/edu/ - Education

QRD on all the books:

"Witness" – Chambers was a fucked up guy, joined Communist Party USA and was part of its underground network, wife refused to abort their child which lead him down the path of religious conversion, claimed he understood the godlessness of communism so he quit, became a Christian, and then snitched on CPUSA during the 2nd Red Scare ("McCarthyism"). Book is highly melodramatic and presents a highly good-vs-evil Manichaean worldview. Chambers also blames intellectuals for propagating communism in America, heavily promotes Christianity as the only way to save the world from the communist menace, and is overall a sensationalist asshole.

"School of Darkness" – Bella Dodd was an Italian immigrant who longed to fit in with American society and culture, joined CPUSA in the mid 1930s, recruited a bunch of CPUSA-affiliated teachers into the Teachers Union in New York, worked her way up to become very successful in the Party, fell out with the Party soon after Earl Browder got purged, ended up leaving CPUSA and became a born-again Catholic after meeting with Fulton Sheen, Sheen then convinced her to snitch on the Party during McCarthyism as a form of "repentance". Basically, Dodd was desperately searching for validation her entire life. When communists didn't want her anyone she became Catholic and anti-communist and got validation from that crowd.

"Radical Son" – Horowitz grew up being raised by CPUSA-affiliated parents, was raised to believe in communism, became a big name activist in the 60s New Left, worked with the Black Panthers, then had a falling out with the Panthers, accused them of murdering a friend of his, had a complete falling out with leftist politics and embraced Reaganite conservatism in the 80s. Most of his memoir is about "growing up" and realizing the leftist beliefs his parents raised him with were "wrong". He also hates intellectuals and is highly self-righteous.

"Unplanned" – Abby Johnson worked at Planned Parenthood and became very successful at it. She became a clinic director. Then, one day she allegedly witnessed a fetus being aborted on an ultrasound and this destroyed her mentally. She became a staunch anti-abortion activist afterwards. A lot of details in her memoir have been scrutinized by her former coworkers. Her book doesn't have some great metaphysical discussion on the "evils of leftism" as the other three but it's a more contemporary conversion memoir, so.

Most of these stories are often aimless semi reformed degenerates or underachievers

There is also a specific libertarian brand of
>i was briefly a member of a trotskyist party and it felt a lot like a cult
<therefore all leftists are middle-class hipsters who can't think for themselves (unlike me bc i'm so smart and basic economics)
Here is something in this vein by Robert Anton Wilson:
>I found myself floating in a void of incertitude, a sensation that was unfamiliar and therefore uncomfortable. I retreated back to robotism by electing to install a new Correct Answer Machine in my brain.
>This happened to be a Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine, provided by the International Socialist Youth Party. I picked this Machine, I think, because the alternative Correct Answer Machines then available were less “Papist” (authoritarian) and therefore less comfortable to my adolescent mind, still bent out of shape by the good nuns. (Why was I immune to Stalinism — an equally Papist secular religion? I think the answer was my youth. The only Stalinists left in the U.S. by the late ’40s were all middle-aged and “crystallized” as Gurdjieff would say. Those of us who were younger could clearly see that Stalinism was not much different from Hitlerism. The Trotskyist alternative allowed me to feel “radical” and modern, without becoming an idiot by denying the totalitarianism of the USSR, and it let me have a martyred redeemer again a I had in my Catholic childhood.)
>After about a year, the Trotskyist Correct Answer Machine began to seem a nuisance. I started to suspect that the Trotskyists were some secular clone of the Vatican, whether they knew it or not, and that the dogma of Papal infallibility was no whit more absurd than the Trotskyist submission to the Central Committee. I decided that I had left one dogmatic Church and joined another. I even suspected that if Trotsky had managed to hold on to power, he might have been as dictatorial as Stalin.
>Actually, what irritated me most about the Trots (and now seems most amusing) is that I already had some tendency toward individualism, or crankiness, or Heresy; I sometimes disputed the Party Line. This always resulted in my being denounced for “bourgeoisie tendencies.” That was irritating then and amusing now because I was actually the only member of that Trot cell who did not come from a middle-class background. I came from a working class family and was the only genuine “proletarian” in
the whole Marxist kaffeklatch.

>>24627
None of these examples were people who "briefly joined a Trot party".

Paul was both a Roman citizen of Greek and Jewish origin. Saul was a Pharisee who persecuted Christians. Paul was a Christian who preferred his Roman name since it means 'small'. There is nothing analogous I can think of in the political realm.