askchapo

Probably in my late teens. My parents were pretty dull meat and potatoes type. My dad never spoke about politics and my mum was fervently anti communist (and to this day refuses to believe communism can ever work, just look at the Soviet union and china! Oh china is only beating us now because they're becoming more capitalist!) so I was pretty conservative or libertarian. Because you know no world experience. I distinctly remember super hating green arrow in the justice League unlimited cartoon when I was like 18. Oh a big leftie who wants government to help people? What a joke of a hero!

Thankfully working and participating in a union, getting a degree in history from professors that seemed fairly liberal but not really in favour of capitalism or communism. Also my major concentration in history was military history (such a cliche I know sorry) but specifically ended up with lots of classes on the Soviet Union. Which made me more amenable to seeing other sides of coin. Learning that much of the popular western tropes about Soviet participation in the war were utter fabrications really helped introduce me to the concept that the west was desperately trying to reframe history around how the Soviets were incompetent and only won because the west was so awesome.

Disillusionment with Obama becoming a complete joke of a president, not accomplishing much of anything and the discovery pseudo left gaming spaces online helped guide me further towards things while I also fell into the Chapo subreddit and was introduced to how leftists are always right and we need to become communists or else everything is fucked. I think the west wing thing podcast helped alot as well.

The truncated timeline of my journey to communism

kid: no politics head empty

tween: america good

teen: america really good (9/11) but also bush bad, war bad MAYBE (?) but respect the troops oohrah

young adult: typical lib who watches comedy central and think's he's above it all because south park funny

adult: women bad, obama bad, gamergate, antisemitism good, jews all the world's problems

30's -- Now: major life events, holy shit I've been lied to my entire life, we needed a communist revolution decades ago, full tankie, deprograming brain from fash shit

Well I thought 9/11 was a scary movie about a smoke monster eating people, so definitely 2003

I grew up in a conservative environment so I just assumed I was conservative until freshman year in high school, when the teacher had us fill out a generic left/right politics poll that placed me just right of center, which was the catalyst for me realizing that maybe I have political opinions, and I should figure them out. I was a progressive-leaning lib within a few months of that.

At around 15, it was the first true descent into the rabbit hole

I ebbed and flowed. Was politically active and radical in my teen years, then entered engineering school and drank the "technology will make everything better bro trust me" kool-aid, graduated and had a pretty good job for a while, before remembering why shit was fucked. Left it all, moved across the world, and now I'm the most radical I've ever been.

I always loved history, especially 20th century. My parents were apolitical "both sides bad" types they didn't provide any real guidance, but taught me to think critically.

I grew up in an extremely conservative area in the late 90s, where mentioning Michael Moore got you labeled an extremist and I was told the Black Panthers were just their version of the KKK.

The stolen election of 2000, 9/11 fever, and the Iraq war all started to sour me on American politics, but Republicans were obviously worse.

I spent a lot of time with airsoft players, who are ludicrously fascist, and this shaped my view of how the chud mind works.

I started listening to punk music a lot and became a left-lib, theory-avoiding, lazy western ancom through the bush-obama years.

Watching the DNC ratfuck Bernie in 2016 and russiagate finally got me to start unlibbing my mind. Chapo the podcast and subreddit were major influences in pushing me all the way left. A 20+ year journey to figure out everything's fucked and it's not gonna get better. At least now I understand why.

Around my teenage years/young adult, but I had been very justice minded from a kid (audhd I suppose). I took part in politics in school, was very radlib and interested in all things political pretty much as soon as I could.

When the 90s neoliberalism hit my country, I was a young uni student, saw how people got treated when trying to get welfare and was in the same boat myself with poverty so I started collecting peoples stories and tried to push the stories into the public. This is when I hit my first real wall with a bougie newspaper that refused to publish my opinion piece and pulled back on a story I almost got them to publish. I did get the stories published in a local student magazine. I vaguely knew how all of this works before that, but getting involved in something made it really sink in.

This is also when I still was naive enough to think that human rights, basic rights and just decency means something in the country I live in. This is also a time when I started to really ask why people don't rise up even though they are treated horribly. I just could not understand it as a starry eyed uni student that people just took the shock therapy and internalized it as their own failure. I watched my family lose work and my dad ended up suicidal from the "personal failure" that was not at all on him (or anyone who lost everything then) and been radicalizing from there to whatever I am today.