Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Serious question: what are the 'far-left' analogs of QAnon, Pizzagate, and the anti-vax and flat earth movements?

I'm sure it's just my bias, but I can't think of any right now.



More to the point, where are the far-left analogues that get a shout out from the POTUS and have ambassadors likely to get elected to Congress in a few months?


What does anti-vax and flat earth have to do with left or right?

Not everything is politically motivated. Some people are just ignorant or crazy.


Anti vax is very, very common across environmental/hippy leftist circles. Same thing for anti GMO FUD. Qanon is pretty uniquely dumb I agree, but I guess russiagate and the extreme "russians are everywhere" paranoia exhibited from some has some parallels. Yes, it's not (at all) as bad as Qanon, but go on twitter and you will see tons of borderline psychotic people accusing everyone of being a russian bot or spreading crazy conspiracy theories about a huge Russian total take over conspiracy that make 9/11 conspiracy theorists look sane in comparison.


> borderline psychotic people accusing everyone of being a russian bot

That at least I think it a little explainable. I'm often checking different news sources about a story from Google news, and if the comment section at the bottom of foxnews.com is anything to go by, it's extremely hard to tell what see from what you would expect a Russion bot to do to stir discontent apart from trolling and/or blind ignorance of what the article was about.

In some ways believing in bots is a bit of an uplifting story. That's a person that doesn't believe their fellow citizens could actually be as disdainful and hurtful to each other as appears readily apparent. It's real tempting to buy into that sometimes.


>> That's a person that doesn't believe their fellow citizens could actually be as disdainful and hurtful to each other as appears readily apparent. It's real tempting to buy into that sometimes.

hmmm I feel the same way I happen upon an opinion piece from the NYTimes, or a clip from MSDNC, or any of the other "the sky is falling and the fascists are at the door to destroy democracy" stories running in any mainstream news of today...


Well, you probably should, to some degree. It's obvious that the media of both sides of the spectrum have lost most of their ability to be nuanced and see the valid points of the other side, just as a lot of the people most active politically have.

The more you believe the other side is comprised of evil racist fascists, or evil pedophile fascists, the harder it is to give any of they opinions due consideration. It's probably not random that fascist shows up as an accusation by both sides.

The only thing that I think has worked to give me a somewhat fair accounting of an event over the last 6-12 months is to use Google news, and specifically seek out how both sides of the spectrum represent an event (that means seeking out the foxnews.com article most the time, but sometimes foxnews is the main one and I seek out how it's represented elsewhere). Often it's like reading high-school essays about that are about the same book but focused on entirely different themes of the plot. I generally have to synthesize my own accounting from them while weighting accordingly based on the news and the source.


- "Sex differences like career preferences taught by society and have no biological basis"

- "There's no scientific basis for race"

These positions are so entrenched that disagreeing with them publicly is to risk your career. But they're also the product of ignorance. In the world of biology, the opposite positions of these are fairly uncontroversial views. (see [1] for an example of the first)

Using a throw-away account for obvious reasons.

[1] https://quillette.com/2019/05/03/selective-blank-slatism-and...


They go by many names, but there is a Strong undercurrent of "Capitalism Bad we must have socialism" crowd on the far left that hate individual freedoms and rights and prefer Group rights and entitlements. That promote equality of outcome not equality of opportunity. That reject merit and instead want to define people based on dynamics of intersectionality.

>>AntiVax - Flat Earth

To Attribute them only to far right tells me you do not really understand these groups. They are not left or right politically, especially anti-vax for which many have far-left economic and social positions


A different/wrong/naïve political ideology is not the same as "Hilary Clinton is literally raping children in the basement of a pizza restaurant".


I think the story was the owner of said pizza joint had underaged pictures on one of his social media profiles and was using the place to arrange Epstein trips. Bill Clinton was a visitor to the island where these arragements happened. Hilary Clinton broke the law and setup a private email server that was hacked.

There is a movie on netflix about Epstein the island.

This is a news story about a series of events. It is not the same as a political ideology.


No, you are libeling a completely innocent pizza joint owner. Please stop. Someone fell for those false storied and shot up the place, and fortunately no one was killed. The made-up "Pizzagate" story has nothing to do with the very real Epstein crimes (and Donald Trump had a closer and longer association with Epstein than Bill Clinton). Young girls were abused on Epstein's island. They were not abused in the basement of a pizza place, as the original story went; it didn't even have a basement, as the gunman who was all set to rescue the nonexistent victims discovered.


To recount a fact, in this case a false allegation while noting it was false ("I think the story was"), to the best of your ability, especially without malice, is not libel.

The US standards for defamation are explained very well here https://law.stackexchange.com/a/132/11158


The hacked emails pointed to the pizza joint. The social media profile of the owner did have inappropiate images and support for groups who support inappropriate relationships.

Someone thinking girls were locked in the basement and deciding to storm the place is a sign of a mental health issue. But his actions doesn't make the known facts false.


1) The place has no basement 2) He did not have in appropriate pictures 3) The "Emails" where all about going to have pizza and some turd burger made a connection to something that wasn't there" 4) that's all on netflix too


2) He did have them on his social media profile and he was in support of a group that wanted more man/kid relationships. This wasn't part of the movie but I remember this going down on reddit.

I agree with all of your other points.


How about "literally everything wrong with the world is caused by an evil conspiracy of cis-het white men?" It's a common belief and not less crazy.


>different/wrong/naïve political ideology

Folks with this "naive" political ideology are shooting at people and kicking peoples head on the streets. Many innocent have died in the riots, much more have lost their business to looting.

I don't see conservatives having a hard time condemning the pizza place shooter or any other similar act, but I see a lot of leftists rationalism and even denying altogether the bad actions of their bad people. They even cheer their bad actors on.


In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.


There's no difference, many believers doesn't make the idea sane.


People literally believe Trump is worse than Hitler. How is that not just as bad?


I love how your comment is grayed out with a child comment saying they never heard rhetoric like that in their leftist circles.

At this point I can only assume ill intent, since we are bombarded daily with rhetoric likening any action by the POTUS and his admin to something nazist.


I've spent significant amounts of time in left-wing circles and I've never seen anyone say anything close to that. Perhaps there are a few people on the extreme fringes who think so – you can always find one or two nutcases – but they don't represent anything near the mainstream.


CNN literally aired this phrase on television: https://mobile.twitter.com/ReaganBattalion/status/1165666060...

If I were to go into work saying I supported Trump, I risk getting fired, because of rhetoric like this.


Can we stop pretending that CNN has anything to do with the "far left"?


The mountain of evidence disagrees with you.


As a non-American, I find the idea of CNN being far-left to be pretty comical.


The only mountain of evidence I see is the one pointing to the fact that you have no clue what the far left is.


Let's see this evidence


CNN promotes BLM/Antifa (the rioters, not just the peaceful protesters). Both groups say on their website that they are Marxist organisations and want to destroy capitalism and the Nuclear family. CNN supporting such a goal is inherently far left.

I don't know if they do this for ideological reasons, or if the outrage machine makes them a lot of money. My guess would be the latter.


Antifa isn't a centralised group, let alone do they have a website that speaks on their behalf.


CNN sympathizes with their cause not their organizations.


I do too, but CNN are clearly turning a blind eye to the organisations behind the cause. I will actually ascribe this to most major networks, not just CNN.


They really do not say it at all, never mind literally. The twitter poster is using quotes "", but what they quote is never said. And the speaker specifically is arguing against calling Trump anything, and says we should speak back against policies and stop with name calling.


That Tweet is a misquote though. He said "he may be responsible for many more deaths" rather than "he may have killed". Very big difference. And he certainly never said that "Trump is literally worse than Hitler". Considering he brings up climate change immediately afterwards it seems he mostly means Trump's persistent war on anything that will slow this down, which will (and already is) causing major problems. A comparison with Mao's incompetence isn't complete inaccurate actually. I do agree it's not helpful, and comparisons to Hitler and Stalin are certainly wildly inappropriate.

But some random guy saying something silly and offensive in one (live?) interview is still not the same as a set of very specific completely baseless allegations in the right-wing conspiracies theories.


I've certainly seen people say that, but never seriously. Of course someone will now claim that all the Qanon stuff is just joking, like Alex Jones said that libelling the Sandy Hook survivors was "entertainment".


Ok how about "the Milwaukee police covering up for a sex traffic ring"


I don't know anything about this, so I can't comment. But sex trafficking and cover-ups do happen; see: Jimmy Savile, Catholic church, Epstein, Bill Cosby, etc.

From a very quick search it seems that the police didn't take several cases serious, and were at the very least rather lax in their attitude. In other words, there's at least an actual crime and at least some smoke. It's not something invented from nothing.

And this is the real danger of this sort of politicized conspiracy bullshit: now this is automatically seen as "politically motivated" instead of actually looking at the matter at hand. People who spread pizzagate-esque conspiracy theories or enable them are very much harming the anti-paedophilia efforts.


Maybe I’m just out of the loop, but I haven’t heard that one, and I find it hard to believe it’s anywhere near as widespread as QAnon.


You're correct about the antivax folks, but I do think flat earth is largely a right-leaning phenomenon. That aside...

> equality of outcome not equality of opportunity

Equality of opportunity is no greater thing to cherish. Opportunity comes from circumstance, and therefore this equates to wishing for equality in circumstances. Boiling this down to its fundamentals, this would mean important life decisions like whether to have children (and how many), what kind of hobbies and preferences people have, etc., would be left to the whims of balancing acts by the state.


Ability comes from circumstance, opportunity comes from free will.


Right now people actually think Trump is stealing mailboxes to prevent people from voting.


Maybe he shouldn't have admitted on TV that he was trying to undermine the USPS in advance of the election, then.

He's either a troll, an idiot, or a saboteur. This isn't debatable in the slightest. Which of these explanations do you prefer?


> He's either a troll, an idiot, or a saboteur.

I'm not sure why it has to be one of those. I mean maybe slightly an idiot because what he is saying is likely not good for him politically, but not entirely wrong. You make it sound like the USPS doesn't have any issues.


The USPS is not supposed to be a profitable business, any more than the Army or the State Department or the prison system is. It is a Constitutionally-sanctioned organization, operating under the premise that universal mail delivery is a valid government concern.

To the extent the USPS "has issues," as you put it, it is because Congress has consistently set them up to fail. Congress is free to shut down the USPS or kneecap it if they want, but the executive is not. Certainly not to serve their own corrupt purposes.

Just something else to add to the list of things Republicans would scream bloody murder about if a Democratic president were doing it.


The far left ecosystem doesn't work in anything like the same way, and doesn't get the push from youtube, but if you want a boogeyman we can agree on the actual Trotskyite SWP (Socialist Workers Party) have a habit of ruining any left-wing movement they get allowed into. Plus, like a lot of close knit social groups, companies and institutions, a sexual assault scandal ("Comrade Delta").

You won't see them recommended on Youtube. I think there are a few "tankies" out there though who also annoy the mainstream left. Named after people who supported the Soviet tanks suppressing revolt in Hungary.

Israel/Palestine politics has a big risk of going from getting outraged about things that actually happened to things that didn't, plus conflating the faults of the government and military of Israel with blame on all Jewish people (which is antisemitic).


TERFs, especially British TERFS, reach QANON levels of batshit idiocy.

https://twitter.com/CaseyExplosion/status/129388933700478566...

> "Gender critical" is just Qanon for British women

For some examples: https://medium.com/@KatyMontgomerie/jameela-jamil-josie-long...

In the UK there's a lot of people who are far left who are pushing anti-vaccination, anti 5G, anti-mask "plandemic" KBF garbage.

The violent groups do tend be be far right though.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: