# I Regret to State I Know Exactly How Liberalism Became Uncool
Check out this funny quote:
I was a teenager in the 2000s. Bush’s presidency encompassed my teen years. I remember this time very well. Everyone in my school believed that we were in danger of being drafted in the Iraq War, thanks to forwarded viral emails—the original TikTok—about a draft that would somehow also cover Canada, so we couldn’t hide there if we wanted to dodge it. One kid at my school had a plan to join the army voluntarily, win a Purple Heart somehow, and assassinate Bush during the Purple Heart ceremony. When I was 14, I dated one of that kid’s friends: a 16-year-old named Tony who saw himself as a bad-boy rebel. He was a militant liberal, often railing against the “religious hicks” who lived in his rural Pennsylvania hometown (we went to boarding school, and he was there on a scholarship). He was obsessed with Michael Moore, and when his parents bought him the DVD of Bowling for Columbine , he licked the box lasciviously in the backseat of their car while they drove us to get lunch. He told me he wanted to buy a pair of skinny jeans (verboten at the time) because it would “scare Republican church ladies” who might think he was gay. He was Italian, raised Catholic, and hated all forms of religion. He made many (very unfunny) sexual priest jokes. One might call him an example of an early “Reddit atheist.” He was eventually expelled from our school for selling weed.
Bizarre, right? That’s the milieu that Moldbug rebelled against in his original writings.
The funny thing is how much the liberals back then did not realize how much the establishment was them, and how much effort and stress it was causing the conservatives to maintain their communities against the establishment, back then. Super bizarre.