Hello, new user here so please excuse my naivety or possible ignorance.
As I've spent the past few months trying to research history and further define my own political identity, I've fallen down a rabbit-hole from mainstream social media platforms to smaller imageboards (such as this one, which has particularly interested me!).
I was hoping to hear some of your own conclusions as to why it's so much more common to see people fall for right-wing pipelines and propaganda, and whether or not it makes them stupid or just gullible. I started to research niche right-wing online communities (which I will avoid mentioning by name) and have noticed their significant influence despite their small size, and their sheer output of content.
My theory is that right-wing politics provide short, simple answers to complicated issues. Because of that, it's easy to build a community that produces content which mocks people who provide answers that can't be explained in a single paragraph. Also the fact that this content is played off as simply a joke or absurdist humor rather than legitimate propaganda.
Again, sorry if this sounds dumb or has an obvious answer!
>>2557753Because China the richest "AES" isn't funding any counter propaganda in the information war so all you're left with is poor NGOs and disorganized grassroot nobodies that will achieve nothing in their lifetime
>>2554839 >>2557756So your theory is that the reason people tend to fall into right-wing pipelines is due to the lack of propaganda being produced or funded by socialist/actual-leftist movements and countries?
That could make sense, can you explain why right-wing memes and culture tend to spread like wildfire? It seems to me like its because propaganda and skewed public-education make that sort of content more familiar to those susceptible.
>>2557753>My theory is that right-wing politics provide short, simple answers to complicated issues. I find it helpful to think about what the right *is*, as a more or less normal or "natural" expression of contradictions in modern societies. Well, I think mainly its essence is to affirm existing conditions (which are currently existing facts that shape our social order) or else a desire to revert to a state which was once an accomplished fact. One of the big advantages for the right is that it has the weight of historical inertia on its side. But they're willing to play with whatever allows them to dominate the immediate situation because that's principally what they're after. The left plays a fundamentally different role in history which, for most of the time, leaves the left to be in a minority position, but which nevertheless is in embryo the TNT that will blow away all of that ossified institutions, doctrines, customs, and habits sooner or later. It's just what it is.
>>2557774Before I continue I genuinely have to know if your "Gay Nazi" badge is a joke or genuine
>>2557775He's a real Gay Nazi. I attest to it.
>>2557756It's more that right-wing ideology is inherently more attractive than leftism because its foundation is aesthetics and spiritualism and tribalism, of course it's far easier for, say, an unhappy young male teenager to go down a right wing pipeline telling them about the superior race, esotericism, cool edits of Nazis marching and shit than a left-wing materialist pipeline full of dry theory. I mean, we could make edits of Soviets marching, but having a focus on aesthetics and glorifying war is kind of against the ideology.
>>2557775I think I started using it troll a Duginist guy who used a Eurasian flag and considered himself to be in a global war with fascist homosexuals, but also /pol/yps who'd come in and make racist Nazi threads, and I'd play with that to make them uncomfortable (I don't know if this ever worked) in the hope of running them out of here.
But now I think of it like using contradiction as a tool for revealing underlying ideology, projection, or anxiety. It's your own interpretation and reaction or unconscious allegience and cultural conditioning that I'm after.
>>2557753it's also that the media is owned by minority rule capitalists that blast these lies out as a survival strategy.
Also "stiob" art:
https://medium.com/the-pitch-of-discontent/would-you-like-to-know-more-satire-american-stiob-and-starship-troopers-746ec0440fa1Think that ^
BTW the weird role of gays in 21st century right-wing politics is a subject I'm interested in. I don't like the sort of left-liberal politics of celebrating gays in the way that everyone finds annoying. You know what I'm talking about. I'm supposed to be really thrilled by Pete Buttigieg here in the United States. Yeah, right. But there's this reaction to that which is always to double down and support a really creepy group of right-wing gay guys like Peter Thiel. I find that ironic and strange and bizarre. There's actually a bunch of them who work for Trump. Believe me when the Eurasian flag anon and these ACP people all voted for those guys.
>>2557753It's funded by billionaires and blasted on mainstream media
>>2557762They flood the airwaves with it, they use bots, and algorithms literally are biased towards showing it. It's not organic so we can't ask as if it's just organically more popular, even if that could also be true in a different world. You can't decouple it from the reality of huge money interests and social media platforms pushing it
>>2557793hey gay nazi poster whats your take on douglas murray? how would you classify him as a right wing gay in politics?
>>2557753A lot of right-wing propaganda is demand lead. Stupid, low-openness, low-social-trust people prone to negative sum thinking like to have their stupid, low-openness, low-social-trust, zero-sum prejudices confirmed. It's not just that they're stupid and gullible, it's that you're starting with an inbuilt advantage. If you hate new things, think other people are naturally evil, that the world is naturally hierarchical (even if you find yourself a total loser in that hierarchy), etc, it's very easy for right-wing propaganda to work on you and much harder for left-wing propaganda to work.
The real decisive tiebreaker here is economics. Every economist agrees that, outside a tiny range of circumstances, tariffs are the most retarded thing in the world. Pre-Trump, a good chunk of right-wingers with more of a libertarian influence would agree. It is, quite literally, basic economics.
Well, the most prominent right-wing politician in the world has a tariff fetish, so what do right-wingers do? Defend tariffs. Defend tariffs in actively retarded ways. (Have you ever considered that maybe it's good to make everyone poorer?)
For all the money a chunk of neoliberal inclined people have thrown at economic propaganda, which has been broadly successful when it comes to taxation and nationalisation (which are "pro-social"/high trust ideas), it all went totally down the drain on tariffs. "I don't like foreigners and think we should stick to our own, the world is zero-sum and if they're winning we must be losing" as a stupid, ape-brained prejudice proved more powerful than all the money in the world.
It should, however, be said that "non-left-wing" left wing propaganda has been very successful. The average young person is incredibly socially liberal and the cultural norms of socially liberal communities (say, "the LGBT community") are overtly socialist, often communist sympathetic. The right are a loud minority of young people propped up by middle aged and old people.
From my observations, left wingers just gave up on trying to reach the people.
>>2557753It's way easier to be right wing than left wing if you're serious about maximalist extremism and the philosophical side of things.
See: The 'best and brightest' far right philosophers are usually total morons relegated to their twitter echo chambers (i.e. people like Psikey or Bronze age pervert, etc.). The only intelligent rightoid thinker who is alive today is probably Nick Land, but even then, he's running off the tailed fumes of his previously better self, prior to the excessive drug consumption.
>>2557856Rightist thinking essentially boils down to a maximalist, ad-hoc masturbation session bent on justifying the most ape-like modes of thinking, but even that's an insult to apes, as this assumes a kind of naturalistic reductionism down to some kind of array of 'base impulses', which is itself an implicit concession to the eugenicist framework. In actuality, human history shows a different story, but the point is that what is essentially 'base' is extant relative to the superstructure of a given symbolic order, so the logos with which a person is predisposed to identify with is bound to be far lower viscosity insofar as it pertains to and comports with the dominant source of influence which constitutes the popular hegemony, which as it happens is obviously reactionary.
>>2557858And to give an idea of how predictable and formulaic rightoid minds are, in response to this post their first 'intellectual retort' would probably be something akin to 'well, if these reactionary strains are so dominant and so readily received, then that must reflect naturalistic viability. You're just being a cynical contrarian against an impetus which has already concretely proven itself!' or some shit like that.
Algorithm sites have interests in having a right wing, unthinking userbase that will just get in debates over boilerplate shit forever without coming up with anything semantically novel.
Whereas the only real left-wing pipeline that algorithm sites allow to exist is FOSS stuff because they neutralize it with lolberts. If you make it to open source social media like activitypub then you start going leftward. Otherwise you just have "anti-woke." aka safe edgy, demsoc debate streamers and video essayists to quell people's yearning to move leftward by funneling them into twitter or being fed twitter secondhand by a streamer/video essayist forever.
The #1 most effective way to establish an efficient left wing pipeline is to create a pipeline out of the core web first, then just speak about left wing stuff on the normal web.
>>2557756>It's china's fault!!!Obsessed
people are biologically greedy and xenophobic, it takes more effort to suppress these tendencies than to accept them
>>2558058then why did it take 250,000 years to invent racism, fucking historically illiterate retard
why do they spend so much time and effort to propagate their worldview if its 'natural', retard
>>2558091racism and xenophobia are not the same
go to North Sentinel and see how the locals greet you
>>2558058It's not true of people in general, it's basically correlated with intelligence and with personality. Intelligence is improving over time and personality can be shaped culturally, so the picture is optimistic in the medium / long term.
It's a bad default but one that in the process of being fixed, even under capitalism.
I mean part of it is that the Right Wing tries to lovebomb people into their side while the Left tries to exclude people from theirs.
Like if you roll your eyes at, I dunno, someone saying “video games appeal to the male fantasy” then right wingers will go out of their way online to spread their propaganda—“Yeah they all hate men, THEY are trying to take your vidya away!” They see a little hint that you share an enemy and they try to grow that.
The Left? One mistake or difference of opinion and you’re out. You show the slightest disagreement and you’ll have people nagging you or coming up with new ways to call you a terrible person. Even in cases where it looks like you might have some broad agreement with a left wing point that’ll be whittled down into nothing by other left wingers.
>>2558126They are only so defensive now because they got sick and one or two of them went to the outside world got sick and died too
Not because they are inherently xenophobic
A lot of right-wing propaganda is demand lead. Stupid, low-openness, low-social-trust people prone to negative sum thinking like to have their stupid, low-openness, low-social-trust, zero-sum prejudices confirmed. It's not just that they're stupid and gullible, it's that you're starting with an inbuilt advantage. If you hate new things, think other people are naturally evil, that the world is naturally hierarchical (even if you find yourself a total loser in that hierarchy), etc, it's very easy for right-wing propaganda to work on you and much harder for left-wing propaganda to work.
The real decisive tiebreaker here is economics. Every economist agrees that, outside a tiny range of circumstances, tariffs are the most retarded thing in the world. Pre-Trump, a good chunk of right-wingers with more of a libertarian influence would agree. It is, quite literally, basic economics.
Well, the most prominent right-wing politician in the world has a tariff fetish, so what do right-wingers do? Defend tariffs. Defend tariffs in actively retarded ways. (Have you ever considered that maybe it's good to make everyone poorer?)
For all the money a chunk of neoliberal inclined people have thrown at economic propaganda, which has been broadly successful when it comes to taxation and nationalisation (which are "pro-social"/high trust ideas), it all went totally down the drain on tariffs. "I don't like foreigners and think we should stick to our own, the world is zero-sum and if they're winning we must be losing" as a stupid, ape-brained prejudice proved more powerful than all the money in the world.
It should, however, be said that "non-left-wing" left wing propaganda has been very successful. The average young person is incredibly socially liberal and the cultural norms of socially liberal communities (say, "the LGBT community") are overtly socialist, often communist sympathetic. The right are a loud minority of young people propped up by middle aged and old people.
>>2557753The right's raison d'etre is preserving the oppressive systems of expropriation of the workers by the parasites. Said parasites (who have a hell of a lot more cashola to throw around since they're the ruling class) happily use some of the blood they sucked to pay obedient mouthpieces to indoctrinate the proles into thinking the system that allows the bloodsuckers to suck blood is based.
Overlapping with some replies already here:
>mass media is not politically neutral. look at ownership of the largest newspapers, television channels and social media platforms. some are openly purchased by Bezos and Musk. so the 'mainstream' opinion most people are basing their worldview on is pro-capitalist and normalizes casual patriarchy, racism, etc., etc., yes, even some of the progressive-liberal media re-enforces these. Right-wing ideology aligns closer to this worldview.
>typically, as a trend, very rich people lean rightward, it's in their material interest, since most of the very rich are owning-class (bourgeoisie) and maintain their wealth through exploiting the worker-class. They also have the resources to buy and control media, ad space (and therefore the ability to pressure media outlets with threat of boycott), marketing and manipulation services (see Cambridge Analytica scandal) and more.
It's unrealistic to take the liberalist approach of assuming that good ideas win by merit of being correct. This is obviously not true. The 'marketplace of ideas' is heavily-rigged, and especially so in the mass media spaces of the Internet, television, radio, newspapers, etc., which are privately-owned, they are not neutral or fair platforms for ideas. YouTube, TikTok, etc., content algorithms have been formally shown to push people quickly into right-wing pipelines, even pushing that content to people watching "left-wing" content.
"In every epoch, the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force." (written in 1845, still true)
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