@ArdainianRight @xue @blitzed @pcachu Thing is it’s not necessarily manipulation. Scary thing is that it’s self-organizing, that’s frequently much worse than manipulation including astroturfing a set of people.
See the US Right going straight into the loony bin with COVID vaccinations for a self-organizing example on that side, no matter how much some people like Nolte claimed many were dying to “own the libs.” (I might give them a partial pass because of how the Left has systematically excluded them from science higher education, but it starts at the high school level of biology. After three years no one has an excuse for not (re-)learning the relevant basics like DNA->mRNA->proteins, that is, no “gene therapy.”)
Holiness spirals are a old phenomena, where people gain status and frequently power by being more holy than their peers, or keeping up with them or whatever; the very nature of it being a spiral means the Party Line is constantly changing.
Independent of politics where the modern Left started with this in the French Revolution you can see this throughout history in religious movements and of course cults. Of course modern Leftism is a religious movement with plenty of sub-cults, they just don’t claim typical sorts of god except maybe Earth which is of course a relevant one here.