Chapotraphouse

I think your perspective is biased based on where you live. The people that I meet in real life tend to be more right wing than social media.

If you think the right wing is collapsing, then who are all of the people signing up to become members of the ICE gestapo?

Also tiktok is very soon to be owned by the Zionist Billionaire Trump-Loyalist Larry Ellison.

From my perspective (canada construction worker) everyone on the construction site is at least performatively right wing or doesn't dare mention their opinions.

Like the side streets where we park around a new building will be littered with "FUCK ~~TRUDEAU~~ CARNEY" plastered pickup trucks by 6am

its not going to be easy. im not saying it will be. but if we can all just come together and vote reeeaaalllyy hard for kamala in 2028 we can all go back to brunch

social media, in general, seems to give its users the impression they have their fingers on the pulse. this is especially true for those engaging in these attention campaigns of bots pushing a narrative, and it seems to create a feedback loop. they're like social power users and they are highly sensitive to all the stats that say their campaigns are reaching receptive audiences.

it's one thing to fund propaganda and blast it out to move the needle, but what seems to have been going on for a while with social media (and accelerating) is that the people making/pushing it hardest are also listening to it and internalizing it deepest.

and because the right's platform is so large and ubiquitous now in our culture, the feedback loop has produced this enormous bullshit maelstrom they can all pile into and have their hysterical chants echo back like hymns. it's everywhere they go, talk radio, streams, podcasts, cable news: it's only escapable with determination and effort.

but i also think there are diminishing returns on bots in the commentariat. more people are burned out of arguing online, there's an understanding that it isn't productive or constructive for exchange information or ideas. and part of that is aknowledging that the person you're arguing with could just be some bot or a bozo with a goal of derailing conversation by being a horse's ass.

i don't know what's next, but i do get the impression that the louder and more bizarre the right's messaging gets in chasing the ultra-online weirdo right, the more it will lose traction with typical people and drive them to tune out if not reject its messages and the medium overall.

like there's really only so many things you can call woke/gay before its so incomprehensible that even some people who habitually want to follow you aren't sure what you're telling them to think anymore.

What happens next?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin

During the 1930s, when the U.S. population was about 120 million, an estimated 30 million listeners tuned in to his weekly broadcasts.

When I can't afford restaurants, I eat at home. When I can't afford streaming services, I watch things on my computer. When the algorithm recommends streamers, I watch streamers. When the streamers it recommends are rabidly right-wing and the algorithm self-reinforces if I accidentally click one, I'm walking through a minefield of Father Coughlins. A total loss of institutional legitimacy only means that every individual voice has equal legitimacy to the viewer.

As things get worse people like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes have and will become the Personal Jesusii of the right. That's a lot more powerful than MAGA's aimlessness because the parasocial attachment is stronger/more constant. The 1930s proxy was only interrupted by the New Deal/WW2 drastically changing material conditions and a wartime ban on fascist broadcasts. It will probably succeed today given how much more advanced the tech is.

The alt right people I know are excellent at distancing themselves from the distasteful aspects of their chosen leadership, but they are more committed to Trump and his kind than ever. The do your research crowd is impressively good at "well I haven't read up on that myself" every time time you mention the flagrant crimes, or the intentional destabilization, the theft of public resources, and so on. In some sense, I get the ones like MTG and Owens. They are just grifters unapologetically doing what they do. But for every one of them, there's a million people who defend and protect them just because Jesus says so.

There is no falling out on the alt right side. They are expert trolls who despite what they say on twitter, are as committed to this regime as they ever were.

We might see more political violence, but I'm skeptical it'll ratchet up. The Democratic party has made being anti-gun it's identity for a couple generations now; it's out of character for them. The current MAGA regime knows who and where every non-MAGA gun owner is. They'll probably find a way to disarm their opposition, and the Dem leaders in the blue states will help them do it.

Social media is mostly bots

Maybe, I'm still not inclined to believe people adjust themselves in the online chambers they enter, but that's not relevant anyway. If social media didn't fulfill its purpose, they wouldn't be putting the resources into ads and bots. E.g. twitter may be a rightist shithole, but it's still pushing people right.

most people hate the government

Not very meaningful I'm afraid. They largely don't question their government at fundamental level, or the structure of the political economy, something that's taught implicitly to be the natural order of things. As such, their hate takes the form of useless protests and inaction.

Material conditions are getting worse

It is, but the US has been a hellhole for some time. Between receiving the scraps of imperialism and Amy revolutionary getting too loud getting murdered, the western proletariat has been unable to do much as demand reforms.

The right wing coalition is falling apart

It's merely responding to popular will, taking new shape to suit the mood of the audience. Rightist movements can add colours to the chameleon, it's only natural for those spineless worms to abandon previously claimed principles for the slightest gain. A shakeup is inevitable and a lot of old faces will be shed, but the core character of the right will remain the same.

I agree with you up to a point. I do think MAGA will fall apart when Trump retires/dies (Carlson, Owens, and MTG are being proactive about jumping off the ship before it starts sinking), but the missing part of the equation is that the Democrats are vastly more right-winged than what they were in say 2016 and because the Democrats are far more right-winged, the Republicans will have no choice but to be even more right-winged in order to electorally differentiate themselves from the Democrats. Your average non-MAGA Republicans got dragged to the right due to MAGA and in a post-MAGA world, they will be pushed to the right by post-MAGA Democrats. Current Democrats are already more right-winged than Bush Jr (Bush Jr at least blames the Zionist entity for troubles in the West Bank when modern Democrats won't even do that). I am not looking forward to how much more reactionary post-MAGA Democrats will be. Who cares if the post-MAGA GOP no longer malds about cultural war bullshit if they benefit or continue reactionary policies that post-MAGA Democrats started?

Remember, police funding skyrocketed under Biden, not Trump. Cop cities where police get trained by the IOF popped off under Biden, not Trump. ICE gets all the media spotlight, but ICE would be nowhere near as effective without local police giving ICE the lay of the land and supplementing them with additional manpower, local police which received massive funding under Biden, not Trump.

And as for people like Mamdani, the more I think about it, the more I see it a step back from 2016-era Sanders. It's almost a decade at this point, but I remember how people were genuinely excited about Sanders. And a big part of that excitement was the fact that Sanders wasn't a Democrat. This got spun to him being an "outsider," which is completely untrue since he has decades of experience as a senator. No, a major source of excitement was the fact that he was a non-Democrat who entered the Democratic primaries as a Democrat to steal the Democratic nomination from Clinton, a person everyone fucking hated. This was why Clinton stans fucking hated Sanders so much. For a millennial who got radicalized by OWS, 2016-era Sanders really was something to be excited about, someone who could finally smash the duopoly.

Of course, it turned out that Sanders was a sheepdog and his major political blunder/sheepdog subroutine being activated was refusing to form a new political party after 2016. Now we're stuck with various (faux) progressive figures who don't even have it in them to run as independents like Sanders. So much for smashing the duopoly. I guess instead of forming a real workers party or having the bare dignity to run as an independent, we can try reforming the party that started out as the pro-slavery party whose party line included thinking runaway slaves suffer from a mental disorder.

"we're gonna see more Luigis and Tyler Robinsons in a country with way to many guns."

I'm not convinced the people making legislation and executive decisions in our government currently understand that the bots are not real people

In reality its time to band together or die. The owning class is winding up the fattest punch to the face of workers the world over. They have been salivating for this for decades. If we don't start ripping these people from their summer mansions and either liquidate or reform our government we are in for hell on earth for us, paradise for them.

It's true that this shit is astroturfed. Unfortunately, this has a very negative effect on young people (who spend a lot of time online) during their formative years. They astroturf like this because it actually is effective.

I don't know how much of a reach the internet really has a lot of it is definitely bots, but I do know there's isolated people who get funneled into right-wing extremist groups and I suspect a lot of this has to do with the fact hat we've basically let them dominate the online space. Which is where a lot of isolated people these days spend their time.

And it's easy to laugh at them, especially since their numbers are not that large. Well this is the kind of person who could be turned into a Unit 731 Operator and then it's not that funny anymore.

I'm quite lonely because my disabilities+being trans makes it hard to integrate and it's scary how easy it is to run into a RWer who will be more than happy to welcome me, but if I try to find a more left wing oriented spaces there's like nothing there. And of course there's nothing there, nobody can afford to broadcast their existence online even if they wanted to or they will put themselves in danger. The few friends I do have just think I am wasting my time and nothing can be done, all of them have buddies who voted for shit like AfD too, which is lovely.

The only hope I do have is literally the fact that Lenin managed to get something together in worse conditions than this. So it's not impossible for things to get better. I just don't know if we have anyone capable of becoming such a leading figure and that's what worries me the most. Sorry if i'm being a bit too doomer here.

To add another anecdote, my dad is also 60 but he gets his news from places like the new york crimes and he’s still on twitter (the novelty of knowing when a hockey goal is scored before it happens on TV never wore off for him). However even with that type of exposure he’s not falling for the venezuela war consent manufacturing. Plus he actually agreed with me recently when I told him that polls are fake, which is a big deal because he usually pretty contrarian to anything political I say and especially if it’s about how the whole system is a sham.