Personally, I was a left liberal for all my life, but had kinda looked into the abyss of anti-sjw and gamergate stuff, like watching Sargon and Bearing, but hadn’t really subscribed to their beliefs, more putting them on as background chatter.
Things changed when I read manufacturing consent, listened to Chomsky and found Chapo at around the end of 2018, at which point I found myself as more an ancom, but Chomsky’s talking points on Leninism and the USSR was never as cogent and didn’t make as much sense as his other points, so I held skepticism about my beliefs then.
Reading more on theory and history, and looking more into different left tendencies via channels like Rev Left moved me over to be a Marxist, as it made the most sense to me in explaining the current and historical situation. Currently making my way through Lenin and looking more into historical ML states and I’ve found that I’m pretty comfortable as just a Marxist with ML tendencies rn.
Kinda wild I didn’t end up a chud honestly. I grew up Christian, with a pastor for a father. I went to a private Christian high school in middle America (and looking back it’s pretty insane what we were taught and generally people’s beliefs). My saving grace was that my family wasn’t Evangelical, and very pro immigrant. Still conservative, but my dad was incredibly smart and morally minded. That’s led to a noticeable change in his beliefs over time politically.
I went out of state to college then with two other high school friends who ended up going through the same changes as me, just sooner. I rather quickly became a lib, helped a ton by going into fine arts (Trump helped a bunch too). I was still very skeptical of the Democratic party because of my upbringing which helped, but my two friends from college became Marxists at some point without me noticing. Likely during the 2016 Bernie run, where I was a passive observer but intrigued. I was then radicalized pretty heavily by them if just subconsciously since we did basically everything together. Now my brain is broken and I feel like left politics is the only thing I care about anymore since… well since it’s basically caring about everything and everyone
