"Woefully uneducated"... that's something else. Where I live, our schools are so badly underfunded it's insane. I remember in high school, we had to read a bunch of Ayn Rand and I wondered why the fuck we had to do that. I mean, Orwell was bad enough but kinda made sense because he's just always been on the reading list. Then I read the covers of the brand new Rand novels we got in spades, and they were all donated by the Ayn Rand Society.
Libertarians rely on undercutting education and state restrictions on what can be taught in public schools, specifically so they flood the schools with their "charitable donations" of free propaganda. Started working in education and it's even worse being on the other side of the school desk, lol.
That's a fair assessment, yeah. I don't think a pipeline needs to be deliberately created, though. I honestly think a lot of the propaganda in this country develops as a byproduct of other stuff, and anticommunists just try to nurture and reinforce it when it happens. Seems like the practical thing to do. Why waste time, money, and energy trying to create a propaganda apparatus from scratch when you can just use a fraction of the resources to give people who already believe the propaganda a platform? Over time it feeds itself.
Here in the US, I've noticed the only people who don't support Ukraine and were allowed a platform to promote those views were ultraconservative Trump types. I have a suspicion that's by design, to help further discredit any counter-narrative.
And as others have said, the "alt-right pipeline".
It was the Pie Man episode. Season 15 episode 19, "Simple Simpson", apparently. Mr. Burns blackmails Homer to pie the Dalai Lama for his - as he says "red Chinese masters".
Most Simpsons seasons were anti-nuclear and anti-Chinese in more than a few episodes. They sorta phased out the anti-nuclear stuff in recent years, but the anti-Chinese stuff stayed. Even later seasons have at least one episode with some snide joke about sweatshops or oppression. They got moderately less racist, though.
I know it's a liberal show, but it still baffles me that they continue to be anti-Chinese and even go so far as to paint Mr. Burns as serving "red Chinese masters" (their words).
I've seen the effects of that last part firsthand. I'm friends with a lot of left-leaning people, particularly college friends in the biological sciences. It's a no brainer to be anti-capitalist as a bio/ecol major, of course, but they spouted vaguely eco-fash narratives about developing countries. Most libertarians and anarchists I've met hold similar views about China, India, etc., being major environmental threats and overpopulated, and that the best solution is a decentralized society and smaller global population. I don't think they're even thinking about what that actually means. Like, all the dots are there, but they refuse to connect them.
"Woefully uneducated"... that's something else. Where I live, our schools are so badly underfunded it's insane. I remember in high school, we had to read a bunch of Ayn Rand and I wondered why the fuck we had to do that. I mean, Orwell was bad enough but kinda made sense because he's just always been on the reading list. Then I read the covers of the brand new Rand novels we got in spades, and they were all donated by the Ayn Rand Society.
Libertarians rely on undercutting education and state restrictions on what can be taught in public schools, specifically so they flood the schools with their "charitable donations" of free propaganda. Started working in education and it's even worse being on the other side of the school desk, lol.