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I still find this claim… strange. The online Right is constantly making up memes which, taken over-literally, seem just as likely to encourage murder as the "fascist" talk. I'm not even talking about race stuff. Woke is a "mind virus" "destroying America", drug addicts are "Fentanyl zombies", Biden and anyone else implicated in the supposed election fraud is a "traitor"… hell, all kinds of people on X were semi-seriously talking about dubbing the Democratic Party a "terrorist organization" as a reaction to the Kirk shooting.
I'm genuinely not sure why the "punch Nazis" stuff would snag so many more would-be-murderers than those. Are Blue-coded memes simply more widespread? Do right-wing nut-jobs trust the GOP to handle things more than left-wing nut-jobs trust the Dems? Or maybe schizophrenics are just more likely to start out Blue before they go completely off their rocker, because the Blues are more welcoming to the mentally ill? I'm genuinely curious what your theory is, but I don't think the answer can be that left-wing memes encourage violence more than right-wing ones do.
Maybe because Nazis actually existed, zombies don't, and we firebombed cities to put them down? There's real, actual history of how to react to them, virtually everyone agrees they were evil and there's a lot of guilt-by-association power if you can make it stick?
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Are you joking? You honestly can't see the difference between 'woke is a mind virus!' or 'the left is destroying America!' or 'fuck I hate all these fentanyl zombies!' (I actually don't get how that one is supposed to be used to incite violence at all so I'm sorry if I'm misrepresenting it) or 'anyone involved in election fraud is a traitor!' and 'punch nazis!' or 'bash the fash!' which, when you say 'but not actually right? Like this is just rhetoric, you're not literally inciting violence right?' they say 'no I mean it. Fuck nazis, it's cool to punch them. Bash the fash. If you want to get laid beat up a fascist. Your grandfather fought in world war 2 to kill these evil fucks, now you better not let him down.'
That's the difference. One side uses rhetoric 'which, taken over-literally, seem just as likely to encourage murder as the "fascist" talk' while the other side promotes actual violence. The right used to use language like that too - helicopter rides and the like. But 'due to the alarming rise in online hate caused by right wing extremism' (read asymmetric application of censorship) it was largely stamped out, while the left's direct expressions of violent purpose were excused and justified with claims about the language of the oppressed and regurgitated world war 2 propaganda.
It's less about "hate", more that the archetypal thing about zombies is that they're functionally dead already and the only kindness you can do them is put them down. I've always parsed the "fentanyl zombie" term as similarly implying that the drug-addicted homeless are a lost cause who should be regarded more as a walking pestilence than human beings in need of rescue. (Which is halfway-relevant to a certain recent viral scandal.)
I think it's more that they literally shuffle around hunched over like zombies -- have you seen these people? It's pretty bad.
And no, I don't think they should beaten with improvised weapons, or even rounded up and jailed particularly (freedom ain't free!) -- but fent has certainly managed to noticeably degrade the public aesthetics of (checks notes) homeless drug addicts over the past several years, which is quite some feat!
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The public "neutral" megaphones blaring these memes to the normies for years on end may have something to do with it. Something something quantity has a quality of its own.
...The flippant "simply" here is, ahem, quite the understatement. I'm sure near-total control of [American] institutions and mainstream culture is nothing to write home about when it comes to memetic virulence.
I mean, that's all very well, but half the country still manages to be Republican. Millions upon millions. What are the odd that doesn't include any crazies? Why wouldn't those crazies take action vaguely suggested by Red rather than Blue memes?
I said "much more", not "all the". You know this, of course.
I dunno, you ask them. I deal with what my lying eyes say I get in the current reality, e.g our memelord here.
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"mind virus" = a problem
"destroying America" = a problem
"Fentanyl zombies" = a problem
"traitor" = a problem
"fascist" = a problem
...
"Punch Nazis" = a solution.
One of these is not like the others.
Blue Tribe has been calling for violence against its enemies and then supporting, celebrating, and providing active protection to that violence for many, many years now, and the result has been a massive increase in Blues committing political violence. We can see the polling that shows that a large portion of Blue Tribe supports lawless political violence. We can point to numerous examples of both grassroots and leader blues arguing that political violence is good and necessary. We can point to Blue knowledge production providing an intellectual framework for why violence is good and necessary. We can point to Blues actually committing violence. We can point to grassroots and leader blues providing support and active protection to violence after it has been committed.
All of this is public record.
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