Friend Infected With Right Wing Brain Worms - What to Do?

It really seems like this video and similar stuff very suddenly landed today with a ton of people who are generally not very political or tuned in to what's going on, and it really is making me wonder how this came about. I'm not usually a paranoid person, but it feels really weird and suspicious.

It is. She has a lot of bad money behind her in the US and UK.

Soviets

There’s always been a market for speakers who base their entire career on assuaging the fears of white people who think they’re not racist. It makes people uncomfortable when they’re confronted with the scope of systemic racism, and instead of listening to the many, many people who are making it clear what is going on, they’re more likely to share something that reinforces their own view.

On the bright side, it’s good that they feel uncomfortable, but it’s depressing that instead of confronting that feeling and doing the slightest amount of work, they’d fall back to: No, it’s the protesters who are wrong. The nice black lady in the video told me so. I can go back to my life and change nothing.

This Is Wild: http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2016/04/20/social-autopsy-founder-candace-owen-channels-gamergate-in-bizarre-attack-on-zoe-quinn/

How did I not realize/remember that’s who she was?

I forgot that she was the person who started the wrong-headed public doxxing endeavor but, in retrospect, the idea she was just misguided but well-intentioned seem wrong.

That was one thing I kept hearing, "she seems like such a nice lady." Her whole thing is to use fake reasonableness to obscure just how extreme and contentious her views are.

Its a key part of how this stuff works, fake reasonableness or disdain, both drawing attention to the fact their opponents are losing it, have gone off the deep end, are histrionic.

I heard some British commentator going on about the statue in Bristol and how mob rule had taken root and the British way of life is at the end of the road. The poor soul clearly believed it, the emotion in his voice, the realization that it was this statue today, your car and family tomorrow. Real emotion, no grift. He should think himself lucky, he was at least true to himself, unlike Owens, Pool, Rubin and other grifters (though Owens seems to enjoy it, no signs of self hatred like Pim Tool)

I mean, if his car was a monument to a historical slave trader, I’d be all for pushing it into the ocean

that's exactly how Candace Owens wins over gullible people. she has a quiet, smooth tone, and a much more muted demeanor than the typical alt-right asshole, so people conflate that with being reasonable. before I knew who she was, in the first few minutes of the video, I just thought she was someone who held a different opinion within her own community, but two minutes later into the video, it was obvious it was a grift.

wow, i have no idea this was the same person from that Doxing crap

I was going to suggest she's benefitting from our collective forgetfulness, but really, the only reason her video went viral is that the words "Confession: I don't support George Floyd" appear in her video thumbnail, most people probably saw that and shared.

she's been on my radar for years now, it is mysterious to me what motivates her or how she forms her thinking but she has a knack for being wrong about absolutely everything.

My uncle finally blocked me on FB, I think it was me mentioning to someone that I had Muslim coworkers, friends, and family, and asked them how many Muslims they knew that did it. My aunt (his sister) hasn't yet, but she doesn't take kindly to being fact-checked; she was proclaiming a Dallas shopowner who was beaten to death by rioters died yesterday. My link fact-checking that garnered a "you don't know how to read" from her. Yes, too far gone.

the second season of Dear White People had a Candace Owens grifter character played by Tessa Thompson. It was good because she plays the protaganist in the movie so there's a scene with her confronting her movie character in the show about her selling out.

lol the "Dallas shopowner" was a) not a shopowner, but just a random citizen, and b) a piece of shit who charged protesters with a fucking machete. fuck that guy and anybody who cried over him.

the same dude has videos or pics of him with a sword, and it's one of those goofy-ass lord of the rings replicas

he is not trained in the sword

one of my Republican friends, who actually is the compassionate type and not a raging lunatic, even fell for the Dallas shopowner shit. when one of my other friends shared a link clarifying what really happened, she thanked her, yet five minutes later, said she was sobbing all day, saying "nobody intervened to stop or help him", as if she had forgotten hearing five minutes earlier that the man was a raging lunatic who attempted to inflict harm in a crowd and cut a skateboarder's arm.

I suspect it's less malice and more she still falls for viral bullshit too much (as do a lot of my liberal friends, tbf)

my dad texted me this morning: "Now Antifa wants to cancel Paw Patrol! They've gone too far!" - now, I know he's half joking, but this clearly means he's watching some FOX/OANN shit right?

paw patrol is copaganda for kids I hope they cancel it

Well, only one of the dogs is a police dog, and he's not involved in every mission - the water dog handles water-related stuff, the construction dog handles construction-related stuff, etc. That's not too far off from the defund-the-police goal of reducing the overreliance on cops in too many different kinds of situations.

I’m somewhat in hysterics that people are taking the Paw Patrol stuff at face value

They're good dogs Brent

Found on FB: All Dogs Go To Heaven Except for Those Class Traitors in the Paw Patrol pic.twitter.com/kJWyWQ1cQx

— cat benatar (@feliskathryn) June 9, 2019

HOW IS ANYONE KEEPING A STRAIGHT FACE!? Ventura County Board of Supervisors meeting. #shesings pic.twitter.com/Bkw3xcPxVA

— Katie (@Katiehugscats) June 16, 2020

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/assets/media/img/mt/2019/03/schitts/lead_720_405.jpg?mod=1552413729

The bell ringing has a bit of a shitty Dr. Amp vibe to it

The mountains white with foam?

foaming whites

fans of this thread may (or may not) like this pretty wild story of a guy who got brain-wormed by youtube in a number of different ways over time

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/podcasts/rabbit-hole-internet-youtube-virus.html

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Saturday, May 9, 2020 3:00 PM (one month ago) bookmarkflaglink

I've just listened to this series.

* It is important / overdue for someone to do a podcast about this stuff
* The production quality / sound collage stuff is superb
* A lot of care and attention has gone into it
* On the whole it was a fascinating listen and worth checking out

but

* There is (unsurprisingly) an underlying assumption behind it that big media companies like NYT are just doing their best and have been misunderstood
* There is zero accountability for either the people spreading this stuff (chummy interview with Pewdiepie was very annoying) or the political / media / social world which has made people feel desperate, frustrated and ready to believe this shit in the first place
* And not really the scope of the thing, but the 4chan shitposting style of humour was not explained, and it's a huge part of why this stuff is so bad and so hard to fight

There are a ton of other interviews on Youtube with this Caleb guy (and he has his own channel). There is a reasonable amount of such content, though how usefully each is explored is open to question.

The basic underlying theme seems, unsurprisingly to revolve around offense and reaction. Its one of the reasons I offer neither to my RW cousin. This doesn't mean I am "understanding" or "sympathizing", as those are both emotive reactions also. The reactions I give my cousin are more in line with the reactions I would give a person asking for directions on the street.

A large part of the information transmitted isn't in the words but in the delivery. Negative reaction is received as validation, I try and remove all dopamine hits from these interactions. The dopamine is the fuel.

lol ur so triggered

* There is (unsurprisingly) an underlying assumption behind it that big media companies like NYT are just doing their best and have been misunderstood
* There is zero accountability for either the people spreading this stuff (chummy interview with Pewdiepie was very annoying) or the political / media / social world which has made people feel desperate, frustrated and ready to believe this shit in the first place
* And not really the scope of the thing, but the 4chan shitposting style of humour was not explained, and it's a huge part of why this stuff is so bad and so hard to fight

extremely otm

Also been thinking about how it takes left wing channels like contrapoints openly fighting fire with fire by using memes, etc. and sneakily implies that this means they are just a left wing version of alt-right edgelords and part of the same rubbish we should all abandon for the safe professional hands of the NYT, ugh.

Yes, that's what I think about when I find myself agreeing too hard with one of those left-wing videos, tbh. Too much confirmation bias? Kidding myself?

The echo chamber is a real thing, and obviously everyone needs to question themselves, but still, no, there is still a huge difference between these two things, one is cynically using sexual/social frustration and anti-intellectualism to promote an agenda of hate, the other is not doing that.

For the most part, I don't follow the far right / red pill / internet conspiracy culture. A few months ago I couldn't've told you more about Gamergate than that a bunch of right-wing trolls harassed a group of women bloggers in 2016, that Pewdiepie was a starter fascist, and that Pizzagate was bonkers. But I rent in a two-family house and my landlady has become a radicalized Infowars goof in the past few years. She cornered me in March to talk about the 5G towers, monkey trials, Somalians, and FEMA. I figured I'd better read up on whose beliefs she was parroting. I enjoyed the "Rabbit Hole" series because it wove together some threads I'd been reading about as separate phenomenon. Like CAL, I had some issues with the podcast, but it gave me a coherent course through the paranoid conservative miasma.

Because I'm late to the game, I wonder if there are other 'big picture' takes that are worthy of reading? Long-form is fine.

Left channels have improved markedly after a very slow start. I think for a long time there was a lot of "go read a book", "its not my job to explain shit to you" from the left - the left pipeline was bricked up. The right didn't give a fuck about any of that, "come on in let's ride!" - which gave them a real head start

would also like to listen to a really good long-form podcast on this topic, something like "How 4chan has poisoned discourse throughout the western world and how we can go about eradicating every fucking trace of it from our culture"

The Atlantic has a whole cache of articles about the conspiracy stuff.
https://www.theatlantic.com/shadowland/

I'm interested in conspiracies insomuch as there are kernels of truth to some of what these wingnuts believe, but their ideological approach is all fucked up and so their response to these kernels of truth is overwhelmingly one of paranoia and racism.

yeah, a friend used to be into a conspiracy podcast and I enjoyed listening to it for the way out ones which sounded like a dramatisation of a Philip K Dick story, these new ones are just boring and racist.

From Behold a Pale Horse to 5G is Killing Our Police Force

Left channels have improved markedly after a very slow start. I think for a long time there was a lot of "go read a book", "its not my job to explain shit to you" from the left - the left pipeline was bricked up. The right didn't give a fuck about any of that, "come on in let's ride!" - which gave them a real head start

― anvil

my feeling is that there's more of people engaging with left ideas in good faith. i don't see that the left were any worse in the past at communicating their ideas, it was more a matter of your famous Overton Window - leftists would make predictions and people would argue with them or come up with talking points or just not take them seriously, dismiss them as "wingnuts", especially since leftist thought doesn't really correspond to the preconceived liberal-centrist "rational" worldview a lot of people (me included) were taught.

well, for more and more of us, questioning liberal-centrist assumptions has become kind of important to our survival, and even for people whom that's not true, honestly, leftist narratives are more congruent with people's lived experiences than liberal-centrist narratives are.

notably liberal centrism just cannot explain "brainworms" at all.

I co-sign that, Kate. As someone who has been a part of radical left politics on and off since I was a teenager, the number of more liberal people who have been coming into the fold during the past few years has been noticeable.

i don't see that the left were any worse in the past at communicating their ideas, it was more a matter of your famous Overton Window

Is there an argument that people on the left improving communication and being more accomodating is part of what helped shift the Overton Window? (I'm not necessarily subscribing to this view, could all be part of a virtuous circle of sorts)

Is there an argument that people on the left improving communication and being more accomodating is part of what helped shift the Overton Window? (I'm not necessarily subscribing to this view, could all be part of a virtuous circle of sorts)

― anvil

i'd certainly be open to such an argument were someone to attempt to make it! it's not the impression i've gotten, honestly - if anything i've grown _more_ skeptical of left media like breadtube and chapo over time.

It might just be that its grown larger, there's more of it? Even the fact that there is a breadtube?

Can argue there are now different problems, infighting (to an extent), the combative debate over seemingly narrow difference (yes can say this has been a feature of left since time began), the need for constant content. But on the other hand the current format seems constructed more for hoovering people up without really asking anything of them

Has anyone argued with a right-winger about Hasan Minhaj/The Patriot Act (where they might be bemoaning why they're 'not allowed' a right wing equivalent in msm)?