I feel like people want to write GATE off as another conspiracy theory but that shit was sketchy . We weren’t the honors students or the IG kids we were not academic over achievers most of us were behavioral cases or became them by graduation we didn’t have the same consequences as our peers a lot of us went abroad as Rotary kids most of us had repeated or chronic illness all throughout childhood remember weird programs posing as recreational or disciplinary supervision programs where we would have our performance in games like man hunt or blind obstacle corses or dodgeball or pool with no sticks recorded a lot of us have a history of crime or addiction in our 20s and again miraculously evading concequences and remember weird incidents with no explanation being a frequent thing in public school. We were never in any consistent program and we often did not realize at the time that we were the only students being subjected to these strange puzzles and “hearing test” or made to drink a pink slightly sedating fluoride tasting fluid before testing that impaired our memory of the actual tests other than something with arranging symbols and identifying sudden startling beeps in headphones that was distinctly different than the yearly hearing test. We may have failed subjects and be incompetent on these areas still as adults but have been passed on to the next academic level anyway. A lot of us grew up to be not just autistic but cluster B. They asked us to sequence nonsense into order that was almost always a shot in the dark guess but more often than not you were told it was correct. The were not logic puzzles like for IQ testing and involved repeating symbols with no known meaning or value and was not a measure of reasoning but intuition. A lot of us had a parent who had been institutionalized or incarcerated at some point and may have been tagged themselves as competently intelligent but refusing to conform to the standards of behavior demanded by a school setting. We have a high rate of vivid early night terrors and dream continuity. This was real I was part of this and for all I know still am. A lot of people within a 2 year age range that I meet in the psych ward were GATE. A lot of GATE kids were addicts in our late teens and early 20s. Most of us were the oldest child in our home or first after a large gap. Most of us have lost a pregnancy. Most of us were premature and induced with pectocin and may have been raged since birth. Many of us report a fixation in childhood with things like PSAs and PIF tapes/Very Special Episodes and recall “off” or dark moments episodes and finales to shows that were staples of our early childhood with more clarity than our peers. Most of us had a very polar positive or negative reaction to Happy Tree Friends incongruent with our reactions to gore and shock footage. They didn’t sort us out with the gifted kids after the Terra Nova standardized test at the end of grade 2, we were academically diverse but almost all white, from my elementary school which was the 2 poor districts and the special needs program and NOT the school where the gifted kids went from 3-6th grade, they had us all at these centers under different pretenses that were inconsistent and no real common link could be found other than that we all knew earth other from similar programs and isolated classes growing up. Very few of us went to higher education and barely any into STEM fields with a disproportionate number of us dead or incarcerated compared to the general population. Most of us are political extremists but no consistency in leaning. What was GATE and what were they measuring and recording our whole lives under a series of pretenses that varied from subject to subject. Why did they want to identify us for sharing these seemingly random traits?