Something I was randomly thinking about just now.

It’s well-known that right-wing personalities deliberately try to spark outrage in order to increase their audience (e.g. if they trigger the libs, then the libs will spread their message for them).

It occurs to me that such a strategy could work for other emotions besides outrage. For example, I don’t know if this is still the case, but at least for a while, there was a big right-wing movement of sharing “cringe” material, the subjects of which tended to be more left than right (e.g. protesters, feminists, vegetarians, people who express their gender in nontraditional ways, people being upset by injustice).

Has there been any success in attempting to hijack the “cringe” trend to spread leftist messages? E.g. Deliberately trying to elicit a “cringe” reaction so that people are motivated to share the message?

EDIT: Off the top of my head, I guess one small example might be CTH’s Matt and Felix embracing the “soy face” thing.