Personally, I was a left liberal for all my life, but had kinda looked into the abyss of anti-sjw and gamergate stuff, like watching Sargon and Bearing, but hadn’t really subscribed to their beliefs, more putting them on as background chatter.
Things changed when I read manufacturing consent, listened to Chomsky and found Chapo at around the end of 2018, at which point I found myself as more an ancom, but Chomsky’s talking points on Leninism and the USSR was never as cogent and didn’t make as much sense as his other points, so I held skepticism about my beliefs then.
Reading more on theory and history, and looking more into different left tendencies via channels like Rev Left moved me over to be a Marxist, as it made the most sense to me in explaining the current and historical situation. Currently making my way through Lenin and looking more into historical ML states and I’ve found that I’m pretty comfortable as just a Marxist with ML tendencies rn.
I was a conservative until Hillary Clinton ran in 2008. I saw her going after Obama harder than anyone on the right and I came to respect her. I tuned out when she lost and felt an ounce of joy when she joined the Obama administration, but it hurt to see her playing second fiddle to a chimp. In 2016 I was set free by her. The day Trump stole the presidency from her was the worst day of my life. Americans never deserved the greatest politician who ever lived. I swore then and there that I would vote for Hillary Clinton every four years until the day I die.
This thread jostled an absolutely horrific memory in my brain of going through a brief anti-Islam phase in high school, at one point having a teacher talk to me after class after submitting an essay about Islam being too conservative and authoritarian and thus incompatible with liberal European values, meaning I managed to be racist, reactionary and a lib at the same time. That teacher probably thinks I went on to be a huge dumbass : /
Thanks :thumbs up: I’d completely managed to suppress memory of this period, and now I feel incredibly embarrassed and ashamed. The funny thing is, I’d considered myself a liberal and a feminist since middle school, and didn’t see myself as at all racist- if I’d been on Reddit at the time, I probably would’ve been upvoting the shit ouf of those endless posts thirsting after photos of Afghani or Iranian women in the 60’s
Self-reflection and self-crit are virtues that you’ve shown, comrade. I hope this post hasn’t triggered anything too major in you
For real.
The only reason a smaller number of Christian extremists are doing petty bombings and shit, is that they already own the world and more crucially, already own the nukes. They can already just say so-and-so has oil and commit genocide on a massive scale.
We have the same phenomenon as ISIS here, and that’s Apocalyptic Christians digging deeper and deeper into upper levels of government. They want to start a nuclear war to kill almost everything on the planet. Wahhabis don’t even want to do that.
They are also trying to expand Israeli domination of Jerusalem because they think they are tricking the Jews into killing themselves. Once the temple gets rebuilt, a lot of evangelicals are going to get reallllll fucking restless.
As a Catholic kid in Kentucky I always viewed myself as a (in retrospect) mild fascist. My first memory was watching the CNN coverage of the Gulf War in 1990 which was a oddly patriotic memory that carried me all the way through the 2003 invasion. That falling to shit made me sit back and reflect. Not like I was deeply entrenched in any ideology at that point, it was mostly cosmetic level shit. Around this time a religion teacher of mine remarked that Jesus would be considered a communist nowadays. I had no real idea what communism actually was so I started to look in to it and other political ideas. As a result I slowly morphed in to the guy who wouldn’t commit and would say shit like “Fascism/Capitalism and Communism both work in theory, they just forget to account for human nature”.
During this time my mother started dating a guy whose whole life was credit card processing and leeching money off people. He had/has more money than I’d ever know what to do with but somehow always found opportunities to complain that he wasn’t making enough. This started poking holes in my idea that capitalism was a good thing.
Then I arbitrarily decided to take an Arabic class in college which led to me studying abroad in pre revolution Egypt and backpacking around the middle east and visiting Gaza and the West Bank. That whole process moved me even further left and wanting to engage in politics more. That caused me to become a lanyard carrying legislative intern for the Kentucky legislature. I had asked to be assigned to the most left person there but I guess the committee found the best fit to be a horse farmer from the middle of nowhere who only cared about farm subsidizes and getting God back in school. This guy taught me that the entire process boils down to token gestures and finding ways to indirectly accept gifts from lobbyists (I lived off those cheese, jerky and fruit baskets for half a year). Thought that might just be a flaw of US politics so when a family friend asked me a year later to go to India with him to become an assistant to a PM I jumped at the chance. Should have done some research first since this guy was a piece of work, an ex cricket player who was forced out of the game and took up politics. Ended up bailing on that since I couldn’t stand the guy and just tooled around in the previously mentioned family friend’s credit card company call center while living on a wealthy farm in a very rural part of India until my scheduled flight home. My belief in electoralism and capitalism’s ability to provide for those not already at the top has never recovered.
Since then I went to grad school for public health and focused on disaster response (pandemics, natural disasters, civil wars, etc) which just further highlighted how capitalism doesn’t have a proper and ethical response to any of these things. As one would expect after spending all the time, money and energy on grad school I have since had a high paying important job able to help me pay off those student loans with ease a series of low paying unimportant jobs which barely allow me to pay off my loans with enough left over to scrape by. You know, the American Dream - the ultimate radicalizer.
Not sure how coherent that was. It was my first time even walking myself through my own political journey.
I HAVE FOUNDED THE CAMPAIGNS OF MANY POLITICAL CANDIDATES FOR A LONG TIME. I HAD THE BEST CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS.
BUT MY POLITICAL JOURNEY REALLY STARTED WITH THE BIRTHER MOVEMENT.
IN 2016 I BECAME POTUS AND STARTED MY FIGHT WITH MY FRIEND QANON TO SEARCH AND DESTROY THE CEO OF ANTIFA.
Reposting from another comment.
In the beginning, I was a liberal. I’m from New Zealand so I didn’t get too much exposure to US politics until I sought it out.
Around 2017 I tried interacting with the_donald to see what the hell was going on there and I was basically told to fuck off but with slurs. I was really nice, too.
My first interaction with slash chapo was in early 2019 as a politics baby asking sincerely what the difference between a liberal and a leftist is in reply to somebody else’s comment. Amazingly, instead of posting PPB, people actually took me seriously, upvoted my question, and provided well-thought-out answers that, at the time, I didn’t understand, but my curiosity about this political sect was piqued, so I subscribed. I didn’t understand anything that happened at first, but over time I became accustomed to how people interacted, started to learn the basis of what they believed — USA bad, question western narratives, liberals do not seek progressive change, helping poor people good — which as it turned out, I agreed with a lot. Now I’m a leftist of some sort. I’m not particularly a fan of either anarchy or authoritarian beliefs, so I just post about killing billionaires. :af-heart:
Being open and helpful to new people really does work.
