Yes, I know we're mostly actually :LIB: here but for the sake of discussion let's pretend otherwise.
I'll start. I left behind a very right wing upbringing, the kind that had family members that openly expressed sympathy and support for nazis, said "the wrong side won the war" and even believed that "science" would have been far more advanced if only a certain WW1 veteran and painter had his way through the 1940s. I left it behind, but I brought much unexamined ideology with me. :zizek:
For most of my college years, I was an alienated and insufferably smug neoliberal that didn't even know there were options between "respectful conservatives" like William F. Buckley, Jr. and Clinton-era liberals. I assumed that older leftist movements had simply ceased to exist and were no longer relevant so I didn't think much about them. Most of my opinions and hopes for the future were shaped by whatever pie in the sky post-Extropian hopium dealers I hopped between, from Kurzweil to worse.
Some of my takes were so bad I feel reluctant to share them, even here, even now. I will say that I once believed that the only real problem with eugenics was that society would push back and the controversy would sabotage the "good" it would do. I also, naturally, had such a preoccupation with death cheating and life extension bargaining-phase coping with young adult existential dread that I saw depopulation as another necessary evil that would have unfortunate society-wide pushback. There would have to be a lot less people if the ones that lived forever were going to be around forever, at least until the near-infinite bounty of asteroid mining and such came about.
I had many post-911 :brainworms: as well. I was simultaneously a believer in compromise as a solution to almost any disagreement but also had my mind shut to anything other than the conservative-liberal false dichotomy. Whatever those scary Muslims were up to, if it wasn't friendly to the United States, it was certainly a threat to civilization itself had had to be stopped no matter the cost, tragic as that was. :liberalism:
I was involved with the New Atheist movement for most of my college years and young adulthood, and my disillusionment really didn't set in until Dawkins' "Dear Muslima" letter and once I stumbled upon the realization of what a quack Sam Harris is and always was.
So-called "futurology" conferences that I used to enthusiastically be a part of started to get bought out by billionaires under pretense of hosting and sponsorship, and when the military started shoving its way in to some of the venues I used to be interested in, I checked out.
During and after college, I worked to survive. Work taught me sympathy for my fellow workers, and it also taught me that my bosses weren't particularly good at anything but had the power. That got me started on a new path.
It wasn't a single event but a process, and I'm still on the path I started to take.
I grew up apolitical but always lib-leaning due to background radiation of California and then became a 4chan edgelord borderline fascist and became really disillusioned when I realized the majority of the people around me believed some stupid ass shit (nofap will not give you super powers, wtf?) and were generally just stupid, cruel people
like my older brother has been posting on 4chan since like 2005 and he always was kind of conservative (which I always found strange) and slowly became more and more fascist and around the Trump election was always talking about how awesome Trump was going to be and all that edgy Nazi shit and talking about how there is hope because of "Gen Zyklon" and he used to wear a Nazi hat and stuff around the house and he kind of bullied me into adopting some of his more extreme views and I went through a period of pretty severe introspection a little while later and started to drift back to some of the stuff I believed a little bit in highschool (one of my friends is from Finland and constantly bludgeoned me about how socdem is best and how USA is shit, it always kind of stuck with me) and my older brother became extremely abusive in response (though he always was, I just didn't really pick up on it) and it just caused me to become lost and search for answers
Over like the next two years I slowly started to lose some of the stupid ass brainworms I gained from spending all day jacking off and browsing /pol/ (also I generally started to realize that yes, me not being white is a hindrance) and eventually I joined group that just happened to be leftbook and I usually got ratioed when I said some stupid shit and most people there were genuinely nicer than most right wing douchebags
I eventually got in touch with my friend from Finland after not talking with him for ages and I tried to act like I used to before I got brainworms and he was like, "election is coming up, who are you voting for? I'm watching this one because it looks crazy, Americans are so dumb" and he eventually linked me to the JRE episode with Bernie and I really liked what Bernie had to say (esp. with regards to when he started going on about deaths of despair because I was pretty close to becoming one of those lmao) and I kinda wrestled with that for a while and became more and more disgusted with fascists and everything around me and then when the Floyd Riots kicked off, I don't even remember how or why but I wound up watching the livestreams (I think it's because I had seen an anticapitalist meme on FB and was like "hey that's true", and then started following that page) and it really radicalized me like crazy, I used to think antifa were crybabies but I saw some insane shit on those livestreams and I was like "holy shit if they're right about police brutality what else are they right about?"
I had actually read Marx as part of a class I took for general ed a few weeks before that and I loved it but I didn't really think "wow, I'm on the left now" until I was watching those livestreams like 10 hours a day
I think I probably always would have wound up like this, I have always hated bullies, and I have had experiences in my life that humanized lots of people who are normally demonized. One of my only friends in elementary school was a foster kid (who opened my eyes to classism, I remember he told me the other white people didn't like him because he was "trailer trash" and that while the Mexicans didn't fully accept him because he was white at least they didn't look down on him for being poor) and I had another friend who was a very sensitive and intelligent person who fell into multiple drug addictions along with having been in tons of remedial classes and interacting with all the black kids who got constantly harassed by the school police and realizing most of them were fucked up but also really fucking funny and for the most part normal people