Nah, I’ve been inside some of the fandoms on the Internet before and I know exactly what the commenter’s talking about (and whenever a similar thing happens I do another facepalm.) /r/HobbyDrama has a fuckton of similar stories as this, you don’t need to adhere to a specific ideology to admit that these things happen. (And even the left has criticized idpol for a long time, don’t just assume the commenter is conservative because of this)
As to why people participate in these tribal fights in the Internet… well one of the problems I see in modern society is a severe lack of agency among the people. Fighting on the Internet for a cause (whether stupid or not) gives one a sense of agency that they are alive in this world and changing things. The problem is that most of the agency that the Internet provides is inconsequential for actually changing the real world and is detrimental to one’s mental health in the long term.
This right here is your indicator that this comment is an entirely made up story about hypothetical friends, with the sole intention of ragging on “liberals.”
Basically, it’s contrarian conservatism that criticizes not-very-controversial values (e.g., general equality) for incredibly vague reasons.
It’s even more ignorant than plain old bigotry because it’s so devoid of ideology. It’s just contrarianism for the sake of not doing what the “liberals” do.
The anti-masking movement of 2020 is the perfect demonstration of that contrarian ideology. Conservatives don’t even know why they oppose masks except that the liberals were putting them on.
It’s pretty sad considering that the first two sentences about ML and online identity were relatively productive conversation that could have gone somewhere thought provoking.