I'm not a Democrat, I am not a Republican. I don't really care who is President and I also don't buy the "sky is falling" Chicken Little stuff that is taking place on one side of the media at the moment nor do I buy the "everything is going to be great now!" stuff that is coming from the other side.
I am Libertarian and believe that both parties are one in the same with Democrats being slightly more evil because of their tendency to create a government program to fix anything - which it almost never fixes unless framed a certain way.
I also have to admit that I kind of celebrate when I see the videos of the Proud Boys beating the crap out of black clad Antifa kids in skinny jeans that are looking for a fight and well, they find it when they meet the Proud Boys.
I definitely identify more with Proud Boys than I do Antifa but to suggest that I truly identify with either one of them is very far from the truth. I would prefer if neither one of them existed.
Now that I got my personal feelings out of the way I want to talk about a little experiment I did the other day: I joined their Telegram channel and got updates from them whenever they wanted to send messages out. This is presumably because they will be banned on basically all other forms of media.
Most of what is posted there is just information that you could get if you watched Fox, Breitbart, OANN, and other conservative outlets, there is very little in the way of any sort of announcements made that have any particular reference to them as a group.
Some of the stuff they post is pretty funny though.
I never get enough of the Chuck Norris references and they are always welcome in my world. They also post self-deprecating photos that other people likely put out there and it is good to see that they have a sense of humor.
If you can't laugh at yourself you don't have a true sense of humor and to me this kind of humanizes them, which is a good thing. If I do something stupid, I am more than happy to laugh with others at the stupid thing that I have done and Proud Boys have some stupid members, just like any political group.
The PROBLEM I have with this Telegram account is that there is a lot of bad information on there and some of it has the potential to create a sort of cancel culture the likes of which the Proud Boys themselves claim to not be fans of. It may just be a response to the fact that they themselves are cancelled all the time basically everywhere, but two wrongs don't make a right, as they say.
Something along the lines of this is very easily made on a wide variety of publishing software suites and it doesn't even take much skill to make that happen. This may have started out as a meme somewhere but because people are so willing to get worked up over literally anything these days, it had already taken hold and a great many conservatives were planning to ban Olive Garden because they decided to revoke his Lifetime Pasta Pass.
There is just one problem with this though
The entire situation was made up
Olive Garden never banned anyone and unfortunately this business and their staff members who are likely already suffering are going to be taking a financial hit despite the fact that basically every news outlet that bothered to cover this has come out saying that it is false
This is not an isolated incident on the Proud Boys Telegram unfortunately: When I bothered to investigate a lot of the claims they were making, it turns out they are about as true as anything that Occupy Democrats put on FB. That is to say, most of it is misleading at best and designed to get people worked up and believe that their side is under attack.
Comments are not allowed on this Telegram sub, for obvious reasons because trolls would come out of the woodwork if they were allowed. I left the page (or whatever it is called when you subscribe to someone on Telegram) after a day because it just meant I was getting more notifications than I wanted.
Later I am going to delve into a far-left Telegram sub and see what happens there. I would bet my house that it is exactly the same, just in the opposite direction. Hopefully they will at least have some Chuck Norris references.