White supremacists will be like “people use to be able to be themselves without getting in trouble for it! they used to be able to speak their mind!” and then the “speaking their mind” is racial slurs and the “be themselves” is committing hate crimes.

Not to lionize him, but Luigi was a pretty good indicator on how much of a difference a single person can make

Couple caveats I’d say here: 1) Let’s not forget he’s just the person they have so far tried to pin it on. As far as I know, it’s an ongoing case, not something they’ve yet legally resolved and locked him away for. 2) The “how much difference as an individual acting alone” seems to have some relationship to how much a person is willing to risk, which sometimes relates to how little they have to lose. Whoever did do it, it could have gone very badly for them and still may be going very badly. Individualism is poison against this sort of thing though, as is emptiness of cultural heritage that is common among USians and colonizer socializing; individualism says it’s all about your personal happiness, so the idea of risking everything for the betterment of most people, whether as adventurism or as part of a strategic group, can sound strange or larger than life, even though those who do it are very much just normal humans.

I wouldn’t even say it’s projection so much as it is just ableism, elitism, and condescension toward emotions (reminiscent of patriarchal thinking). If we flip it and take it as projection, people on the morally correct side of history aren’t inherently “better thinkers” or don’t react to fear, nor are they necessarily being way more diligent with their sources as individuals. The problems and solutions are much more systemic than that; people are influenced by propaganda but are also influenced by their personal circumstances and the inertia and enforcement of systems. Individualism is a misleading framework for understanding the world.

If the US with Trump manages to somehow align with Russia

I’m not saying it isn’t possible, but I have a hard time seeing the point in Russia doing this, even from a cynical purely self-interest way of thinking. Making peace deals is one thing, under the right conditions, but this whole campaign of an unnecessary war has been the fault of NATO and the western empire creating a problem and forcing an issue on Russia’s borders, effectively warring with Russia by proxy. Not only that, the Trumpian faction is uniquely despised even within the US by the liberal camp and there’s a lot of lingering red scare hatred of Russia and newer hatred of Russia from propaganda relating to the issue with Ukraine. So normalizing relations would look like… what exactly? I know Russia isn’t exactly a bastion of socialism at this point, but they gotta have some self respect that pretending the western empire wouldn’t try to screw them this time is beyond absurd.

I think this is a case by case thing, but sometimes we simply cannot afford to be too much critical. Think of an actual communist, politically isolated, representing a small city in the bourgeois state, or something. If the opposition found out bad stuff about that guy’s past, of course the bourgeois media would create a campaign to hunt them down. In such cases should we join the hunt? This is the challenge of having the correct historical understanding of your time and place, so these choices become clearer. Over the time you start acting based on the political outcome, instead of an abstract moral value which you do not adopt yourself in your life. Then you criticize any mistake in private if possible, outside the eyes of the opposition.

Something that comes to mind here is the importance of applying this thinking to non-leaders, not just figures who have a significant reputation. That part of opposing the current system means recognizing the humanity of each person; they are never “just a number” but a whole human being with a history to them. And when the time does come that we must act against such a person, it needs to be done, as you put it, “based on the political outcome.” Better known figures tend to get more of the attention in discussions like this, but I think the “abstract moral value” thinking can definitely come for the “little individual” as well—and they tend to have little power to oppose it, which increases any sense of a “leftist” leader acting more like the existing system than something different.

To try to put it in example form, not allowing obvious liberals to run rampant in lemmygrad is easily recognized as a political outcome focus; by keeping them from doing so, it becomes a more pointed and focused anti-imperialist and communist space. On the other hand, if lemmygrad were to wage a campaign against “still lingering liberalism in its communist users”, that could very quickly get into abstractions and grandstanding that are difficult to concretize into something to act upon. Which brings me to a point of existing system vs. otherwise, that such an approach would likely get lost in individualist thinking. “It’s not our failure that this person is still too liberal, it’s their moral failing and so they must be cast out.” In other words, is what “we” want being cultivated/encouraged/rewarded or only watched for violations of from a tower. (To be clear, I’m not saying this as a vagueposting reference to something that happened on lemmygrad. Just using the site as a basis for example to try to be more clear in what I mean.)

The tough moralistic thinking mindset might have us thinking that the harder it is to be moral and still be it, the better the person is or some such thing. When in practicality, we get the best outcomes when it is as easy as possible for people to be aligned and act ethically, and when it is made systemically difficult for them to do otherwise. And that is an area where working amid the existing larger system presents a challenge, since people are constantly being pushed at from the pressures of a system that often normalizes or even rewards selfish or predatory behavior of one kind or another. Hope that makes sense.