I never get tired of 'em. I know we've discussed this before. I know the process is ongoing, not necessarily based on a single event, and depends a lot on your position in society. If discussing the radicalization of others, don't mention any methods unless people specifically told you that certain things radicalized them.
For me, I was a left-liberal for most of my life. Long story short, I ran in a state senate election trying to be as friendly to everyone as possible. The one thing I really wouldn't budge on was universal health care, since I knew from experience that it worked. I lost my election BADLY to a guy who ran on no platform at all, although he had much better name recognition. I worked so hard on that campaign and really was devastated and had to look for answers. Stupid as it sounds, at around that time I found the r/chapotraphouse subreddit and started listening to the podcast. That led to me listening to much better podcasts (like Revleft Radio), reading actual theory, and giving up on the Chapo podcast entirely once Bernie lost the last primary.
I'm always trying to radicalize others but I just usually get nowhere. George Floyd's death plus coronavirus I think resulted in a lot of people reconsidering things, but it seems like many of them have kind of swung back in the other direction now, at least as far as I can tell from watching my friends on Facebook. I've been arguing with my lib dad for months about all of this shit, with the result that he has actually gotten much better at deflecting Marxist points than the average lib lol. Sometimes I can get him to admit that everything is fucked and that Marxism is the only answer, at other times he'll say that we need to make friends with local business owners (some of the worst fucking people in the universe) and not alienate them.
Anyway, if you feel like writing your radicalization story or the radicalization stories of others, I'm happy to read.
I had an office job for several years that was relatively unsupervised, spent all day in front of a computer doing rote work, and I needed stuff to listen to. I listened to a good bit of fiction, the Harry Potter books, a bunch of Robert Jordan, R.A. Salvatore, some Podcasts, and inevitably, conspiracy documentaries. The conspiracies were fun because it gives you the feeling of being in on secrets, but most of it did require a suspension of disbelief. There was a common thread that ran through most of them, though, and the more I watched, the more obvious it became what the real source of it all was. Capitalism.
I'mma humblebrag a bit, but I thought I was the only one who had had this revelation, and I tried to write it out, thinking if I just started from the beginning, I could explain the whole thing to anyone. I worked on it for a long time without producing anything finished, because finding that beginning was the real challenge all along. I did do what I realized later was interesting theoretical work, though, but not original theoretical work. I independently figured out several things that Marx wrote about in the first few chapters of Capital, chiefly, the difference between CMC and MCM transformations, though I didn't use that terminology. When I finally read it (no I didn't finish it, are you kidding), I was super proud.
There was also a long MRA and anti-SJW phase that was important to my journey, but not really worth retelling.
This was 2011, and I was still pretty far out there, think David Icke/Jordan Maxwell stuff, but there was a huge TV in the large breakroom always playing news, I think CNN. Virtually everything they talked about referenced the recession, the recovery or the financial crash. Obviously by this time I suspected something was up about it, so I started to look for stuff about economics specifically. I spent a lot of time on ZeroHedge, and got pretty good at deciphering the way they speak, and the charts and types of analysis finance people do. It was while I was in this world that the Euro crisis happened, and I watched that happen in real time. I was absolutely giddy about the end of capitalism, and thought it was about to happen. Ah, well, nevertheless.
Anywho, the depression of working what I would later come to know as a bullshit job, and the fact that I wasn't doing the job, came to a head and I left and went to a restaurant. I've always liked food and cooking, and I still think I made the right decision, but for a few years I didn't have the same ability to take in info. After changing restaurants and working for a little more, they had me doing prep work in a refrigerator, so I could listen to things while I worked again. I did nothing but Chomsky for a while, but eventually started reading more and more. I actually listened to the Chapo book before I ever listened to them or found the subreddit. I didn't know who was who, and I can still hear Matt saying "Are you triggered" when I close my eyes, however, it was the chapos and this community that gave me the final thing I needed....validation that I'm not wrong for being mad all the time, it is the proper response to living in this hellworld.
Cheers, chapos, you're my family.
Kind of speaks to the fact that this stuff is just materially the case and would get independently figured out even if Marx hadn't ever formulated it.