raccoona_nongrata , 10 months ago

If you think about it it kinds of makes sense, they’re essentially the MAGA of China. It would be more strange if such an authoritarian nation like China that is hyper-focused on monitoring speech and manipulating public narrative *didn’t * have some kind of deluded super-nationalistic demographic.

I think the skepticism of their prevalence from the outside is understandable and happens because A) hardcore prepper types do tend to be melodramatic, often mixing in racism and applying terms like tankie in bad faith and B) the tankie’s themselves can often operate in a lowkey way in english-speaking communities. They can’t go into a community and immediately start advocating bloody dismantling of democracy, so it’s not immediately apparent how extreme they are until confronted with something that criticizes or contradicts the Chinese government and the like. Like Russian trolls, I don’t get the impression that they really have any issues pretending to be someone else to stir up chaos.