Its like Hillary walking into a working class kitchen for the first time.
They’ve been shielded from even critical support of China and other AES for so long they literally, not figuratively, literally cannot process that people exist that have beliefs that aren’t Reddit Approved. They immediately assume it’s bots or wumao. Human beings can’t possibly hold these beliefs, so they must be Oriental hordes or actual robots.
the podcast hosts didn’t like that the subreddit was more based than them/not centered around their content, and the subreddit didn’t like that with the exception of decent anti-imperialism the podcasters have a tendency for shitlibbery, hence adopting one of the better podcasts at the time as the official podcast (they can be shitlibs too but oh well)
writing that out I kinda wonder whether it was a running bit on both sides