askchapo

As a black person who went through a huge internalized racism arc, when I ventured into leftist spaces that said stuff like "Fuck white people.", I got enraged and responded with something along the lines of "As a black person, that's totally fucked up! This is the opposite of what MLK promoted!'.

I got laughed at and called a "bootlicker", all while thinking I was some cool, grandiose, and righteous figure in this context.

Boy, do times change or what!?

The libs inability to break the rules to stopbTrump turned me from a well meaning lib into a ancom.

Watching the rat fucking of Bernie in real time followed by the pandemic response turned me into an ML that wonders if the Soviets shouldn't have stopped at Berlin.

My most lib moment before all of this was agreeing with someone that Snowden was bad because he endangered America.

[reads title]

[thinks about the question for a minute, remembers something] oh... god...

[remembers something else] oh God

[something else] Oh God!

[something else] Oh GOD!

[something else] OH GOD

[something else] OH GOD

[retreats into corner sucking my thumb to prevent my soul from leaving my body] Nope! Nope! Don't wanna think about it! Dooon't waaaannaaa!!!

I listened to Chapo Trap House yesterday

More serious answer: I joined the Marines when I was a liberal, and probably said some shit like "they do some bad stuff but they do more good than bad" when I did. If it makes it any better I was an absolutely terrible troop, and probably cost the US more money than I provided back in labor, lmao.

God this is embarrassing.

I was a high school senior in 2003. I was taking an English class at the local community college. I got into a long argument with a student in that English class.

They opposed the war in Iraq. I maintained that George W Bush could not possibly be lying about weapons of mass destruction because it would guarantee a loss in his reelection campaign in 2004. I agreed that the evidence presented for weapons of mass destruction was not convincing, but I maintained that no president could possibly lie to start a war of convenience and still win re-election. I believed wholeheartedly that there was evidence that had not been made public that would justify our aggression in Iraq. The idea of a president lying to start a war was so incredibly alien I refused to accept it. I refused to believe that our Democratic system would reward a president who lied like that with another term, especially after the shady way he was elected in 2000.

I learned my lesson eventually. By mid '04 I realized how stupid I had been. When Bush won reelection, what little faith I had in this nation and it's institutions, finally evaporated.

When i was in preschool i voted for john mccain in a mock election because his name reminded me of candy canes

I used reddit

For like an entire semester after taking the intro microeconomics class at my university I definitely believed that abolishing the minimum wage would be good for everybody because something something the point on the curve I don't even remember, it was dumb as hell. I remember explaining this theory to a girl I liked and she swung her purse at me lmfao

My biggest and continued lib moment is still liking 1984 as a book

No actually, my biggest lib moment that I'm still very ashamed of was arguing with a black guy like 5 or 6 years ago that racism didn't really exist in the UK anymore

I was super into Russia gate for a hot minute. The thing that finally busted me out of it was when someone finally pointed out to me: "If you think Russia can use platforms like Facebook to influence Elections to that extent....just what kind of influence do you think that Facebook and all these companies have themselves?" Once you start asking those questions it changes your perspective on things pretty quick.

I argued that obama was a leftist and called stalin a state capitalist

Before Oct 7 it was really hard to find like, any info on the genocide in Gaza fron Google. I'd punch "Israel-Palestine conflict" in, and just get a bunch of fucking ADL links and shit about how it's Israel's birthright or whatever the hell. Bereft of other sources, being pre-Hexbear, I just mentally threw my hands up and 1:1 spouted the "It's so complicated! Thousands of years of history!" line. Their stupid propaganda working flawlessly, then.

Oh yeah also, for a year or so I was really into the "only two genders" shit, which was a combination of my browsing 4chan and my girlfriend at the time being really into Internet Aristocrat and Sargon of Akkad. To be fair I was like 16, damn am I glad I stopped that shit before adulthood.

Being a massive transphobe ~2016, a coupla months later and I ran into a transwoman at pride, way more patient than she needed to be, not only shut my bigoted ass down but also helped me to realise I was an egg.

I remember the night of the 2008 election, when Obama won, I was part of the collective sigh of relief across the nation. I remember thinking, "now things are finally going to change," and feeling genuinely hopeful.

To my credit, the country was psychotic under Bush, at least until 2006. And then the Great Recession happened, and it was worse.

I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. I had only been 18 for like a month, I didn't know any better I'm sorry

A number of years ago, I took selfies with a number of Democratic Party politicians. Not even Bernie or anything, more moderate types. Stood in line over an hour for one of them.

The most embarrassing part was that I was, at that point, already radicalized. I opposed these people, I'd already read a fair amount of theory (from Anarchism and Other Essays to Blackshirts and Reds), and I was already moderately involved in organizing. Quite embarrassing, and there is no chance I'll release those photos on the internet, but honestly I probably won't delete them either.

I'm not American, but I thought Obama's inauguration would be the start of real change worldwide. PNAC was finally out of power in the White House. Intelligent people were about to take the reins on the global financial crisis. Racism was over, Americans elected a black president who spoke positively about LGBT+ people in his inauguration speech.

So much for all that. Eight more years of lip service but no real work on social safety nets, and the same MIC bullshit that's been going on since WW2.

I emailed my dad links and quotes from the impeachment hearings and mullor shit and deadass was like "let's see donny wriggle his way outta this!"

Fuckin shoot me

Bought into the logic that it was bad for Trump to meet with because it would be "legitimizing" the DPRK.

Then I actually learned the tiniest bit of Korean history and went "no wait they're mostly right, death to America".

Sent in a submission for an Ayn Rand essay contest.

Enlisted in the national guard, partly because I thought they still did good things, but mostly because I was broke, in massive debt from student loans, and no one else wanted to hire me. Eventually disabused myself of the notion that the national guard had any good in them and radicalized maybe halfway through that enlistment. Never went into combat (signal corps, went on one deployment and spent most of it doing next to nothing in an air conditioned building outside of any combat zone) but tbh I'm not going to try to justify being in the military. My enlistment ended, I didn't reenlist, and now I'm trying to get involved in leftist causes and do something that actually helps.

Joined the military when I was kicked out of the house, all of the adults in my life told me it would be the best thing for me and set me up for life. So I bought into that stuff and was really excited about continuing my family legacy and becoming a man in my families eyes.

Well, I no longer talk to any of the adults in my life and I’m a non-binary trans communist. Biggest fucking regret and mistake of my life, but also I don’t know that I would have radicalized without seeing the belly of the beast and being a cog in the us navy, but I would like to give myself more grace than that.

I thought that I had been a liberal but never really a passionate anti-communist, that I had always been kind of okay with communism, but then I randomly found a Facebook exchange I’d had with a communist in college back in 2009 where I asserted that Cuba was doomed to imminent collapse. It was embarrassing. I had unconsciously blocked that one out basically. The reality is that to be a liberal is to be an anti-communist.

I started a liberal club in high school lol and nobody came.

When Trump won in 2016 I burned out my car battery because my phone was plugged into it and I was constantly refreshing the results, willing them to change. I was overseas teaching so this was in the afternoon.

I ran in local elections as a Democrat several times. I lost the first few times because I was a Bernie Democrat but after I actually won and ended up at the table and saw who I was sharing that table with (a bunch of fucking Nazis) I resigned. By then the pandemic had started.

There are probably many many many more embarrassing liberal incidents from my life.

I met Nancy Pelosi at an event and called her a "rockstar."

casual racism against the roma, asians, africans, middle-easterners and slavs

i once said and i quote: "The only reason communism worked in China is because the people there are kinda like ants."

i was thankfully never really against feminism or women's rights and that helped me from falling into full blown chuddom, i bounced off the fascist pipeline once they started crying about "teh wimmenz"

bruh i literally got a finance degree because i was working in a call centre that dealt with both the medical and financial sectors and thought "hey, maybe becoming a financial adviser to help people with their money and superannuation/pensions would help my local community" lmao

Like 23 years ago, I took a shot of something alcoholic at a party, coughed, and said something like "sorry I'm weak like a girl". There were three presumably more left people than me right there, and they tried to patiently correct my language. I got all defensive about it. Um, sorry those three people at the party.

Voted for a candidate with a biggest net worth because he has the biggest net worth

Idk how lib this is necessarily, but when I played Metro 2033 and Last Light back when they came out I made a big deal of killing as few humans as possible, including the nazis, because "everyone is a person".

Now when I replay them I kill every nazi in the game and still get the good ending.

i was never lib. im essentially a very cool anime protagonist

Used to be obsessed with 1984. Let it define my personality. Thought i was the big brain for having read it.

I didn't cry when Killary lost but I did go for a walk that night and just look at all the houses and wonder if there had been absolute nazis in these houses the entire time. It was pretty disappointing. By 2016 I was a socialist and didn't see Bernie as a socialist but would have been very happy to vote for him. I thought the 2016 election as a total waste of an election and thought Hillary would win by default and I voted for her because of course Donald Trump's not going to be president, like I assumed most people would.

Like a lot of people, my most lib moment was thinking Obama would be a reformer. The wars were super unpopular and the economy was dead in 2009. If republicans weren't so obstructionist, they probably would have taken one of Obama's many offers to cut social security. So I guess we're lucky they hated him so much.

I was born radicalised. I'm so red they celebrate international workers day in honour of my birth.

I thought Bernie would fix all the ills of this rotten empire, thought Europe was a model for the future.

I phone banked for John Kerry.

when trump broke up that black lives matter protest in D.C. to get the photo op i legit thought the civil war or a crackdown was going to start.

i was ready to gear up with whatever i had and was ranting for half a day. thought i was going to have to join some "popular front resistance" lol

Was a history/politics nerd growing up and had a lot of mid-00s Democrat takes like "we could do so much better at all these good and wholesome regime changes but those idiot Republicans are fucking it up." Wrote at least one paper saying we should have done Iraq like we did a bunch of Latin American countries before WWII; just embarrassing stuff.

What broke me out was a combination of reading a lot more about the U.S. in the Cold War, souring on capitalism (largely due to the 2016 Bernie campaign), and eventually finding Blackshirts and Reds, which got me past the final "well what other options are there, can't be those evil commies" hurdle. Edit: Manufacturing Consent was a big one in there, too, and more lib-accessible than Parenti.

This is a great thread for thinking about how to move people left. We do way too much writing people off; put the lib or outright reactionary anecdotes from this thread in Hexbear now and we'd be calling all our former selves irredeemable fascists not worth anything more than a