'Steve,' a caller who says he was once an anarcho-communist in the 'Occupy' movement, discusses the changes of heart which led him to vote for President Trump in 2016 on the Freedomain Radio podcast with Stefan Molyneux.



"I got involved in the anarchist movement -- anarchism in particular. Now, I know you lean towards the libertarian anarcho-capitalist direction. But I'm talking about communist anarchism," Steve said. "It is an enormous difference."



"If you listen to people who are in the movement talk... there is a big hagiographic perspective on the Spanish anarchists. This is getting ahead of things, but one of the things that led me away from the [communist-anarchist] movement was reading more about the anarchists in Spain [during the Spanish civil war] and discovering, hey, actually, they committed mass murder, they carried out mass rape of nuns, they would force priests to watch parodies of the mass and then murder them. Anyway, those were the guys I really looked up to, that we all really looked up to," 'Steve' explained.



"Yes, it was the usual freak show of totalitarian mass murdering nightmarishness," the host Stefan Molyneux said about the Spanish civil war.



"I was a huge fan of Marx too," Steve continued. "We all were... The people who are communist anarchists are often big fans of Marx. The reason is that other than Kropotkin and Bakunin, who are two Russians, anarchist thinkers don't really have their own theory and their own bible, so they need Marx. He breaks it down and makes sense of things."



Stefan agrees: "Yes, [Marx] promised a withering away of the state and a stateless society , so if you really want to take a deep hit on the Marxist bong, you can see your way through to anarchism."



"Exactly," Steve said. "It is kind of funny. If you look at communism and see it as a parody of Christianity -- which it sort of is -- Anarchism is like a parody of Gnosticism, and the Gnostic Christian movements. But anyway, I had gotten involved with it early -- I was 17, 18, 19... Call me a recovering alcoholic, but I also struggled with some of the harder drugs. That actually ties in to the anarchism, addiction is extremely common in that scene. And the people who aren't addicted to drugs or alcohol are very often addicted to rage and violence... The rush you get from that kind of hatred that you direct at everyone else in society, it feels like a drug. It feels like addiction."



"The regular rules don't apply to you, you steal to survive, and you think that makes you better," he continues.



"I have learned as I have gotten away from radicalism, and gotten away from intoxication, just how chaotic and abnormal it was."



He explained more about the roots of his former ideology: "From my perspective, I think there were, my journey to leftism had a couple components, both related to my upbringing... Two things that really impacted me... The first is whether my dad was all that smart or not, I actually did have a very high IQ. I was one of these kids that was tested and put in the gifted class, and I lived in a place and time and culture where that wasn't really respected. It was looked down on very strongly. I had to fight a lot when I was a kid... I was a smart kid, I was interested in smart things, Star Trek, whatever, and so I identified... other people being mistreated because of things they couldn't help, they were black, gay, or whatever, I identified really strongly with that... Even though racism was common among my peers, I remembered thinking that is why I shouldn't be racist. The same kids were coming after me for being a nerd in the gifted class."



"I got this idea in my head that small communities of people who have common traditions, maybe they care about the land they live on, maye they're a little bit closer to nature, that that was a good way of organizing human society. And as far as I knew, that idea was contained in the radical left," he said.



"I encountered the most eco-radical strains of anarchism... like Earth First. That is what I saw in them. It was only much later that I looked more closely into it, after 100 things had happened. And I realized there is a name for a political belief where we prioritize smaller groups, customs, traditions, localism... and the name is not communism, it is conservatism."