Ok maybe I'm being dramatic, its not the end of the world but surely this is a very tumultuous time we're living in. I guess I should start with my a brief recounting of my political "journey" I remember in 2016, my freshman year of high school, I was in my history class when a boy who later became my best friend started talking about communism. Now I didn't know what communism was other than it had something to do with Russia and America hated it. That night I decided to look into it and quickly became enthralled with the ideas, seeing as I was a bit of a Berniecrat at the time and communism seemed like the logical next step. Of course I was still a liberal, it probably took another year or so before I was fully deprogrammed, which was not helped by Trump's election. It was around that time when I discovered lefty-youtube or proto-breadtube, mostly made up of 8channers and people radicalized by the 2016 Bernie movement. I pretty much dedicated my whole being to being a communist, looking back I must have been unbearable, yet my friends still put up with my mindless ramblings. I was in this sphere for a while, probably until 2017 where I changed schools and didn't have that boy to talk communism with. It was around then where I found Proles of the Round Table as well as joined a communist minecraft server. The former was actually a pretty good show about communist history and the latter had me in a community of fellow communists. These kinda served as an echo chamber where phrases like "death to America" and "Stalin did nothing wrong" were frequently thrown around. And then in senior year I got a girlfriend, which kinda killed all the free time I had to dedicate to communism. She knew I was a communist, I kept it kinda secret, especially from my parents and other adults because I knew it was a dirty word in their minds. But she was also very much a die hard liberal, supporting or denouncing the current thing to be passionate about. She thought being a communist was just an extreme form of that. Talking politics always ended in a little bit of an argument, so we kinda just avoided the subject most of the time. As I was with her more I kinda got out of the echo chamber, still hated America and all that stuff, but was a lot more mild about everything. Well mostly everything, whenever the US was pushing the "Uighur genocide" narrative, I held firm against it. Then the pandemic happened and I found that a small youtube channel, Caleb Maupin, which I subscribed to years ago started having frequent live streams. He mostly talked about communist history but also had analysis on modern things that was wholly refreshing and unlike other communist voices at the time. And then summer 2020 happened. Quickly it became a trendy thing to be an America hating communist and with all the riots in the streets I honestly thought revolution was around the corner. I vividly remember listening to one of Caleb Maupin's live streams where he was talking about the slogan "abolish borders"; pretty much saying that it serves more as a virtue signal which fails to communicate an actual policy decision and scares away people who would be sympathetic to a more thoughtful explanation. After hearing that, All the ACAB, Trans women are women, and BLM stuff started to not be the shining beacon of progress I once saw it as. This was only compounded by every company under the sun fully embracing the woke talking points. Then I started working for doordash, my first job. I suddenly needed to fill large gaps of time so I started listening to more podcasts; my favorite of which was Low Society with Peter Coffin (stopped listening after he left the show); along with Red Scare and Twink Revolution. Suddenly I found myself surrounded with an alternative left, They didn't hate average Americans, they didn't all have to agree, and they didn't fall in line with the Democratic party line. Jimmy Dore, who I had been watching for years, also didn't quite fall fully for the woke makeover. Over the course of the year this alternative current started diverging more and more from the woke current, ultimately being separated by the January 6Th riot. While the woke current was emboldened by it, suddenly having found the secret Nazis they had been alleging existed, they aided the FBI and embraced giving more control to the government and big tech and celebrated censorship. The alternative started questioning the narrative of the supposed insurrection and more or less started supporting free speech. It was around this time I also had a powerful experience with mushrooms. After the trip I could no longer really bring myself to hating any group of people any more, whether it be "anti-vaxxers", the religious, or Trump supporters. I also started regularly interacting with more conservative people, something I didn't really have to do for most of high school. I saw they were pretty much normal, liked what I liked, and were friendly, not the demons the media made them out to be. It was around then the vaccines started rolling out. Before they were even announced I knew I was gonna wait a little just in case of side effects. Since I was an "essential worker" for doordash (queue eye roll), I was able to get the vaccine pretty early, but I still waited. I was explaining this to my girlfriend's brother when he yelled at me that there aren't any side effects and they had been thoroughly tested. I was shocked that merely expressing some minor hesitance would yield such a reaction, by that point I hadn't been watching much mainstream media at all and didn't know how large the PR campaign by big pharma really was. I waited about a month, got my first shot without issue, but when I got my second shot, I was knocked out for over a week. I knew the vaccine would wear me out but what I experienced was much greater than what the "normal" reaction was. Each day I had very little energy and almost fell asleep driving multiple times. This was very inconvenient because I was moving at the time. During the long drives between the bay area (where I was moving from) and Sacramento, I found a podcast "Blocked and Reported" which covered internet drama, especially around the woke crowd. This kinda aided in me becoming sorta anti-woke and introduced me to some non-leftist voices. So in the course of a year, from summer 2020 to summer 2021, I went from a ACAB-shouting, America-hating, anti-free-speech communist to a... well I don't know a communist still but understanding all these issues have so much nuance to them that can't be and shouldn't be summed up in a flashy slogan. And with moving to Sac I got to experience life outside the covid-consensus. Most people in the town I was living in in the bay area were fully in support of any sort of mandate and would judge any of those who didn't follow covid protocols perfectly. This is despite the fact none of them perfectly followed the protocols either. My girlfriend's family was especially like this, if they saw someone without a mask you'd be sure to hear some snide remark. They all were terrified of getting the virus even after they were vaccinated. I was dragged along for some of this but after a week of Sac life, I realized that there was a different status quo here. I was fully vaxxed, and at the time we thought that meant you couldn't get it, after all that's what Fauci told us was the case. So I stopped wearing my mask everywhere. It was liberating. It was around then we started hearing about a vaccine mandate and places would require proof of vaccination. I originally didn't think much of it until I saw how otherized the unvaccinated were. Suddenly they couldn't get medical procedures or go to certain stores. When I would go back to the bay to visit my girlfriend it was like they were living in a different world. More and more voices in the alternative left were hesitant of the mandate, they were deemed anti-vaxxers by the woke left. Some time later I thought it would be funny to read "Industrial Society and its Future", I wasn't expecting how much the manifesto would resonate with me but Kaczynski makes some very good points about various subjects, especially around how the way society is developing is anti-human.
I guess this was just a long way of saying I feel like I have no true home in modern politics. Of course neither of the parties are desirable in nearly any way. The woke left has been consumed by constant infighting about identity politics. I still don't really know how I feel about Covid. I don't know if I'm even fully a communist anymore.
The only good thing I see emerging in modern politics is the emergence of a sort of united populist movement against mandates. Both the alternative left and the alternative right are mostly against them, for different reasons, but in agreement nonetheless. There is more dialog among these groups than ever before, with the invasion of Ukraine we saw both the right and left being critical of NATO aggression and even before that most of what became the alternative left didn't go along with russiagate.
I guess I'm not homeless since I have the alternative left, but really what is the alternative left? The only unified thing about them is that they have left wing ideas but either do not identify with or have fallen from grace from the liberal/woke left. Bill Maher surely isn't part of the alternative left yet he matches this description.
This post was too long and I have more to say but I'll save that for a different time.