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I don't think this is a good characterisation of the DR position here. They aren't clinging to a moral code of trying to tell the truth - they perceive telling the truth as one of the weapons that are actually available to them. They can't rely on speaking power to truth as the MR/ML can, and their ideas actually have to stand on their own without the backing of the mainstream. "That person is lying to you for their own personal gain - here's the actual truth they don't want you to know" is a powerful opener for propaganda, especially when the person saying it is actually correct.
Technically true but I want to provide a bit more context. The reason that the DR has next to no real organizational capacity is that any DR organization which forms is immediately infiltrated, crushed and prosecuted by existing power structures. In many countries, forming a DR group is explicitly illegal, and in the vast majority of others it will get you immediately added to governmental watchlists.
This is the exact opposite of reality. The DR is the most effective propaganda outlet in the modern world - their memes and culture have completely colonised the gaming spaces occupied by the youth, their ideas shape popular conversations and their memes are so ubiquitous that they have in many cases become indistinguishable from regular internet culture. They can create ideas like the OK hand signal and milk being white supremacist dogwhistles and have the legacy media take them entirely seriously and broadcast their claims. They created "It's ok to be white", a scheme which caused a lot of nastier people on the left to drop the mask in a way that got a lot of normal people noticing. They don't just know that they're supposed to do it - they obsess over creating memes, "meming" things and repeatedly testing their ideas and messaging amongst themselves for maximum virality, creating entire internet subcultures devoted to spreading their ideas. They played such a large role in the election of Trump that a lot of forces on the left and MR immediately started attacking the major tech companies in order to do everything they could to make that collaboration less successful and less powerful - to say nothing of instances like the prosecution of Douglas Mackey.
Or in other words, they're counting coup- Kiwifarms vs. Keffals and co. is how I'd expect that to look.
If it looks like a liberal and quacks like a liberal it's... probably a liberal. They're disproportionately dissident anyway when in a political situation that doesn't favor them- it's probably an evolutionary strategy to be sufficiently indispensable that the progressive-traditionalists can't fire them. These people just tend to create things because it's, for lack of a better word, in them to create; hacker culture used to be like this and, when you look at what the forefront is (used to be tech in general, but it's more limited to ML now), still very much is.
Once you figure out that traditionalists and progressives are just fighting over the temporary allegiances of these people- remember that, while the left can't meme, neither can the right (without the liberals)- political dynamics make more sense. It's just a pendulum; when dominated by traditionalists, play progressive, when dominated by progressives, play traditionalist.
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