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)
my experience as someone who was exposed to right-wing ideas as a youth on the internet:
my earliest days on the internet were primarily motivated by video games firstly and porn after that. i started posting on anime forums first where there was basically zero politics, but they would link to vierkanal from time to time so i started browsing there. this Wal probably around 2009/2010 so /pol/ didn't exist yet and /news/ had already been shut down due to being flooded by stormfronters and neo-nazis. i primarily browsed /v/ and met people through steam groups. one of my friends would casually say unwelcoming things about jews, and being young and impressionable i just went along with it. the influence from all these things was very gradual, and because i swallowed the american propaganda about communism being a dangerous murderous ideology i tended to stay away from leftist thought and assumed leftists themselves were just monsters who wanted to kill people. at some point neo-nazi posting on vierkanal started ramping up and so /pol/ was created as a containment board. the site's cultural influence was still pretty high and so some of the best talented artists making memes mingled with right wing ideas, and it was seen as a cool counter-culture movement. we thought: the american government was corrupt, leftists want to take avay muh free speech and liberty, and they both hate hitler. hitler talked about the banks and how jews had infiltrated society, etc. and so he must be right due to being so hated. as social outcasts ourselves we closely identified with all of this. after this things just snowballed, right wingers in america got word of the radicalization of the youth, donald trump came around, elon musk got involved, yada yada the rest is history. now we have all the big tech companies enabling right wing propaganda because many of them believe it and become it helps them keep the capitalist chains around our necks. right wing propaganda is easy to swallow because it tells people, "you know all feelings you get about killing people you dont like and being horribly cruel to others because they bother you? well guess what, that's actually the right thing to do!" you'll see that this is the basic mode of right-wing thought. it's emotion first, and everything else is rationalization. they'll do a bit of quoting from a book they read 10 years ago picking certain lines that agree with them for the appearance of being educated, but it's all just decoration. right-wingers are obsessed with aesthetics only for the most part. however because i was always oriented towards educating myself, i never fully bought into all the bullshit. i always maintained the socratic ideal of always doubting yourself, and it wasn't until i took education seriously, actually reading history and philosophy, etc., and until i completely detached from vierkanal because it had turned into a worse version of twitter with an unbelievably petty and corrupt moderation staff that i was able to make the connection that i had in fact been duped by people i had thought were intelligent and well read. if you try to question right wingers about their beliefs, and i mean, really interrogate them, don't give them any breathing room, you'll realize that most of the are really just nihilists. any principles they pretend to hold are immediately thrown under the bus the minute you point out the inconsistencies in their logic. in the end they will deny everything they purported to believe and continually contradict themselves under the guise of post-irony just to protect their ability to deem anybody they don't like as subhuman and deserving of death, without a hint of rational thought or logic behind it, just pure bestial killing instinct and a thirst for blood.
>>2557756>Why is the west Nazi?<Because CHYNAH!ecerybody laugh at the westoid
>>2557753Liberal Democrats are literally just as bad as Nazis. Your whole conception of "right-wing" is broken.
bot farms
>>2557753If you exclude liberals/libertarians then rightoidism is easier to understand as its more of a feeling than a concrete ideology. Its just hatred towards outgroups and narcissistic self love towards ingroup if you boil it down to its core.
>>2593507I do wonder how obvious it was that rightoids prioritize aesthetics and "feels over reals" before the internet. That shit is pretty apparent from a cursory inspection of couple right wing social media pages, like most of the accounts bitching and moaning abt muh western culture don't even post about European culture or history outside of slop images of greco-roman statues, they probably think baroque is a fucking woodwind instrument. I mean imagine converting to a religion based solely on the aesthetics of there iconography(although I would bet a lot of the loli avatar ones like organized religion for grooming reasons tbh). iirc some of the italian futurists did outright say they prioritize passion and aesthetics over materialism and empiricism but ironically a lot of modern day rightoids would probably denounce futurist art as degenerate modern art thats gonna turn kids gay or something.
>>2593684p much, marxist types have to actually care about material reality in the real world while rightoids just make shit up that affirms there belief that there just inherently better than everyone else and the only reason this isn't reflected by reality is [insert scapegoat here]. In the time it takes to find a couple decent sources on a period of history or field of study a rightoid propagandist can churn huge amounts of slop that tells the intended audience there literally the main character in a world of mindless NPCs. Some people would rather just tell themselves that message every waking day of their life than even come close to admitting there just another schmuck like the rest of us. There not just another worker like the vast majority of the human population you see there actually a based schizotrad ubermensch not because of accomplishments or talents or anything like that but because of there skin color and/or aristocratic sovl.
>>2593769>I do wonder how obvious it was that rightoids prioritize aesthetics and "feels over reals" before the internet. not very i think, unless you were an intellectual. that's the reason why it gained such a strong foothold on the internet, but now the genie is out of the bottle, we got our wishes with trump, and predictably we got fucked over. the only people hanging onto it are the ones who's intellectual fields lie dead and decripit. they live off the moldy scraps of corn they harvested ages ago content to live off a diet of the unchanged comforting bedtime stories they heard as a child, much like an old crotchety man who watches fox news every day and gets angry when something doesn't conform to his idealized version of things where his knowledge is complete and omnescient.
although the youth are just as susceptible to idealism and indulgence of their base instincts as always, it's difficult to ignore the failures of this little fascist experiment that brought practically nothing new and has only degraded our quality of life. i think leftism should stay somewhat of an underground movement, because under this capitalist system even an ideology that calls for its abolishment is a commodity to be exploited. it also makes it seem more attractive and counter-culture. those things come in cycles and we can already see right wing thought becoming stale and crusty.
>>2557753>short, simple answers to complicated issuesSure but leftists also have all kinds of esoteric arguments about how things are the exact opposite of how they seem to normal people ("dialectics" being the biggest offender, picrel). Or as Marx said:
<But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.Even if the left is convincing, the next step is doing things that will get you treated very badly by the powers that be.
>>2557784Glorify revolution and reconstruction, kids fucking love building in Minecraft, it will scratch the itch i assure you
In terms of right-wing religious pipelines (TradCath converts, etc.), this largely stems from people wanting a sense of purpose in their lives that leftism is too much of a clusterfuck to fill. Think about it. Most "leftism" in the West today revolves around consumer identities. Queerness is a consumer identity. Neurodivergent has become a consumer identity. Liberal feminism is a consumer identity. Even being a run-of-the-mill social democrat is a consumer identity. That kind of thing. This hyper-individualism and fixation on individual identity feels empty after a while. Leftist spaces are mostly online now, where you'll find hundreds of people who share your identity but nothing more. But if you become a born-again Evangelical or Catholic convert you'll find a wonderful IRL community and a sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself.
>>2557753Because they are individually getting billions of dollars in funding from the bourgeoisie, whereas communists run on a budget of a university bookclub. Do the math.
For example, look at how much money Charlie Kirk was getting for being a colledge student debator.
>>2593507>it's emotion first, and everything else is rationalization. Yep. You summed it quite well actually. Much of what the right intrinsically understands and plays to is ingrained (group) beliefs that dictate behavior.
In my country (America) there are a lot of people who are just defiantly mean and respect viciousness. Nick Fuentes says he's a 27-year-old virgin who has never had sex? Well, look around. A lot of white males have either dismal sex lives or no sex lives at all. No dates worth remembering, no romance worth reliving. There's a weird and toxic mix of anomie, cowardice, thwarted expectations, shame, and a feeling of wretchedness running throughout this country which run directly into the right-wing camp, and also quite naturally leads to a desire for spite and vengeance against anyone who they do perceive as enjoying their lives and having sex (i.e. people such as yourself). They want to see people like you suffer while impaled on a stake.
What if terrorists got ahold of several nuclear bombs and detonated them simultaneously in the middle of Los Angeles and Manhattan? These guys would finally have a real chance at feeling empowered. Think of this guy from the movie Escape From L.A. and it's not that far removed from what's going on inside the mind of such a person when they're deep inside REM sleep.
>why is bourgeoisie supported thing winning
>>2557837>hey gay nazi poster whats your take on douglas murray? how would you classify him as a right wing gay in politics?Hey sorry, I missed this but, yeah I think so. Neocon. I'd describe him as a neocon.
He wants to be Christopher Hitchens except Hitchens wasn't a Zionist (he never went that far). He very clearly is trying to model himself after Hitchens. He's a particularly English type of right-wing gay. What he has working for him is a very well patented "style." I can't explain it but his method works to lull people into a certain mindset, and he has certain tricks, some of which he directly lifted off of Hitchens. It's in the intonation of the voice and certain tropes, like he went to Israel to pose for photos somewhere in Gaza, but he wasn't in any real danger. Then he'd criticize people who don't like Israel by saying that ~he actually went there~ and he's old-fashioned like that, as if that gives him some special insight (this is bullshit for several reasons I can go into).
He will name-drop people which makes his audience feel sophisticated. When talking about antisemitism he will quote Vasily Grossman (who served in the Red Army during World War II btw), and Grossman did have real insights on it. Grossman was not wrong about what he said. But Murray will redirect this towards support for Israel and I don't know what Grossman would think about that. At any rate I think the average Douglas Murray fan is mroe affluent. The opera-house crowd I think. There's a Sam Kriss article about him that's pretty good:
https://samkriss.substack.com/p/douglas-murray-gruesome-toadyBut I would say this brand of neoconservative can be attractive to gay men because it's articulated within this framework of liberalism and the European Enlightenment which has been (they argue) beneficial for you.
>>2594853Thanks for the response.
I’d never made the link that Murray is trying to copy Hitchens, but it makes perfect sense. He has the plummy public school accent so beloved by people. Even Brits fall for it all the time (see Jacob Rees-Moggs, a fake aristocrat, but wear a monocle and top hat and a copy of the FT, and some people go gaga, and it’s not even people you expect)
hitchens anti zionism is very interesting because on the one hand it's quite logical (Zionists get mocked all the time for mocking religion, but suddenly believe the Bible when it comes to land claims), but doesn't really seem to fit in with the rest of the New Atheists, or neocons who were rabid supporters of the Israel project? I wonder if his stance on Israel would have changed over time had he lived?
Would he increasingly see Tehran as an overarching threat? The increasingly role of religion in the Palestinian resistance? The rise of isis in the Syrian war?
>>2593507>if you try to question right wingers about their beliefs, and i mean, really interrogate them, don't give them any breathing room, you'll realize that most of the are really just nihilists.trvke
>>2557849You're right with this, the left has always been terrible at extending it's reach. They just keep getting into splinters.
>>2558139Baby boilers in a nutshell, much of the further left resemble a cult, while right wingers give the image of a "unifying" team, so even barely right wing people start getting into it.
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