In my experience, people don’t like to be on the wrong side of an issue. When confronted with evidence, people with reactionary ideas tend to get very angry and go bad faith. I guess that would be the cognitive dissonance playing out. I think we’ve all seen many a lib get ultra shitty when clear facts are ruining their ideology.
So here’s my history:
Around 2020ish and the protests after the George Floyd murder, many BIPOC activists were calling out the bullshit of white and/or men amongst the liberal and left crowds. For a small amount of time, maybe two months, I played around with the ideas of stupidpol and class determinism. I was probably butthurt for being silenced, which doesn’t actually really happen anyways. The funny thing was that as COVID went on, it was a masterclass in how terrible white/male progressives are. Also Hexbear became big as lockdowns happened, and my thinking has changed to “white guys fucking suck, and if a marginalised person argues with you, you’re better off just shutting the fuck up”.
I gotta go way back in time to find the previous instance. When I was maybe 13, before the internet was a thing, I just to get really damn upset at my older sister calling out her brothers’ sexism. It was a long ass time ago, but I remember feeling red hot angry at feminists. If 4chan or TikTok existed, it would probably channel me into shitty manoshpere ideals. Thankfully I was mostly occupied with WarCraft2 missions and Sim City. It’s far too long ago to remember who was right.
Unrelated to what happened in my teen years, but I’m sad to report that my sister is now an insufferable lib.
I grew up in a very conservative community, but was like 5 when Iraq happened. I had an Iraqi neighbor and they’re daughter was in my kindergarten and constantly bullied for being Iraqi. I didn’t get it, she was nice. Then I just kept pushing back against everyone I knew as I started learning more and became a “humanist atheist” in middle school which really endeared me to the Christian school I went to.
Just kinda floated around libertarianism for a while because I didn’t know any better and had no one to teach me.
After I dropped out of college and got a job I tried to understand politics more by reading news and became a bit of a lib, though I still disagreed with them on a lot of things. Then I got a job delivering pizzas with a bunch of communists and finally got exposed to Marx and Lenin and Parenti. Turns out I was a communist all along and just didn’t know lol.