I’ll start first: at the height of reddit going absolutely mad and frothing at the mouth I heard r/genzedong mentioned a lot as this evil evil tankie place, so I checked it out. Was a bit overly china fanboy-ish for my taste back then but alright overall and leagues more civil than people on other subs. So I started lurking over there to preserve my sanity until it basically became my most frequently viewed sub. I’ve kinda warmed up to the whole idea of socialism during my stay. And then it got quarantined. I’ve heard of lemmygrad even before the quarantine, so I switched to this place instead. As of this moment, lemmygrad remains my primary source of news and entertainment where I dont have to risk running into some flavour of wehraboo.
spoiler
When I was less politically developed, I was honestly closer to an ML than I would be for years after. I never quite fit in with what I saw as “the Left,” being liberals, on issues outside of most social issues. Of course the general pollution of US politics ensured that my egalitarian and pragmatic sensibilities were distorted in many cases.
2016 to about 2020, I got sucked into Breadtube and the Compatible Left. It wasn’t all a waste, I learned a lot about anticapitalism, racism and queerphobia. However… the pettiness, pretentiousness, spoiled ignorance, a general upper middle class white hipster affect of this space kept me (thankfully) from ever really wanting to put down roots because it never felt 100% right to me. Around 2020 the poison of this space reached a head with the podcast “It Could Happen Here” and I reached peak doomerism.
Public figures like Hakim, Michael Parenti, BayArea (RIP), and passively absorbing bits of theory from all the big names, all softened me up to the point where I briefly identified as a Trot, in an effort to find some sort of enlightened middle ground between the liberal hipsters and the genocide-denying “tankie scum” I feared I secretly was. The Trot org I joined, however, very quickly didn’t feel right either.
I don’t remember how I found GZD but it was that community that sealed the deal for me, right as the Ukraine War was breaking out. Learning about Ukraine, China, on top of what I had already learned about the USSR, finally learning actual substantial information on geopolitics and history…it was a rush. I also hate to admit that it felt like I was “sticking it” to the very same hipsters of the Compatible Left that had been a very negative entity in my personal life growing up. Suddenly, my doomerism melted away as I learned the truth. Finding communities with an actual variety of races, nationalities, and walks of life told me I was in the right place.
(No hate btw if any of ya’all are hipsters, I myself have had some aspects rubbed off on me, you know the types of people I’m talking about, the spoiled shitlibs who treat politics like a social club and who LARP being poor, etc)