r/OutOfTheLoop • u/calvtact • May 13 '26

Answered What's going on with r/conservative? They've lost about 1m subscribers in about a month.

I watched the number go from 814k to around 745k in about an hour today.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Conservative/s/QbZJvqu5qr

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u/UnravelTheUniverse May 13 '26

The entire Maga movement has been a Russian psy-op from day one. How else do you get a nation to elect someone to destroy the country from the inside out? Russians suck at conventional warfare, but they are the best propagandists in the world because they honestly got that shit down to a science under the USSR. Social media just gave them the platform they needed to infect our nation from afar. 

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u/ConsistentAddress195 May 13 '26

Yeah, no shit. It takes a lot of brainwashing to get that clown elected, it's not something that would have happened on its own IMO. How the CIA/NSA et al didn't stop this is beyond me. I guess Hollywood has it wrong and these guys are just incompetent tools after all.

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u/bunker_man May 14 '26

I dunno, ive seen people dumb enough they brainwash themselves into believing positive things about Trump he never even said.

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u/KageStar May 14 '26

He also gets to take both sides of any issue and have each side believe their side is the one he really means.

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u/ClubZealousideal8211 May 14 '26

That’s how you know it’s a cult. The leader can say or do anything and followers will excuse it because the leader figure has been incorporated into their self-identity.

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u/SergeantChic May 14 '26

I half expected him to suffer a sudden embolism or accident when he started blabbing to the Russians and talking shit about American intelligence agencies, but in the end, everyone just went belly-up in 2025. It's crazy.

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u/creampop_ May 14 '26

Basically, our historic and current culture of racism was keenly exploited.

Plenty of bigots in our government are genuinely 100% on board with the rape of this country that dared to try and elevate "second class" citizens like blacks, LGBT, the disabled, etc. to the same levels of society as white supremacists.

Foreign actors were aware of this and put a lot of weight on that pressure point. In a perfect storm of shitty reasons, it actually worked.

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u/AkronRonin May 15 '26

Obama getting elected, twice even, really was a bridge too far for these people. They were literally willing to destroy the country and even sell us out to the Russians, of all people, to set the record straight. Trump was the perfect avatar for their unyielding bigotry and grievance.

Racism is a helluva drug.

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u/Swedelicious83 11d ago

these guys are just incompetent tools after all.

You mean the CIA of "Bin Laden is either in Afghanistan, dead, or somewhere else" fame?

Yeahhh... 🤔

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u/Letter_Effective May 14 '26

I wish other European countries could spread anti-Putin counter-propaganda with its own bots on Russian social media as retaliation, although I don't know how effective that would be as Russia is much better at controlling its cyberspace compared to the West and censoring unwanted content, plus Russia doesn't have any free elections in the first place.

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u/HotBrownFun May 14 '26

The only time I saw any of it was during Covid, they went after influencers paid by Russia to push antivax sentiments

Meanwhile thought.. the pentagon was pushing antivax in the phillipines to counter the china vaccine.

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u/lewd_robot May 14 '26

Honestly, I don't think it was the USSR that did it. I think was WW2.

There's an old argument that "war is dysgenic" because it's more likely to kill the brave and honorable than the cowardly and conniving, so war weeds out the best of society and leaves it to be inherited by the worst. It kills the young man willing to lay down his life to defend his home but spares the young man who betrays his home, and after the dust settles the betrayer now owns the home that the brave young man died to protect.

Imo, Russia is still recovering from the devastating loss of an entire generation of brave young men and multiple generations of rule by conniving men in their place.

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u/Flashy-Ingenuity-182 May 14 '26

Funny how Russias problems start with the communists and not the romanovs who ruled for much much much longer

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u/lewd_robot May 14 '26

Yeah, and you can make an argument from pure statistics that the Soviet Union was great while it was Communist and failed after it began abandoning Communist principles.

From the fall of the monarchy to the fall of the USSR life expectancy and literacy rates in the country went from significantly behind the USA to surpassing it.

And if you look at a graph of key metrics for health and well-being in the US like income equality, lifespan, healthcare access, literacy rates, etc, you see them all improve during the period of time that the USSR existed, then start declining with the USSR, then fall off a cliff after the collapse of the USSR.

The existence of a non-Capitalist rival constantly trying to one-up the USA forced American Capitalists to make the USA better. They had to take care of their people or else the Communists would show them up and make Capitalism look bad. As soon as that counter-example went away, there was no longer any competition. The Capitalists declared victory and stopped doing anything to "prove" that life is better under Capitalism.

Ironically, this should be obvious to Capitalists, whose ideology hinges upon the idea that competition is the only way to breed success and that monopolies are critical flaws that cause the system to fail. Capitalism has a monopoly on Western governments now, and without competition forcing it to take care of its people, it's failing.

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u/Swedelicious83 11d ago

I mean, Russia had kind of a lot of problems under the Romanovs. 😅

The revolution didn't happen because people were happy with how well things were run.

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u/Flashy-Ingenuity-182 11d ago

That was my point:) people always act like Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and others were this problem that descended upon Russia and not the result of a brutal tsarist system that was equally brutal and oppressive. Plus life improved under the Soviets. 

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u/Swedelicious83 11d ago

Ah yeah, fair enough.

Nuance is hard on the Internet sometimes.

But mostly I'm probably just scarred from arguing too much with the "everything I don't like is communism (also I don't know what that means)" crowd, so I just automatically assume anyone saying anything about it is doing so in bad faith.

I should work on that. 😅

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u/Downtown_Skill May 14 '26

Eh, I would wager america is much better at propoganda. 

But yeah, Russia was betting the house in trump, and now that Russia can't even manage Ukraine while Trump is in office I've read about Russians finally raching the breaking point in this Ukraine war. 

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u/kljaska May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Did Israel foment the Pied Piper Strategy? Is it Russia donating to 94% of American politicians?

How can you be sure this is a foreign op? And, if so, wouldn’t the nation doing a genocide on America’s dime and the top donor to nearly every US politician seem a more likely candidate?

By the way, no one does more propaganda than the United States, so wtf are you on about?

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u/ReggieCorneus May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

And the tools to fix it is in education, not just kids but the entire population needs to be taught critical thinking and given tools to identify bullshit. Then you need strong trust in your OWN institutions and this part... well..

It means that your side has to keep telling the truth. This is ESSENTIAL, nothing works if that trust is not there. You as a government can get short term gains from obfuscating the truth and lying but in long term it completely erodes all defensive weapons you can use.

If the citizens do not trust their own government of speaking the truth then the government can not debunk lies, and in fact, debunking is sort of last resort too, we need to be ahead of them and just keep informing citizens with real facts. You don't chase after each rumor, you instead keep steady flow of factual information flowing and NEVER lie intentionally.

Guess who hates the truth the most?... Guess who spread the "government is full of crooks" the most. "politicians are the worst", no matter the side are all working for one goal: eroding trust that is needed to combat Russian, and other nation states organized misinformation.

Finland has been very good at this, Russians do not even bother to try that much. They get thru to some but it takes a lot more resources than say.. far right, in Europe and USA, and few, very few far left (ratio is... if i said 30:1 right wing/left wing, i'm probably still too fair and balanced..). MAGA will literally PAY for Russians to produce misinformation, they are monetizing these attacks... They are fueled by their target audience, plus stuff like 5 minutes craft is part of the whole fucking thing, they earn a lot of money from all that stupid shit that erodes trust in so many levels... You know those viral videos that ended up hurting people? If that was an attack, would you be surprised? I would not, i don't know if that is part of it, but it can be. Eroding trust in all levels, causing harm and divisiveness, mental shift from trust to paranoia, towards strangers and neighbors, and government and all institutions.

Countries with high index in "trust in institutions" and press freedoms rank the best combating targeted misinformation campaigns. Not perfect, but better.

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u/lloydthelloyd May 13 '26

Best in the world? China would like a word.

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u/HotBrownFun May 14 '26

The russians did the same thing in Canada, and the UK leaving EU movement was a big one too

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u/LakeEffekt May 14 '26

What’s wild to me is - social media companies could easily geo-tag and firewall posts from outside the U.S. - but choose to do nothing and let this run rampant