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.
I've shared this before but am happy to do so again:
I found this community (and leftism in general) the night of the 2020 Iowa Caucus. I took a bus to Iowa twice to canvass door to door, the second time was on the day of the caucus so I had a several hour long bus ride home that evening, when results should have started to trickle out, but everything was strange. Bus full of 40 very motivated bernie supporters all scouring the internet to figure out what was happening and we couldn’t find anything.
So when I got home around 11 or midnight I kept looking until I happened across chapo (having never heard of it) while searching, and what I saw was posts on posts explaining what was happening, why it was happening, examples of past events I’d never been taught about where similar things happened, and clearly this was no surprise to anyone. It was eye opening. It was all right there, the pieces necessary to build the conclusion I was being presented with, and I’d never been told about any of this. So when everything checked out, so my only option was to accept that as a valid interpretation, and then as I kept looking I just saw more and more of them.
I also saw some fun memes, people genuinely supporting each other, posts talking about helping people not punishing others, and the line “To each according to their need, from each according to their ability.” I cried after seeing that quote and reading the comments of people discussing it. And then made my first post, something like “Hey I’m new here but I think I like this place!” Within the first couple days I realized that I’d been brainwashed all my life and that the ‘evils’ of socialism/ communism were at the very least overblown. By the end of the first week I knew I was at very least some form of communist, and since then I’ve decided to just sit back and enjoy the ride, not try too hard to do stuff like label my tendency or work out an opinion on china or any of that shit, doesn’t matter to the actual good I can accomplish locally with what I have learned y’know?