In my experience, people don't like to be on the wrong side of an issue. When confronted with evidence, people with reactionary ideas tend to get very angry and go bad faith. I guess that would be the cognitive dissonance playing out. I think we've all seen many a lib get ultra shitty when clear facts are ruining their ideology.
So here's my history:
Around 2020ish and the protests after the George Floyd murder, many BIPOC activists were calling out the bullshit of white and/or men amongst the liberal and left crowds. For a small amount of time, maybe two months, I played around with the ideas of stupidpol and class determinism. I was probably butthurt for being silenced, which doesn't actually really happen anyways. The funny thing was that as COVID went on, it was a masterclass in how terrible white/male progressives are. Also Hexbear became big as lockdowns happened, and my thinking has changed to "white guys fucking suck, and if a marginalised person argues with you, you're better off just shutting the fuck up".
I gotta go way back in time to find the previous instance. When I was maybe 13, before the internet was a thing, I just to get really damn upset at my older sister calling out her brothers' sexism. It was a long ass time ago, but I remember feeling red hot angry at feminists. If 4chan or TikTok existed, it would probably channel me into shitty manoshpere ideals. Thankfully I was mostly occupied with WarCraft2 missions and Sim City. It's far too long ago to remember who was right.
Unrelated to what happened in my teen years, but I'm sad to report that my sister is now an insufferable lib.
Oh, more times than I'd necessarily care to admit, and I'm sure I still have some brainworms today. There were a lot of the typical ones when I was a kid, but the "funniest" one in hindsight, if it counts, is that I was an anti-brony for a few years as a kid — but then, somehow, within a few years of declaring the fans of a cartoon show about colorful horses as my archenemies, I ended up like, "Dammit, I'm supposed to hate these people, not spend time with them! Not like them! Not... become one of them!!!" — and now, within a decade of that, I now find myself organizing weekly watch parties for a show that I used to see as the harbinger of the downfall of civilization.
Maybe my anti-brony phase was me making my suppression of my own gendy feelies into other people's problem, before realizing that I could myself use bronydom as a space to vent those gendy feelies in a manner more "sustainable" than wholesale suppression. Or maybe my anti-bronydom was a reaction to some genuinely unsavory MLP fan content my friends had shown me, before I'd developed the awareness and knowledge to make sense of why people would make and enjoy things like pony.mov. Or maybe both. Or maybe I was just a weird kid with some reactionary brainworms.
Ironically, I'm pretty sure pony.mov was actually anti-brony content.
What makes you say that?
Creator is a chuddy nihilist and I remember the general community reaction at the time being mostly