Like, I remember as recently as 2016, that term was just used as a mocking term for weird larpers. Now, it's used as a term for people they want to purge from the left (yes, I'm using those words. How they're acting is literally the definition of purging, it doesn't have to include violence).
:cia: and Va*sh have been successful pushing their "Uyghurs are being genocided" narrative to the point the point that people equate questioning or debunking that narrative with "supporting genocide". It may sound like an exaggeration, but whenever I see the topic of "tankies" come up in r/SubredditDrama, there's almost always a poster from r/Vaush with a hot take voted to the top of the thread.
On the topic of r/SubredditDrama, it seems like I see a large "tankie"-bashing thread there almost weekly, and they get a lot of attention. Some recent examples:
Subredditdrama has some alts from top subreddit mods running it. So makes sense.
I know they have politics and neoliberal mods on their roster.
It's fed shit and their process is as follows:
Then they'll use those meta subs as force multipliers.
They follow this process over and over again. They create the drama, then they take it to againsthatesubreddits and SRD where they spread it to people that spread it to the rest of reddit. The outcome has been a red scare style of tankiephobia on the site.
The whole strat completely falls apart if MLs simply move to different alts for modding new subs, which most of us have done. There's a growing number of reds in default subreddits now too but I won't be naming the subreddits anymore for opsec as tankiejerk are watching this space. Honestly the day that subreddit gets deleted will be a very good one for us.
Tankies are usually the ones to break CIA/NED initiatives, like this person.
If our side typically argue at this level, it's no wonder they see a need to stamp us out. Over time there's just too much sense being made that any subreddit that allows tankies a voice will start turning anti-imperialist like the r/cth near the end and worldnews from time to time.