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.
Arguing with neolibs/libertarians after the 2007-2008 economic crisis pushed me left. I was a very basic liberal before that and really didn't think a lot about the state of the world or the future. Thinking a lot about economics and environmental issues pushed me more and more left. It was pretty obvious to me that the stuff libertarians pushed, like Austrian economics was total BS, but then I dug more into more mainstream thinkers like Paul Krugman and found even that not particularly satisfying. I would credit Yanis Varoufakis and others in his camp with turning me to the left. Perhaps not all of them are radical, but most are extremely critical of capitalism and view mainstream economics as basically "propaganda with math".
After that living outside the US in a "semi-third world country" and witnessing a lot of stuff just got me thinking more and more that the world was more scary and out of control than I ever imagined. Then it just kept getting weirder and weirder with politics in the US beginning to resemble things outside the US. I just felt angrier and angrier at how deceived and naïve I was before.