excerpt including mention of The Greyzone:

[....] Tankies are a trendy youth movement

Some people think that the tankies are astroturfed by Russian trolls or China’s famous “wumao”. Others blame the rise of The Grayzone, a publication with strong tankie leanings that has been vigorous in denying the existence of concentration camps in Xinjiang. But while there are probably a few Russian and Chinese trolls skulking about, and while Grayzone does have a decent Twitter presence, tankism is more likely simply a faddish edgelord youth movement feeding off of the general leftist energy released by the politics of the last few years.

Since I’ve only interacted with tankies on Twitter, I’ll defer to the perspectives of non-tankie leftists who have encountered the movement in real life.

In one thread, socialist @QueenSorviaV recounts her time in tankie culture.

A thread that serves as a brief reflection and observations from my days (about a year) as a Tankie:

— Sorvia (@QueenSorviaV) July 16, 2020

She depicts tankism as an ideology defined fundamentally by anti-Americanism. She describes a process by which people with some justifiable anger against America — due to its treatment of minorities or overseas military actions — slip into a deep and monomaniacal hatred in which America defines evil and anything that opposes America is defined as good. As she describes it, these people then cluster into a close-knit, highly paranoid, almost cult-like subculture:

This anger also became directed towards individuals. The obsessive paranoia of the “deep state” led to a resurgence of democratic centralism. A need to police views. Power struggle for ideological control within the group. Pretty brutal stuff for social media

— Sorvia (@QueenSorviaV) July 16, 2020

Meanwhile, anarchist @rechelon describes some of the same social dynamics among tankies, but attributes their emergence less to burning rage than to a kind of social media entrepreneurialism. Here are a few excerpts from his thread:

[.....]

If Gillis is right, then the emergence of tankies is one result of the failure of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Bernie’s whole sales pitch was “political revolution”, and when it became clear on Tuesday, March 3 that a political revolution wasn’t happening anytime soon, some of the young people in the movement either moved toward the idea of actual physical revolution (anarchists, tankies, Trotskyists) or away from the idea of revolution and towards the hope of political evolution (social democrats).

But like their long-ago predecessors in the Spanish Civil War, today’s tankies are specialized not in actually bringing about revolution, but in infighting against other types of leftists.

Tankies don’t get along with other leftists

[.....]

the term also has an entry on Wikipedia, including this section on "Neo-tankies":

"Neo-tankies"[edit]

Satirist Martin Rowson observes that the hardline, black and white, authoritarian outlook of the far left has often been preserved by some of its former members, even when other aspects of their leftism have been shorn by experience or ideological shifts:

"John Lloyd is one of those pro-war lefties or ex lefties, whom I prefer to call neo-tankies, who've dragged their Manichean mindset from the Cold War and insist on seeing the final battle between good and evil just round the next corner." [16]

He says:

"I came up with this word to describe Lloyd, Hitchens, Aaronovitch and the rest of them … It honours the pro-war ex-left's origins by acknowledging the neo-conservatives, that bunch of ex-Trots who believe in the violent export of democracy throughout the world on the back of the US-military industrial complex, and the tankies, the old diehards of the British Communist party who supported Stalin or Moscow's line at every turn, above and beyond accepting unquestioningly Soviet tanks trundling through Budapest or into Czecholoslovakia"[16]

and in The Urban Dictionary

the mayor of Portland isn't talking about "tankies" but he IS finally using the words "antifa" and "anarchists". Had enough, no more of this shit, finally cracking down hard, take your show elsewhere: