The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

My go-to example of this in Occupy were kids who "not to brag but had been an anarchist now for OVER A MONTH" getting furious and yelling at longstanding anarchists that we were "fake anarchists who don't know anything!" because we weren't pacifists.

See also leftypol & the dirtbaggers. Folks get converted on one issue and then recoil about being expected to also learn / change their opinion on a variety of other topics. *Respecting pronouns?! Never! You olds are a joke! We're making a new movement with hookers & blackjack!*

Anyway, tankies and their eternal tactics of parasitic duplicitous entryism are particularly effective online with kids who are freshfaced and have no deep AFK contact with radical/activist spaces. They basically ate 99% of meme pages on facebook and every subreddit.

Now did some of these people get hooked up with checks from the PRC or something? Maybe. We've seen eg DPRK funding neonazi reading groups. But I think this is minor and is not responsible for the 2015/2016 tankie explosion. Bernie did that.

I mean quite literally it was Bernie. In 2016 an activist group I was in was interviewing people looking to get involved and we found (to my comrades' shock) a number of fervent bloodthirsty tankies. Looking at their social media they were THREE MONTHS into being tankies.

I mean literally we're talking about people who had been Bernie Bernie Bernie liberals and then the moment prospects for further standing in that scene fell out with the collapse of his campaign they turned on a dime and got into Stalin did nothing wrong, Castro's a hero, etc.

These kids had basically never done activism before and knew NOTHING but were fronting as longtime super serious radicals. They were *astonished* to learn we were all anarchists. They didn't know anarchists were real or 90% of the actual activist scene.

These kids who had again, three months prior been all about Bernie and had no fucking politics beyond a few Bernie videos they watched, were making posts to their social media praising Stalin exterminating anarchists.