Yes, they’re convinced that the Russians are going to be landing in Dover any minute now. It’s wild, but that’s what literally decades of war propaganda does to the brain.

I will check Freire out, ty for the rec.

Hmm. I think we do need to level up our media strategy significantly - there are definitely plenty of individual creators on those platforms agitating and propagandising, but as they’re individual and their output isn’t linked to any broader project, there are limitations to the quality of political education and message discipline.

I suspect that getting on these platforms is necessary but isn’t enough; you’re right, social media is the new public square and the new newspaper, but something I think is missing here is that we need to have our own platforms that are democratically controlled and not subject to capitalist censorship. Hexbear (and other parts of Lemmy) might be a good example of this, but we just aren’t big enough to have any impact and we’re not growing presently either.

Where the major innovation of the early 20th century was the party newspaper, the major innovation for us could be party (or at least, working-class) social media. It’s disappointing that Mastodon is pretty inaccessible because Twitter’s downfall was a major moment of opportunity to launch something better, and instead we just got Threads and Bsky.

those cinnamon donuts rock