I would encourage American progressives on Lemmy to remember when attacked by would-be comrades in places like Canada and Europe.

Most developed nations have their own versions of rural Americans. People who are similarly ignorant, pigheaded, and prone to meanness, bigotry, etc. Travel in these countries and you will meet plenty of them.

That is who you find on Lemmy painting the entirety of US populace and culture with broad strokes, contempt, and rage.

The world feels betrayed by Americans, and the news that reaches them detailing the ongoing consequences of our last election is legitimately scary.

It’s not too suprising that street brawlers show up in droves whenever there’s a chance to, from a comfortable distance, cajole American activists into violent insurrection and mortal combat against tanks and grenades, or simply dogpile on them, since it gives them an easy outlet for that fear.

Abuse of oppressed and brainwashed working class people in authoritarian regimes (Americans, Chinese, Russians, etc.) probably feels like “punching up” if you’re convinced they are not working hard enough to stop their fascist dictatorship and will happily profit from your imminent suffering at the hands of their government.

Many of these openly abusive accounts have eventually been exposed as bots and banned (usually for reasons completely unrelated to hating Americans).

These bots appear to have several common objectives for their activity on this platform but, in particular:

• to disrupt working class solidarity by sewing distrust fear and discord
• to distract destabilize and distort with misinfo and disinfo
• to demoralize and deactivate those who would fight back through effective means like voting, canvassing, protesting, building support networks, etc.
• to promote violent lone-wolf stochastic terrorism which, for some reason, they all agree is the only type of political activism that works (this is IMHO their most obvious tell)

It is an ongoing problem and it’s not isolated to Lemmy.