Dad fled the Soviet Union to the States before I was born, and as such has right wing opinions on pretty much anything except maybe gay people and abortion, buying into the stuff Republicans sell hook line and sinker. Raised in a wealthy place and surrounded by either conservatives or rich liberals, you can imagine how I was brought up. Communist was synonymous with pretty much any historical evil that has happened in the past, and since everyone was comfortable there was nobody around me that challenged that assumption at all.

Took a bit of time to realize my dad, while he had some legitimate grievances with the administration of the late USSR, wasn't as wise as I thought. He acepted the American Dream to the point he refused to believe anyone in the US was disadvantaged in any way from achieving it, even though the only reason he could pull in a decent income was because of a free college education courtesy of the Soviets. He arbitrarily rejected science or news that didn't fit in with what he thought freedom was, and gave passes to American repression, inefficiency and violence that he didn't give to the USSR because it didn't affect him personally. The fact that he admitted that he basically didn't learn any marxist education at all actually helped make me more curious about the theory, though that I didn't really question baseline liberalism until pretty recently.