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The reverse happened. But I'm GenX so that might be normal?

I was given the full American Exceptionalism battery of civics propaganda in my public schooling, and I believed it all even more than my peers. It might be a neurodivergent thing, being credulous and actually believing what my teachers taught me.

I also took economics 1A and 1B in my early college career, which was all capitalism centric. (They talked about command economics, usually as a counter example, highlighting the problems it has.)

I was kind of an asshole, but I was young.

Then SCOTUS gave Bush the presidency, and that was weird. He was creepy even before 9/11 but then that happened and, well, all the conservatives went full evil. When my dad was telling me that yes, Donald Rumsfeld is right that waterboarding is not really torture (Narrator: Waterboarding is, in fact, commonly classified as torture by the scholarly consensus) and that extrajudicially detaining and torturing people because they're Arab and Muslim is entirely acceptable, I had a reckoning and an internal identity crisis. I knew that torture was what Darth Vader did to Leia to show that the Galactic Empire was evil through and through, and Vader didn't flinch at the grisly tasks.

In the next decade civil rights, including ones established in the Constitution of the United States, started getting massive carve-outs. The bill of rights didn't apply whenever national security was invoked. FBI was sending NSLs left and right telling people they're now FBI informants, yet were obligated to keep that secret on threat of being disappeared. (NSLs are still a thing, BTW.)

Officials were openly engaging in war profiteering. Halliburton was getting fantastically rich. Also Texas, by way of Enron was fleecing California. The rolling blackouts were featured in Monsters Inc. ...as was the scream extractor, possibly the best representation of late-stage capitalism at its most extreme.

We talked a lot of enhanced interrogation and extraordinary rendition and black sites. Signs of the surveillance state started manifesting even before Edward Snowden dumped a ton of data to news agencies.

Obama got elected. There was tons of talk about Hope and Change. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize just for not being George W. Bush. Neither hope nor change were forthcoming. In fact, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis starting in 2007 resulted in some massive bailouts (about $1 Trillion) to some really big companies. If your company collapses, I had learned according to Capitalism 101, it means your business model is bad and it deserves to collapse, so this bailout didn't make sense from the ideological perspective. A lot of other people noticed it and formed OWS and protested until New York City turned off all its cameras and sent the police in to anti-riot them.

Then in 2014, Michael Brown was shot in dubious circumstances, triggering the Ferguson unrest. Police uniforms lined up pointing their assault rifles like they were at a firing squad, what I remember was poor weapon discipline, and the sort of thing Red Goons from the Soviet Union did in movies starring Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris. Troops and troops of police officers pointing their guns like they're ready to start shooting into the crowd. Then when the policing hour happened at night, they gathered up in their MRAP and started tearing up the streets (literally) firing their tear-gas grenade launcher willy-nilly, just gassing the whole neighborhood for no peacekeeping purpose. It was terrifying.

I learned in the 1970s a congressional order required FBI to catalog all officer-involved homicides and report annually to the BJS. They hadn't. Only civilian volunteer groups had been tracking killings and brutality by law enforcement. Several news agencies started after Ferguson. One of the beats on Techdirt already was about police being stupid or drawing their guns early, or SWATTING the wrong house and rendering it unlivable. Oh yeah, social engineers discovered they could get a house raided by police with big guns anytime they wanted to, and it became an occasional tactic in COD PvP.

In 2015, I was long read about the faults of capitalism, the failures of government, the rise of regulatory capture, the police state, the surveillance state and rising wealth disparity (which was a big deal in my college Macroeconomics class -- this is how you get your civilization to collapse to social unrest). I'd also taken a deep dive into moral philosophy so I understood why torture is generally frowned upon, and I didn't have to take my cues from George Lucas.

From there, I was a few breadtube videos away from going totally Pinko Commie, but I less adhere to any given ideology so much as specific ideals (e.g. Everyone gets fed. )

Strangely, a Bolshevik chorus follows me around everywhere I go.