This certainly evokes the anxieties of parenting, where the weight of responsibility seems out of proportion to the modicum of control.

> “All I wanted was for people to take me seriously,” he repeated matter-of-factly. “They treated me like a rational human being, and they never laughed at me.”

This feels very key: If someone is hurting, that's a real hurt even if they're blaming the wrong people or seeking a false solution.

> how expertly extremists have leveraged the web to prey on young people who are depressed

There's a particular episode from a long-form Youtube series on this: "How to radicalize a normie" [0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P55t6eryY3g

> One morning during first period, a male friend of Sam’s mentioned a meme whose suggestive name was an inside joke between the two of them. Sam laughed. A girl at the table overheard their private conversation, misconstrued it as a sexual reference, and reported it as sexual harassment. Sam’s guidance counselor pulled him out of his next class and accused him of “breaking the law.” Before long, he was in the office of a male administrator who informed him that the exchange was “illegal,” hinted that the police were coming, and delivered him into the custody of the school’s resource officer. At the administrator’s instruction, that man ushered Sam into an empty room, handed him a blank sheet of paper, and instructed him to write a “statement of guilt.”

And here my friends is how over liberalism leads to far-rightism.

I would be classified extremely liberal by American standards, yet even I'd be traumatised if something like this were to happen to me even today (and something like this actually did). And even I would find refuge in the far right. Trust me, no one's making lines to find refuge in the left.

Now imagine the effect of such a traumatic encounter on a child.

I don't find the entire narrative in the article plausible. It smacks of the "everybody clapped" genre. This section feels particularly contrived:

> Did you hate me when I was hostage to the cult?" he asked. I'd never heard him use that phrase before.

>

> “I didn't hate you,” I said after a minute. I sensed this was a test, and if I passed, something important was waiting for me. "I was just baffled."

>

> “I hated myself,” he admitted. "I felt trapped. And now I feel so stupid."

>

> He started sobbing, raggedly, struggling to catch his breath. "Why would adults want to do that? Why would they want to fool kids? How could I fall for it?"