What are the go-to subjects for revealing the true, regressive beliefs of reactionaries who don’t consider themselves reactionary? Off the top of my head:
-Trans people in sports: Major gateway to transphobia and misogyny. Complaints about trans athletes inevitably lead to sexism towards literally any woman with muscles. Pretty sure this is how Joe Rogan and a ton of his supporters became so unhinged.
-Affirmative action: So, so many liberals and “leftists” will complain about how they would’ve totally gotten into Harvard and Yale if not for The Blackstm. Love to bring up SAT scores even though they’ve been proven to be racist and classist and a shit metric for intellectual value.
-Shakespeare authorship question: A bit niche. Basically, Curtis Yarvin and other Dark Enlightenment dweebs don’t think that Shakespeare was capable of penning such timeless plays because he wasn’t rich, and according to them, not rich=dumb and uncreative mental husk.
Bring up homeless people, transgender people, immigrants, any of the people they regard as subhuman, and look for cracks.
American flag apparel/stickers.
Sometimes old people who are progressive(ish?) will have American flags on their house, but only serious chuds buy American flag shirts.
but only serious chuds buy American flag shirts.
Every racist brawl in the south has at least one chud in an American flag wife-beater.
IME transphobia really outs them. I’m not trans or anything but basically any new troll showing up to ruin a community just can’t keep resist parroting one of the far right talking points or has truckloads of them in their history. Another I’ve noticed is a user whose kind of sus but their post history is almost 100% sports subreddits.
The sports thing is real. If somebody makes supporting a football team the most prominent part of their identity they’re almost always aggressive chuds.
That’s not really true, there are plenty of gay footfall/soccer fans
plenty of reactionary LGBT and LGBT-appropriating individuals, too
or porn. if they’ve commented on porn even once 100% chance they’re reactionary.
I like football and have commented on porn
Homeless people. Even demsocs/socdems ostensibly progressive pretty much everywhere else will sometimes with almost no prompting (other than being with you when they see a homeless person) just make disparaging comments about homeless people without a second thought. Their reactionariness usually extends well beyond that too, but they keep it better camouflaged and them being anti-homeless will often be a first sign
One of the most immediate and easy ones to spot is .eth suffixes or NFT avatars. Yes some exceptions exist, the same way that one of the coolest posters still on Twitter has a skull with sunglasses and skulls are often reactionary chuds.
When it comes to takes, the moment someone says “everything is so political these days,” you’ve just read a take from a reactionary because pretty much everything is political by definition and being upset about noticing it is inherently a reactionary take in favor of the “nonpolitical” status quo that they so miss.
If someone hates furries, that’s a sure sign that they’re reactionary
True. I feel like furry hate made the word “de-gen-er-ate” more popular online. “Autist” as well as ableism in general.
edit: The word is banned here, so I spelled it out weird.
That’s a good pick, and I’d like to add that anything involving “Chris-Chan” is another massive red flag that it’s not just a chud, but one of the especially lowly super-internet-poisoned chuds. Like the chuds that other chuds are like “get the fuck away from me.”
Full disclosure, I was into the whole picking on Christine Chandler thing for a while during my edgier years. I eventually grew out of it as I actually came around to being an empathetic person and my foray into leftism. The recent news about her and what she did to her mom and subsequent jailing is so sad, this is a person who was so failed by society and absolutely preyed upon by horrible people. Really hate how self-righteous a lot of these stalkers are, they hold her up as an example of why it’s okay actually to stalk and harass mentally ill people. Mind you, I don’t condone what she did, but I wasn’t surprised in the least.
i watched a long youtube video about her a years ago (pre-transition, i believe) and seeing the way people treated her… like, how could that not destroy someone? the Internet tortured her and made her declining mental state a spectator sport
i don’t remember the full context/details, but there was one event described where someone (a woman i think?) pretended to be her friend/fan, and then destroyed her yellow sonic necklace (which she was always wearing and clearly meant a lot to her). it genuinely made me cry
i don’t remember the full context/details, but there was one event described where someone (a woman i think?) pretended to be her friend/fan, and then destroyed her yellow sonic necklace (which she was always wearing and clearly meant a lot to her). it genuinely made me cry
they tortured the fuck out of her. The most notable I can remember was a young kid pretending to be a girl and coming on to him/leading him on, which lead to him leaking a sex tape. Can’t even begin to imagine the mental state of her trolls sitting back and being like “oh hell yeah, I just tricked an autistic person into doing a sex tape!”
Omg, yes! It boggles my mind how casually people on the internet will bring the fact that a big part of their childhoods was stalking and bullying a severely mentally ill person. So weird. The saga’s more mainstream than other chan-related things. There’re hours-long documentaries this person’s life and a subreddit with thousands of members—and everyone just acts like it’s completely normal even now.
My hot take: the level of hatred for just that one individual did more damage to the public’s perception of autistic people than Autism Speaks.
That’s something I find especially insufferable about the people who love “lolcows”, is that actually e-stalking people for more than a decade makes you the freak if you do it, you aren’t so above your subject when you act like a fucking chanlet.
I’ve given up on those sites ever being taken down. Silver lining is that a lot of right-wingers (i.e. Red Scare, Yarvin, etc.) are targets now. Fingers crossed that internet trash chokes to death on its own fumes.
Complaining about “Politics” in their video games/ media is usually a bad sign
“I wish they would stop forcing all of this POLITICAL stuff into my video games” - definite reactionary
muh “anti-hwite racism”
When it comes down to it, reactionaries are going to be repulsed by systemic change.
Have them acknowledge a problem then ask them if they would be willing to uproot a major component of the system and change it to solve the problem. Provide a detailed and serious solution. You will quickly see how they suddenly become disinterested in solving the problem. You will also likely be disappointed in realizing how many reactionaries there actually are.
