The shady rightwing tactics to make the left look bad.

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The online right are really good at framing issues so they get to decide what the sides are and then manipulating it to make the left look ridiculous. And I hate seeing leftists and liberals fall for it.

It works like this - the rightwingers start stirring up some controversy or debate. Often this starts with a "leftwing" puppet account created by some rightwinger as a false flag, but it can also just start with loud rightwing people arguing against a point that no one on the left is making (yet). Either way, they construct two opinions, and they firmly stake themselves out as being against the opposing opinion.

And then you'll get people on the left taking the bait - seeing the alt-right arguing against something, they argue for it (or vice versa). Despite the fact that they had any real strong opinions before, the fact that asshole rightwingers are arguing against it means they, as good leftwing types, must be on the opposite side. Their opinion is whatever opinion the rightwingers are rallying against.

Then the switch comes. Once you've got a bunch of your political opponents arguing a position you yourself created, it is trivially easy to start making them look bad - especially if that was the intent from the very beginning. If it is an abstract position, you can start poking the holes in the logic because it is logic you created and that no one on the left would have come up with themselves so they can't defend it despite espousing it.

If it is a person or organization? That's an even easier trap to spring. You pick someone relatively obscure, and in your initial attacks you make it all about going after something people on the left will step up to defend. If you attack someone for speaking up on trans rights, or advocating for people of color, or stuff like that and you will get leftists coming to their defense. And that's when you can drop your "why are you defending someone convicted of quintuple homicide?!" bombshells.

By being the ones to create the controversy, they can create the sides and pick which side their opponents will fall into arguing and load it up with traps. It is devastatingly effective, and we fall for it again and again.

The most recent example I've seen - a bunch of rightwing tabletop gamers started making a list of RPG companies and classifying them as whether they were "apolitical" and thus "good" (on their greenlist) or "too political" and thus "bad" (on their redlist). And of course, initially the redlist of companies that were too political were all "woke" companies.

So, of course, a lot of leftwing tabletop gamers started sharing the list around going "Hey, support the redlist! If the right hates these publishers for being 'too political', they're probably good people to support!"

But, of course, the list is a living document and has companies added to it all the time. And now they've added at least one literal neo-Nazi convicted of murder to the redlist because white supremacy is also "too political". But of course I'm still seeing folks on the left sharing around the list going "support the redlist!" either because they didn't notice the addition of a neo-Nazi to the redlist or because they never actually read the list in the first place they just assumed anything the right was against they had to be for.

Now, importantly, not everyone falls into this trap. I've seen plenty of people on the left look at the list and go "whoah, wait, just because a bunch of rightwingers think a company is bad doesn't mean the company is good". Some people are indeed very good at only arguing the positions they themselves have constructed or at least researched and they manage to avoid being manipulated like this.

But it is a very real strategy the alt-right especially is happy to employ again and again because a lot of people do fall for it.

I really think this is a strategy we all need to be aware of and better prepared to defend ourselves against.

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