"Minor" political events that had a big impact in shaping your outlook

[HisGrace]

Some people will say I'm late on this, but the Republicans playing politics with the Iran deal was when I became convinced they'd clearly jumped the shark, with Trump then coming afterward.

A couple that others have said.

Duke Lacrosse. I was maybe 13 at the time, I heard about it and thought it was awful. Then it started to sound like there was maybe some doubt as if they did it, and I didn't know. Then when the evidence really started coming in I changed my mind and thought it was clearly fabricated. Even when I was basically a kid I was able to mold my opinion after the changing facts. Meanwhile, even after all the evidence had come in you had all these feminists running around saying that everyone "just loved rape" if they didn't think they did it ("rape loving scum" for a direct quote from one article I remember) and then there was that popular hot take that that was what they deserved for hiring a stripper. My first encounter with the braindead demagoguery of what would later be known as "SJW's".

I'll also second Troy Davis. I was already anti-death penalty but seeing a clearly innocent man get executed made the issue a much higher priority for me and convinced me it was something that really needs to be changed. Also around the same time there was a longform article in one of the glossy magazines (maybe The New Yorker) that went back and proved that an incident where a guy was executed for burning down his ex wife's house was actually a gas fire. There's this talking point that innocent people "never" get executed because juries are so "careful". These two are probably just the tip of the iceberg.