Thread by @Noahpinion

This guy isn't a tankie, but this kind of thinking -- we all have to just let (insert communist empire here) conquer whatever they want, because anything else equals full-scale nuclear annihilation -- pretty quickly leads to tankie conclusions.

https://twitter.com/robrousseau/status/1469840706701344769

It's just "better red than dead"

The tankies themselves are this tiny irrelevant cabal of sickos. But there are a much larger number of leftists out there who are susceptible to the idea that the U.S. is the source of all conflict, that conquest by "communist" empires is actually resistance or liberation, etc.

And just as Nazis slipped ideas into Trump's movement, tankies are able to slip some ideas into the socialist movement -- the belief that the repression of the Uyghurs isn't real being the most prominent of these.

Of course, the socialists won't take over the Dems the way Trump's movement took over the GOP, so the tankies will be far less consequential than the Nazis were in the 2010s.

But as Biden and progressives triangulate the socialist Left -- adopting bold economic initiatives while staying pretty centrist on foreign policy -- socialists will turn ever more to foreign policy to differentiate themselves from the establishment.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/biden-is-tri…

So my instinct is that not only do tankies themselves not matter, but the ideas they've managed to quasi-mainstream will also ultimately not matter.

BUT, in the age of Twitter, I never quite know what's impossible. And I'd rather not be unpleasantly surprised.

(end)