Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

While I don't have the energy or frankly desire to unravel the whole conversation leading to this exchange, Arthur's dissection of this one point is nice for illustrating a very big problem too many people are sleeping on: People who consider themselves extreme leftists getting

https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1244883279146143744

quietly steered towards the very far right by nazis with the savvy to frame exterminationist language as "pro-worker" talk. (Which is not something I am specifically say someone is doing in this example to be clear! Again I'm too tired to look down this specific rabbit hole.)

There's this concept in politics called "Horseshoe Theory" that says people on the same end of the political spectrum have more in common with each other than people in the middle. This is total BS and not at all where I'm taking this.

However, there is ANOTHER BS argument that

the political spectrum is this fixed, perfect ideological concept, whatever views a person holds fall at some particular point along it, which perfectly represents them, and while an individual can drift left or right along it they can only do so gradually.

The reality is, first

off, that the whole "left vs. right" thing really only works in a broad fuzzy sense, like alignments in D&D. You can't say "well I killed that one red dragon and those are evil so clearly I am good" and you can't say "I'm in favor of free health care for everyone, thus I'm left."

Someone who is unambiguously of that alignment/political affiliation and actively championing the cause properly IS going to be in favor of dragonslaying/free healthcare, but you can't say it's one for one because the most evil selfish racist in the world would agree on those

points if, say, a red dragon showed up breathing fire on them and their stuff and they need those burns to be treated but money is tight.

When we're looking at this in a fuzzy idealistic sort of way, the political spectrum doesn't really care about free healthcare as a leftist

position because "free healthcare" is part of the big leftist ideal, it's just a means to an end for the actual basic philosophical concept here, which is basically- Hey, life isn't fair. Lots of people have things really hard due to a combination of factors both man-made and not

and it is a basic fundamental fundamental duty of society to correct for all those injustices as best we can and make sure everyone gets to live a good life free of pain fear and hardship regardless of how good or bad their luck of the draw on things in general might have been.

And from that basic principle a whole lot of points of political strategy become pretty-self evident like "healthcare should be free because punishing someone who's sick or hurt by then also taking all their money is grotesque" and "wow fuck any and all kinds of discrimination."

Meanwhile the far right basic ideological principle is the opposite of this: Any good fortune I have had in my life has been because I deserve it. In some fundamental cosmic sense, I am this special chosen one, far superior to the average human and as such I must tangibly have it

much better than them, which of course will make those lesser beings resentful and thus it is important to keep them in their rightful place below me and ensure they don't get any of these things I am entitled to because I am special.

For what it's worth I honestly don't believe

there's a way to frame that that doesn't just say the far right is monstrously evil.

But again the whole thing is a spectrum, and practically speaking, no given human being is legitimately going to live at either end or be totally dedicated to one of these ideals, they're mainly

just useful as a loose guide for how to find the people who are most likely to have your back when there's a conflict you have a stake in. Like, if anyone ever introduces you to someone with a list of your lands and titles, it's pretty clear that the people you want around you if

the peasantry really decide they need some food, because they're probably dealing with similar uprisings. And if a fascist police state has decided to exterminate anyone who has a certain set of features, it makes sense to look for help from the group they'll be hitting after you

ALL OF THAT though is just about normal people just trying to live their lives and not have anyone trying to kill them or take things away from them.

Nazis and various similar groups aren't about just kinda keeping what they've got and making incremental gains. They're all about

big fast sudden changes, and jerking as many people as they can as far and quickly to the right as possible to maximize the support and minimize the risk they take in doing this stuff. And the way they go about that, while pretty simple, doesn't have a damn thing to do with any

values or vague philosophies, beyond where they want things to end up, and everything about looking for people who are really passionate or upset about things, and pasting far right ideology in as what they're passionate and upset about.

The obvious clear-cut modern examples of

this are of course Gamergate and various efforts at spin-offs like Comicsgate or Knittinggate or whathaveyou. I think we're all familiar with how this goes. Bunch of nazis pretend that they're really just big fans of Whatever, spin up a bunch of propaganda about how marginalized

people represent some existential threat to Whatever, and try to recruit actual fans of Whatever to attack those marginalized people and generally slowly turn them into new nazis to come along on the next raiding party somewhere else.

But two major points that keep getting lost.

At least not until they've hit a very serious saturation point, they never just outright SAY "Jews, Roma, trans people, austistic people, women who won't be subservient to me, people of color, disabled people, and anyone defending any of the above are the reason things are bad."

What the do is scapegoat specific autistic Jewish trans women of color who won't do their laundry for them, and say "this person is why everything sucks!" and also "this rich white guy is a victim of that evil person" and then steadily build from there towards a general notion of

all their scapegoats being part of some evil cabal, and working out that cabal's nefarious agenda and full membership roster and never calling any attention at all to the fact that they're really just compiling lists of marginalized people and presenting progressive causes as bad

until enough people are on board with and committed to the witch hunt that those facts are seen as "a sign of evil" not "what the plan was from the start." And even then, they try to be euphemistic about it. We all know what "politics" really means in "keep politics out of games"

etc. but it's still an important dog whistle.

The other thing that tends to get lost is that nazi infiltrators do, in fact, know how to market their ideas well. It's not one-size fits all sloganeering, it's tailored to the target group, and workshopped, and ideally fed out to

established members of the community to propagate who nobody would call a nazi and expect to be taken seriously. Thought goes into "hey, what does everyone gripe about?" and "what does everyone like?" and "what language do they use to talk about these things?" so we don't start

right off with "Jews control the banks and the media." We start off with "everyone is corrupt and these dudes who tell you what to think all got seduced by some evil slut to talk about stupid shallow indie games instead of hyping up the next call of duty" (and then very slowly

start painting in the full picture of how this actually happened because Jews control the banks and the media without saying so outright, like look at this "George Soros shill" talking to you right now on Twitter about this).

Anyway, this all comes around to "leftist political

circles" where people are pretty damned complacent, because obviously if what everyone HERE is passionate about is "leftist politics" then there's no way anyone can be recruited by nazis to start shouting far right talking points, right? And it's not like "keep politics out of

politics" would work as a dogwhistle. But uh... the naivety of that complacency really jumps the hell out at you the second you stop and ask "hey, wasn't 'nazi' short for something?"

It's short for National SOCIALISM people. The fact that it's so easy to flip "hardcore leftists"

into nazis is THE REASON WE CALL THEM NAZIS. Just like the reason we call them Trans Exclusive Radical Feminists is because people who think of themselves as really extreme feminists are the easiest marks for their particular brand of propaganda.

And again the reason this really

does, in fact, work, is that nazis twist around people's really specific passions and goals and such, they don't do broad overton window crap. So they can take one really specific pet leftist cause like, say, financial exploitation. And they can reframe it away from any sort of

real leftist ideals like how hey, a bunch of rich white people born into generational wealth and property ownership control all the places where people live and run every major company and exploit that position to make people who weren't born into that all starving and desperate,

and push it instead into a far right framing- hey you're a special person who works real hard and deserves nice things but there's all these greedy lazy people who don't do a damn thing and you're expected to just give away all your hard-earned money to pay for all their expenses

while they just sit around. Phrasing it in this particular broad way to widen the issue away from the idle rich charging people for participation in society by way of owning large swaths of it (and ideally away from that entirely), to this notion of various minorities and people

with serious medical problems being parasitic lesser beings. BUT this is all being propagated mainly by people who have always considered themselves to be "major voices on The Left" (who got suckered in by someone using the right sort of language) and they consider to present the

straight up well-established nazi propaganda they're now spouting as "very leftist messaging." To the extent, honestly, this being a really widespread issue people have been ignoring for WAY too long, that in an alarmingly large number of circles, the phrase "economically left"

has fully shifted from "a BS dog whistle Libertarians (who always vote Republican)" use to try and win leftist voters by promising lower taxes hoping they'll ignore their anti-gay agenda or whatever" to "the real left (as opposed to those 'centrists' winging about equality)."

That's not actually saying "keep 'politics' out of politics" but it's the same sentiment put in language that works in that context.

Also worth noting how again, the initial seeds that take root with these infiltrations are always about hitting specific individuals, as "evil"

people, generally defining evil in a way the targeted group will already accept, without even having to slide in the far right worldview first. It's just that the "crimes" are total BS. So when you have some field where, for instance, there aren't a whole lot of women around, and

you notice how people are talking about how all the women who ARE around are evil/traitors/duplicitous (not because they're women, it's just coincidental I swear) then... that should probably be a big ol' red flag that some such seeds are being planted.

Hell that's true even if

there aren't just a few people to be targeted. Like, hey. You know me. You know how turning over rocks when I see people getting mobbed and watching which other rocks or holes in the ground the various creepy crawlies revealed scurry off to is kinda like, my whole thing, right?

Two of the newer efforts nazi infiltrators seem to be getting off the ground that are still generally at that stage of "well that seems like a ridiculous thing to even be trying" but getting a few results:

- Let's try and get trans-masc people to be raging misogynists.

and

- let's try and foment some old school Puritan sexual conservatism spun up in artsy queer/furry circles.

Whole lot of random target painting going around. Lot of clearly still being workshopped sloganeering like pointing at trans women and saying "she secretly hates AFAB people"

and picking out random queer women and nonbinary people with 18+ art accounts saying they're corrupting children (I've legit seen people try and post arguments that people wouldn't tag art streams as 18+ unless they secretly want kids under 18 to sneak in). Whole lot of attacks

people who write fanfiction about or doodle hero/villain couples from whatever series and claiming they're secretly glorifying abusive relationships or whatever.

So uh... I GUESS my point with all this is like... literally any time you see anyone getting upset about anything you

should take a moment to consider who specifically is being targeted and what broadly is being pushed for and evaluate if your friends have actually been suckered in by the fringes of some fascist operation. Which, sure, when I put it THAT way sounds incredibly paranoid. But like,

the sad truth is we kind of are living through a period where fascists are actively in power and really enthusiastic about consolidating it, and really on their game about pushing it anywhere and everywhere so... no really be that paranoid please. It's pretty important to manage.