Hakim explains: https://youtu.be/LcJ5NrJtQ8g

Vijay Prashad (regularly works with Chomsky) explains: https://youtu.be/tsqE9kEsDVY

The Deprogram explains: https://youtu.be/YVYVBOFYJco

In short, "tankie" is a thought-terminating phrase thrown into any conversations where people want to get others to terminate all thought coming from people to their left. It gets thrown at communists by other communists, it gets thrown at communists by anarchists, it gets thrown at all of the above by socdems, it gets thrown at all of the above by liberals, and it gets thrown at all of the above including liberals by fascists.

Its function in actual practice is that it moves discourse and spaces rightwards. Anyone using the phrase should be completely disregarded as a person that wants you to keep your brain closed.

Of all the things Kruschev would do after Stalin's death that Stalin should’ve shot him for - running tanks into Hungary was absolutely correct

The Communists who sided with tanks going into Hungary was how Communists earned the moniker “Tankie”

Yet 50 years later it’s revealed that MI6 were training the rebels

“Tankie” should unironically be worn with pride. In the fact “tankies” were absolutely correct in characterising the uprising as a semi-fascist counter-revolution (doors of jews and Communists were marked for extermination) that needed to be put down

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/mi6-trained-rebels-to-fight-soviets-in-hungarian-revolt-1359599.html

Some of the weapons used were American, and others almost certainly British. Mr Smith says MI6 and the CIA had buried arms caches in the woods around Prague and Budapest for use by “stay-behind” parties or fifth columnists in case of war. Additional: The Truth About Hungary is a brilliant and quite short book worth reading. Published in 1957 it basically set out the character of the protests as semi-fascist and supported by the imperialist powers. Basically everything that was dismissed as Communist propaganda but has now been confirmed by the Western press. People seem to forget that Hungary only a 11 years previously was a fascist state allied with the Nazis and Left Anticommunists have continually tried to portray the uprising as a “socialist uprising but with a more human face”

https://espressostalinist.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/the-truth-about-hungary.pdf

Section from the book “The Truth about Hungary” by Herbert Aptheker; a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse in the 1940’s, and Marxist Historian. Written in 1957 it outlined what later would be confirmed by the bourgeois Western press

"The special correspondent of the Yugoslav paper, Politika, (Nov. 13, 1956) describing the events of those days, said that the homes of Communists were marked with a white cross and those of Jews with a black cross, to serve as signs for the extermination squads. “There is no longer any room for doubt,” said the Yugoslav reporter, “it is an example of classic Hungarian fascism and of White Terror. The information,” continued this writer, "coming from the provinces tells how in certain places Communists were having their eyes put out, their ears cut off, and that they were being killed in the most terrible ways."

"But the forces of reaction were rapidly consolidating their power and pushing forward on the top levels, while in the streets the blood of scores of massacred Communists, Jews, and progressives was flowing."

"Some of the reports reaching Warsaw from Budapest today caused considerable concern. These reports told of massacres of Communists and Jews by what were described as 'Fascist elements' ...." (N.Y. Times, Nov. 1. 1956)

"The evidence is conclusive that the entry of Soviet troops into Budapest stopped the execution of scores, perhaps thousands of Jews, for by the end of October and early November, anti-Semtic pogroms - hallmark of unbridled fascistic terror - were making their appearance, after an absence of some ten years, within Hungary."

"A correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv (Tel Aviv) reported:

During the uprising a number of former Nazis were released from prison and other former Nazis came to Hungary from Salzburg . . . I met them at the border . . . I saw anti-Semitic posters in Budapest . . . On the walls, street lights, streetcars, you saw inscriptions reading: “Down with Jew Gero!” “Down with Jew Rakosi!” or just simply “down with the Jews!”

Leading rabbinical circles in New York received a cable early in November from corresponding circles in Vienna that “Jewish blood is being shed by the rebels in Hungary.” Very much later-in February, 1957-the World Jewish Congress reported that “anti-Semitic excesses occurred in more than twenty villages and smaller provincial towns during the October-November revolt.” This occurred, according to this very conservative body, because “fascist and anti-Semitic groups had apparently seized the opportunity, presented by the absence of a central authority, to come to the surface.” Many among the Jewish refugees from Hungary, the report continued, had fled from this anti-Semitic pogrom-like atmosphere (N.Y. Times, Feb. 15, 1957). This confirmed the earlier report made by the British Rabbi, R. Pozner, who, after touring refugee camps, declared that “the majority of Jews who left Hungary did so for fear of the Hungarians and not the Russians.” The Paris Jewish newspaper, Naye Presse, asserted that Jewish refugees in France claimed quite generally that Soviet soldiers had saved their lives."

"Tankie" is a term originally used within the left-wing political sphere to describe those who supported the Soviet Union, including its use of military force to maintain its influence over its satellite states, particularly referring to the crushing of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and the Prague Spring in 1968 with tanks. Today, it's often used more broadly, sometimes pejoratively, to describe people who uncritically support or idealize authoritarian socialist or communist regimes, often ignoring or downplaying their human rights abuses.

• ChatGPT4

Tankies are either:

• Blue-haired white college kids from high-income families going through the commie phase that many go through due to academia’s fascination with at least the theory of it and the fact that such students start out spending most of what little free time they have online

• The stereotypical basement-dwelling, probable-chomo neckbeards with BO who moderate large subreddits, unironically believe that work should be abolished and never socially matured past high school. Examples include Doreen Ford and awkwardtheturtle.

• Edgy American 13-year-olds from high-income families who just discovered politics and chose (their idea of) communism over nazism and unironically stan Putin because they think he’s fighting something something gay/pronouns (which totally aren’t despised in Ukraine too)- as well as many other free and fair governments like North Korea and the Chinese Communist Party.

And sealioning is a type of internet trolling where you repeatedly make incessant, bad-faith attempts to “just have a debate” and then ignoring all responses unread.

Per Wikipedia, "Tankie is a pejorative label for communists and those who align with Marxism–Leninism ideology." That's basically what you get when you ask people to define, "tankie."

But, as with most perjoratives, its usage has expanded. It can still be used in its original meaning but it's often used much more broadly. If you do a search on how people use the word "tankie" (like in comment threads) you'll see it's now commonly used to describe anyone who isn't sufficiently critical of China and Russia and sometimes as a modern synonym for "un-American".