Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints) mentioned Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roper 5 times

Megan left the Westboro Baptist Church in 2012 after a crisis of faith precipitated by a power struggle within the church. She wrote about all this in her book "Unfollow", which is honestly a pretty interesting account of deconversion and the circumstances that lead to someone leaving a hate group.

— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)

In her book, in her TED talk, in her public appearances, Megan expresses the idea that society has recently become polarized in some unprecedented way, that we've all become extremists, that, in some sense, we've all become the Westboro Baptist Church.

— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)

The last lines of her book address her family. "I want to tell them that I love them. I'll just have to find another way." This is touching and human and also kind of a conflict of interest.

— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)

Megan often says she was deradicalized on Twitter, but if you read her book carefully you'll notice that's not exactly true. The major precipitating even for Megan's crisis of faith was her mother's mistreatment at the hands of an increasingly misogynistic church leadership that made Megan feel like she was the victim of the church for once. She says of the church discipline, "For the first time in my life, the accused were people I lived with and knew most intimately, and I knew that the judgments leveled by the elders were wrong. I could no longer blindly trust the judgment of these men."

— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)

Reformed bigots have to face not only the shame of being dupes, but also the guilt of having devoted years of life to harming vulnerable people. This is something Megan, to her credit, faced head on. "If we were wrong, then I had spent every day of my life industriously sowing doom, discord, and rage to so many, not at the behest of God, but of my grandfather. I had wasted my life only to fill others' with pain and misery." Most bigots cannot stand to face this moral sunk cost.

— Natalie Wynn (Contrapoints)