overly pessimistic about the truth.

Now I need to try to deprogram my YouTube algorithm, or at least balance it with some dissonant opinions. I really wish the algorithm would give both sides of the argument, so perhaps that’s what I could really use help with first. Can you all recommend solid rational YouTube channels that work well as a counterpoint to red pill? And can you give any other advice if you’ve been in a similar circumstance?

Anyways, thank you all for reading this far.