Has anyone else noticed how prevalent Hexbear posters have suddenly become? Maybe sometime last week I noticed nearly every political post had at least one long thread of Hexbear users that do nothing but repeat CCP talking points while waving anyway anything even remotely reliable as Western propaganda. That or getting all excited about trolled libs. The way they tell it, you’d think everything from DW, to Fox, to Propublica, to straight up AP News articles, are all written by the same people.
Not to mention, their info on the Fediverse observer is either straight up wrong or there’s some serious botting going on. According to that, the instance is less than a month old, yet somehow they already have one of the largest, most active userbases, along with far and away the most comments of any instance.
Seems to me like Lemmygrad on steroids. Considering we defederated from them, seems like a no-brainer to block Hexbear as well.
So glad this thread could become such a perfect microcosm of why we need to defederate.
Same type of person. Careerist strivers who all accept the basic liberal version of history and society. The liberal version of history coincides with the reactionary version of history because they both refuse to question the premises of capitalism. That is they both agree more over capitalism and Western Hegemony more than they disagree about specific cultural issues. They don’t all have to be in the same room, coordinating on a narrative because they all share the same boundaries of inquiry. So the same kind of stuff gets written without active coordination. This is a roundabout way to say they’re all of the same class. They have class solidarity.
A liberal news source will talk about how good and downtrodden immigrants are. A conservative news source will talk about how all immigrants are drug dealers. But they don’t disagree that there both needs to be immigration or that it needs to be regulated. A good real world example of this is Democrats flipping out over Trump’s racism and then upping funding for “border security” and advocating for a tech wall. Neither question the fundamental assumptions about immigration. Both advocate for the same idea, just in different abstractions. Nobody actually thinks the person who writes a bleeding heart article gets up from their chair and sits at a different desk where they write about caravans of cartel members. Though you do get the same person/organization drifting into sounding like their opposition, like the NYT. Which illustrates, again, that they’re the same class and ultimately share the same goals and fears.
It’s not a hard code to crack. You just have to be willing to actually question things and be curious. But there’s a lot of resentment in doing that (displayed here) because part of the media is propagandizing poor people and getting them adopt the same goals and fears as the upper classes. The people in government right now spent decades selling off your jobs and livlihood to cheaper areas of the world. Because it benefited them. One of those places was China. Capitalists gave China everything they needed to become what they are. It was fun when sowing. Now, because of problems in the West, China must become a talking point and scapegoat. The rich don’t like them because they’re closing themselves off from foreign investment and they’re not playing ball with our foreign policy. That is they pose a threat to unite with other countries and close off investment as well. If US companies can’t set up shop in Taiwan, for example, that hurts wealthy people in the US. You don’t have that wealth or investment so that argument won’t work on you. Therefore the problem must be abstracted and layered under a bunch of cultural or moral arguments. So you get stories about how the Chinese are all savage bug people who work like robots to overthrow your way of life. They’re violating your liberal ideals of free speech. They’re detaining Muslims so they’re too racist. They don’t like LGTBT people. They ruin your bitcoin gambling. They kill their people by cooking in sewage oil and their buildings fall down.
This is to get you to share opposition to China so that by the time we work ourselves into a War, you won’t really question why your children are fighting in it. They’ll go die so that US companies can keep pumping out resources from those countries and keep the competition out. All the sentiments about honor and duty and security and freedom are a lie.