It’s because they are doing what libs to and universalising their own experience (I get my opinions from social media sites like R*ddit and YouTube), applying Orientalist and neo-red scare notions (Chiner controls TikTok and it’s corrupting the minds of the innocent!!), and then projecting this out onto communists (therefore communists get their opinions directly from TikTok).

You see this same thing coming from Va*shite hives on places like r*ddit; they ask the circlejerk why tankies are tankies and the answers are invariably that tankies are such because:

• They are dogmatically anti-American

• They have a latent desire to have authority over others and they’re using the guise of socialism as an attempt to create this set of social relations

• They are crypto-fash

• They want an excuse to worship dictators

• They are brainwashed children who are ideological weathervanes

Imo this speaks more about the person expressing these views that it does about what tankies actually believe and how they arrived at their politics. They’re essentially just telling on themselves without even realising.

Most Va*shites and baby leftists are in their late teens or early 20s.

Most Va*shites just want an excuse to denounce “authoritarian” leaders (i.e. those who are opposed to western liberal hegemony.)

Most Va*shites are incredibly comfortable with Va*sh cosying up to the far right and handling them with kid gloves, with regurgitating far right talking points and in adapting the phraseology of the far right (VDS, anyone?), and in excusing circa-fascistic actions of NATO and the US armed forces abroad as well as domestically (strange how they were so vehemently opposed to the concentration camps on the border right up until Biden came in and, despite interning more migrants in those concentration camps and continuing the construction of the border wall, you don’t hear a peep about it from them today.)

They (obviously) are ideological weathervanes and they’ll agree wholeheartedly with Va*sh’s anti-trans rhetoric or his anti-PoC rhetoric and then they’ll turn around and claim that they’re pro-trans and that they care for PoC, and they have zero theoretical grounding for their political beliefs.

In my experience, whenever I’ve drawn one of these clowns into regurgitating the position that Marx was anti-authoritarian or that I’m just a stupid tankie who is indoctrinated and who hasn’t actually read any theory, as soon as I start flexing my fluency in Marxist theory and knowledge of Marx’s position on authority (including with quotes) they fall silent immediately and scurry back to their echo chambers where they can find people to reaffirm their beliefs and preconceived notions because the cognitive dissonance is too much for them to handle.