In my defense, I was a kid at the time, and this was back when he still had a deadpan, fake-conservative persona, and was able to trick people - including the President himself once - into falling for his gimmick; things like "Better Know A District", where he'd use his anonymity to troll unsuspecting politicians and get them to do wild stuff (like admit to cocaine on air), and his mock debates with John Stewart, where he'd play it straight and argue for increasingly ridiculous neoconservative positions against John's "clearly more sensible" "centrism". He never laughed, he never broke character, and he had a genuine knack for absurdist parody, at least before he became too famous to fool anyone.
I wasn't really "a neolib", but almost everyone in my social group at the time (early internet nerds and an old money Blue State with tons of far left university kids everywhere) was some form of leftist, and I distinctly remember being told (usually with disdain) that neolibs were just progressives who allowed the free market to operate, and I remember thinking that, "HEY, that's not so bad right? I like freedom, I like progress, maybe there's a few issues with neolibs but they sound like they could be cool. (Bill Clinton was the saxophone guy, right? Nothin' wrong with that, surely!)"
Again, I was a kid, and this was right at the end of the Bush era - which, you have to remember, was the high water mark for the neocons. The neocons were ramming through some of the worst legislation and foreign policies conceivable, most notably Joe Biden's Patriot Act, and the Forever War which, again at the time, we entirely blamed on Bush and his Daddy wanting oil, and not on an Israeli-controlled uniparty acting to plunder resources and fundamentally alter Western society so as to better control the tax cattle. Nowadays they're mostly uncommented on, but if you the reader don't remember the neocons, they're those Never Trumper RINOs, like Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham, who made peace with MAGA after Trump's win, and are now advocating MIGA and hate-speech laws and telling you to forget about Epstein. Picture Ted Cruz running the country for eight years, and all your memes were fun edgy male-oriented lefty ones made by Gen X kids with a fuck-you attitude and a penchant for tits and casual violence.
But yeah, nobody in those social circles knew what the fuck was coming. When Obama got elected, they all assumed he would end the wars ,and then we'd all become atheists and turn into a Star Trek society. The idea that we would have gay marriage was already a stretch (I remember arguing with my Fellow Travellers that maybe gay marriages shouldn't be a legislative issue, since marriage shouldn't be the state's business at all, and that the gay cakes drama was a clear violation of the darn homophobes' right to free speech and association, and even homophobes have rights, so maybe we shouldn't do that? We believe in tolerance and universal rights, right? And while it didn't earn me many friends, it also didn't get me cancelled for thought crimes. Not then.)
Shit like tranny bathrooms, gay kids, racially-tiered justice systems, the total collapse of mainstream media into raceswapping feminist revisionism, deplatforming, and social credit scores were either unthinkable, or a wild conspiracy theory used to lampoon lameoid kkkonservatives who hate gays for absolutely no reason / because they're secretly gay themselves, obviously. The internet is free! And Obama is ANTI-authoritarian, y'all! Funny TV Man said so!
Obama was a wakeup call for me on Day One, and I stopped supporting the Dems soon after. But it was hard, because again, you have to remember: at the time, we all just assumed that America's downward spiral was entirely due to Bush and the neocons, rather than the carefully orchestrated dance between the Angry War Party and the Tranny Porn Party that it is. Consider today, with MIGA and Epstein; how it's split the Right, and how now, some people are starting to embrace Woke policies, like censorship and foreign interventionism, when just a few months ago they were Free Speech Absolutists and America First.
In hindsight, I don't think I was EVER "a leftist", at least not by the definitions leftists use today, and I think the 'tism helped me fall out of the Prog cult fairly early, well before they could troon me out. But there was something funny about Colbert, in the early days, and since he seemed to be standing up to the forces which were visibly ruining America even then, it helped build emotional capital.
