Blue MAGA may dominate legacy media (which is done by design because it sets the limit to how left-wing you are allowed to be), but the GOP all the way to the most bloodthirsty psychopaths have a monopoly on new media. It is making our youth think violence, hate groups, and nazism is "hip and cool" while tolerance is seen as something for losers.
PragerU, Ben Shapiro, Richard Spencer, Jordan Peterson, Nick Fuentes, /pol/, these people are considered to be omniscient and are among the media icons of milennials and gen z (yes, I know Peterson is much older and PragerU isn't a person), but the problem is these people have won the culture war just telling people what they want to hear. We are outnumbered and as much as I want to challenge these views, I don't think I can reliably do that.
To anyone that has converted a younger hog, how did you manage to do that? I've had speculation that if I was friends with one and had one-on-one chats in let's say an Overwatch team chat or whatever they'd be more likely to listen. Alternatively, we could try to use any burner accounts and subscribe them to any leftist channel on Youtube or Twitter and see if we can skew the algorithm less in the right's favor.
Other than that, I would say that the left could do with better PR and steal some tricks from the right on how to get better publicity. Cherry pick the cringiest MRAs, the most ungrateful landlords, etc.
Idk, I get that this is an unrefined thought, but I don't really have the language to put this in better terms.
The aesthetics and mechanics of (western) socialist propaganda have yet to properly be:
1 & 2: Left Unity needs to be achieved. People new to being a leftist don't know what to think for a solid 1-3 years; they bounce around leftists spaces getting completely contradictory messaging from all of them. Is China a model of modern socialism? The answer is Yes, No, Maybe, No, Yes, Yes, Maybe. Eventually these people stop getting banned from leftist communities (or rather they finally stumble into the one that doesn't ban them). But now they have to start learning proletarian theory and history - and while learning this they have to avoid all the irony-poisoned joke answers / memes which they might take at face-value and they also have to dodge all the psy-op misinformation / veiled counter-revolutionary propaganda. This process takes ages to happen organically and for every comrade that finally fucking figures it out 5-10 got frustrated and gave up despite sincere attempts to enter. This problem is similar to teaching people anything that is complex - let's use coding as an example: there are a ton of online communities that are designed to take someone who knows fuck-all about anything technical and speed-run them into being proficient at coding/programming. This is what proletarian education so badly needs - we need to have a program that catches people up to speed on the movement once they've taken the first step and expressed an earnest will to learn. What does this have to do with left unity? Well, MLs or Anarchists (or Maoists, Trots, etc) could each try to develop their own programs in parallel and then compete against one another to win the hearts and minds of the masses but this wouldn't escape the problem of people being so confused about what is the proper thing to be learning. Once again, to compare this to coding, this would be similar to people who never load up their first text editor because they've been bombarded by highly opinionated people about which language is the best to start with. We need to figure out what socialist tendencies are serious about left unity and start developing a program that accommodates them all - this means that there needs to be consensus on how the historically divisive topics are going to be traversed and judged. Democratic centralism could really shine here to bury the hatchet on these topics once and for all.
3: Once an educational program has been conceived, designed, and deployed and all involved parties are invested in it, it is time to get the word out. Trying to counter or dominate the media narratives on capitalist platforms is mostly a waste of time. Similar to election participation there should just be some basic material on such platforms that steer people off of them and onto platforms that are maintained by leftists or at the very least entities that are ideologically neutral (platforms that exist for the purposes of countering censorship, for example). We all know there is a ton of great socialist content regarding theory/history/organization on the internet already but it's all constantly at risk of being purged - we need a solid platform for it to exist on and even then solid back-ups scattered across a multitude of geographic locations. Once they are housed safely they need to be professionally curated so they can be readily accessible. We've got dense information in spades, but that style of content is next to useless for engaging the masses. We need a model for agitprop and it needs to be rhetorically refined to be easily digestible (examples: A , B , C , D). Videos, audio recording, physical graphics - we need agitprop cadres curating material that can be deployed en masse by anyone as they go about their day. We need stickers to slap on bathroom mirrors, recordings that can be blasted over wal-mart intercom systems, and video clips that can be deployed to any one of the thousands of televisions we are constantly surrounded by - as these actions will be at best frowned upon by the owning class we also need people trained on how to safely deploy them without risking their livelihood. The agitprop sparks the interest - the programs and online archives of content are there to do the work once the interest is sparked.
Everything I've stated is currently within the realm of possibility and could even be done by an entirely online community. Once it was completed anyone (even in a completely atomized society) could participate in praxis on a daily basis with little to zero personal risk and accessibly by providing a current of proletarian education wherever they go during their daily routines.