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 : /

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.

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I'm from Puerto Rico so I was openly critical of the US from early on. I didn't like them. I didn't like what the Military did to Vieques, I didn't like how I never saw my flag flown by the state on its own. I didn't like how they changed the color of my flag so it would look more like their own flag. I thought my island was beautiful and rich in culture and nature, and I saw the US as trying to impose themselves and take that away from us like they did to Hawaii.

I was always left leaning. When I got a Facebook I marked myself as Very Liberal because I couldn't fully get on board with what regular liberals were spewing. I had no idea there was a left. Gay marriage and Puerto Rican liberty were my pet causes in particular, although I was generally always willing to learn and change my mind to be more respectful of stuff I didn't know about.

When Obama was elected in freshman year high school, I thought maybe things would change for the better like they said they would. When they didn't, I became disillusioned. I was actually terrified that he would make PR a state during his presidency. People here are mostly very very brainwashed into believing we can't do it on our own, that we're inherently inferior, that we need the US. Blame that one on years of imperialist propaganda shoved down our throats. He didn't. I actually don't think anyone ever will.

I began reading pieces that were critical of Obama and learned that the left exists. I wasn't fully ready to understand economic implications, I guess I believed that capitalism could be reformed by a strong welfare state. All I ever heard was that communism was good in theory. I really did admire places like Cuba, though.

Eventually in my early to mid 20s I flip flopped a lot, and at one point I believed in the power of incrementalism. It wasn't until the Trump era that I began to realize that this system and the supposed ways to change it are complete bunk. Eventually I found y'all and professors like Parenti that really really cemented my ideology to where it is today.

I still don't know if I'm authleft or anarchocom. I'm figuring that out for myself by reading. But I know that PR and the rest of the world can't realistically achieve communism without the US bursting through the door to bully and overthrow like they do all the time in the rest of the world. The US needs to fall, and thus I fully support a full scale revolution on the mainland while doing my part to better things at home and show people that there's a better way. I think we can get there. It's hard, but it's the only real way to survive.

Hurricanes. Earthquakes. Pandemics. Unfair laws like the JONES Act. Those aren't going away with statehood and they're never going to care about us ever. They don't care about Flint. We're brown too. I don't want everything I love about my island to be wiped away and replaced with old gringos who shit all over everything we love and treat us like garbage. They're currently ruining all of our efforts to contain the virus by coming here for vacation (no we cannot stop them the airports are privatized and access is federal) after we've been quarantining for months, refusing to wear masks. I hate it here. We need real change, and that's not gonna come from voting.

Solidarity forever.

I was an Obama lib as a kid (I had his inauguration speech on my wall in elementary school, cringe ik), but of course not a serious one since I thought Obama stood for good things and I didn't really understand politics. Then as I got older I started getting into stuff like Jon Stewart/TYT and was essentially a socdem but I felt like something was a little off about TYT's politics that I couldn't really place, until Bernie's two runs, Michael Brooks' show, and my YDSA all solidly pushed me to the left :) I am still reading, figuring out my tendencies and stuff, but think it's safe to say I probably am not an anarchist.

Horny —> Gamergate —> Nihilist —> Communist

Lib, then libertarian during the early Bush years since they at least had a critique of the GWOT that wasn't 'do the same thing as Bush but better' and also recognized the Patriot Act and other such post 9/11 innovations were extremely dangerous.

Then once I started working in the US healthcare system I became a libertarian socialist. Kind of stayed around there for a decade, until Sanders 2016 run and all of a sudden there were folks who had similar beliefs coming out of the woodwork and I realized I didn't have to be a lone voice in the wilderness. Since then, I've intentionally kept my tendency vague, because tendency fighting is the lamest shit possible. I'm much more of a 'we'll settle that shit after the revolution' kinda guy.

Instead, I try to focus on doing community work that matches my values, and let other folks in the local org(s) handle the tendency fights and socialist education. Since I'm a middle aged white guy, I try to be the 'respectable intro' for normies. Gotta make a presentation to a neighborhood association? As a middle aged white guy who owns a home, I'll gladly go. Because I appear 'respectable', particularly if my tats are covered. But, I'll also go into low income neighborhoods and knock doors for tenant organizing, and have a 'riot bag' just in case our local cops pop off.

As far as theory goes, I tend to avoid any of the larger tomes, because I come from a history background. I am much more interested in the history of socialism and socialist revolutions (shout-out to Mike Duncan and his Revolutions podcast as he walks the path to radicalization) than I am in dunking on Kautsky for the millionth time. Or, to put it another way, I'm far more concerned with how socialists gain and exercise power than reading some dudes complaints about how everyone besides themselves is a reactionary. As an aside, I highly recommend studying the Greek Civil War during and after WW2 for a perfect example of how focus on theory destroyed a revolution.

Also, I own a large grill. It's entirely possible I've been grillpilled.

I was a daily show lib through the 2000s, obama being a big disappointment to me combined with that stupid rally to restore sanity broke my brain away from it. Probably the rally for the most part, it made me realize politics was just aesthetics for them.

Similar journey to you. Lefty liberal, identified with the usual internet liberal/libertarian zeitgeist (pro-abortion, pro-drugs, meh on guns, anti-religion, etc). Ended up circling the drain a bit on that libertarian-to-fash pipeline, with the likes of gamergate rapidly politicising a previously mostly apolitical sphere. I always felt a bit out of place, what with quite liking redistribution and egalitarianism, but the race and gender stuff was beginning to seep in.

From there, somehow I found Chapo, and it had the same irreverent humour as before, with the bonus of it being directed exclusively at mainstream conservatives and liberals, rather than at marginalised groups.

From there it was a small step over to RevLeft, and Breht’s sincerity reminded me that it’s ok to unironically give a shit about things.

Oh, and death to America, of course.

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My path to my political present started in 2015. To that point I had been a progressive lib kid, I was from a rougher neighbourhood in Toronto but I was surrounded by well meaning people. The first scratch on my political consciousness was when Trudeau axed electoral reform. I was a nerd and was super excited for it, even though I couldn't even vote at the time. When I found out the reason it was axed (the system the Liberal party wanted (Ranked MMP) would grant them a majority forever, and the commission had said basically any other system would be better) I quickly became disillusioned with them.

Then, during Trump's election I hadn't really kept up with the primaries beyond knowing that Sanders ran a good race and that Clinton was probably already a war criminal. I figured she still had it though and when she lost I took another blow to my political thought.

I join the army to pay for school and suddenly I'm surrounded by different with all sorts of views. Everything from Peterson alt-right to kill-the-landlords Maoists. The training for the army in Canada is different than it is in the states, the focus is explicitly on the importance of teamwork and group discipline. That definitely helped me form my political opinions.

Then a couple years pass, I do more school, get more army training, then one day while I'm on a temp contract I start seeing stuff on reddit about Vietnam for some reason, probably some shitpost about the Viet Kong dunking on some Americans.

I see some people getting down voted being told to stay on Chapo and I was like "what's Chapo?" I click on it and find what becomes something of a guilty pleasure at first, seeing people wish for the deaths of billionaires and stuff. At first I thought it was too extreme but I guess as I stayed and was exposed to very different views about the world I was persuaded that they have no place in society.

Then the Epstein story breaks and I snap from "progressive" to wanting a dictatorship of the proletariat. Back at school I'm trying to find arguments to pull people from across the country left (nationalising oil works really well on people from Alberta it turns out) and chewing out my student union for being comprised of spineless careerist libs who wouldn't touch the manifesto with a 10m pole and are literally only doing their job for their resume. I read some theory and bettered myself. Finished my degree and am not looking back.

My family's really poor, and has a history of voting for the for the NDP, so my values and class interests have always aligned with leftist politics. I got exposed to communism at a young age from Civ 4 (the communism civic). It's a fairly unbiased, for a western source, explanation so I pretty much realised by that point (age 12 or 13) that communism was good. I probably would have 'grown out of it,' if not for discovering Kaiserreich. I think a lot of people get pushed away from communism by the (heavily propagandised) legacy of the USSR, as well as contemporary China. Discovering libsoc ideologies through Kaiserreich let me avoid that; I could support communism, but through anarcho-syndicalism, rather than those nasty stalinists, or whatever. At this point I was like 15 or 16, and just entering high school. The only theory I had ever read in my life was the tvtropes pages for ideologies, and I was an unironic monarcho-syndicalist, had a lot of incel traits, and was just in general really cringey.

In high school I started moving more left. This was around the 2016 elections, but I didn't really follow any news at that point so I never even heard about Bernie. If not for my least favourite teacher I've ever had, I probably would have stayed around where I was for longer, drifting around as some sort of monarcho-syndicalist with succdem characteristics. In grade 12 though, I had the most lib social studies teacher to ever exist, and he pissed me off enough that I started reading. No complex theory, but I read (and failed to understand) the manifesto, started reading history, and discovered r/CompleteAnarchy.

That sub led me to all sorts of leftist subs eventually, but it gave me a coherent ideology. I was an anarchist. The USSR and China were bad, Catalonia good, etc, etc. At this point though I still had a lot of issues, especially with regards to culture. I was very class reductionist. As a white cishet male, I didn't really see any of the identity issues as important, and got really mad when memes, videos, etc, called white people privileged. To me, I wasn't privileged. I was an autistic anxiety and depression ridden poor dude. Luckily, I managed to take a course with one of the very, very few actual marxist profs at my university, and his course taught me what identity politics, privilege, power, etc actually mean. He also introduced me to how doomed we all are due to climate change. That was a terrible day for me. I don't really know where I'd be if not for him. In my first year of university I also had a super lib prof, and I tried reading Capital just so I could have a more theoretical base for arguing with my classmates. I got through the first volume by myself, but started struggling with the second, so I gave up. I also read the Bread Book, and in general just tried to engage with theory. At this point though I was still an anarchist, and had lib tendencies, like believing electorialism could work. This was around 2018-2019.

Last year I was in my second year of university. I went to pretty much all the climate marches in my city, but nothing changed. I was desperate for the provincial NDP to win, but they lost. I was mildly interested in the federal NDP doing decently, but they didn't. I got really enthusiastic for Corbyn to win, but he lost. I got even more enthusiastic for Bernie to win, but he lost. That pretty much crushed all of my faith in bourgeois elections, which moved me more towards ML. Every time the image of Lenin was posted on Chapo, I moved even closer. Then after Chapo got banned, I spent a few days lurking and reading through the China channel on discord. And it made me realise that, as much as I condemned China, the USSR, etc, I didn't actually know a single thing about any of them. So now I'm more optimistic for what China's doing, really depressed the USSR fell, and probably a MLM that's sort of critical of democratic centralism, and strong states. I'm also reading Capital again, and realising that I actually didn't understand any of it the first time.