LMAO this was me. Once the faith fell away, and once it was replaced with a humanist lens, there was only one rabbit hole left to fall into :hammerandsickle:
“fiscally conservative, socially liberal.”
Tons of us were, I think, so don't feel bad about it. Fiscally conservative, socially liberal has been babby's first alternative political ideology for the past 20 years, and I think a significant amount of posters here will identify as former libertarians. I know I do. I voted Badnarik in 2004.
this. i realized most people that call themselves libertarians don't really give a shit about liberty at all, as far as it applies to people that are not like them. you can really tell by how many strain themselves into apologetics once the topic of how facist the police are and always have been arises. freedom to choose, unless it's the brand of boot on your head.
A huge moment for me was seeing the concept of Intersectionality in action. My wife came from a poor background, I did not, however seeing her family struggle and then especially seeing my families reaction to it and attitude towards it definitely shaped alot. The intersectionality at least for me came from seeing the Documentary the "13th" when it first came out. I knew about racism and white supremacy but to just have it instantly "click" like that for me, started me doing a spiraling rabbit hole of "Why are the powers that be so racist", which led to "Why do the rich hate the poor" and then I realized that there was an entire system in place propping all of this up, and that seemingly EVERY SINGLE PROBLEM IN the World seemed to related to Money, or rather a LACK of money. So many problems in the world all seemed to have a single root "Solution" which was to toss money at it, but that really made me realize that creating a system like that just further shines the light on how the system itself is the problem.
I think it was actually Trayvon Martin's death that started it. I always hated cops and cop wannabes, but the reaction to his death on the right wing really woke me up to who I was palling around with. I still had chuddy aspects after that, I still liked shit like tumblrinaction for an embarrassing amount of years after that. When 2016 rolled around, I was callijg myself a pacifist anarchist because I had temper issues and I figured my natural impulses were intrinsically wrong and life was sacred and yadda yadda yadda (this cost me a friendship).
Then the Unite the Right rally happened and Heather Heyer got run over and it finally clicked entirely that the far-right was irredeemable. An embarrassingly long journey, but there we go.
well i was a centrist but to me was two moments, the first one was the migrant crisis that made realise that a had been following fascists that would have throw me into an oven for being mestizo, and two reading the history of the USSR and realising the "both sides" was bullshit eventually i became an ML
I was defending a rape joke that Daniel Tosh made to a trans woman who put me in my place so thoroughly that I rethought my entire fucking life
I always had black and hispanic friends so when my dad was saying racist shit, it was kind of hard to do the mental gymnastics to justify how none of it applies to those guys. Then I learned one of them was an illegal immigrant, that dislodged a lot of the stuff I was hearing at home. Then I went to college and was brainwashed by liberal college professors espousing communist Obama/Clinton/Biden rhetoric and it was a wrap.
When I found out there were alternatives. When i was a teen I hated being a conservative christian, but ai had no idea there were other eays to be so I just did it while being miserable. Had it not been for the internet and stuff I probably wouldn't have changed from my small town ways till I went to college.
So, I can't even claim any measure of wit or fortitute was at play. I was just lucky enough to ahve a cool sociology professor that made us read some howard zinn.
I found out that Obama was actually born in the United States. I was pretty young (early teens) and all my information about politics came from my family. Finding out that they all got duped by a brazenly white supremacist hoax made me reconsider the views that I had inherited.
I was a fairly devout Christian when I was a rightwinger so I transitioned to lib shit for reasons that should be obvious to anyone that reads the New Testament.
My parents are hardcore Republicans and I went to a private, Christian college so I just assumed I was that way too and hadn't really thought through things. I was almost led down a path towards MGTOW/Red Pill due to my struggles with dating as a teenager, but I was fortunately able to break free of that. I still held several non-conservative positions like supporting Kaepernick or ditching religion.
But I think what really led me down the right path was my first job out of college. I took a job at a start-up where all the employees were vastly underpaid market value while the executives made a killing. We all got the spiel that once our company hit it big everyone would get due compensation but that never happened. The company started doing OK but then hit a snag and started firing a bunch of people. I was the only one on my team of 3 to survive the layoffs but they soon hired someone else. I was supposed to train him as I was the leader of the team. I found out that he was hired away from some hedge fund and that he made almost double my salary.
After that I immediately went looking for another job and never looked back. That was also the only job where I really put in a great deal of effort and was super invested in the success of the company, because I honestly believed I'd be rewarded for it. Now I do just enough to keep the job and keep them happy enough, I don't go out of my way for anything. Funny thing is now I make a lot more money but do a lot less work. I didn't really get radicalized fully until 5-6 years after that experience but it definitely provided the foundation for it.
Bernie Sanders' Liberty University speech was when I decided "Ok, this guy speaks to me"... before then, I had broke from the right during OWS and became mostly apolitical because I didn't have any answers for the real issues that OWS uncovered to a lot of people... so I was a mostly apolitical right-lib until Bernie came around.
