I just had a very strong sense of justice from an early age and always felt things were wrong. I was a communist in high school, and when I met a girl and started working I was sort of catapulted into the lib-o-sphere by my need to make money, fast. I was surrounded by successful people and felt finance / investment banking could be my path to a better life. I even joined the Lib Dems for a time in 2016 or so and bought into some of the hysteria against Corbyn (ie that they were unelectable because reasons) . Mostly it was the people I was around, but I think I was also suffering indoctrination from neoliberal economics courses that I was studying.

When Trump got elected, I bought into the hysteria about Russia, and even turned on Julian Assange who I had written essays on for my A-Levels. About the same time I learned a former friend of mine had become a red hat "contraversial" MAGA / PUA guy themselves. Anyway, with Trump's election, I automatically knew my own country was going to vote to leave the EU, in a vote which I viewed as a good proxy for how stupid and racist somebody was. This came to pass, and I was increasingly drawn to new online communities on reddit. To begin with, this was things like The Mueller, and as stuff progressed and my own gammon-pilled countrymen voted for the third time in ten years for the shittest political party on planet earth to ruin things even further, I spent a lot of time on r/ChapoTrapHouse, r/GenZedong and r/GreenAndPleasant (and when this got infested with libs, r/GreenAndExtreme).

By this time, I had come back into the fold, but I think the tipping point was when we elected Boris Johnson prime minister and Corbyn was ousted as leader of the labour party. I feel like this is when anti-semitism really started getting wielded as a mallet against the left. Then when Bernie got snubbed in the US elections, and a senile Biden got put in his place, I really started to think what the fuck, how can things be this bad.

After writing all this, I realise the question I have answered is when did I give up on electoralism. I gave up on capitalism when I was forced to pay rent to increasingly shitty landlords for ten years straight in an economy that had been in the shitty for my entire adult life and was clearly never ever going to get any better, in a country where I had never received a pay rise, despite increased costs every single year, with shitty public services that become shitter every year. Seriously, in 2010, a graduate salary was £23k, and today in 2024, the graduates I know are still paid £23k to begin with. It is completely fucked.

Now I know better, and I feel it is a massive shame that I ever got off track, having gotten everything right already when I was a kid.