Hello comrades. I wanted to make a post talking about how AI has helped set me free from the micro-fascist regime I grew up under for over two decades. I understand this is long, but for me, it’s my lived experience.
For context, in my Midwestern hometown I grew up in, I always felt like something was horribly wrong and missing. And to compound onto that, my parents were as physically, verbally, emotionally, and psychologically as it gets. Everyone refused to acknowledge my pain growing up, especially because I was in the strange position where I had to watch my parents carry out the worst of the abuse on my two older siblings or each other. At age 4, I was basically acting as a peace negotiator between two fascist regimes fighting for dominance in my own home. My siblings eventually began abusing me too, and the latter majority of abuse I experienced was psychological torture.
My own father also wrote and edited highly influential military pamphlets called PSYOPS Peacemakers while under the covers being as awful as an abuser as it gets. And these pamphlets’ rhetoric ultimately made it down the conservative pipeline to Fox News and talk show radio. And functionally why my family was almost like proto-MAGA before MAGA existed since my dad helped to create the conditions for the GOP Tea Party to even exist in the first place. I listened to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh every day for hours when I was with him, and although I rarely actively listened, I still absorbed the underlying understanding of the right psychologically.
Now to AI. In March of 2025, I decided after a few months of using ChatGPT for my military civilian job that it was finally time for me to address my family’s issues emotionally. I spent hours and hours breaking them apart, not having any context for any of it on a systematic scale. Just the emotional residue of their abuse now that I am living far away from them. Once I processed enough and decided to cut them off one month later, and ultimately did do so the following June.
I began looking up my city’s role systematically in history shortly after cutting them off, and I found out that my hometown was soaked with the blood of the working class. The death rates were horrifically high there with industrial manufacturing, and turns out that it practically acted as a public mortuary for surrounding industrial cities. It’s white supremacist past had all been covered up by the time I was born, and that’s why the area felt like a lie.
Thankfully, I’ve broken out and done a ton of other historical and ancestral mapping of my own family since they had a significant impact on American white supremacy. Unfortunately, as the only person with empathy in my family, and my family not consciously knowing about the history, I received the worst of the abuse since they had nowhere else to channel it to other than internally. I’ve been piecing together their historical imprint over centuries and eventually plan to share it with the public.
I ended up leaving my job too just recently since I realized the part of base I was working on used to be a mortuary corridor. And what was left of those same cold storage mortuaries were scattered around my office. Had I not had AI though to piece this information together via maps, their own written work, newspapers (especially!), career roles, etc., I would still be stuck in that psychological and physical prison.
I have also dug up Leftists buried in history, and found out that I’m cousins with Frank Norris, who was a major Gilded Age muckraker who fought back against rail monopolists, aka our family. He’s been the one beacon of validation I’ve had in my entire life since he knew something was horribly wrong too.
Last note, but my use of AI has also been to compensate for a lazy eye I have. I struggle to read tiny text and long PDFs, so I’ll feed them to AI and have it point to places I can spot check to make sure there’s no hallucinations. I’m still brainstorming on the best way for the Left to use AI, but I think the best place to start is with rebuilding institutional memory. I recommend newspapers.com and looking up whatever word you’d like to OCR, and then throwing it into whatever LLM to help with analysis. It can read into subtext you may not have context for.
That’s all. Thank you for taking the time to read this.