• pooh [she/her, any]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      So when Haz wasn’t even a thing yet, I remember seeing a suspiciously polished promo video for INFRARED that immediately set off alarm bells for me. Also strangely, I can’t seem to find that promo video anywhere now.

      I also remember not long after the channel started seeing a clip of Haz on a girl Twitch streamer’s stream and the title was something like “Haz flirting with ____” and the whole thing struck me as overtly trying to appeal to lonely young men on the internet, in a similar vein as gamer gate, red pill garbage, etc. Basically following the Steve Bannon/Mercer Family social media manipulation playbook. I haven’t really dug into it, but I’d be curious to see if there are any links with patsocs to people like Steve Bannon or Aleksandr Dugin.

      • keepcarrot [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        He got recommended on r/chapotraphouse a few times, and because I don’t watch streams or go on twitter, I had no idea who he was for like… A while into chapo.chat

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          It took us some time to work out the whole thing they were doing was sus to be fair. Initially Haz looked alright until the reactionary stuff piled up and up and up. Some of his early Stalin videos were genuinely good. Several of us, including myself, thought he was a good entry into the lineup of marxist creators at the time, Bay Area 415 was also suspiciously doxxed and taken out of commission at the time, there was a concerted influence and counter-influence op that was mounted against growing marxist influence at the time. That shitbag Beau of the Fifth too exploded during that period. And funny-clown-hammer growth was explosive too but we countered him relatively well.

          Haz and the patsoc crowd started getting attention for being reactionary and double and tripled down on it for growth.

          My take is that they’re fascists or feds. I wanna say feds because I don’t think the fascists put the kind of effort in to read that Haz and patsocs have done. Haz definitely has engaged with marxist literature to some extent whereas the fash rarely have the attention span.

          • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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            9 months ago

            I know who doxxed BayArea415 given that I was an advisor of his.

            Also, Haz and the PatSoc crowd initially were banking on fighting Maoism (which garnered them support) but ultimately they became right-deviationists.

          • Pluto [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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            9 months ago

            I would also argue that none of his videos were good, not even the first ones, and it’s telling that the original gang of Infrared isn’t there anymore except for Haz.

            • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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              9 months ago

              Hmmm I distinctly liked his Stalin one back in the day. I think what they were doing back then was trying to be shocking by supporting Stalin but it didn’t have the effect they wanted (because we actually do) so they moved on from him to other reactionary behaviours instead. I think the goal was and always has been to coopt MLism and then to make MLs look bad, which ties in well with the entryism if you think about it.

                • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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                  9 months ago

                  If you work under the assumption of fed involvement it sorta demonstrates how an inexperienced team of liberal feds would approach things too. They would initially internally expect pro-Stalin things to be “shocking” due to unfamiliarity with MLs. Also they probably expected pro-Stalin content to have more of a detrimental effect if others saw it, that people on the wider web would see pro-Stalin stuff and immediately have a visceral negative reaction. Instead, people watched that content and softened their views on Stalin which is the opposite of what they wanted because they didn’t want to help MLs they wanted to make MLs less attractive to the new growing waves of baby-leftists.

                  This experience for them led to adaptation of their methods and a change of direction.

                  The dots connect together rather neatly.

      • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Dugin, yes. At least philosophically. I don’t know if his networks in Russia have any links to them in the US.

        But Bannon, sorta. Peter Thiel funded right wing podcasts and ecelebs including Red Scare.

      • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        9 months ago

        Yeah, there’s something very weird about how he went from “guy on youtube that literally no one has heard of” to appearing on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show in a matter of months.

        • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          Dude looks like a grown man but is supposedly 19. He also recently started college. Normally I wouldn’t think much of that, but with all the context, he’s definitely grooming susceptible college kids into doing stupid shit.

          • Ram_The_Manparts [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            9 months ago

            Dude looks like a grown man but is supposedly 19. He also recently started college.

            I believe what you’re thinking about here was some dumbass bit he recently did for his youtube channel or whatever, where he just went to some random college class and started doing ePiC oWnS on the blue-haired sjw’s like it was 2015.

            As far as I know he’s not an actual student, and he’s like 22-23.