What was your most lib moment before you were radicalized (or at all)?

As a black person who went through a huge internalized racism arc, when I ventured into leftist spaces that said stuff like "Fuck white people.", I got enraged and responded with something along the lines of "As a black person, that's totally fucked up! This is the opposite of what MLK promoted!'.

I got laughed at and called a "bootlicker", all while thinking I was some cool, grandiose, and righteous figure in this context.

Boy, do times change or what!?

i think you mentioned 4chan in another post and god it is so common to find POC trans people on 4chan that have whole ass settler colonies living in their heads. sometimes they reach out to me and even explaining basic trans positive stuff is mindblowing to them. 4chan needs to be fucking banned, its a hazard to all life
- 4chan needs to be fucking banned
  How the fuck has it not happened already? Really feels like there has never actually been any attempt at all, not even an activist push or anything.
Fuck white people.
As a white (kinda), I still find it cringe. Could you elaborate why that's not?
- we answer this in our FAQ
- tldr: We colonised and genocided much of the world, and most of the white people in the world now assume that we're richer because we're smarter, not richer because we stole everything. Throughout modern history, nearly all white progressives and leftists have taken the side of imperialism, because it benefits us materially. There's a handful of based white people in history, but they're few and far between.
  long version: read Settlers
  Edit: if a member of an oppressed group wants to say "fuck white people", the very least I can do is acknowledge all the crimes heaped upon them by us, and not debate bro them about reverse racism or something.
- don't be white, white is a racist US census statistic
- Because it's a disgusting antiquated caste identity with no real cultural content beyond domination and race hatred, so identifying with that nonsense is pretty cringe
  Also you know, 500 years of white supremacist violence being constantly inflicted on practically every nation on the planet kinda sends a certain message
- Fiddy is responding to this on my behalf
Thank god this isn't an internalized racism post...I have a few....terrible stories. But a lot of my early reddit days were "As a Black person" comments 🤢
I used to get upset at white people for that too. Because a white person saying "fuck {a particular race}" reminded me of them doing it about my race in a post-9/11 world and it was uncomfortable. It actually took more educated white leftists to explain why the power dynamics make "fuck white people" vastly different from their "fuck minorities" stance.

Disclaimer: I've not kept up with Assange goings on so if there's any dirty laundry there, I'm not aware of it. The below is purely about the WikiLeaks stuff.
Seconding the Snowden reaction sadly, except it was Julian Assange... I actually have a memory of that that makes me cringe incredibly hard. I was at a birthday party at a friend's house and someone there was so drunk that they went full mask off and were openly sieg heiling and saying Nazi shit (really unpleasant 4chan loser type who my friends subsequently downplayed the actions of, but that's another story)...
Anyway, I got into a number of political arguments with them and the topic of Assange came up and I said something along the lines of: "Why shouldn't he be arrested? He's a criminal." The Nazi guy just looked so frustrated and said "aaaaargh, mainstream media!!!"
It was only a few years later that I realised, oh shit, he was right about that one. I was just parroting what the news was saying about Assange. I was so lib that I allowed a Nazi to have a more informed position than me. That's a hard one to live down.
Watching the rat fucking of Bernie in real time followed by the pandemic response turned me into an ML that wonders if the Soviets shouldn't have stopped at Berlin.
oh wow! me too!

[reads title]

[thinks about the question for a minute, remembers something] oh... god...

[remembers something else] oh God

[something else] Oh God!

[something else] Oh GOD!

[something else] OH GOD

[retreats into corner sucking my thumb to prevent my soul from leaving my body] Nope! Nope! Don't wanna think about it! Dooon't waaaannaaa!!!

Repression is stroooong

Damn this thread is really making me realize how much further along I am in the jokerfication process than even most of the sickos on this site.

When she lost I just cackled madly. That was the fucking funniest thing that could ever happen in that moment.

I was convinced Trump was going to win from the second I heard he was running lol
- Your username is the funniest shit
- In December 2015 I had already called the nomination for him, and I was the only person I knew who thought that was even remotely possible. Still never thought he'd win the general though.
  Though I was definitely a lib I absolutely did laugh at Hilldawg losing lol
When she lost I just cackled madly. That was the fucking funniest thing that could ever happen in that moment.
It was definitely an "I'm not happy he won, but I'm really glad she lost" moment for me.
I'd heard she did some really heavy drinking after she lost, which is why she didn't give a concession speech that night. I've never heard it either confirmed or debunked though.
I watched the election results live on the Alex Jones youtube stream because
. Was hoping for over the top rage, got him lighting up a cigar.

I used reddit

God this is embarrassing.

I was a high school senior in 2003. I was taking an English class at the local community college. I got into a long argument with a student in that English class.

They opposed the war in Iraq. I maintained that George W Bush could not possibly be lying about weapons of mass destruction because it would guarantee a loss in his reelection campaign in 2004. I agreed that the evidence presented for weapons of mass destruction was not convincing, but I maintained that no president could possibly lie to start a war of convenience and still win re-election. I believed wholeheartedly that there was evidence that had not been made public that would justify our aggression in Iraq. The idea of a president lying to start a war was so incredibly alien I refused to accept it. I refused to believe that our Democratic system would reward a president who lied like that with another term, especially after the shady way he was elected in 2000.

I learned my lesson eventually. By mid '04 I realized how stupid I had been. When Bush won reelection, what little faith I had in this nation and it's institutions, finally evaporated.

When i was in preschool i voted for john mccain in a mock election because his name reminded me of candy canes

A candy cane would also crash an A-4 attack aircraft, so that's an easy mistake to make.
.....ok but why were they having preschoolers vote in mock elections?
- To teach the importance of participatory democracy, and how it is completely unassailable and the only reasonable way to impart change!
  Seriously, to brainwash kids into not thinking about anything else besides voting vis a vis politics
- Indoctrination, same reason we make all children say a fascist oath of allegiance every morning
- I was in a private christian school that also functioned as a church... it was weird
I voted for Bush when I was five because it was the only name on the ballot I could read. I've been trying to repent ever since.
- As you should smh
We had a Kerry vs Bush

I listened to Chapo Trap House yesterday

it was a really good ep tho

For like an entire semester after taking the intro microeconomics class at my university I definitely believed that abolishing the minimum wage would be good for everybody because something something the point on the curve I don't even remember, it was dumb as hell. I remember explaining this theory to a girl I liked and she swung her purse at me lmfao

tfw the Long-legged Socialist^{tm won't let me explain Basic Economics}tm

More serious answer: I joined the Marines when I was a liberal, and probably said some shit like "they do some bad stuff but they do more good than bad" when I did. If it makes it any better I was an absolutely terrible troop, and probably cost the US more money than I provided back in labor, lmao.

Undermining Western imperialism by engaging in an increasingly absurd series of pratfalls while Yackety Sax plays in the background
o7
you cost them money and scammed an education in gun usage/weapons operation
have we finally found the only good troop?
- There's no possible way he was more buffoonish and costly than young John McCain
we need more spindly nerd fuckups to enlist

My biggest and continued lib moment is still liking 1984 as a book

No actually, my biggest lib moment that I'm still very ashamed of was arguing with a black guy like 5 or 6 years ago that racism didn't really exist in the UK anymore

I read and enjoyed 1984 at least 4 times
- Forgive me for posting the same comment twice, but since I just was talking about 1984 in this thread, I'll say here as well that I don't think you should be ashamed for enjoying multiple reads of it. I harp on how bad the writing was, but honestly it was... passable. But more importantly, I would argue that that book really did capture some important concepts and feelings and fears that were floating around. It's just that it was written by a hardcore liberal at heart who just had to fucking blame communism instead of taking the accurate path and blaming capitalism and imperialism. Anyway... what I just posted in another comment:
  It's not even that 1984 was a terrible book. It is rather poorly written by an author who was kinda a shit writer, but the dude did capture a certain important and lasting zeitgeist. He did identify an undercurrent of fear, a very valid fear, that permeated culture. The problem was that he misidentified the direction where the fear was coming from, the systems it was actually bubbling up from were the capitalist systems. But commies were both easy and profitable to make the enemies. The source was the society he actually knew better and mostly lived in, but he had witnessed other systems and wanted to project all the negativity onto the socialist systems that, again, benefited him to badmouth. His book could have been still a poorly written but interestingly prescient warning of capitalism, what it was what it was becoming (and what it is), and some of the extremes trends towards... That's what could have been if he had correctly attributed the dystopian elements as being rooted in capitalism instead of communism. Also, even thought he may not have been a great writer in general, he was good with using phrases that fit well in the milieu at the time and continue to. Like "thought police" and "Doublethink" and "Newspeak" and "memory hole." "Big Brother is watching." "We've always been at war with East Oceania." Bunch of others. There is a reason that shit stuck around, reason that goes beyond just the fact that the capitalists blew it up and made it popular, this otherwise mediocre book they held up for its usefulness in propaganda as some great bulwark against the terrors of communism. Really a tragedy that Orwell was a fucking rat-narc liberal coward.
- I’ve read and enjoyed 1984 two or three times. I read Animal Farm, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia (about half of it), Burmese Days, plus a book of his essays, his writing advice, etc. Orwell sucks but I agree with the other commenter here saying that there is just something about 1984. I don’t know. I took another look at Brave New World recently and thought that it was just eugenicist crap. I haven’t looked at 1984 in at least ten years so maybe my opinion would change if I did.

I was super into Russia gate for a hot minute. The thing that finally busted me out of it was when someone finally pointed out to me: "If you think Russia can use platforms like Facebook to influence Elections to that extent....just what kind of influence do you think that Facebook and all these companies have themselves?" Once you start asking those questions it changes your perspective on things pretty quick.

Ooh, that’s a really good way of phrasing it. I also started wondering why Europe doesn’t have any large social media companies of their own, and instead rely on American companies like Facebook.
Oh damn thats an amazing way of putting it

I argued that obama was a leftist and called stalin a state capitalist

hopefully not at the same time

Before Oct 7 it was really hard to find like, any info on the genocide in Gaza fron Google. I'd punch "Israel-Palestine conflict" in, and just get a bunch of fucking ADL links and shit about how it's Israel's birthright or whatever the hell. Bereft of other sources, being pre-Hexbear, I just mentally threw my hands up and 1:1 spouted the "It's so complicated! Thousands of years of history!" line. Their stupid propaganda working flawlessly, then.

Oh yeah also, for a year or so I was really into the "only two genders" shit, which was a combination of my browsing 4chan and my girlfriend at the time being really into Internet Aristocrat and Sargon of Akkad. To be fair I was like 16, damn am I glad I stopped that shit before adulthood.

Being a massive transphobe ~2016, a coupla months later and I ran into a transwoman at pride, way more patient than she needed to be, not only shut my bigoted ass down but also helped me to realise I was an egg.

A lot of trans people report this. A bunch of vocal bigots are victims of patriarchy performing loudly while harbouring inner questions they've never addressed. It's like the bigotry is a shield from what lies beneath.
- Internalized transphobia is definitely real, but there's also the simple fact that a lot of trans people started out transphobic because almost everyone on the planet was transphobic until like 10 years ago (and most still are).

I remember the night of the 2008 election, when Obama won, I was part of the collective sigh of relief across the nation. I remember thinking, "now things are finally going to change," and feeling genuinely hopeful.

To my credit, the country was psychotic under Bush, at least until 2006. And then the Great Recession happened, and it was worse.

Lol this is mine too. Voted for Obama on 2008 and actually put stock into it. By 2010 I was convinced the only way for anything to change was via the destruction of the US state as we know it and I haven't looked back
I remember the entire 8 years after Obama's HOPE campaign where it feels like mostly nothing really happened, except perhaps gay marriage, but you know everything else kind of got worse.
- The gays got married
  And released gay spores
  And all the straight people
  Weren't in love no more
  'cause them gays got married

I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. I had only been 18 for like a month, I didn't know any better I'm sorry

lol holy shit dude, quite the pivot you have made

In my case I guess my most lib moment was thinking Obama would follow through on any of his campaign promises (and believing he was somehow the anti-war candidate close guantanamo etc).
Dude, same. Glad you got better too.
- You too, crazy how far we've come huh?
  I think a lot of it was the recession hit my family hard, and when you're a high school kid and the "smart" people on TV say its Obama's fault you just accept it. Not that that's any excuse but just goes to show how easily people are influenced.
  I actually cannot believe 18 year olds vote, I didn't have a mature view on the world till I was at least 22 or 23.

I'm not American, but I thought Obama's inauguration would be the start of real change worldwide. PNAC was finally out of power in the White House. Intelligent people were about to take the reins on the global financial crisis. Racism was over, Americans elected a black president who spoke positively about LGBT+ people in his inauguration speech.

So much for all that. Eight more years of lip service but no real work on social safety nets, and the same MIC bullshit that's been going on since WW2.

Bought into the logic that it was bad for Trump to meet with

because it would be "legitimizing" the DPRK.

Then I actually learned the tiniest bit of Korean history and went "no wait they're mostly right, death to America".

When I was a lib I still "supported" (arguing with my friends about why we shouldn't be killing them) America's enemies and every AES country except DPRK because they were so obviously corrupt and evil that I couldn't ever defend it to my friends. After reading about the beginning of the Korean War I was like "wait so where's the part that justifies U.S. intervention" and kept reading and it wasn't until I reached the part where Douglas MacArthur built a fascist stronghold with the Japanese and started eradicating leftists where I realized "oh this is just like every single other indefensible U.S. intervention I opposed with hindsight". There's a reason your average U.S. history class skims its wars other than like the revolution and WWII lmao

A number of years ago, I took selfies with a number of Democratic Party politicians. Not even Bernie or anything, more moderate types. Stood in line over an hour for one of them.

The most embarrassing part was that I was, at that point, already radicalized. I opposed these people, I'd already read a fair amount of theory (from Anarchism and Other Essays to Blackshirts and Reds), and I was already moderately involved in organizing. Quite embarrassing, and there is no chance I'll release those photos on the internet, but honestly I probably won't delete them either.

Oscar cancelled for taking self-portrait with Marie Antoinette
- Oscar canceled for not doing something really funny.

Sent in a submission for an Ayn Rand essay contest.

Wow, you were balls deep. Congrats on getting out!
I promise this is relevant I just ramble
Was just talking to my uncles friend who lives an... interesting life. Very nomadic, used to and might still do a lot of drugs, you get the picture. Anyway he was at a family function for my dads birthday and he got talking with me about philsophy, specifically absurdism, we eventually got on to politics because i brought up the society of the spectacle which id been reading before we started talking and he tells me he's read it before. High key caught me off guard because basically no one in family is further left than your average US president. Now reading books doesn't necessarily mean you're a leftist but it let me be comfortable enough to admit im ML and steer the conversation in that direction.
This man. What a journey he's been through. Just 9 years ago he was an avid ayn rand fan, complete ancap as well as a conpiracy theorist and I mean full on lizard people are controlling our society conspiracy theorist. I was too afraid to ask about his past views on race, gender, and sexuality but he mentioned specifically that he now believes that the emphasis on "social issues" such as trans people is part of the spectacle which makes me think he maybe didn't always have great opinions on their existence. He attributes this change to his reading, meditation, and travel but hes also in a better mental state as well.
Anyway he isn't an ML but he is anticapitalist, certainly left of US politics, and has a much better understanding of how neoliberal democracy works than the majority of people in this country. Seeing him go from an ayn rand enjoyer and a conspiracy theorist to an anticapitalist among a gathering of conservatives brings me hope

I emailed my dad links and quotes from the impeachment hearings and mullor shit and deadass was like "let's see donny wriggle his way outta this!"

Fuckin shoot me

I thought that I had been a liberal but never really a passionate anti-communist, that I had always been kind of okay with communism, but then I randomly found a Facebook exchange I’d had with a communist in college back in 2009 where I asserted that Cuba was doomed to imminent collapse. It was embarrassing. I had unconsciously blocked that one out basically. The reality is that to be a liberal is to be an anti-communist.

I started a liberal club in high school lol and nobody came.

When Trump won in 2016 I burned out my car battery because my phone was plugged into it and I was constantly refreshing the results, willing them to change. I was overseas teaching so this was in the afternoon.

I ran in local elections as a Democrat several times. I lost the first few times because I was a Bernie Democrat but after I actually won and ended up at the table and saw who I was sharing that table with (a bunch of fucking Nazis) I resigned. By then the pandemic had started.

There are probably many many many more embarrassing liberal incidents from my life.

I started a liberal club in high school lol and nobody came.
holy fuck comrade. i love you dearly.
- but also running for public office is kinda hardcore and i genuinely respect that, even if you found that it didn't really get you anywhere you wanted to be

Enlisted in the national guard, partly because I thought they still did good things, but mostly because I was broke, in massive debt from student loans, and no one else wanted to hire me. Eventually disabused myself of the notion that the national guard had any good in them and radicalized maybe halfway through that enlistment. Never went into combat (signal corps, went on one deployment and spent most of it doing next to nothing in an air conditioned building outside of any combat zone) but tbh I'm not going to try to justify being in the military. My enlistment ended, I didn't reenlist, and now I'm trying to get involved in leftist causes and do something that actually helps.

I met Nancy Pelosi at an event and called her a "rockstar."

Joined the military when I was kicked out of the house, all of the adults in my life told me it would be the best thing for me and set me up for life. So I bought into that stuff and was really excited about continuing my family legacy and becoming a man in my families eyes.

Well, I no longer talk to any of the adults in my life and I’m a non-binary trans communist. Biggest fucking regret and mistake of my life, but also I don’t know that I would have radicalized without seeing the belly of the beast and being a cog in the us navy, but I would like to give myself more grace than that.

Remember when you said joining the Navy would make me a man? Heh, well funny story,
My kid is still in great lakes. Just went thru boot. I'm scared shitless for them, thank you for the ray of hope. :)
- If you can, try and stay in contact with them, I went really insular and lost that outlet and spent several years being kicked from navy psych to psych and hearing various forms of “shape up or get out.” When I met my now wife I had someone to talk to that was unconditionally supportive and they pointed out to me how being in the Navy was exactly like being in an abusive relationship, which help me reframe my issues as not really about myself, but about how I don’t fit into the system. The Navy wants you to internalize why you don’t fit in so that you’ll homogenize, and so that they don’t have to make structural changes. It’s really hard to feel like the odd one out in those places without an unconditional support system, the Navy certainly doesn’t provide that.
More details about what made the military so awful please.
- Most of my anecdotes are just that, anecdotes. Suffice to say the military command structures, especially the navy while onboard a deployed ship, is not kind to transgender people, or depressed people, or anyone not a gung-ho patriot white supremacist.
  Trigger warning for depression and suicide, and sexual assault.
  ::: spoiler spoiler
  One anecdote, a close friend was placed on suicide watch while on deployment, which means somebody from our department has to watch them 24/7, which is on top of our normal watch and maintenance requirements. They were locked in a room inside medical with 1 sailor from our department, 24/7, and they are unmonitored by medical staff or doctors. Instead, my command send the transphobes and the people that already were known to dislike my friend. So they were trapped inside this room, with the same tormentors that led to them being confined in the first place, enduring a constant stream of hate. “You’re useless to us, you can’t stand watch, you can’t do maintenance, you might as well kill yourself, your parents would probably be relieved anyways” that type of stuff. And you know, being suicide watch, you would think sharp objects aren’t allowed, but every single one of them carried their knife in there and offered it to them. I volunteered to take the midnight watch, nobody else would, and heard this and worse first hand. Both from my friend, and later in berthing listening to those fucks gloat and joke.
  And I want to clarify at the end, my friend was dishonorably discharged, and with the help of their civilian out of pocket psychiatrist who documented everything, sued the Navy for 100% disability. Close to a happy ending as you could get, not every anecdote ends well. Or ends at all. Almost all women experience sexual assault in the armed forces, the statistics are high as fuck, and it’s under reported on top of that.
  Funny anecdotes would be the time our entire training command barracks was raided for suspected contraband. They seized something like 30 dildo’s, a couple toaster ovens, but no drugs.

casual racism against the roma, asians, africans, middle-easterners and slavs

i once said and i quote: "The only reason communism worked in China is because the people there are kinda like ants."

i was thankfully never really against feminism or women's rights and that helped me from falling into full blown chuddom, i bounced off the fascist pipeline once they started crying about "teh wimmenz"

Voted for a candidate with a biggest net worth because he has the biggest net worth

Like 23 years ago, I took a shot of something alcoholic at a party, coughed, and said something like "sorry I'm weak like a girl". There were three presumably more left people than me right there, and they tried to patiently correct my language. I got all

defensive about it. Um, sorry those three people at the party.

boy itll be sure awkward for them if you have a transition arc

bruh i literally got a finance degree because i was working in a call centre that dealt with both the medical and financial sectors and thought "hey, maybe becoming a financial adviser to help people with their money and superannuation/pensions would help my local community" lmao

the fact that like one of the biggest cornerstones of my life is even dumber and more idealistic than the times i've tried to kill myself really speaks volumes
- real
  hours back then

Idk how lib this is necessarily, but when I played Metro 2033 and Last Light back when they came out I made a big deal of killing as few humans as possible, including the nazis, because "everyone is a person".

Now when I replay them I kill every nazi in the game and still get the good ending.

thats cute

I thought Bernie would fix all the ills of this rotten empire, thought Europe was a model for the future.

Thinking that the NATO bombing/invasion of Libya and subsequent brutal execution of Colonel Gaddafi was a good thing. I specifically remember being impressed reading some article about how "rebels" on the ground were using Twitter to tell NATO where to drop bombs.

Fortunately about two years later I started seeing articles about the civil war, slave camps, ect and had a real hold a minute moment realizing the situation had gotten much worse rather than any better. By that point I was already interested in socialism/communism as a concept but I would definitely credit that specific moment in history for leading me down the path of Marxism-Leninism

I didn't cry when Killary lost but I did go for a walk that night and just look at all the houses and wonder if there had been absolute nazis in these houses the entire time. It was pretty disappointing. By 2016 I was a socialist and didn't see Bernie as a socialist but would have been very happy to vote for him. I thought the 2016 election as a total waste of an election and thought Hillary would win by default and I voted for her because of course Donald Trump's not going to be president, like I assumed most people would.

Like a lot of people, my most lib moment was thinking Obama would be a reformer. The wars were super unpopular and the economy was dead in 2009. If republicans weren't so obstructionist, they probably would have taken one of Obama's many offers to cut social security. So I guess we're lucky they hated him so much.

Used to be obsessed with 1984. Let it define my personality. Thought i was the big brain for having read it.

- I was the same for both animal farm and 1984 i just applied it to the Tory government and work life instead. The anti communism was lost on me completely cos well I didn't exist in it or near it so made more sense to apply it to a capitalist government instead.
- i thought animal farm was horseshit but it was fun to read
- dirt_owl more like smart_owl
1984
It's not even that 1984 was a terrible book. It is rather poorly written by an author who was kinda a shit writer, but the dude did capture a certain important and lasting zeitgeist. He did identify an undercurrent of fear, a very valid fear, that permeated culture. The problem was that he misidentified the direction where the fear was coming from, the systems it was actually bubbling up from were the capitalist systems. But commies were both easy and profitable to make the enemies. The source was the society he actually knew better and mostly lived in, but he had witnessed other systems and wanted to project all the negativity onto the socialist systems that, again, benefited him to badmouth. His book could have been still a poorly written but interestingly prescient warning of capitalism, what it was what it was becoming (and what it is), and some of the extremes trends towards... That's what could have been if he had correctly attributed the dystopian elements as being rooted in capitalism instead of communism. Also, even thought he may not have been a great writer in general, he was good with using phrases that fit well in the milieu at the time and continue to. Like "thought police" and "Doublethink" and "Newspeak" and "memory hole." "Big Brother is watching." "We've always been at war with East Oceania." Bunch of others. There is a reason that shit stuck around, reason that goes beyond just the fact that the capitalists blew it up and made it popular, this otherwise mediocre book they held up for its usefulness in propaganda as some great bulwark against the terrors of communism. Really a tragedy that Orwell was a fucking rat-narc liberal coward.
I did that too.
Could be worse, the only person I've known that got really into that book ended up as a literal nazi within a couple of years
Nice pfp
: this is where I'd put a hollow knight emote if I could find one :

when trump broke up that black lives matter protest in D.C. to get the photo op i legit thought the civil war or a crackdown was going to start.

i was ready to gear up with whatever i had and was ranting for half a day. thought i was going to have to join some "popular front resistance" lol

2020 was a wild time

I was born radicalised. I'm so red they celebrate international workers day in honour of my birth.

i was never lib. im essentially a very cool anime protagonist

I phone banked for John Kerry.

I am John Kerry, thanks for the phone banking.
I used to post on hexbear a lot more under my real name but then tankie mods started banning my kerryposting because they thought it was a bit.
Holy fuck lol hindsight makes this so much more painful to read lmao. At the time I would have been cheering you though
- I know, it's so incredibly cringey now. Bush was legitimately a fucking monster even for a US President though, so at least I got that going for me.

Was a history/politics nerd growing up and had a lot of mid-00s Democrat takes like "we could do so much better at all these good and wholesome regime changes but those idiot Republicans are fucking it up." Wrote at least one paper saying we should have done Iraq like we did a bunch of Latin American countries before WWII; just embarrassing stuff.

What broke me out was a combination of reading a lot more about the U.S. in the Cold War, souring on capitalism (largely due to the 2016 Bernie campaign), and eventually finding Blackshirts and Reds, which got me past the final "well what other options are there, can't be those evil commies" hurdle. Edit: Manufacturing Consent was a big one in there, too, and more lib-accessible than Parenti.

This is a great thread for thinking about how to move people left. We do way too much writing people off; put the lib or outright reactionary anecdotes from this thread in Hexbear now and we'd be calling all our former selves irredeemable fascists not worth anything more than a

Manufacturing consent same, also the Shock doctrice and Jakarta Method. Finding out how much of what I think I know is actually bs and finding out about the Chicago school of economics and neoliberalism. The George Monbiot Guardian article about neoliberalism and how it fit into my own lived exprerience from the 90s was a huge step towards understanding for me personally.
- I'm optimistic that the pipeline of reading that's:
  Extremely critical of capitalism and the U.S. empire (but silent on/dismissive of AES states), followed by
  Parenti
  Is the fastest way of turning a lib into a leftist.

Gave Bernie money

$22 to be exact

I thought the reason people in poor countries were poor was because they didn't have social democracy. Once I thought more about why there are poor people in the first place, I very quickly became a communist

I have so many: Thinking that Obama becoming the US president will make the world better (I'm not an American).

Thinking that with merits/education I can move out from poverty.

Thinking that cops are there for our collective safety and can be trusted.

Thinking the welfare state exists for the betterment of peoples lives.

Thinking my singular vote changes things, being all emotional about getting to vote in a democracy and it having an impact.

Thinking Nordic social democracy could regulate capitalism.

Seeing the winter war valid in my country. Agreeing that we weren't nazis, but a secret third thing somehow. Considering joining the army.

Thinking that communism is an utopia.

Thinking that the society I live in would opt for solidarity in an emergency (covid). Trusting that people would not get left behind, things would be run with people first and not profit. Oh lol...

What has broken me over time is climate change and how it is not addressed, imperialism & colonialism, covid, neurodiversity and my lived experience in this system as a poor audhd woman who never did fit in or whose ideas of material social justice were always framed as childish or utopistic. I am thankful I got curious to find out why that is.

I uh... I used to think Mueller would save the country after Trump was elected lmao.

This was after I saw Bernie get rat fucked.

I listened to like 6 episodes of pod save america.

The pod johns radicalized me

Supporting the Libyan revolt. In my defence, I knew Socialists in Libya who supported it. All gone now...

I used to obsessively watch Thunderf00t videos as a teenager

Lol I remember watching one or two of his science-oriented videos, then going to his channel and seeing like 800 videos about Anita Sarkeesian and just going
- I admit with great difficulty, I did used to watch his video for like 3 weeks as a teenager. I came for the "lol look at how dumb these young earth creationists are" and before you know it you're watching rabid anti feminist propaganda in a way that is completely impossible to navigate or understand if you're 14
  Though back to the question in the original post? The most cringe shit I did was watch both Thunderf00t and Anita Sarkeesian videos because I was smart and listened to both sides

attended the jon stewart rally.

i remember thinking the signs were kind of cringe to be honest but it's not like i had a fully formed critique of liberal spectacular apathy.

real answer i post on hexbear

Being pro-Iraq War.

Granted I was 13 at the time and the only vocally anti-war person I knew in my zip code was the annoying granola hippy lady who lived across the street. Guess she was more based than I thought.

Yeah... Same. I wish I could apologise to the handful of people at school I knew who were anti war

A month or so before election night 2016 I told a coworker (who was 60+ years old) (I was mid 20's): "however bad you think Hillary is, Dolan Turmp is so much worse" (this was after Bernie got fucked out of the nomination, I was a bernie guy). She just laughed. I guess having decades of experience gave her some insight that i couldn't comprehend.

She was just trying to grill for God's sake.

This is embarrassing but I cried when SHillary lost to Trump

That remains one of the funniest nights of my life, I literally woke myself up laughing the next morning.

Once upon a time my lib ass somehow thought racism and sexism were both basically solved in the US. I got into an argument with someone against affirmative action and reparations.

I used to half like that Creed song One. That's basically the meaning of the lyrics.

Before the end of 2013, I actually did think Obama was going to be "decent". There was really no mention of any of his complicity in a list of war crimes that might even make the piss-drenched Ronald Reagan blush.

Then I moved back to South Africa due to circumstance right before the new year, where in the span of an hour after getting out of the airport, suddenly I was hit with the realization that "Obomba really is a slavemaster Zionist capitalist war criminal piece of shit, huh".

I did still have some lib takes (which eventually wore off some years later) like the criticisms levied against EFF and concerns over what they actually meant with regard to their alleged "anti-white" rhetoric. Despite this, I still voted for them in 2014 and 2019, in the latter part coming to terms that I tend to be in pretty close agreement with their positions (like severing relations and sanctioning Shitrael, supplying Hamas with South African weaponsystems, decommodification of land, nationalization of the mining and banking sectors), to name a few.

Also because people were coping at me for voting the EFF in 2014 and suggested that I voted the DA to replace the ANC. I basically responded with "well DA loves Obama and Israel so

"

Marie Sukers should be arrested. Also Death to AmeriKKKa

How did you get that realization within an hour of leaving an airport?
- There was a series of protests against Obama. Also figure of speech.

I was following r/Ukraine and related pro Ukraine subs at the beginning of the invasion and believed them.

I was also a euro-federalist and wanted the EU to become 1 country because I was a massive EU simp.

Same here I even posted on 4chan back in 2014 about how its time for the EU army on some post about macron and how the
::: spoiler bodyshaming "manlet in moscow" :::
better hide. Real fucking proud of that alliteration too...

My friends and I went to a surprisingly based public high school that taught about the coup against Allende and US imperialism in the Phillippines post-WWII. Also our Spanish teacher was an out-and-out PSL connected Communist, you could basically write "Che cool, US bad" on your tests to get extra credit.

We used to make fun of the Spanish teacher and also argued a few times with one of the humanities teachers about how "biased against the US" our curriculum was and how it was a little over the top. He just said "appreciate it while you have it, because once you graduate you're never going to see this perspective again". Right he was, and now thankfully my core group are all some flavor of communist/anarchist.

But a lot of peripheral friends from those days have gone on to be weird execs at places like UBER or even cops. Really even that curriculum wasn't able to inoculate any but a few of us in the end.

I talked someone out of voting for Bernie in 2016 in favor of Hilary

I believed in all the free market bullshit, thought that the problems in my country are because we are not as developed a society as the west and that we need to do more things like them, believed that austerity measures were a necessary evil because "le economy" naturally requires harder times when it's not going well.

The real problems are a combination of many things, some of which are heavy imperialist exploitation of my country, uneven growth of capitalism, monopolies taking over local production, and the usual good old capitalism that is true for every capitalist regime.

Voting for the local eurocuck green party and sincerely believing the EU and its institutions were a good thing

Same. I've become increasingly pissed off remembering the way the EU got sold to progressives in my country, I was a teen at the time and remember arguing againts people who were sceptical of it in favor of free mobility and such nonsense.
Funny how the consent manufacturing machine was totally able to leave out the part where the EU is first and foremost an economical union working for the interest of capital.
Also fell for the "Greens as a sort of leftist option" for a while. Until I realized they are truly the worst liberal tool of muddying the waters that stands in the way of actual change. A planned economy is the only viable solution to the climate crisis is something no Green will ever say here.
- Can I ask which country you're from just for curiosity.
  I'm from portugal btw, and the party I mentioned is "Livre" which is basically a split from a trot party that completely rid itself of any anti-capitalism and dove right into defending european institutions from the left, the other left parties in the country are way more critical of the EU, especially the communists
I voted baerbock to my eternal shame

Thinking Arabs "invaded" Israel and that as foretold in the Bible, they should be "kicked out" of the "stolen" land to be "given back" to the Jewish people.

i read my liberal political manifesto to a girl i liked. She had a concerned look on her face.

I couldn't sleep the night they were counting votes for the 2016 election lol. I didn't cry but it was still kind of the same.

I think my most lib-brained moment was that deep down inside I feel like I got involved with the local boomer democrats club because I was still holding on to notions of reformation. I had a stupid fucking "I can change him" moment but for a whole ass group of old fuckers that just wanna be angry about Donald and ride on Biden's every geriatric dick thrust. They don't want to change shit.

I'm not sure how to categorize my radicalization though, at that time I was already considering myself a socialist and have for a few years. That was before I did a deep dive into theory tho. So I guess it just wasn't solidified yet.

That racism was largely solved in the us and there was just a small fringe who are outwardly racist who needed to be dealt with. Fortunately even many libs these days know that's not true.

my main vector for criticizing an israeli facial recognition tech sales pitch given to my synagogue on our israel trip was "but what about the hong kong protests"

to be fair to myself I was sixteen and like a day later I had the brain break that sent me leftward
- oh god I also remember in 2016 I remember thinking "i mean it would be kinda funny if trump won" on election day and when he did I half-sincerely believed for like a day that I manifested it and was self-flagellating for the entire week internally because I thought I had wrought neo-naziism unto the world or something. I was 13 and hadn't killed my solipsistic streak quite yet

My most lib moment was agreeing with a Gommulism bad video on YouTube like 8-9 years ago or something

This is embarrassing but I cried when SHillary lost to Trump.

me too tbh

I supported Bernie in the primaries but when he lost I held my nose for Hilldawg and argued for her online lol

yeahhhh same I don't remember arguing for Hillary but I'm sure I did, at least as an "obviously trump=fascism" 99% hitler type logic

I was at a rally in middle school and shook Bill Clinton's hand when he was running against Dole. It's embarrassing as hell, but it sure as shit has made my "six degrees of separation" game fire as fuck.

Ok John Mulaney

I got into the 2020 primaries like a football game

I thought Obama would help me go to college and stop my parents from getting their home foreclosed.

I was very pro-Bernie in 2016 but also against the whole Bernie or Bust idea. Lesser evil-ism in general made sense to me, and the man himself endorsing Hillary on basically those grounds was enough for me to be vocally against Busters or people against voting in general. In my defense, I was a minor and couldn't even vote at the time. By the time I could vote in 2020, my beliefs had shifted enough that I voted for Bernie in the primary but not for Biden in the general. I sure as shit won't now, and not for state-level Dems either like I did in 2020.

I honestly am still not against lesser-evil thinking as much as most people on this site are, but for very different reasons than liberals. That kind of thinking really warmed me up to anti-imperialism. Once I got enough historical background on the death toll of America and colonialism and about how texts like the Black Book exaggerate and fabricate deaths under communism, comparison compelled me to realize that if I believed the lesser evil should be supported, then the DPRK, Iran, Syria, etc. (all the places I thought of as scary dictatorships before, essentially) are the morally superior side in geopolitics. On the basis of morbidity alone is enough to believe so, if nothing else

For that logic to work though, you need to believe people are of equal dignity no matter what part of the world they're from. That every dead body is equal to every other dead body. So, I have also come to realize that the failure of other supposedly pro-"lesser evil" libs to be staunch anti-imperialists comes down to either racism or using the "lesser evil" argument as a rhetorical trick instead of an actual belief. Or worse yet, both!

One shouldn't even need to be convinced of socialism or even social democracy to really follow this logic to its ultimate conclusions and support anti-colonial resistance, but apparently that's too fucking much to ask.

On that basis, I commend Hamas. I think Olof Palme would've understood that. I wish the non-communist """left""" today would have enough of a soul to follow the example of types like him.

In my freshman year of college I wrote a whole paper about how you shouldn't punch nazis for my writing class

I voted for Barack Obama in 2012

I still remember the "binders full of women" debate

I believed Obama's campaign promises and thought his election was going to deliver major structural changes to the financial sector and empire, reducing their grip on state and delivering it to citizens.

I thought the wars would end and Guantanamo would close. I thought we would get universal healthcare and it would finally let me become self employed.

in grade school the entire lunchroom at my school would chant 'Bush Bush Bush' like little hitler youth members during the bush v kerry election, and as an uninformed child raised by self-described 'democratic socialists' i would naturally respond by screaming kerry's name, even though i know next to nothing about the candidate then or now.

Sounds to me like you were just opposing fascism at a young age seems pretty based to me even if it meant supporting a lib.

I was conservative as a kid but so are a lot of people whose material circumstances contradict those views.

I still have a dvd of Indecision 2000. I'm not even american.

The _mueller days

shudders

I really did hope that everyone wasn't full.of shit and Putin had Trump.in his pocket. But we live in a dumb timeline.

I had faith Bernie Sanders was going to win the 2016 election and fix the at least somethings in the country

Thinking that unrestricted free trade was good and would help non-western countries develop their economies in the early 00s, which is pretty liberal. But then I actually studied an ounce of economics.

Never dabbled in the post Bush era American libbery tho, which seems to be most of this thread.

I texted for Bernie in 2020. I'm not even American. The funniest thing is that when I told an American friend about it she was shocked and brought up "foreign interference in elections"

So I guess I was one of those foreign agents they warned you about

correctly predicting the joe biden presidency in like 2015

No lie. I did too. I watched countless hours or Rachel Maddow. And used phrases like the radical left to distance myself from commies.

Voting for the lesser evil when I was like 18

I was a cop for Halloween when I was six back in the early 90s. Easily most regrettable decision.

thought andrew yang was kinda cool, threw a couple bucks his way (like he was a street entertainer or something, not real support)

You can do other stuff as a vegan rather than just consumer choices. You can join a local animal liberation org for instance
Calling veganism a "lib moment" when it's actually within the logical conclusion of principled leftist tendencies has got to be one of the most painfully obvious copes I've ever seen on this site.
When you understand the vast, vast material impact of continued meat consumption in the imperial core it is very hard to paint veganism as anything other than the correct thing to do. I would not lump it in with liberalism, that’s for sure.
- Veganism being correct and important and two separate issues.
  It is undeniably correct. However, it isn't direct action in a meaningful way.
Are you no longer vegan?
Being vegan is lib? So I assume you're in favor of banning vegans from the site, as we do with all liberals?

I used to be confused why punk songs in the 90s would criticize the President. It was Clinton! He's good, right!? He's not bad like Bush or Reagan!

I was a naive little liberal in those Bush years.

I used to regularly listen to true crime

Out of all the liberal media obsessions (Harry Potter, Ted Lasso) this is the one I don't get. It's just so grim and horrible hearing about people like the green river killer or Ted Bundy. Last Podcast on the Left has been the only palatable way for me to hear about that stuff, because they very clearly understand the dynamics. Most of the victims being vulnerable, invisible populations and the perpetrators being cis white guys. Also police incompetence and racism.
- I think I've said this on here before, but there is such a vast gulf of difference between true crime trying to prove someone is innocent and true crime just describing horrific events that I think they should be treated as two separate genres. One of them is morally good.
- Seriously, it's the only true crime I listen to because they put both the respect and the disrespect squarely where they belong. They don't make fun of the victim, have any respect for the murderer, or make excuses for cops.

I liked and supported Bernie Sanders as a non American back in 2016.

I also voted for the DA once back when Mmusi Maimane was their leader.

Being a radlib anarchist for like 20 years.

I cried and had a panic attack when Bernie lost in 2020 lmao

9/11. I was in gradeschool but yeah. For about a year or two I made excuses for the war on terror. I still think about it sometimes.

Hmm. Well I was an anarchist for many many years before reading Marx & Lenin proper. I think my worst thing was believing all the tripe about Stalin from any western source, completely uncritically until I actually decided to examine that on my own. I used to be real bad about “going with the flow” of whatever appeared decent politically, usually some flavor of mainstream liberalism; I’m glad I grew out of that.

Does reading Stirner to impress an old girlfriend count? She considered herself an egoist…my half-serious opinion of that these days is that I think Engels made him up as a joke lol.

Rooted for and voted for a libertarian party in one election because they were against the government reading my emails. Which is fine, I still don't want the government doing that - not that I really sent any emails back then - but I checked years later and turns out they also had some opinions about let's say children and photography that I had not yet learned to associate with the word libertarian.

High school libertarianism.

I hoped and changed. I thought Obama would mean something. I did volunteer work for the campaign. I didn't even bother to vote for him term two. So that shows you burnt I was. As am elder millennial I can't properly explain how bad we had Bush derangement syndrome at the time.

after the 2016 election i read both hillary and comey's (god, there's a name i haven't thought of in a while) autobiographies to keep my lib brain occupied while waiting on the mueller report

Going to Chicago to protest the war in Iraq.

"New atheism"

I was once really exited about the mueller report 🤦

Probably me uncritically absorbing gulag archipelago and leading in anti-communist/pro-america discussions to get laid while getting my political science and international studies degrees.

Fun times but I cringe at the absolute horny libshit I said in empty classrooms

My fucking senior quote in high school was "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff", in reference to this libertarian book. Fortunately, I took those ideas to leftism, because I think the third part of that sentence should be "don't turn yourself into the stuff's stuff"

Donated to Jill Stein. I don’t even live close to the US

Bringing up Chinese debt trap diplomacy in geography class. I was really proud of it as well.