Counterintuitively: falling down the alt-right pipeline. I could never bring myself to fully agree with it and was "deprogrammed" by (and I really hate to say it) . I was a ite for awhile and even (also to my current regret) voted for Jim Crowe Joe in the 2020 election. However, my ism also led me to finding out tankies existed. Like many ites, I mocked and sneered and resisted them at first. However, I like to think of myself as somewhat intellectually honest, and my confrontations with them led me to reading and finding out they were right.

Before long I was a frequenter of r/genzedong (I didn't use reddit at the time chapo was the specter haunting reddit and only heard of the sub from genzedongers after it had been banned for awhile). I migrated to Lemmy when genzedong got quarantined for fighting against liberal disinformation regarding Russia's liberation of Ukraine in early 2022.