I never get tired of 'em. I know we've discussed this before. I know the process is ongoing, not necessarily based on a single event, and depends a lot on your position in society. If discussing the radicalization of others, don't mention any methods unless people specifically told you that certain things radicalized them.

For me, I was a left-liberal for most of my life. Long story short, I ran in a state senate election trying to be as friendly to everyone as possible. The one thing I really wouldn't budge on was universal health care, since I knew from experience that it worked. I lost my election BADLY to a guy who ran on no platform at all, although he had much better name recognition. I worked so hard on that campaign and really was devastated and had to look for answers. Stupid as it sounds, at around that time I found the r/chapotraphouse subreddit and started listening to the podcast. That led to me listening to much better podcasts (like Revleft Radio), reading actual theory, and giving up on the Chapo podcast entirely once Bernie lost the last primary.

I'm always trying to radicalize others but I just usually get nowhere. George Floyd's death plus coronavirus I think resulted in a lot of people reconsidering things, but it seems like many of them have kind of swung back in the other direction now, at least as far as I can tell from watching my friends on Facebook. I've been arguing with my lib dad for months about all of this shit, with the result that he has actually gotten much better at deflecting Marxist points than the average lib lol. Sometimes I can get him to admit that everything is fucked and that Marxism is the only answer, at other times he'll say that we need to make friends with local business owners (some of the worst fucking people in the universe) and not alienate them.

Anyway, if you feel like writing your radicalization story or the radicalization stories of others, I'm happy to read.

  • thelasthoxhaist [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    i was a centrist Putin stan that only watch RT and anything anti-american, all i knew of soviet history was that lenin good everyone else bad, i also watch the anti-sjw channels like a guy who used a kangaroo avatar.

    after the refugee crisis and crimea crisis, i realise the channels i watch were very racist specialy against black people, i always believe people were influence by their enviroment, but these channels claim blacks and refugees were bad because they wanted to.

    so I realise they were fascist, and i never liked liberalism because of my anti-americanism, so i was left with the russia staning, eventually i realise Putin was kinda cringe, so i just care about latin-american politics and history, then reading about my parents country of chile and the history of Mexico i saw the oppression of the communists by the state.

    so i read soviet history were i thought communist came from, and i just click, it make sense why America was so evil, and why the western fascist blame everything on minorities, and most importanly why latin america was the way it was.

    It was the fucking capitalist class messing with the rest of the world for money.

    I became a marxism who like Khrushchev and thought stalin bad, eventually i realise all the death counts were bullshit (thanks to the chapo sub at that time) and i started liking both stalin and mao

    and thats how i went from Centrist Putin stan to M-L Stalin stan

    • furryanarchy [comrade/them,they/them]
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      4 years ago

      I started to fall into those weird alt-right channels for a while, but something always made me feel uneasy about them. I agreed with their views mostly (due to being uninformed and not realizing how much important information they left out about everything they talked about), but was weirded out about how passionate and hateful they were about things that didn't matter that much. Eventually I saw one of those channels slip the mask off a bit and show one of those videos of black people rioting edited to make them look as scary as possible, with the color settings messed up so their facial features melt together and they look creepy. It was shown as background footage when they were talking about muslim immigrants, and it made me realize what was actually going on.

      • thelasthoxhaist [he/him]
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        4 years ago

        yeah, to me it was something similar, they were super into that their culture was wrong and stuff, and when someone would bring up that europe did shitty stuff they would always deflect by saying, they were civilizing people and they were on the right and i guess because of my anti-americanism i just started seeing them as just a bunch of crying westerners