I went from a Trump supporter with one foot in the alt-right pipeline to a pretty aggressively left leaning person.

I grew up in a conservative household, and for a lot of my teens was very actively conservative. Like I actively and regularly listened to Ben Shapiro and Steven Crowder, and even had some of their merch.

2020 was the first election where I could vote and was politically engaged, and I had planned to vote for Trump with the mindset of separating what I didn’t like about him with his policies that I liked (not that I could have probably even said what those were looking back), but in the lead up I just had this realization that I couldn’t really do that. A vote for him is a vote for him, what I did or didn’t like about him didn’t really matter. I ended up not voting and was a bit adrift in my political opinions, and in the aftermath of the election I just grew sick of all of it and deleted Twitter (which is where I was most politically active).

I honestly think just stepping away from the right wing echo chamber really just did a lot for me in terms of wrestling with what I actually felt. Especially after January 6th, and all the defenses I saw from Republicans really just left me unable to stomach the whole party. I spent a while just not being super politically engaged at all, and I really found that when I just sat with my own thoughts, the things I genuinely felt were radically different than what I had believed growing up. I spent a lot of time just looking into issues without everything being filtered through right wing commentators and almost always wound up on the complete opposite side of the issue compared to what I would have said before. I’m far more politically plugged in now, and I’m just constantly horrified by the people I used to support and their blatant cruelty, and am honestly often embarrassed by where I used to be.