Sorry if this has already been discussed or if I've already told you these stories before.

I didn't radicalize until 2017 or so and was a lib until then. I was in high school in the '00s and there was only one guy there who was an out communist. He was more than an acquaintance but not a close friend. He once went through the trouble of downloading a bootleg copy of The Fellowship of the Ring for me, which would have taken like all day with the internet speeds of the time, and then he burned it onto a CD, for which I will be forever grateful. We never talked about his political beliefs together—I was a lib but always against the Iraq War (wish I could say the same for the Afghanistan War). My lib friends and I discussed his beliefs once behind his back, saying it was funny that he thought capitalism would expand across the world and then destroy itself, ha ha, how could that possibly ever happen?

When I was radicalizing in 2017 I reconnected with him and he gave me a Trotskyist book, Socialism Seriously, which I liked a great deal, even though it trash-talks the USSR within the first two or three pages. He moved to a state with more jobs and became a [member of a rare decent powerful union with good pay and benefits] and seems to be more or less a lib now, although I haven't been on FB for quite some time so I'm not sure.

Anyway, being a radical today is hard, even though to be honest it seems like it's even harder to be a liberal or a fascist ("Why is everyone around me sick, dying, or miserable all the time? They just need to work harder and smarter!"). Most of us were radicalized, if I'm correct, post-OWS or post-Bernie, so I'm curious if any of you were radicalized earlier and how things were different at the time—for instance, as terrible as the internet is, I can't recall anything resembling a communist community existing anywhere in the '00s. Leftwing websites were merely progressive at best.