Like a story can literally beat someone over the head with a theme or moral and people somehow come to the opposite conclusion?

It’s like “Tyler Durden is so manly and cool” except every bit of media feels like it’s misinterpreted like that now.

  • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    15 days ago

    I’m not a huge fan of The Kavernacle - he’s fine, just a bit 101 for my tastes and kinda uninteresting to me. But at no point did the creator elaborate how he was using dogwhistles or how you can turn a leftist into a Nazi by using dogwhistles or how he was a Nazi himself. It was all just throwing out buzzwords and doing really loose association (which is a charitable way of putting it because there basically wasn’t any through line at all imo.) He did use the term “Nebula elite” to refer to people like Lindsey Ellis in one tweet, which honestly is a pretty fucking accurate assessment, and the closest thing to an argument was that this is a dogwhistle because using the word “elite” here is basically invoking the antisemitic conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jewish elite globalists control the world. If The Kavernacle actually did make positive or veiled references to The Protocols of The Elders of Zion or something then I’d be more sympathetic to the argument but instead the next thing they very heavily implied was that this is basically him wanting to put Jews on trains to Auschwitz. The connecting thread between this argument was so tenuous that it might have not existed but it was brain-melting to see people praising the analysis because they basically just did the verbal equivalent of pointing to a picture of The Kavernacle then to a picture of the cover of The Protocols then to a picture of Auschwitz then nodding emphatically.

    It’s pretty shocking to see people agree with things just because it feels truthy and salacious.

    I think this sort of thing happens not because people actually “agree” with it, but because they don’t like a person, and the liberal worldview doesn’t allow for nuance. So if someone is “bad” they are all bad things at once, including a nazi. So this person making this video did not set out from a position of “I discovered an awful truth about this person and need to share it with others.” but “I don’t like this person and I want others to hate them, so I’ll look for something I can accuse them off that shuts down discussion.”

    You see this a lot with online drama stuff, one party will accuse another of doing something beyond most people’s “moral event horizon” in order to shut down discussion, not facilitate it. The people who watch this video can then just insist that this Kavernackle guy is a “nazi” and “why would you support a Nazi?” since liberals (currently) think nazis are bad, they will just agree with the accusations to avoid looking like a nazi sympathiser. It’s something CHUDs have figured out about liberals for a while now, which is why they always accuse them of things like domestic abuse or animal abuse, because they know it is something that will just completely shut down a discussion about a person, because no one wants to defend an animal abuser. And they don’t “believe” it, but they know if they repeat it enough, people will internalise it and it will cause the damage to their target’s reputation that they want.