There is a general tendency on the internet that any forum that promotes free speech and only moderates spam and illegal posts, but does not remove posts based on their content, becomes majority right wing after some time. There are left-wing forums with censorship, and there are right-wing forums with censorship, of course. But if you let people discuss their ideas freely without interference, the mostly tend to become right-wing. It seems that without censorship and content-based moderation artificially steering discussion left-wing ideas cannot exist.
I don’t think that’s really true unless you very broadly define right wing, and very narrowly define left wing.
The Establishment has done a fantastic job of co-opting movements such that you can have someone who is anti-censorship, anti-corporate power, anti-corporation, borderline anti-capitalist, and yet they’re considered far right.
I guess under that rubric, yeah I guess eventually everyone kind of agrees that we shouldn’t be blindly following the establishment, and that’s far right.
Thing is, in most of the ways that matter I think a lot of people painted with that right-wing brush are in fact left wing. Sure, maybe they’re not part of the institutional left, but if you talk to these people they all think that major sweeping changes need to be taking place to our institutions. They think that there’s corruption, that there’s greed, that oligarchs and long entrenched powers are taking the power away from the people and giving it to themselves. That doesn’t sound right wing to me, if you define right wing as keeping the status quo, keeping things the way they are, not advocating for dramatic changes in a New direction.
It’s like when the trucker protests happened. People were calling that right wing, which was insane to me. You had labor organizing, and yes they weren’t organizing under the banner of a union, but they were organizing in order to protest massive Powers being handed to corporate oligarchs. And you had the institutional left and all of their cronies cheering for their bank accounts being frozen, and if you want to tell me that that’s far right I’m going to have to disagree every day of the week.