As a recently radicalized baby-lefty I’ve been thinking about this a lot
"the idea of a “moment” of radicalization is liberalism and connotes that people need this singular moment of experience or persuasion whereby they enter the class conscious state."
fair point, just goes to show that my perspective was influenced by my own experience, thanks for pointing it out because now I'm aware :D
So I guess the real question would be "What's your personal history with leftism?"
I'm sure I'm not alone or unique in my response but the night that the 2016 election results were coming in, I had a thousand-yard stare pointed at the TV but I could not hear anything. My liberal brain at the time just broke and could not fathom how someone like Trump could rise to power. Being the nerd I am, this naturally resulted in me asking questions and researching answers. Eventually, I started listening to political podcasts to try and just get started with wrapping my head around what I should be paying attention to. Eventually, I came across the Chapo subreddit. Since I like dark humor, it was a good mix of laughing the pain away while still being somewhat informed. Then, I listened to ChapoTrapHouse for a while and slowly started learning about more leftist history and media criticism (BASED Citations Needed shout-out) through related podcasts. Now, I don't listen to ChapoTrapHouse at all; mostly, and this is on rotation: Beau of the Fifth Column, Bad Empanada, Citations Needed, and the GameGrumps (I like feeling like a kid sometimes, leave me alone).