I was in middle school, just gaining political awareness at the time of the nato intervention in yugoslavia. I was in the US for that experience. The difference between what was said about the bombing campaign inside the US vs what I heard from my family outside made it clear to me that there’s always two narratives at play. When 9/11 happened I was made extremely uncomfortable by the open jingoism, then with Iraq I was primed to distrust the WMD line. I got involved in anti-war protests, then I quickly became aware that democrats were not faithful opposition when it came to war. The Kerry campaign pitch was essentially just to run the war better than bush was. When I wrote my democratic senator/reps expressing opposition to the war I got boilerplate responses.

I pretty much only hung out with the punks and theater kids through high school because being opposed to the war would get most anyone else to respond with ‘what are you a terrorist?’ I was reading political theory at this point, but legitimately found it hard to engage with marx or lenin at the time because it was the end of history and all I could really see was that avenue being closed off entirely. I’d get lots of exposure to that sort of politics from listening to my grandfather rant though. While I wasn’t really drawn to organizing at the time I was perfectly happy to go onto conservative forums and rile up/dunk on the fox news watchers.

What I did develop at a young age was a really critical eye for the media, it was jarring whenever I would travel to visit family, leaving America really felt like leaving a bubble. Not just leaving the rat race, but for example when not visiting touristy areas, if I was speaking in English I’d get people being like “oh you’re American? why are so many people in prison there?”. I still remember as a kid trying to wrap my head around just why so many people were in jail, the result was a deep disappointment in the US, and any politician upholding ‘norms’.

At the same time as being totally disenchanted with the US I realized that I still needed to survive somehow, and living in the US gave me better options than anywhere else so I opted to stay. I knew I was trans at this point, not that I really had the words to properly describe the feeling, though I also felt that pretty much everyone I would interact with would be hostile to me if I expressed them, which made me avoid discussing it at all. I did know that I couldn’t afford a prolonged encounter with the American medical system. I also hated the prospect of having to be the sickest patient in the mental ward just to be able to get medical support. I concluded that it just wasn’t to be and instead I opted to repress and went to college. My degree selection based on a cold calculation of what degree that I could stand would make good money and graduated in time for '08 financial collapse. Putting off transition felt like a wise move as I then needed to move back in with my parents while looking for work.

I remember being actually hopeful that something might change after that and the occupy protests, only to be monumentally disappointed by Obama.

I was actually hopeful for Bernie too, it was nice to see what looked like the pendulum swinging left for a change. To then have whatever youthful energy there was so callously shut down to prop up the old guard democrat fossils really made it clear to me what side they were on. COVID also got me to to re-evaluate my life and political commitments. Organizing with my local anarchists was great for connecting with other trans people who were also COVID-concious, many of whom would probably also be considered tankies by lemmy users at this point. It also motivated me to read more theory, anarchist and marxist. Parenti was actually a great entrypoint for me on the marxist side, while Graeber was my original favorite on the anarchist side. I opted to start transitioning late in life when I finally had both financial independence and the social supports.

COVID also made it really clear to me that I couldn’t count on the democrats being honest about something if they saw a political advantage in lying, that they would tolerate the final solution if it was on a long enough timescale. Gaza confirmed that realization. I could talk your ear off about that in greater detail, but this isn’t the place for that.

I went on reddit for easy dopamine hits pretty much since the digg migration, but after october 7 I just kept getting banned repeatedly and that motivated me to finally move over to lemmy.ml and I’ve been here since.

I was born in '91 in a conservative family, and I grew up with the naive vision that international conflicts were a thing of the past and we could put politics aside and work on developing science and technology for the good of all humankind. Then, when I was 10 years old, I watched as every adult in the country lost their fucking minds over a couple buildings falling down. I watched our civil liberties get stripped away while we started stupid pointless wars that accomplished nothing and left far more people dead, with complete bipartisan support. In high school, I leaned Libertarian because Ron Paul was a thing and basically the only antiwar voice in politics, though I grew out of that once I no longer had teachers and parents bossing me around lol.

I had hope for Obama, though I was still young and not politically engaged. He was going to shut down Guantanamo and hold the Bush administration accountable for their blatant war crimes and disregard for both international law and the constitution - or so I hoped. But he didn’t. He kept the illegal mass surveillance going and, contrary to his promise to protect whistleblowers, hunted Snowden to the ends of the earth for revealing the government’s crimes.

As for my personal life at this time, I had no idea what I wanted to do, so I studied physics, thinking of it as a sort of “study of everything.” But even that wasn’t broad enough for me, I wanted to expand my cultural horizons as well, so I studied abroad in Japan for a year, which opened my mind to a more global perspective and reaffirmed my ideal of being a global citizen.

At this point, I was a liberal, skeptical of both parties, and politically disengaged. Watched The Daily Show and would probably fit in just fine with .world. But then 2016 happened.

I honestly didn’t jump on the Bernie train at first, because I subscribed to the “conventional wisdom” of moving to the center to win over moderate republicans. As the republicans went more and more extreme, the democrats would achieve total political dominance as the “party of reason,” Trump would lose in a landslide. Then he won. I was extremely furious and disappointed, I couldn’t believe it! How could this happen?

In my personal life, I had entered the workforce. In spite of graduating with a B.S. in physics, my focus had been on studying things that were interesting to me, without regard to practical matters like my career. I’m probably somewhat autistic, I’ve always done very well on tests and grasped concepts quickly, but I got poor grades on account of neglecting homework. It wasn’t until upper division physics classes that I found myself actually having to study. I was also privileged enough to not be concerned about practical matters growing up. After graduating, I’ve worked menial jobs, including warehouse work at Amazon, which gave me plenty of time to think. Since I started having a boss and a landlord, my politics improved. I also had a traumatic experience with my brother who came back from the Middle East, “self medicated” with meth, and almost became a mass shooter, but that’s a story for another day.

In order to figure things out, I tried to find a place to debate politics online, and wound up in the cesspool of r/CapitalismVSocialism, which was created by An-Caps. Freshly radical, I was of course more attracted to libertarian socialism, rejecting authoritarianism, though the term “tankie” was not popularized at the time. I saw right-libertarians as the more “reasonable” people on the right, an idea which I eventually became disavowed of by actually talking to them. Eventually, I realized that their whole ideology is based on wordplay, and that they, along with the right in general, have absolutely nothing of value to offer whatsoever, and their nonsense simply dragged down the level of debate, preventing anything of actual substance from being discussed.

Leaving that behind, I looked for a left-wing space, and found many of them to be clownish. I was turned off of r/socialism from the “Catgirl fiasco,” and I was too skeptical of the democrats to fit into purely liberal spaces - both of which lacked the bluntness and diversity of thought I was looking for. As a last resort, I checked r/ChapoTrapHouse, which I had heard all sorts of nasty rumors about - but instead, it was exactly what I was looking for: a non-sectarian leftist space that didn’t have a stick up its ass and wasn’t afraid to tell off both right-wingers and crybullies, which made it reviled because the crybullies would run off and whine and make up rumors (just like .worlders do).

During this time, I also did a good bit of reading. Progress and Poverty by Henry George helped me get a basic grasp of political economy, while All the Shah’s Men by Stephen Kinzer taught me about Iran’s historical attempts to reclaim their resources through a popular, liberal democratic movement, which was crushed by the CIA (similar stories can be found in many countries around the world).

When the subreddit was banned I migrated to Hexbear (yes, I’m from there). I was still very skeptical of states like China and the USSR, but my opinion of America had plummetted in 2016, and I saw them as acting as a counterbalance to US hegemony. I took a perspective of being system-agnostic, that non-aligned nations ought to have as much flexibility as possible in regards to their economic situation so that they can experiment and get it right, and then that system can spread out of that. When there’s just a single hegemon, it can exert too much control, but in a multipolar world there are more options. I was reading Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti and watching his lectures, as well as some snippets of theory.

But probably the thing that really pushed me beyond that was Covid-19. In the US, they lied to us, telling us masks don’t work, and then sent us all back to work with no protections. Up until that point, I at least had trust in US scientific institutions, but that lie completely broke my trust, and it really sank in as real that the government does not give a single shit about protecting the people, and that my interests are completely in conflict with those of the state. Meanwhile, China actually listened to the science, they never told people not to wear masks, they did lockdowns, I even saw in Vietnam where the government delivered groceries right to people’s homes so they’d stay inside, while in the US everyone was scrambling over each other to buy toilet paper. I had to quit my job because the situation was so bad, I lived in the south and we had no protections at all.

And yet, as usual, nobody was held accountable for the failure, and the government’s mistakes were swept under the rug while the media blamed China and spread rumors that it was some sort of bioweapon. Naturally, anti-Asian hate crimes skyrocketed because of that bullshit. You can actually see very clearly where most people were fairly ambivalent to China before 2019, and then there was a major shift, coinciding with a propaganda campaign. The goal, of course, is to sow fears of China in order to justify more funding to the military, and to distract from the government’s own failures. It’s no coincidence that China suddenly became a military threat the moment the war in Afghanistan started to wind down, always gotta have an enemy to justify why we’re building bombs instead of healthcare. And if some random people get hate crimed, the government doesn’t give a shit.

Ultimately, I’d love to return to my initial dream of setting aside politics and pursuing science to build a better world for all. But how can I do that when you have cases like Jane Y. Wu, a distinguished neuroscientist who committed suicide after the US government shut down her lab for the sin of being born Chinese? How can I pretend that I’m a global citizen when the government shuts down innocent intercultural programs like the Confucious Institutes? I never signed up for this shit. I’m in this for humanity, not the United States, and the United States government is making it increasingly clear that it’s an enemy to the common cause of humanity.

So there’s my life story. None of us are “Russian bots,” we’re mostly just downwardly-mobile disillusioned intellectuals.