My views have evolved along with my personality and personal traits.
I was raised the son of divorced parents. My mom has been atheistic and practically apolitical as long as I can remember, though she does tend to lean towards right-libertarianism. We never had much money, but mom worked hard to make sure I had what I needed. Her parents are non-practicing Baptists and are mostly apolitical, but slightly liberal. My dad is a protestant Christian and a conservatism, though he hates most Republicans. He worked in the medical field and was middle class.
I remember telling people I was a Republican when I was younger, though I didn’t know what that meant at the time and I don’t remember where I first heard the term from. As I grew older, I had my first real exposure to politics in my 9th grade Current Issues and my Creative Writing class. Both teachers insisted that all conservatives are retards and you are only truly enlightened if you are a Democrat. By this time, I was struggling with my Christian faith, and I adapted extremely far-left liberalism as a political ideology. I supported Dennis Kucinich, I thought that Bush was secretly trying to establish a theocracy to kill all the gays and brown people, and I thought that anyone to the right of Chairman Mao should be “re-educated” and put on the straight and narrow. I tried hard to reconcile my Christian beliefs with this ideology, and my politics became much less extreme and I became a sort of Hippie-Christian liberal, though most of my peers who ascribed to the same viewpoint rejected me because of my extremely pro-gun views that I have always had. I was also struggling with depression and extreme anxiety issues during this time that I directed as rage towards anyone different from me politically.
As I grew older, I rapidly grew tired of Christianity and I more or less became extremely hostile to the religion and I became an atheist. It was also during this time that I took a sharp turn to the right. I became very cynical of my teachers who influenced me as a teenager, and I started to realize that they were extremely bigoted and narrow-minded. During this time, I was rather hawkish, but my libertarian streak was starting to grow stronger. This is also when I started making my own money and I developed a business-savvy streak.
As I grew even older, I became much less hostile to Christianity and religion in general, and I started studying religions such as Sufism and different forms of Buddhism, and I started valuing religious philosophical thought. I also got over my depression and anxiety and became extremely self-reliant. This is also when I started studying old homesteading skills and I started to become an outdoorsman. This is when my libertarian views came into their own as I began to really value individual liberty. I also became an old-school conservationist in the style of Theodore Roosevelt at this point, and I’ve pretty much been this way ever since: a happy, self-reliant lowercase-l libertarian conservationist pseudo-agnostic who has no problem with religion and I’m equally skeptical of anyone who proudly and unquestioningly ascribes to both liberalism or conservatism, because I have done both.
And I love punk rock.