I accidentally made friends with a misogynistic weirdo

Posting this on a throwaway and being intentionally vague just in case he uses Reddit and happens to see this

I (early 20s NB) met a guy (mid 30s M) on a certain video game I was relatively new to at the time when he saw that I was by myself and struck up a conversation. We immediately hit it off and the friendship progressed very quickly from there. Within the span of a couple months, we would hang out with each other and a few of his friends in this game almost every day for hours at a time, we added each other on Discord, and he even bought me a year of Discord Nitro. We became very comfortable bantering with each other, as well as confiding in each other certain very personal things (which I feel like an idiot for now), and he's even visited and promoted some of my livestreams. Eventually, he invited me to his and his friends' private Discord server and that was when I began to notice some concerning behavior.

Immediately upon joining, I saw one of his friends very openly using the r slur. I expressed how this made me uncomfortable as a neurodivergent person who has been called that word derogatorily before and he said that some of the people in this server use "gamer words" and dark humor because a lot of them are older millennials who frequented certain forums during a time when the internet was much less moderated/PC, but assured me that they're not intentionally being ableist when they say that and that I'm not a [r slur].

For a while, I was willing to give him and the other people in our mutual friend group the benefit of the doubt, though I did keep my distance from certain members of that server because it was pretty clear to me that they leaned conservative. However, some of the things this friend said raised some red flags, particularly with regards to women. He's had some bad experiences with dating in the past, which has colored his perception of women in general other than those in the server, so he would casually make comments like, "Of course [manga] is incoherent, it was written by a woman". I also noticed that he watches and shares videos from certain content creators that have some very questionable, if not downright bigoted political takes. This led me to digging into some of his past message history, where I discovered that he self-identifies as a MGTOW and says things like, and I quote, "blue-haired liberals who can't tell you what a woman is and think 2+2=racism" and complaining about "DEI/woke bullshit" and diverse characters in video games being shoved down his throat and stuff like that.

Obviously, as a very heavily left-leaning AFAB nonbinary person, stuff like that makes me uncomfortable, but I don't even know where to begin expressing that, let alone trying to distance himself from him. I really did trust him for a time, the people in that group keep reiterating that [server] is a family that always has each other's backs and they're gonna make sure my stream blows up and stuff and he like showered me in compliments and gifts but now I'm realizing that our views may not align on a fundamental level and now I have no idea how to distance myself from him or leave the server without him holding all that over my head or using the personal info he knows about me to blackmail me or etc.

What should I do in this situation?

Posted Nov 14, 2025, 6:52 PM UTC

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