On the other hand, I've known a number of tankies through the years who pitched hard-right once they found community with online right-wingers.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Authoritarian-minded narcissists don't care about ideological consistency, ethical reasoning, or contextual realism. They just care about the authoritarian grift that feeds their insatiable egos.

They call the "horseshoe politics" argument "both-sides-ism" when it's actually the opposite. "Both sides are bad" is an attempt to equate left-wing with right-wing politics to justify doomerism, complacency, and cynical accelerationism while claiming some sort of moral exceptionism (my ends justify my means because both sides are bad).

"Horseshoe politics" on the other hand calls out ideological and methodological extremism on both sides. Its main claim is that authoritarianism is bad, regardless of which side of the political spectrum it falls on.

It also comes as no surprise that these same types of "leftists" never call out trump, maga, and the actual fascists. No, they focus all their ire on corporate dems (who are deserving of critique within their own contexts, of course, but not to the exclusion of far-right conservatism), calling them "liberal fascists," whatever the fuck that is, and watering down the term "fascist" so that we all sound like loonies whenever we call out actual fascism (such as maga/trumpism).