He told me about how he had to break up a fight between a tankie kid and a prepubescent fascist, and how all the Chinese kids are suddenly talking about American imperialism.
God the kids are so cool. How did they get so cool. Fuck.
When I was in senior year government education class, we were forced to try and run a mock election in class and had the class divide up into political parties to run in.
Obviously the majority of the girls went to run under the democrat banner and the majority of the guys ran under the republican banner.
If I remember at this point I was rapidly drifting away from being a rabid reactionary that would've made a gamer gater fascist smile with pride at to being generically apolitical. Like not even any stereotypical hog positions or shitlib stuff like I went full tabula rasa mode.
So I didn't really give a shit and was gonna just kinda fly under the radar not participating when this group of wanna-be greasers in spikey leather jackets and long greasy hair who played in their death metal band and gamed over weekends asked if I wanted to join their party as their primary speaker of their Party. I asked then what party it was and they said the communist party.
I had literally no idea what a communist party was except having like the barest grasp that 1984 and animal farm was about them but because I had no background education on literally anything east of Germany those lessons didn't give me anticommunist brainworms.
Anyways when we ran they were all behind me doing rocker poses and head thrashing to shit I said since they gave me a basic run-through of what some commie positions were and I basically did a Bernie sanders speech while they shouted commie memes between sentences.
We won first place lol
I know the situation with the left in the west isn't great but we so far ahead of what I remember growing up in the 90s. Michael Moore represent the absolute furthest left anyone in the US could conceive of. Yeah you had RATM but socialism was so far out of favor that people heard the lyrics and were just like Arnold in Westworld ("it doesn't look like anything to me"). Similar thing with the Che shirts. Progress may feel like very little but I do think it's something.
You sure that isn't just you radicalizing? There have been left-wing movements in the US always. There were those WTO protests in 1999 for example. Are there really more people with left-wing views who reject western propaganda today than there were previously? Socialism in Russia ended in 1991, is it really more popular now than it was right then? I guess that would make sense lol.
all the Chinese kids are suddenly talking about American imperialism.
Hell yeah, way more based than I was at that age.
Combination of climate change in screaming contradiction with business as usual + radicalizing algorithms in everybody's pocket
As a boomer I felt the same way about Millennials.
LGBT+ are people too? Awesome, kids.
Cops killing blacks is riot worthy? Finally!
Fuck the boss? Yeah, that's the cool zone. 😎
