I love saying "tankie and proud" as a response to "anti-tankie" discourse. It really is just a thought-terminating cliché, often used by misguided westerners who truly do not understand class consciousness and materialism, with some of them going as far to paint "tankies" as "reactionaries disguised as leftists," when in actuality, "anti-tankie" sentiment is actually what seems to be more of a reactionary tendency posing as leftist, especially when you know of the horrors supported by prominent "left" anti-communists like Orwell.

I used to hang around anarchist/demsoc spaces a lot more, and in the past, I fell into this trap of painting AES states as being as "evil" as capitalist propaganda wants you to believe they are, and I tried whatever I could do to distance myself from them, their thinkers, and their ideologies. However, in the grand scheme of my life and the path that my material conditions led me down, three things eventually ended up turning me away from that kind of thinking:

1. Joining Hexbear: When I got tired of using Reddit, especially since I was fed up of all the bigotry and discrimination that was seeming unavoidable on that site, I joined Hexbear because I was looking for an alternative that was not only accepting of marginalized peoples but more inclined toward leftism as a whole. Though I was still an anarchist when I first joined Hexbear, I quickly came to understand that the people that are commonly demonized as "tankies" are not this evil group of horrid people that many anti-AES leftists paint them as. It's actually been the contrary!
2. Reading Theory: Reading Lenin especially helped with me overcoming this, but of course, just gaining an actual better understanding of the theory of Marxism in general was a huge plus as well.
3. Connecting With Black Radical Thinkers: This is a bit of an extension of the previous point, but as a black person, I noticed that the common leftist tendency of many black radicals, such as the Black Panthers, was more in alignment with Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, etc. I didn't find black nationalist associations with anarchism to be as common, and I wondered why. Being able to examine the words of thinkers like Kwame Ture, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, etc. helped me process the connection of black liberation and how it pertains to radical ideology that I felt like I had a more difficult time grasping when I was mostly hanging around white, western anarchists and demsocs, considering their own ideological understanding of leftism and then tying it to the construct of black liberation. Black liberation was much harder for me to wrap my head around looking at it through a more anarchist lens than it was looking at it through a Marxist lens.

Though I am a former anarchist and a Marxist now, this isn't meant to be a sectarian dig at anarchists. It's just more of me being frustrated with how such "anti-tankie" sentiment has painted genuinely effective leftists as monsters and "fascists in disguise" when they have been nothing but the opposite, and ultimately, they have led the greatest and most broadly applicable implementation of tactics that can actually liberate so many oppressed people, both in the context of class and identity.