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The Great Replacement theory is good at motivating people. However, as is also the case with Holocaust denial, the kind of people that it attracts are about 5% smart, sometimes even quite smart, but 95% very stupid. The reason in both cases, I think, is that it is hard for anyone who is familiar with history and is capable of even somewhat objectively looking at politics to believe that elites are both aligned enough with one another and competent enough to pull off conspiracies of the scale that faking the Holocaust or globally coordinating to destroy whites would require. As for why these ideas sometimes attract smart people, well, smart people's intelligence is uneven.
This, perhaps, is the far right's fundamental problem. It largely attracts imbeciles and literally mentally ill people. Now, this statement might come off as uncharitable, but I think that it is objectively accurate. Look at 4chan /pol/ for example. It is mostly made up of people who are some combination of 1) so ideologically minded that they interpret all politics through a simplistic theory (which makes them incapable of grasping nuance), 2) too stupid to follow even very simple chains of logical argument, and 3) literally mentally ill.
They do have some political strengths. For one thing, their stupidity and emotional frustration makes them doggedly tenacious. For another, they are willing to say some unpopular and taboo truths. However, despite their tenacity it is hard for me to imagine such people being competent enough to take over any society in which their opinions are not already very widely popular. And although they do speak some taboo truths, they shoot themselves in the foot by also being so ideological that they frequently accompany those truths with utter nonsense.
There are subsets of the left that have a similar problem in that they are largely made up of tenacious idiots. However, they have better branding than the far right does because those leftists' declared goals are basically "peace, love, equality, tolerance, and puppies" and to understand why their politics are a problem you have to be smart and knowledgeable enough to realize what sort of damage those people are doing and are likely to keep doing in their supposed pursuit of peace, love, equality, tolerance, and puppies. To understand how and why the far right might cause problems, on the other hand, you basically just have to have heard of Adolf Hitler.
Now, someone might say "but Stalin and Mao...". Yes, they are popular with tankies but very few wokists go around trying to defend Stalin and Mao. When it comes to the far right and Hitler, on the other hand...
I’m not sure that’s true. Barely anyone even on the far-right defends Hitler.
On the other hand, it’s fairly common to find who excuse, or are apologetics for, the USSR and pre-Deng China — more often for Mao and Lenin, perhaps less often for Stalin, but surely still more than for Hitler!
I don't know about this. I see a lot more rightists defending Hitler than I do leftists defending Stalin and Mao. Certainly here on the Motte, you will find more rightists at least implying that the Nazis had the right idea, whereas I can't recall any leftist defending Mao or the USSR since marxbro got banned way back when. Granted, the Motte is not a representative sample size, but this matches what I see in more normie online places as well (those few in which you can still find far rightists and far leftists coexisting).
Well that's just the thing isn't it? What places are those? Because I haven't been on twitter in a long time, but there were so many USSR fans on there a few years ago that people would refer to tankie twitter like black twitter or weird twitter. Radical leftists don't have to hide in forums for pedantic contrarians.
Tankie twitter is still there, while neo-nazi accounts are still mercilessly deleted.
Dunno why Elon does not put his big hammer down, why he does not give order to treat hammer and sickle accounts just like swastika accounts. Normie conservatives would be in high heavens, while normie liberals would have to tie themselves in knots explaining why banning Nazis is heroic fight against hate speech, while banning Communists is nazi censorship.
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