I know the post this inspired is a few days old, but while it's true that people become more susceptible to extremist groups and cults when they're in bad life situations, a) you can arm yourself against this by teaching yourself critical thinking skills, how to recognize propaganda and dogwhistles, and so on. It's not that different from how like, you can arm yourself against abusive friends/romantic partners by looking for red flags of abuse like love-bombing, and thus if your "new friend" bombards you with 15 texts in as many minutes, you're probably going to be wary of them! There are some of us who've been in those desperate-for-friends, ultra-lonely life moments and found ourselves talking to someone who tried to give us some questionable shtick and we still recognized it and stopped talking to them fairly early in that conversation, not several hours later. b) Hate group and cult members do in fact try to recruit from people who seem likely to buy their bullshit. That doesn't mean they're always successful, but there's probably something about you that makes you seem like a likely recruit and yeah, some of it's an accident of demographics - for instance, some particularly stupid and young TERFs on here will often just follow any feminist blog run by a cis woman in hopes of getting a chance to sell on her on their garbage - but if you're getting the actual Spiel (TM) then you've likely done more than just "be a white able-bodied person," but in fact given some indication that you might be receptive to that sales pitch. It's important, especially if you were talking to Nazis for hours at a protest before realizing what they were, to think about what caused them to target you! And to re-up your familiarity with hateful rhetoric so this doesn't happen to you again. Given the number of people who think they're just being "anti-Zionist" who are circulating Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion level antisemitic tropes on here, I am really not surprised some of you were seen as likely targets by Nazis! But that's an opportunity to fix that: and to listen to Jewish people when they tell you about this, and not require them to prove their political bona-fides to you before you do so.
