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

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

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.

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

Gave Bernie money

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

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 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 used to obsessively watch Thunderf00t videos as a teenager

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

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.

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.

I listened to like 6 episodes of pod save america.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.