First I saw the blatant lies in the coverage of the Gaza genocide. It was especially bad in Germany like our supposed neutral public news repeated literal IDF propaganda. An unholy rage I never felt before send me down a rabbit hole. I know “Manufacturing Consent” is not liked anymore but that burst my bubble on our propaganda being anything different than a tool to control the masses. In the meanwhile I spend more and more time on Breadtube watching overzealots, revolutionarythot etc. Somewhere along I joined here to find out what being a “tankie” is about. As a side quest I also started transitioning while I struggle through “Das Kapital”.

So to put it short: Huge flaws in liberal propaganda and decent red propaganda have brought me here.

Watch ‘Come and See’ - in general just read more from the actual sources of those our countries demonize.

I started to engage with socialist lit and art to get a more rounded view of things as im a sociology student and they teach you to consider many perspectives, not just one singular one. Turns out most propoganda falls apart when you actually bother to consider the other sides perspective and gain a better understanding of how ideology is shaped and manufactured.

I would really reccomend engaging with parenti and althusser as academics but also on a lighter note try out some propoganda from the USSR about the US - https://youtu.be/PAwxe-i19pg

On top of that consider liberal conceptions of ‘social progress’ - like if we compare womens rights in the 1960s between the UK and the USSR. In the USSR women could get abortions, rent was 2% of your income, martial rape was illegal and women could have bank accounts and go into pubs by themselves. None of this was true in the UK.

Combination of the failure of Democrats to live up to expectations, Bernie and other SocDems becoming non-viable options because the game was rigged, direct personal experience with poverty and wage labor, love of history and historical accuracy, agitprop from leftists, and the triumph of Trumpian Fascism before my very eyes as the liberal order floundered before him.

I came from a red area so my initial programming was right libertarian. I was still young amid the US right’s ascendancy in the mid 2010s, and I was beginning to get plugged in to libertarian echo chambers when I first encountered the term ‘antifa’. Since I, you know, engage in politics in good faith, I investigated a bit and followed up to the libertarians with “But aren’t fascists bad? Aren’t we antifascist even if we disagree with others who are also antifascist?” to which I received the customary “antifa are the real fascists”. I knew then and there that I was dealing with unserious people and began drifting left from there. I then had a left anarchist phase but grew out of it lol

Learning about Fred Hampton and Salvador Allende, who they were, what they accomplished, and what they were trying to achieve, was the watershed moment for me. Learning how the USA crushed them with such unrepentant enthusiasm shattered a lot of the narratives I’d internalized and allowed me to confront my biases and assumptions and move beyond them.

Learning about WWII and the Great Patriotic War. Reading history and communist literature. And just seeing what China is doing and comparing it to what is happening in the West.

For me it started with watching as China stomped out Covid despite the costs while western countries kept obsessing about “the economy.” Then when the SMO started and everyone started cheering for nazis and calling people “Ork” it really showed me what liberals are.

So I joined r/genzedong and they quarantined it a few days later and then I ended up here and hexbear where I was pointed to better media and books.

I was gonna give a longer explanation that goes into detail but it was a combination of a large amount of things

1. I was raised with a general distrust of the government so when I eventually found things that they were actually lying about instead of random shit i was ready to believe it especially since there was actual evidence to go with instead of just because its th gubmet

2. I happened to fall into slightly more left wing circles who were willing to actually answer my stupid ass loaded questions that at the time I didnt know were loaded

3. And this is a really big one, I realized that crippling gender dysphoria is not a normal state for every cis dude and that I am in fact trans more importantly related to that is that the conservative people I know overwhelmingly hate trans people

4. related to 3 but the fact that people on the left let me question my identity and beliefs without judgement for the absolutely stupid shit I believed at the time

I was very lucky and despite growing up in the middle of nowhere, with conservative homophobic parents and going to church 3ish times a week. I just didn’t buy into it, I wasn’t really engaged in politics till I was older but I always carried the golden rule and I thought it was dumb how queer people were treated over something that doesn’t matter. Then I spotted tons of contradictions in the bible that I never talked to people about because I didn’t trust them. I constantly touched onto communism even as like a 10 year old but was constantly shooting myself down with typical rhetoric; “Too bad it doesn’t work” “shame it always leads to dictatorships” etc. Even was harassed by our police chief when he though he was being funny many times and arrested for carrying wooden sword on the side of the road as I was walking over an hour to the park.

The final thing that tipped me though, one of my friends said they were communist and I finally had someone to talk with about it who was actually educated and was able to get me past the self policing stage. it was just a landslide from there, constantly questioning what I thought I knew about everything. Researched Che guevera and Cuba’s revolution got me revolutionary, turned this into a life path for me.

All I needed was someone educated on this stuff to exist. But I got very very lucky by being empathetic and not trusting adults around me early on.

This might sound corny, but honestly the films of the USSR. They are so beautiful and humanistic. It’s what got me interested in that time period and country.

Saw screwy fraud type things when I was in the military, shrugged it off. Watched Iraq for Sale and it kinda broke my brain, became anti war. Learn about fundamental attribution error on the western world while in college, that started to crack the foundation of my conservative religiosity. Trump got elected first time and it further broke the facade for me.

Then just doom scrolling on Reddit I came across anti-capitalist memes. Read Parenti shortly after, the rest is history.

Having to get a job after dropping out of college; was introduced through Unions (local PetsMart actually got unionized at the time). From there, it was summary education and living examples in regards to the contradictions of Capitalism, class struggle, class antagonists, etc. Finally read the Communist Manifesto, and it made sense- and now continuing to read (though slowly, ADHD).

My first job treating me like shit. Seriously.

It took a few weeks of scrolling through lemmygrad out of morbid curiosity of why y’all seem to love China and Stalin so much.

My first impression was that the China glaze here is akin to US glaze anywhere else but less harmful since it’s not a dominating narrative. I thought it would be healthy for me to read what you all have to say about China (and Stalin) and it slowly opened my eyes to the anti AES propaganda I’d been subjected to for so long. This was a few years ago.

By writing a book about the history and politics of my country. As I did more research for the book, I realized that historical and dialectical materialism seemed to be the superior frameworks to contextualize and explicate the events of the last couple of centuries. When I began writing it, I was a timid leftist; midway through, I had become an ML.