Underground rappers xaviersobased and phreshboyswag dance in giddy circles, arms swirling while an on-screen caption reads, “Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 found footage upscaled to 4k.” “Is Phresh Trotsky?” someone asks in the comments. Another clip flashes between gameplay footage, music videos, and a “Free George Santos School Walkout” meme, overlaid with an anime girl wearing a Soviet cossack hat who meditates on the difficulty of committing to radical politics in our brain-smushed modern era. “Bro how did Karl Marx write all those books without AI?” she mewls. “How did Karl Marx stay true to his ideology without buying V-Bucks or an iPhone?” xaviersobased’s entrancing “90 Down The Block” rumbles in the background.
TikTok content
Over the last few months, there’s been a surge of similar and even more surreal edits. Hop into the abyss and you’ll find people comparing the Arab Umayyad Caliphate to the Ghaznavid Dynasty like they’re sports teams, to the tune of bashing jumpstyle music. There’s Xi Jinping mogging Bibi Netanyahu while deafeningly aggro phonk bludgeons away; hype montages paint Marx as history’s greatest theorist and pair Zohran Mamdani quotes with Playboi Carti Die Lit cuts. It’s communist brainrot, the far-left’s doofy and delirious answer to the torrent of alt-right Rienfenslop polluting social media feeds. Even the people making the videos can’t say if they’re being serious or shitposting, but they want to give leftists some “culture” worth rallying behind.
Maybe the biggest and most fantastical motif in this new clutch of comslop is Shambhala, not to be confused with the Canadian DIY electronic festival full of “Shambhalove.” It’s an idyllic kingdom in Tibetan Buddhist mythology that’s supposed to be the birthplace of Kalki, the final incarnation of the god Vishnu. The concept dates back centuries but took on a new life in the twentieth, when Russian theosophist couple Nicholas and Helena Roerich led an expedition in the 1920s to find Shambhala in the Altai Mountains. Nicholas believed he was an incarnation of the fifth Dalai Lama, and that he would somehow unify millions of country-spanning Asians under a movement to follow the Future Buddha, or Maitreya. Helena, meanwhile, was supposedly a mystic receiving directions from spiritual masters hidden in the Himalayas. They also trekked through Mongolia on the Shambhala hunt but came up empty.
The Shambhala cause was taken even further by Gleb Bokii, a leader of the first Soviet secret police, who thought this mythological land would give him access to mind-control techniques and magic weapons. He dreamed of merging Tibetan Buddhism with communism.
Basically, an extremely diluted and distorted version of this history—“Red Shambhala equals communist utopia”—has flooded across TikTok. Dozens of clips with hundreds of thousands of views imagine figures like Mamdani as the gatekeeper of a future Shambhala. Some feature VTuber-style anime girls while a wheel of sickles—a canny inversion of the neo-Nazi “Black Sun” symbol—flickers over montages of glorious mountains and Communist leaders. The descriptions often proffer a Wikipedia TL;DR of Shambhala lore and a grab-bag of hashtags: #redshambala, #classstruggle, #resistcapitalism, #antifascist, #karlmarx, #communism. Many people have framed the rise of Red Shambhala as a direct response to Vril and Agartha, two concepts that have become a fixture of alt-right memes in the last year. Vril refers to a fictional life-force of supreme beings, while Agartha is a supposed kingdom within the hollow Earth. They’ve been folded into xenophobic and antisemitic edits pining for an Aryan ethnostate.
TikTok content
“We needed an Agartha of our own,” explains a TikToker named leftist0, who’s amassed hundreds of thousands of views with Shambhala edits. The 15-year-old self-identified Marxist from Australia tells me he was always pretty liberal, but finding out about Red Shambhala videos earlier this year pushed him into reading The Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s The State and Revolution. “I did research and went through Democratic-Socialist to Marxist pretty quickly, still need to read more theory.”
His clips are pretty rudimentary tributes to guys like Thomas Sankara, the former Prime Minister of Burkina Faso, shouting them out with highlight reels and songs by 100 gecs and Jersey club collective TwerkNation28. While he’s mostly “just shitposting,” he thinks impressively edited Red Shambhala clips could be an antidote to alt-right slopaganda. “By making [Marxism] look cool, it changes peoples’ ideas about it,” he reasoned. “That’s how Vril radicalized so much people to the Right.”
The Shambhala element is absurd, but these editors aren’t totally off-base. Trying to get kids bred on Cocomelon, corecore, and Rizzler clips to read radical literature is a herculean task, so why not meet them where they are in the algorithmic insane asylum? Vril and Agartha have thrived in part because of the way the editors mix brainrot and bigotry, disguising their ideological assaults in the fried fog of GifTok rap gibberish.
The Marxist and Shambhala edits have grown to such a point that there’s now chatter about a so-called “alt-left pipeline,” where jacked dudes with southern accents are talking about how they love “man-to-man” things like working on cars but also fully support abortion and Black liberation and detest United States imperialism. This has rankled some even further-left creators, who see these newcomers as posers with no actual culture outside the party line. “The libs are stealing it,” says leftist0. “It’s annoying seeing libs call themselves alt-left.”
TikTok content
Perhaps the biggest current editor is thomasankarafan, an 18-year-old from Texas who’s hooked on radical politics despite (or because of) his very conservative parents. Since starting channels earlier this year, he’s racked up over 37,000 followers across platforms with education lessons where he has the cossack girlie narrate the greatest achievements of Russian feminist revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai and read chapter one of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book while Subway Surfer gameplay loops in the backdrop. He’s also raised money for Gazans, shat on lib commander Gavin Newsom, and urged his fellow comrades to ditch Discord and get burner phones. “The feds listening and they finna do a sweep like Future,” the anime girl warns.
The creator told me over Discord that he thinks a lot about the line between parodies and praxis and isn’t entirely sure where he falls, but does feel like he’s fighting a modern infowar. He wants to inspire the brainrot sheeple, galvanize them to care about the world and make leftist TikTok edits. “I’ve given people book recommendations. People need to get back in the library, bro.” He’s incredibly paranoid about Palantir and internet surveillance and owns multiple burner phones. “To a degree it’s like, yo, we’re cooked—but the revolution keeps me optimistic,” he says.
One hurdle for these editors is that far-right hate is more conducive to digital slop, both because algorithms prize outlandish ragebait and because the tribalistic ideas themselves are low IQ rubbish. The basic tenets of something like socialism are easy to understand but less glitzy and less ecstatically aggro; it’s harder to convey class consciousness in a 20-second TikTok. So the method here is to co-opt the hysterical semiotics of alt-righters for sickle supremacy. Instead of the neo-Nazi slogan “Billions must die,” Red Shambhala fans comment “Billions must love”; instead of the phrase “Another Aryan Classic,” it’s “Another Proletariat Classic.” One clip with nearly four million views flips the MAGA call to arms “Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition” into “Reject Racism, Embrace Humanity.” “We all bleed red,” one top comment proclaims. Ironically, a lot of this stuff ends up feeling exactly like what leftists accuse liberals of doing: all surface and premeditated mantra with no actual ideas or thought. It rarely goes deeper than a hype edit.
This amorphous network of political content feels like a 2020s TikTokified incarnation of what Joshua Citarella mapped out in his book Politigram and the Post-left, tracking ideological microcultures that are more like kids trying on masks. These TikTokers are puking out thunderous Chiang Kai-Shek phonk edits, Charlie Kirk clanker Shambhala fan-fic, and “transjuche transmaoist” Hong Kong liberation posts. There’s a batch of “commie twink,” “homoSSR,” “total bisexual supremacy” edits. It’s hard to imagine this stuff inspiring a mass leftist takeover; knowing about obscure Communist revolutionaries is a bit like being into esoteric rock groups or turning underground ephemera like Yabujin into your identity. Politically or electorally speaking, Maoism could hardly be less relevant in this day and age—no one wants egalitarian totalitarianism anymore than (most) people want fascism. Critics would tell these kids: Stop looking at TikTok, meet your neighbors, organize your workplace, develop a community. At least this stuff could save the ones who are hopelessly hikikomori-mode. It highlights the disarray of the online Left in a time of rising far-right authoritarianism, a void filled by idling kids who are mining the Wiki archives for something worth getting excited about.
TikTok content
These more radical communities are heavily fragmented yet increasingly popular. On the far right, Vril and Agartha have racked up millions of views even after TikTok banned the Vril hashtag. Further down the gorge of TikTok depravity, there are things like TCC, or the True Crime Community, an online subculture that’s been tied to actual school shootings. Multiple TikTok TCC hashtags are swarmed with edits glorifying school shooters. The audiovisual language is similar to other TikTok edits; they flash between images of mass murderers with dreamy background music, and viewers leave comments about how these shooters are their “goats” and describe the amount of people they killed like Call of Duty scores. “I love the editing style, I just wish it wasn’t associated with irl murderers,” one person wrote on a video. Some are clearly ironic, but the line between blind devotion and mocking derision is seriously mangled.
Inside this opaque vortex of both nonideological and ideological mayhem, the Red Shambhala scene offers kids one (ridiculous) escape hatch away from the alt-violence pipeline. The creators I talked to spoke of it like a genuine community. thomasankarafan told me he’s made many friends from the TikTok edit scene, and described insular discourses that happen in their TikTok chamber, like debates about China’s economy. He’s thinking of new ways to explore different content and integrate online music heroes, like an alt account called Sankarasobased. I ask him what Shambhala would be like if it actually somehow existed. He laughs. “Lil B is there. Xaviersobased holding a glass of Leninade.”