So I saw a “Second Thought” video posted, about why the US is pretty much constantly at war.

And so I thought, oh, shit, it’s these guys.

“Second Thought” is pretty likely, to me, to be some kind of propaganda operation which is deceptive about its goals and origins. If you don’t take already take my opinions seriously, then you probably won’t be convinced by this post, since I have no evidence at all and the signals are to me pretty subtle. It’s just the vibe. Almost every video includes some way of twisting things around into why the Democrats are bad. This is pretty unusual for universally anti-US-politician thinkers, since most of them will lump “Democrats” in with the entire system of badness without needing to single them out extensively as a particularly bad part of a universally bad system. And also, when “Second Thought” does this, there’s a particularly noticeable way in which the facts tend to get twisted around to support that notion, in a way that sticks out just a tiny bit as compared with the rest of their extremely well-founded claims in their generally pretty accurate videos.

An example: If you go to their channel right now, you’ll see in the thumbnail for the climate change video “Democrats are making it worse.” Also, it has a specific picture of Kamala Harris specifically, just to drive the point home. That’s a weird thing to put on the video right after a Democratic president was the first person in US history to take big action on climate change (which almost no one knows happened). I haven’t watched the video, but I can almost guarantee what talking points it will raise (we reached a record level of fossil fuel extraction under Biden, and how many drilling leases were granted), and what context it won’t add (that the IRA was the biggest action to reduce emissions, funded by increased corporate taxes, of any US president in history, almost ten times over). And that it will levy more specific criticism at the Democrats for their policies than it will specifically at the Republicans.

I did check the transcript for the capitol riot video, because I was curious if it would also have anything weird in it. (I generally don’t watch the videos, just pop them up for long enough to grab the transcript and then click away, which hurts their ranking with the YouTube algorithm). Lo and behold:

The word “coup” has been used a lot in the last week. In some regards it’s appropriate - there was a group of people who tried to violently change the result of an election. But on the other hand, look at what happened once they breached the Capitol: most of the crowd just started messing around. They sat in some chairs, stole the speaker’s lectern, took some selfies, chanted some slogans, but that was it. They didn’t go to any other government buildings, they didn’t pursue evacuating politicians, and as far as we can tell, they didn’t really have any concrete plans at all.

Not to step on any patriotic toes, but it doesn’t really count as a revolution if you’re trying to keep a president in power. When other countries riot and storm their seats of government, it’s usually to demand changes that will materially improve their lives. What will keeping Trump in power accomplish? He doesn’t care about the working class who actually need material help, and the millionaires won’t suffer under a Biden presidency. Biden is a corporate centrist dedicated to maintaining the status quo, and that means continued pandering to massive corporations and crippling austerity for the rest of us.

In the aftermath of the Capitol riot, we’ve begun to see a social media crackdown and the expansion of the surveillance state. The president was suspended from Twitter along with over a hundred fifty thousand other accounts, including over seven thousand related to QAnon. Parler, the most well-known hive of white supremacists and QAnon followers, was threatened and then suspended for refusing to moderate hate speech and content inciting violence, at which point a reported 600 thousand new users flocked to Gab, another site willing to host their hateful ideology.

The discussion around social media censorship is fraught, with some asserting that banning vile accounts is a good thing while others claim it’s a slippery slope and will be used against any number of other groups. If you want my two cents, here goes: you can be glad to see fascism dealt a body blow and also concerned about the precedent this sets. At the same time, fascism, white supremacy, nazism, cults completely detached from reality - these are all objectively bad. Limiting their recruiting power is a net good. Do tech companies have too much power in curating the online conversation? Absolutely. But I won’t cry over the loss of literal nazis.

For those who say this will be used to justify banning left-wing accounts - trust me, I know. Censorship and bans have been leveled at the left for years. It’s not like suddenly we’ll face a new threat; this already happens all the time. Tech censorship affected the left far more than the right up until the Capitol Hill riot, because the U.S. is vastly more afraid of communism than it is of fascism.

All that aside, now that the right is getting a taste of the free market deciding not to put up with their nonsense, maybe we’ll actually see a growing consensus that corporations have too much power. Perhaps more concerning than the social media crackdown is the new justification for state surveillance. The FBI are suddenly the good guys for trying to identify right-wing agitators. Many on the left are gleefully turning in co-workers to the feds, and this is exactly what the powers that be want. This whole debacle is an incredibly convenient way for our leaders to normalize asking us to turn in our neighbors for perceived crimes against the state.

Today that crime is breaking windows at the Capitol, but what will it be tomorrow? I got a visit from DHS for supposed anti-American sentiment in my videos. How long will it be until making YouTube videos saying we should improve society is a crime against the state? To emphasize my point, and to quote the Wall Street Journal: “Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.” Well, that’s delightfully vague, isn’t it?

Even if Biden were to define terrorism as something most people agree upon, there’s nothing stopping the next president from criminalizing something entirely different. This legislation will 100% be used more viciously against the left than the right. Look how the Black Lives Matter protesters were treated - it was a bloodbath, and they were far more peaceful than the Capitol Hill goons. I guarantee you that Black Lives Matter will be classified as “ideologically inspired violent extremism.” Laws that are left intentionally vague like this give the state a blank check to commit acts of horrible violence against their citizens.

There is a precedent for this. At the height of the Red Scare, there was a group known as the House Un-American Activities Committee. Its prime function was to conduct investigations - or more accurately, baseless witch hunts - under the direction of Joseph McCarthy, from whom we get the term “McCarthyism”: the accusation, completely without evidence, that a U.S. citizen is guilty of treason for being a suspected communist. Unsurprisingly, we see a lot of this behavior even today. Many of the rioters were certain they were the only thing standing between the United States and communism, and news networks routinely equate communism with fascism, completely ignoring the fact that the U.S. allied with the communists to defeat the fascists in World War II, which would indicate that one is indeed worse than the other.

But regardless of how you feel about your friendly neighborhood communists, Biden’s new anti-terror legislation will result in the baseless arrest of innocent Americans. Another consequence of the QAnon or beer gut putsch, if you prefer, is the enacting of a new batch of no-fly orders. As much as watching mildly inconvenienced Trump supporters may delight some people, we need to again think about this in terms of state abuse of power. Pair this no-fly rule with Biden’s proposed anti-extremism legislation - are climate activists extremists? Black Lives Matter protesters? Am I an extremist since I’ve been visited by the DHS? If I were to participate in a march for Medicare for All in DC then tried to get on a flight back home, would that trigger an arrest?

If we prosecute the people who tried to kill congresspeople to keep an open fascist in power, where will it end? The implication being, I guess, that we shouldn’t even try, as if not trying would keep us safe as opposed to opening the door to worse government overreach in the future. Also, Biden Biden Biden. Trump was still president when this was published, so it is very weird to be tying “corporate overreach, surveillance state against leftists” so hard to “Biden” here.

Again, there’s nothing particularly airtight. I’m just talking about my individual take on it. I bolded some specific parts where they’re making some very specific opposite-of-the-actual-facts claims in support of what they’re trying to argue. Also, I think it’s very notable to compare the “social media crackdown” talking point against right-wing talking points about how social media companies are censoring them en masse (which they aren’t), and what happened with left-wing social media censorship they were warning against, during the ensuing Biden years (nothing).

I’m also very curious to hear about the visit this person got from DHS about the content of his videos. I’m not saying it didn’t happen, but I just badly want to know a lot more about it, and he just kind of casually threw it in there.

Also, lest I be accused of trying to say that the US isn’t in a constant state of war for corrupt reasons, I did check the transcript from the “why the US is always at war” video, and I generally agree with it. In my view, the reasons the US is always at war are (in descending order of significance):

1. It involves buying tons of weapons and services from defense contractors, which makes politically-connected people filthy rich beyond the dreams of filthy rich people from the gilded age. This is probably the main reason.
2. The US military services the US empire, which is more or less always involved in some kind of power struggle in some little corner of the world. We need to bomb the Houthis because they might threaten the ability of all our various small-fry friends and allies to make millions of dollars shipping stuff around the world, which is more important than dead Palestinian kids. Lots more important.
3. If you want a powerful military, it needs to get a lot of practice. The US military is scarily effective partly because it’s always blowing stuff up somewhere, getting a lot of practice, and that’s important to maintain if you want to be able to keep doing #1 and #2.
4. Sometimes, individual people in the State Department or US military mid-level command think that it would genuinely be a good thing to do. They’ll intervene in Syria strategically for reasons of empire, but a lot of on-the-ground decisions are getting made for pure reasons of defending a genuine revolution against a genuine bloodthirsty dictator. People might try to claim this motivation never exists, but especially at mid-levels, you can see it pretty clearly on display if you read any amount of writing by these guys or see how they make decisions.

The video deals with #2, and includes #1 as a significant side note, where I would say the importance is reversed and #3 and #4 are also important aspects to understand if you want a complete picture. But just in case it wasn’t clear, I’m not trying to say that this specific video was saying anything that was wrong or in any way propagandized, overall.

(Also, I am aware that I am doing a Streisand Effect. That is fine. I’m all good with people seeing the complete information and deciding for themselves, including both the maybe-propaganda videos, and also the explanation for why they are maybe propaganda.)