chapotraphouse

Sure, but we must consider why you do such things. I can hazard a guess: Because we are a minority opinion, the socially-designated burden of proof is on us irrespective of the kind of claim being made. We can point to the CIA literally stating in an official capacity that they did X and it's still a crapshoot whether the person we are talking to will consider us a conspiracy theorist for pointing it out. With some crowds, it is much worse talking about Israel (though with some it is better).

Redditors can just accept MSNBC slop because MSNBC is thought of as reputable. We and many of our sources are regarded as disreputable, which is why I can tell you offhand about like a dozen different liberal journalist or governmental reports on Tienanmen Square, it's effectively a type of opinion laundering, whatever we tell ourselves it is. It takes some effort for us to "clean" the case we want to make, while Redditors receive claims that are already "clean," but fundamentally it doesn't indicate as much of an internal difference in our attitudes as OP wants to believe. We have basically the same desire: To be making claims that will be regarded as reputable by the kind of people we are likely to be speaking with. It takes more work in our case, but that too is part of our social position, just like our ideology itself.

Mind you, I'm not even criticizing our practice. You know what I just said about laundering my opinions about Tienanmen Square through the liberal press? I'm going to keep doing it! I barely even engage with overtly communist (or even more generally anti-west) news sources because it just adds in extra steps. Just look hard enough at neoliberal slop, especially from the more "useful idiot" types who watched too much West Wing, and you'll see them tip their hands left and right.

I don't think it's as dishonest as my wording might imply. I view many political arguments as centering on stipulated premises, so it's really just a matter of picking and choosing what premises I want to stipulate. Even if some liberal saying "Yeah, I was sipping tea under the Mao statue on the morning of June 5th" wasn't the origin point of my stance, I'm not saying it was! I'm just presenting that claim (which, incidentally, I do also believe) because I view it as more useful to stipulate than something that is more central to my beliefs but more likely to be dismissed out of hand.

As an aside, here's one where we're in the same boat as Redditors: Have you ever looked up the Gonzalite boiling babies story? I tried to find a basis for it but couldn't.

but I’m still going to do a certain amount of looking into the claim and what the evidence for it is before believing it and repeating it.

You don't need to do this

The west owns a hugely disproportionate amount of wealth, and you're also an english-speaker, so by default 99% of anything crossing your ears is going to either have a pro-western and pro-white and pro-capital bias, or be neutral

I wouldn't consider hexbear to have an anti-western bias either, it's just closer to neutral. An anti-western bias would have to be something like "each and every anglo saxon is unironically spawned from the loins of esau and has corrupt DNA" or something like that. Basically, due to the sheer scale of actual bad things the west is doing (and has done) it's hard to actually make untrue propaganda about it.

I would say it's impossible to make propaganda about the west that's anywhere near as false and unfair as the propaganda they make about others, simply because of the atrociously huge material wealth gap in both the past and present