Right wing experience: Walk past a right wing protest literally by coincidence, spoke to the demonstrators just for giggles. They wanted to give me a sign to hold, wanted to network. So I networked with them. They invited me to another few protests which I didn’t go to. I had some time and went to 1 of their protests. Afterwards they invited me to a house party and I went to that lol.
Leftwing experience #1: finally found a leftwing group, Which was rather difficult because my city is right wing. Extremely eager to go out and do praxis. My contact there got in touch with me via email. She didn’t want to progress from email to call or anything in person. When I asked about irl Praxis she said they didn’t need anybody right now (???). The back and forth emails felt like mostly a waste of time. She’d throw in the occasional low-key insults. Eventually revealed that singular they wanted to spend God knows how long “vetting” me before anything further would happen. This was happening at around the same time I met those right wing activists above.
That leftwing above wouldn’t allow me to network with anyone else in their org, extremely strong gate keeping. Judging from a few things she said, I’d only speak to someone in the same manner as her if I thought they were a murderer on the run.
Eventually i just gave up.
Leftwing experience #2: Different City. Networked with my local iww. Gave me the union training over zoom. I didn’t have money to pay for their dues, but told the organizer to invite me to protests they go to. Long story short, organizer said they wouldn’t invite me for any protests unless I put cash on the table.
In the 20 years I lived in that City, I never saw or heard anything about that iww. Pretty sure they never did anything besides closed door zoom meetings.
Tldr: the left wingers I met or either incompetent or douchebags.
It’s literally easier and faster to approach women for dating/sex stuff, at least in my experience, than get lefties to do something. in my country. I’m not a Chad or anything either.
My suggestions: Drop the gatekeeping bs, actually do shot that isn’t zoom meetings or reading books, drop the financial requirements. If the right wing icons didn’t spend so much time bashing minorities, I might have believed capitalism works.
This is a great point you bring up. My right wing contacts seem much more likely to vote and weigh in to the world financially and sometimes politically (ex bringing up anti abortion shiza in public)
My African-American contacts often don’t vote. They usually more concerned basic survival needs compared to the right wingers (ex job loss = homeless but for my right winger contacts, job loss = have to delay vacation plans)
How does somebody recruit ethnic minorities that are 5th gen plus into a left-wing thing? (Ex African Americans. But not say Chinese immigrants - the 1st gen immigrants I know don’t vote, they usually focus on being, imo, bloody wealthy)