I don’t think so. For one thing he’s neither smart nor subtle enough for that. And his target audience is mainly conservatives. A fed would behave more like Vaush. Hinkle sounds to me like just another grifter looking to make money off of building a social media following.

Seeing CIA behind every account with bad takes is probably giving them too much credit. Oftentimes we assume that someone cannot genuinely hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time because it seems so obvious to us that they don’t fit together. In this case there is a clear contradiction between on the one hand believing in communism, which is an ideology of liberation for all, and on the other hand rejecting LGBT+ liberation. For us it is plain to see that these two are incongruous, but not all people who grow up in a culture with such deeply embedded prejudices have managed to reckon with and discard those prejudices. Unfortunately it happens more often than we would like to believe that people simultaneously hold both progressive and reactionary views. I’m not saying there aren’t a lot of opportunists out there who are just acting cynically in order to build some kind of following, and very likely also a few intelligence agency plants, but reactionary communists do exist.

That’s a lot of words to say slave labor.

Polls like this are just a reflection of the audience a certain channel has cultivated. If a channel with a more pro-Russian audience were to ask the same question you would get a very different distribution.

I just want to say i really appreciate the quality of this discussion and i think very good arguments have been made by both sides, many of which also reflect my thoughts on this matter.

they can’t fully block them without attacking China/Russia which would be considered an act of war

I think this is the essential point here. This is the crucial difference between the old sea routes, where other countries control passage, and this one. Blocking the former would require much less escalation.

Other factors to mention are Russia’s growing superiority in the arctic (US has nothing to rival Russia’s modern nuclear icebreakers), and the capability of shore based hypersonic missiles to interdict a conventional naval presence. The US really only has two options here which is submarines or air sorties from Alaska, both of which involve serious risk of starting a nuclear war…and that’s a threshold I’m not sure the US is willing to cross yet.

Yeah, climate change is a big reason why this route is now much more viable and why it will continue to gain in relevance. In that way this is quite a bleak sign…

Sorry if it’s a repost, i’m not on tiktok so this was new for me.

For those unfamiliar with the German FM: her grandfather was an ideologically committed Nazi and member of the SS.

Thanks! I’ve never used tiktok so i don’t really know the proper way to share a link to a video on that site.

Most likely. It was definitely not organic. Whenever you see a sudden spike in almost identical talking points against a threat to the establishment you can be sure you’re dealing with a very top-down co-ordinated propaganda campaign.

Oh look, it’s exactly what the US has been doing for the past 70 years to the global south, which in turn is just what the British were doing before the US took over the role of imperial hegemon.

2026? I’d say that’s unlikely seeing as there’s no US presidential election that year. But you never know with those sneaky Russians, they may decide to use their Havana mind control ray to make the US hold early elections.

If you meant 2016, then no. Russiagate was an intelligence agency manufactured hoax.

Do you have any substantive criticism to offer or are you just here to throw around ad hominems?

This is actually really great! While China’s rapid economic development has been immensely positive it also came with a few downsides and one of those has been the tendency for the population from rural areas to migrate to the cities, leaving the former with a weakened economic base as well as a relative lack of development and investment, and the latter with all the various challenges and issues that come with overcrowding. If initiatives like this can help heal some of that imbalance it will be a major win for China and for the overall quality of life of its people in both types of regions.

My thoughts exactly!

I have no doubt that if the tables flip, and Rumble becomes big and mainstream enough to start getting pressure from the US government and corporate sponsors, this will probably all change

That’s probably how it will go. Then a new Rumble will appear and so on. The last resort of the imperialists will be to censor the internet right at the provider level, which will leave the imperial core (“the West”) in an information bubble increasingly detached from reality.

Rumble’s audience is already skeptical of mainstream media and other big tech platforms, so I’d say that it’s more likely your stuff gets traction on there

This is a very good point!

Twitch is already the reactionary version of Twitch. Twitch is a pro-imperialist platform and even more censorious than YouTube toward anti-imperialists. The post was asking about platforms that won’t do the State Department’s bidding. Twitch literally complies with anti-Russia sanctions, it bans and demonetizes Russian or pro-Russian channels.

If someone is looking for alternatives to YouTube because YouTube banned anti-imperialist channels that were getting too big, they are definitely not going to find that in Twitch.

Inevitably people who wake up to what is going on in the world are going to want to get away from these highly controlled mainstream platforms which are becoming more and more repressive as the establishment’s political control is threatened. Telling people that it’s not ok to go to alternative platforms because there is right wing content on there will only have one of two results:

Either they will abandon any nascent anti-imperialist sentiments they may have in order to be allowed to stay on the mainstream platforms, or it will drive them straight into the arms of the right which will welcome them into the alternative spaces and validate their frustration over the censorship and control they experienced on mainstream platforms.

Lol. Just lol.

But there was insufficient media skepticism overall, and alternative voices and awkward questions were all too often crowded out.

Hm. Yeah, “crowded out” (aka blacklisted and smeared) by who? Oh yeah by the very same publications that you are currently writing for. That continue to do this even as you write this article.

This is really rich. You’ve only now just noticed you’ve been cheerleading another war based on lies and helping to spread falsehoods and propaganda while demonizing anyone who says differently?

I find articles like this really, truly shameless. They are honestly worse than the ones where they just lie all the time. At least with those there is no pretense. But to pretend like now all of a sudden they care about the truth? Sorry, i’m not buying it. It’s too little too late.

Ultimately it is going to be inevitable that communists migrate to alternative platforms because the mainstream ones are just going to escalate their crack downs on anti-imperialist content. Branding these alternative platforms as “right wing platforms” is not going to help us in the long run. It will become a self-fulfilling prophecy as leftists will avoid them and these places will become more and more right wing echochambers. Meanwhile, everyone who remains dependent on the mainstream platforms will be forced to increasingly self-censor out of fear of getting banned.

The best thing to do is to establish a presence on these alternative platforms sooner rather than than later so that when the ban on the mainstream spaces does come we will be ready and will not be starting from zero.