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Wow, that’s a hell of a journey. How did you steer away from that stuff?
I can’t remember how I started. Some standard reddit tier shit about exams for voting rights and such. Cringe atheism facts and logic bro. I guess over time I was exposed to counter-arguments and chilled out for a bit, stewing in cognitive dissonance. Then some friends dragged me into the communism cult and here we are!
In the mid-late 2000s I was an unironic “conservativism is the new punk rock” type guy who looked up to people like Johnny Ramone, Michale Graves, the guys in Green Day, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, Penn and Teller, and Ron Paul. Weirdly at the same time I was into bands that are pretty openly leftist, like Anti Flag and Leftover Crack.
Also up until the events of 2020, I genuinely believed that even though libertarians don’t agree with leftists, we should accept them, because their “anti-authority” stances meant they’d be potential allies in left-wing struggles against the government. Boy was I wrong.
the guys in Green Day
They’re radlibs, so not that bad. They’re not conservatives or anything at least.
True, it’s probably not fair to lump them in with proper chuds like Michale Graves lol. But the political messaging in their lyrics is so vague it can be interpreted as either anarchist or right libertarian and you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s like they want to have the appearance of rebellion without actually saying anything that would challenge the status quo.
I mean “No Trump, no KKK, no fascist USA” (a lyric they sang at a lot of concerts) is fairly clear in its message. But otherwise yeah I agree with you. The lyrics are very generic status quo stuff. But that’s the territory that comes with making popular music. You have to have the lyrics appeal to almost everyone, regardless of the underlying message. And their boomer marketing for their latest album was absolute dogshit.
I’m guessing I was the furthest right person here? I used to be a holocaust denier.
I was fairly apolitical but leaned fairly left/slightly conspiracy minded. Probably because if you don’t lean left living in the most uneqal country in the world, you have serious brainworms. What kicked off my journey into politics was actually my friends wanting to watch the Cris Kyle American Sniper movie. I thought it was pretty creepy that they made a movie about some guy killing people in a foreign country in what was a clearly imperial conflict, so I searched it on the internet. And I got a Secular Talk YouTube video about it. So watching the secular talk YouTube started my journey left. I quickly outgrew that content though, and some decent leftists in the YouTube comments (very rare I know) directed me to actual leftist content and theory to read. And that’s how I ended up on the chapo subreddit, and now here
So yeah a bunch of very lucky coincidences.
I was born with a copy of the manifesto in hand
