Several things radicalized me, and this will be a long post really detailing it.

Born in the deep south and have spent my entire life there. My family have a legacy in industrial and seafood work with shrimping, oystering and ship building. This legacy goes back to my great grandparents. All of them were very pro-union and I grew up hearing stories about how they used to have strong workers rights, unions and labor was something they took pride in. Grandparents still to this day talk about how all that was destroyed in the 80s and then 90s with the help from Democrats in Clinton's presidency. They can tell you about the days they used to have unions and how it all disappeared.

Lived in poverty for most of my life and first realized something was wrong when I got into my teens in middle school. This was after 9/11 and all the schools I went to had Zero Tolerance policies and were run kinda like prisons. Police officers showing up at our school was a weekly occurrence and how discipline was often enforced. We had events of police officers and preachers who would talk to the entire class and scare the hell out of us talking about going to prison or the preachers who would just yell at us about sin and burning in hell. At a young age, I realized that this was not normal. My middle school had gender divided classes that they put all the quote on quote on "bad" and "slow" kids. So if you had bad grades or struggled, they assumed it was cause you were one of the bad kids and would make the argument that their was a connection between bad behavior and bad grades. In these classes, the Zero Tolerance policies were pushed to the absolute extremes as you were told often how you were on such thin ice. Suspensions were common for the most minor things (cussing at teachers, skipping class, etc), and if you got into fights or were merely suspected of having drugs on you, then you had to go up to the principal's office where they called the police and would have a cop search you thoroughly and might put you in the back of a squad car and take you to juvenile to scare the shit out of you. And yes, this happened to me on more than one occasion just cause I "looked" like a bad kid. I was drug tested before when the cops couldn't find cannabis on me while my teacher swore that I looked like a pot head and because I was found with CDs of heavy metal bands in my backpack one day, I just had to be on drugs.

Our schools also had a sorta form of solitary confinement known as 'in school suspension' and it was what the school enforced for minor discipline that didn't result in you having to deal with cops. Suspension classes were the detention rooms and had all the desks divided and facing a wall, and you were not allowed any contact at all. If you even looked away from the wall or desk towards another student, that got you in trouble with the teacher in there watching. This was a form of punishment in social isolation. If you were stuck in school suspension, you spent your entire day just starring at a wall or a desk (if you were doing work), no talking or anything unless it was begging to go to the bathroom and then you were given a 5 minute time span to do your business and be back or else get reported to the administration (and only 3 bathroom breaks allowed). When you had lunch, you couldn't talk or look at the other kids. I spent several consecutive months at a time in the detention rooms and would be so zoned out, all I ever did was sit there and draw. My parents wondered WTF was wrong with me around this time when I would come home from school and not really talk to them and would just stay in my weird little zone drawing or with music. I at least had parents that realized something was wrong and got me out of school after having to deal with cops.

I had 3 suicide attempts by the time I was 16 years old and it's a wonder I'm still alive. High school was a bit better but only cause I had a handful of teachers who were awesome and I've posted about them before on here, but won't get into it. One thing that would lead to radicalizing me was when I discovered articles about the "school to prison" pipeline and was able to relate to everything I was reading. I had thought of school like a prison and reading articles about it, something just clicked in me. ALL my friends from childhood ended up following a life of crime. When we were in middle school, it was petty crimes and I was guilty of this too. We would smash stuff at the school and commit property damage as a way of taking our anger out. By the time these friends of mine got to high school, they were graduating to more hard crimes like drug dealing and robbery.

The 2009 recession happened when I was still in high school. I watched my parents both lose their jobs and then later lose their house. This came after they both voted for Obama and were so excited to get rid of Bush. As I was getting out of high school, I suddenly had to start working on behalf of my parents and helping them survive. That took several years away from me. I watched them both wear themselves down; my mother with health problems, my dad with drinking and they became extremely bitter people as a result.

Because everyone I knew from my teen years was following Alex Jones and conspiracy stuff back then, I also got into it. 2008-2009 Alex Jones and conspiracy stuff in general was very different from how it is now. Jones ran the whole "Endgame" theory which I began thinking must've had some merit to it if Dave Mustaine had made an entire Megadeth album about it. I spent a few years in conspiracy land, and some how came out of that as a Marxist, beginning around 2013. I began reading Das Kapital as a result of getting curious about Karl Marx after seeing so many conspiracy theorists blame Marxists for everything. I could clearly see that Obama absolutely was not a Marxist right from the get go. I spent the next few years mostly reading Marx, Engels, and later Lenin, Stalin and Hoxha. I felt I finally found my political beliefs as their writing resonated deep within me. Around the time of the first wave of BLM protesters, Trayvon Martin's death, and later the Michael Brown shooting and all the riots in Ferguson, I could not turn back at all from Marxist ideology.