Because I wasn’t particularly fond of most of the ghetto black people I encountered growing up in Washington DC, and had a Confederate flag t-shirt and was a huge super fan of the Dukes of Hazzard I am apparently a “white supremacist.” Because I oppose US wars for Israel, the power of the Israel lobby, and Jewish double-standards when it comes to basically just about everything, that makes me a “neo-Nazi.” And because I think feminism is ridiculous and figure most women and men are happier in more or less traditional gender roles – and that children are best raised and educated by their own mothers – that makes me “far-right.”

But that’s wrong. I’m actually a radically moderate, center-left liberal extremist whose views were perfectly mainstream when I was growing up in the 1990’s.

My political instincts were shaped by the works of 1989 Pulitzer Prize Winner in National Reporting, Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Barlett and Steele vividly reveal how Congresses and presidents of both parties repeatedly make decisions that favor the few at the expense of most Americans. But the authors show that this need not be. To make the American dream a reality for all Americans, our government must reassert itself on behalf of all the people—with regulatory oversight that balances public safety with business interests, more equitable tax policies, and programs that assure all Americans of basic health care and a decent retirement.

Radical, I know. These days this is pure National Bolshevism. But back when I was a young man, in the 1990’s, this was all quite moderate, common sense, middle of the road reformist Democrat. I haven’t changed much.

But my radicalization didn’t end there. Pretty soon I was down at the local radical bookstore reading the works of notorious anti-semitic conspiracy theorist, Princeton graduate and Washington Post reporter William Greider.

Seriously, click on the link to understand how I was radicalized:

http://williamgreider.com/

By the time I finished Greider’s Secrets of the Temple : How the Federal Reserve runs the Country, I was thoroughly down the rabbit hole. Greider’s view – straight out of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion no doubt – was that the Federal Reserve system wasn’t actual a neutral, technocratic institution, but was in fact, political, and that the political decisions it made favored creditors and disfavored debtors, meaning in the grand scheme of things, helped the rich and hurt the poor and the middle class.

Truly, the idea that the central bank helps the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle class is a extremely radical idea, something only a Commu-Nazi like William Greider would believe. But as an impressionable young man, I didn’t realize how I was slowly being radicalized.

It got worse. Soon I was supporting the radical political movements around extremists like Raph Nader and Ross Perot.

I am now very ashamed to admit this, but I actually registered and voted once or twice. Hey – it was the 90’s, man, everyone was experimenting with all sorts of degeneracy. I thought I could handle it, but by 2004 I had given up the habit and have been completely clean since then.

I could write some trademark fanfic here, and talk about the time I worked for a certain three letter agency and attended the 1999 Seattle WTO protests as an anti-globalization activist. But I won’t do that, it would just spoil the mood.

Pretty soon I was using terms like “mystification” to describe the ideologies and rhetoric of the ruling class capitalists they use to obscure their – and our – class interests. I started using phrases like “neo-liberal” and discussing obscure, wonky issues like the “North American Free Trade Agreement” and objecting to multilateral free trade agreements, offshoring jobs, union busting, and mass immigration of cheap scab labor.

I went from a mildly bookish young man with an interest in economic, trade and tax policy to someone completely #DerangedAndAimeePilled.

I started claiming that “woke” “social justice” politics are mystification of class interests and, in fact, a rather natural outgrowth of what Gloria Steinem called “the liberal CIA”. That elite academia – like Harvard and Yale – pushed “Critical Race Theory” to mystify their promotion of their own class interests, the class interests of elite capitalists and managing bureaucrats of non-governmental organizations that are, in fact, often actually just CIA fronts. That, as in the 1960’s the CIA created the Congress for Cultural Freedom to promote a kind of “non-communist leftism” that was not at all concerned with economic issues, but instead a cosmopolitan lifestylism that attacked tradition, high culture, and the conservative social values of the proletarian family, Harvard and Yale promote anti-whiteness for much the same reason; mystification of their class interests and their class war on working and middle class Americans.

This process of radicalization can happen to anyone. In my day, it started with a library card. These days, young people are exposed to all sorts of unapproved opinions on the internets.

That’s how I went from a moderately socially conservative, economically liberal labor-oriented progressive to a radical neo-nazi white supremacist red-brown anarcho-nazbol domestic extremist without changing a single opinion.

It only took about twenty years.