In the summer of 2020, Xaviaer DuRousseau was preparing to appear on a Netflix reality show called “The Circle,” where a group of strangers, isolated in separate apartments, compete for a cash prize and occasionally adopt fake digital personas to trick one another.
Mr. DuRousseau, then 23, was a progressive who marched in Black Lives Matter protests, had pushed his university to require ethnic studies courses as a graduation requirement and voted for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in 2016. For the TV show, producers wanted Mr. DuRousseau, a Black man, to pose as a white woman and lecture others about racial injustice, before revealing his true identity.
Mr. DuRousseau spent hours boning up on right-wing politics to get ready for debates with conservative contestants.
But as he watched videos from PragerU, the conservative advocacy group, and Candace Owens, a right-wing influencer, he found himself nodding along.
Maybe, he began to think, the media really was targeting President Trump for taking on the political establishment. Maybe free college and free health care were unrealistic goals, despite what Mr. Sanders said. Maybe police brutality against Black people was less common than he thought.
“I was getting so frustrated, because I kept agreeing with some of the stuff that they were saying,” he said. “I just kept debunking myself, over and over.”
