askchapo

7th grade in middle school when I told my (mostly white & christian) classmates on the bus to school that I didn't believe in God and they all branded me a terrorist because that's all we heard about politically in the years post 9/11.

Gotta thank them though because that pushed me into being politically aware (although some of you will be shocked to learn I was a /b/ poster all throughout middle school and up until like Freshman/Sophomore year of HS when Obama was running; to me this is not shocking because obviously 99% of /b/ posters during that era and maybe even now are middle schoolers)

Wasn't a true leftist (read: more left than most liberal) until 10th grade or so, coinciding with my first few jobs lol

Raised by a Rush Limbaugh fan. So pretty young. During Clinton I realized that Republicans were just complaining even though Clinton was doing what they wanted. Turned 18 registered libertarian.

I grew up in a conservative environment so I just assumed I was conservative until freshman year in high school, when the teacher had us fill out a generic left/right politics poll that placed me just right of center, which was the catalyst for me realizing that maybe I have political opinions, and I should figure them out. I was a progressive-leaning lib within a few months of that.

Around the 2016 election, when I was beginning to transition and was a liberal just by default, was when I actually started paying attention to politics. Prior to that, all I really understood is that queer rights were good but were opposed by conservative christians, and the forever wars in West Asia were bad and based on lies. Trump's election was very distressing for obvious reasons, but what followed was a whole bunch of bluster from liberals that culminated in... the fucking pussy hat march. The response by liberals was so painfully politically impotent that I started paying more attention to the people who actually seemed serious about opposing the adminstration, and they all seemed to call themselves socialists. Moreover, those people actually seemed far more serious about the situation, and their support of the queer community didn't come off as the empty words I had come to expect from the Democrats. After that, it was just the natural progression from "democratic socialist" (read: progressive liberal/socdem) to communist.

both my parents were (actual) leftists, so pretty much when i became conscious in general
though i only became engaged with politics properly at around 14 when i read Lenin

At around 15, it was the first true descent into the rabbit hole

I ebbed and flowed. Was politically active and radical in my teen years, then entered engineering school and drank the "technology will make everything better bro trust me" kool-aid, graduated and had a pretty good job for a while, before remembering why shit was fucked. Left it all, moved across the world, and now I'm the most radical I've ever been.

I was always politically aware because of my Dad, but he was a libertarian/conspiracy bro so he passed on a lot of those brain worms. I didn't become a communist until I was about 17, and even then I had a lot of brain worms to get rid of. Still do, but honestly I'm pretty happy with where I am now with that. The libertarian brain worms were definitely preferable to other brain worms because I was already against imperialism and other parts of the American empire that mainstream politics wouldn't have had me be against.

Started really thinking of it around 14 and started reading liberal theory. Was reading Kropotkin, Malatesta and shit by 16 and became an anarcho-communist. Read Lenin and then Marx in my early 20s

I always loved history, especially 20th century. My parents were apolitical "both sides bad" types they didn't provide any real guidance, but taught me to think critically.

I grew up in an extremely conservative area in the late 90s, where mentioning Michael Moore got you labeled an extremist and I was told the Black Panthers were just their version of the KKK.

The stolen election of 2000, 9/11 fever, and the Iraq war all started to sour me on American politics, but Republicans were obviously worse.

I spent a lot of time with airsoft players, who are ludicrously fascist, and this shaped my view of how the chud mind works.

I started listening to punk music a lot and became a left-lib, theory-avoiding, lazy western ancom through the bush-obama years.

Watching the DNC ratfuck Bernie in 2016 and russiagate finally got me to start unlibbing my mind. Chapo the podcast and subreddit were major influences in pushing me all the way left. A 20+ year journey to figure out everything's fucked and it's not gonna get better. At least now I understand why.

I grew up doing animal rescue. Before I was consciously political, maybe around age 6~, seeing the complex cognition in other species gave me a naive sense of biocentrism and species-being that were immediately radical. Most of my current eco-Marxism was already there intuitively. Then 9/11 happened and the flagfucking culture in its aftermath was so weird to me that I was opposed to anything nationalistic or racist. At age 12~ I read the Communist Manifesto while trying to find a copy of the Anarchist Cookbook and it made more sense than anything else I had read about social studies to that point. That's when I began identifying as a socialist, even if it took until maybe age 20 before I started reading theory seriously.

Probably in my late teens. My parents were pretty dull meat and potatoes type. My dad never spoke about politics and my mum was fervently anti communist (and to this day refuses to believe communism can ever work, just look at the Soviet union and china! Oh china is only beating us now because they're becoming more capitalist!) so I was pretty conservative or libertarian. Because you know no world experience. I distinctly remember super hating green arrow in the justice League unlimited cartoon when I was like 18. Oh a big leftie who wants government to help people? What a joke of a hero!

Thankfully working and participating in a union, getting a degree in history from professors that seemed fairly liberal but not really in favour of capitalism or communism. Also my major concentration in history was military history (such a cliche I know sorry) but specifically ended up with lots of classes on the Soviet Union. Which made me more amenable to seeing other sides of coin. Learning that much of the popular western tropes about Soviet participation in the war were utter fabrications really helped introduce me to the concept that the west was desperately trying to reframe history around how the Soviets were incompetent and only won because the west was so awesome.

Disillusionment with Obama becoming a complete joke of a president, not accomplishing much of anything and the discovery pseudo left gaming spaces online helped guide me further towards things while I also fell into the Chapo subreddit and was introduced to how leftists are always right and we need to become communists or else everything is fucked. I think the west wing thing podcast helped alot as well.

Around my teenage years/young adult, but I had been very justice minded from a kid (audhd I suppose). I took part in politics in school, was very radlib and interested in all things political pretty much as soon as I could.

When the 90s neoliberalism hit my country, I was a young uni student, saw how people got treated when trying to get welfare and was in the same boat myself with poverty so I started collecting peoples stories and tried to push the stories into the public. This is when I hit my first real wall with a bougie newspaper that refused to publish my opinion piece and pulled back on a story I almost got them to publish. I did get the stories published in a local student magazine. I vaguely knew how all of this works before that, but getting involved in something made it really sink in.

This is also when I still was naive enough to think that human rights, basic rights and just decency means something in the country I live in. This is also a time when I started to really ask why people don't rise up even though they are treated horribly. I just could not understand it as a starry eyed uni student that people just took the shock therapy and internalized it as their own failure. I watched my family lose work and my dad ended up suicidal from the "personal failure" that was not at all on him (or anyone who lost everything then) and been radicalizing from there to whatever I am today.

I dunno, I guess it depends on how you want to slice it. Maybe when I was ~12, maybe when I was ~18, maybe some time between those two points, or maybe I only became politically aware once I joined Hexbear. It depends on whether you count having shitty or chunibyo politics as being politically aware.

I'd say I began my political journey in high school. Went through the "classical liberal" phase, was an anarchist for a while, then a weird pseudo ultraleft/cooperative focused "Marxist," then finally settled around ML, more accurately ML-MZT/XJT. The biggest accelerant to my political journey was working in an industrial environment right out of college, that ended up driving me to genuinely take theory more seriously.