I don’t think so. For one thing he’s neither smart nor subtle enough for that. And his target audience is mainly conservatives. A fed would behave more like Vaush. Hinkle sounds to me like just another grifter looking to make money off of building a social media following.

Seeing CIA behind every account with bad takes is probably giving them too much credit. Oftentimes we assume that someone cannot genuinely hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time because it seems so obvious to us that they don’t fit together. In this case there is a clear contradiction between on the one hand believing in communism, which is an ideology of liberation for all, and on the other hand rejecting LGBT+ liberation. For us it is plain to see that these two are incongruous, but not all people who grow up in a culture with such deeply embedded prejudices have managed to reckon with and discard those prejudices. Unfortunately it happens more often than we would like to believe that people simultaneously hold both progressive and reactionary views. I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of opportunists out there who are just acting cynically in order to build some kind of following, and very likely also a few intelligence agency plants, but reactionary communists do exist.

Polls like this are just a reflection of the audience a certain channel has cultivated. If a channel with a more pro-Russian audience were to ask the same question you would get a very different distribution.

Oh look, it’s exactly what the US has been doing for the past 70 years to the global south, which in turn is just what the British were doing before the US took over the role of imperial hegemon.

My thoughts exactly!

I have no doubt that if the tables flip, and Rumble becomes big and mainstream enough to start getting pressure from the US government and corporate sponsors, this will probably all change

That’s probably how it will go. Then a new Rumble will appear and so on. The last resort of the imperialists will be to censor the internet right at the provider level, which will leave the imperial core (“the West”) in an information bubble increasingly detached from reality.

Rumble’s audience is already skeptical of mainstream media and other big tech platforms, so I’d say that it’s more likely your stuff gets traction on there

This is a very good point!

Twitch is already the reactionary version of Twitch. Twitch is a pro-imperialist platform and even more censorious than YouTube toward anti-imperialists. The post was asking about platforms that won’t do the State Department’s bidding. Twitch literally complies with anti-Russia sanctions, it bans and demonetizes Russian or pro-Russian channels.

If someone is looking for alternatives to YouTube because YouTube banned anti-imperialist channels that were getting too big, they are definitely not going to find that in Twitch.

Inevitably people who wake up to what is going on in the world are going to want to get away from these highly controlled mainstream platforms which are becoming more and more repressive as the establishment’s political control is threatened. Telling people that it’s not ok to go to alternative platforms because there is right wing content on there will only have one of two results:

Either they will abandon any nascent anti-imperialist sentiments they may have in order to be allowed to stay on the mainstream platforms, or it will drive them straight into the arms of the right which will welcome them into the alternative spaces and validate their frustration over the censorship and control they experienced on mainstream platforms.

Ultimately it is going to be inevitable that communists migrate to alternative platforms because the mainstream ones are just going to escalate their crack downs on anti-imperialist content. Branding these alternative platforms as “right wing platforms” is not going to help us in the long run. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy as leftists will avoid them and these places will become more and more right wing echochambers. Meanwhile, everyone who remains dependent on the mainstream platforms will be forced to increasingly self-censor out of fear of getting banned.

The best thing to do is to establish a presence on these alternative platforms sooner rather than than later so that when the ban on the mainstream spaces does come we will be ready and will not be starting from zero.

To be fair, the so-called “capitol riots” were pretty funny. And in principle the correct thing to do, except that the masses storming the government buildings should be aiming at toppling the bourgeois regime and establishing a socialist government, not just be butthurt that their favorite bourgeois figurehead lost an anyway farcical election. The difference however is that leftists would not be treated by the police with kid gloves like these right wing losers were.

where suddenly everybody has more or less the same talking point

That could also just be an indication that the liberal imperialist media is very efficient at relentlessly drilling the phrases and talking points that their PR people came up with into the heads of their followers through constant repetition.

A great example of this is how the European media when referring to the Ukraine conflict constantly and in unison repeats phrases such as “Putin’s war”, “unprovoked”, “full-scale invasion”, etc. They have been doing this day in and day out for over two years now. For a good chunk of the population, at least those who are not yet highly skeptical of the mainstream media, eventually this propaganda works.

reddit became a fucking hotbed of posting about how good he was as MN governor, and how full the Harris/Walz campaign rallies are

I am convinced that shit is hella astroturfed. Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of Democrat fanatics out there, but i highly suspect that they also have huge bot farms that get activated at times like this. It was the same with the whole NAFO psyop when the Ukraine conflict kicked off, yes there were some mentally unstable individuals and genuine fascists in that, but a ton of it we later found out was co-ordinated and botted almost to Zionist hasbara levels. The intelligence agencies are deep in this sort of stuff.

Point is, the image that you get of the political mood in society if you just look at online social media is deliberately and heavily manipulated.

It’s bad and it’s only going to get worse. The weaker the center gets the more unhinged liberals will become and the more we will see them compromise with and adopt the positions of the far right rather than give ground to the left.

I mean it probably is a lie, i’d multiply that number by about six to get a rough ballpark estimate. And that’s just straight up combat casualties, you add up defections and other attrition and you’re probably safer going times eight. On the other hand, i think that this is about right for Russia’s losses. As usual most of what the pro-Ukraine propaganda writes about this conflict is projection.

Maybe but that’s not what people find cool and seek to emulate. People pick up more on the superficial aesthetic of apathy than on any deeper message the show tries to have.

I didn’t watch much of that series but it seemed to be considerably darker and more cynical.

I can understand 60s nostalgia, even though much is also idealized about that period it was in many ways the last time that there was some real hope for change for the better in the West. The youth wanted a radically different kind of society, there was a strong anti-war movement, decolonization struggles were happening across the world, you could argue things appeared to be on a positive trajectory. Where the 80s and 90s were decades of counter-revolution, the 60s were at least trying to be revolutionary, if in a somewhat naive, idealist way.

But honestly these three are certainly not the worst offenders, not by a long shot. Superhero franchises for instance are half fascist ubermensch fantasy half military industrial complex propaganda. And nearly any media set in the future takes place in some kind of dystopia - it’s like Western society has become unable to even imagine a better future, or rather we are being conditioned to be incapable of imagining a better world. A healthy society would produce media portraying utopian societies to give people something to aspire to and work towards.

Instead we get it drilled into our heads again and again that things can only get worse from here. Because optimism and hope mobilize people whereas pessimism and doomerism lead to inaction and resignation, which is exactly what the ruling class wants. And if there is anything positive that is imagined about the future in such media then that thing is never the result of the mass mobilization of society toward a common goal but by the merit of individual genius, singular individuals who are superior to everyone else and who single handedly advance society and technology. A typical fascist trope.

And that’s what it boils down to. Western society’s sickness at its core is that it has a fundamentally fascist world outlook that permeates the entire Zeitgeist and is fed to us from birth, through schooling, advertising, media, politics and the structure of the economy, and which manifests as various seemingly separate pathologies but which are really interconnected and stemming from the same source: supremacism, worship of individualism, capitalist realism…

The Nazis tried and failed to do what the Anglos successfully did to a whole continent.

These are all indicative of a deep rooted sickness in Western society.

Ironically the first is probably the least objectionable, it shows how lack of social safety nets and opportunities pushes people to criminality but doesn’t romanticize that life.

The second is straight up glorifying nihilistic misanthropy, it’s making an entire generation think social apathy is cool. The third romanticizes one of the worst decades in modern history by portraying the 80s, the decade of Reaganite/Thatcherite neoliberalism, when entire societies were seized by a mass psychosis of selfishness and hyper-consumerism, through rose tinted nostalgia glasses. If someone wants to see what the 80s in America were actually like outside of the privilege bubble of suburbia they should watch John Carpenter’s They Live instead.