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Look for newbie-nazis looking for advice on how to pull themselves slightly further in (inferior culture -> inferior people -> we need to look out for our race -> races need to keep to themselves -> we need to deport other races -> that’s too hard lets just kill them), and instead give them the most direct and awful version possible (skip to the genocide).
Speaking of newbie-Nazis, /r/Libertarian is a great place to scare them away from going full-on fascist. The libertarian-to-fascist pipeline is real, the community is large enough to get some bang for your posting buck, it’s easy and fun to dunk on a joke ideology, and there’s a fairly established subgroup of posters there who are either on the left or at least sympathetic to it. Plus, they don’t ban you even if you quote Marx, so you don’t have to bother too much with sneaking around. You can just openly describe how hellish a libertarian utopia would be (your “skip to the genocide” strategy).
The legitimate ideological openness of that sub also facilitates your first point, but even more directly: you can just give a leftist alternative and describe how it’s good; you don’t even need to wrap it in a chud veneer. Sometimes an easy, clearly-better alternative is the most convincing argument against something.
I’ve had a lot of luck directly recruiting libertarians, they’re actually the group I’ve had the most success with. You can usually get them to entertain the difference between private property and personal property, and if you spend a couple months paying attention to that then suddenly you’re a socialist. And explaining the difference between modern unions and historic radical unions (casting all anti-union propaganda as the fault of modern unions being small) works super well on libertarian tech-bros.
I’ve just stopped talking about private property at all except when someone specifically uses it. I usually just say “private ownership of the shit we need to make shit”. I guess it probably depends who you’re talking about.
I have the exact opposite experience of talking to libertarians unfortunately. It gives me some hope that you’ve had some success with them though.
The libertarians I deal with are those weird ones that overly criticize “liberals” and leftists at the drop of a dime but shrivel up and piss themselves when I deconstruct IDW bullshit or mildly push back reactionary rhetoric. These two people revolve their anti-govt attitude around George Orwell (one is obsessed with 1984 and nothing else), Ayn Rand and Thomas Sowell. Throw in the typical IDW guy videos and they become this impenetrable wall of libertarian horseshit that is almost impossible to deconstruct.
I’m not really even trying to “recruit” or convert any of them. I just get caught up in being an online guy (I mean we’re posting here ffs lol) and sometimes can’t help but fight back against the bullshit.
I probably need a new approach but god damn it is tiring
Sucks.
I guess my advice would be to try to agree with them about things being Orwellian, then immediately pivot into complaining about corporations and how the government is too beholden to them to do anything about it. Credit scores, Google/Facebook having eyes everywhere, every website runs on AWS, that sort of thing. If you really get them going then try to talk about how your boss has his job because of nepotism and you and your coworkers don’t have a say in getting rid of him, but that’s pretty advanced.
they’re further along the pipeline than the newbies being described. they’ve already started swallowing the first few layers of propaganda. the shock doctrine approach above of just like calling for genocide way before they’re ready to hear it or making them sit with the discomfort of illiberal feelings (always from a source that’s “just like them”) will land better.
I’ve had a lot of luck directly recruiting libertarians, they’re actually the group I’ve had the most success with.
They’re on the upper end of the pipeline to fascism, which makes them among the easiest to turn away.
You can usually get them to entertain the difference between private property and personal property, and if you spend a couple months paying attention to that then suddenly you’re a socialist.
This is a good entry point. Two other ones I’ve had luck with are:
- The sub is focused on capitalism far more run-of-the-mill conservative subs (and certainly more than white nationalist groups), so critiquing the places where capitalism fails most egregiously fits in pretty naturally. You don’t have to be the “but the real problem, of course, is capitalism” guy all the time because they’re discussing it so fucking much already.
- They spend a lot of time re-litigating whether we need public schools or public courts (lol) and there are just overwhelmingly good arguments for all of that stuff and more. You get lots of space to put those arguments out there, so anyone dipping their toes in and thinking “my public school wasn’t great; maybe we should just privatize all of this” can get connected with why that’s a horrible idea.
Besides derailing fascist pipelines, there’s also the benefit of sharpening your own critiques of capitalism (and your own alternative solutions).
Plus Libertarians have already somewhat revolted against the neoliberal world order (even if they basically agree with all of the basic principles), so they’re more open to structural critiques than liberals are.
They’re on the upper end of the pipeline to fascism, which makes them among the easiest to turn away.
Disagree actually. I’ve had a lot more success with libertarians than I have had with liberals. (I’ve also had more luck with chuds than liberals.)
Though I’ve spent no time on /r/libertarian. Most of the libertarians I talk to are on Hacker News.
I suppose this is where I came from. Though, I never thought ill of women, POC, or LGBT+ so maybe I was just always a socialist and didn’t have the right ‘language’ for it.
Thinking ill of women, POC, and LGBT+ people isn’t really in the “pitch” of libertarianism. But…
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They’re the first groups that suffer under a libertarian ideal, so a certain degree of callousness towards them is required to stay libertarian if you’re not completely head-in-the-sand about it
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Libertarianism is often used as a cover for stealth chuddery
