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Sir, there's been four new Nazi/Hitler/antisemitic issues in the conservative community in just the past day
Following the recent Politico expose on the Young Republicans groupchat leak among mid 20s-30s leaders of the organization containing comments about gas chambering their political opponents and antisemitic remarks like this
In the followup to this, yes you heard it right, at least four new antisemitic and/or Nazi controversies in the past day or so.
A flag with a swatiska embedded in it was spotted in the office of Representative Dave Taylor. Rep. Taylor has called it out and condemned it, and it's quite possible he never noticed it before himself but it does seem to be another sign of the embedded antisemitic and pro nazi rhetoric in lower level staffers if one of them put it up.
Additionally, the Border Patrol posted a video on an Instagram containing an antisemitic slur. While the higher ups of the border patrol likely don't have much to do with what gets posted on the social media, it's again another bad sign that the lower levels who coordinate posts and approve them are antisemitic. Someone had to specifically pick that particular verse of that particular version of that particular song, they knew what they were posting and whatever approval process they use, the others would have heard the lyrics and yet signed on.
The third controversy is the most explicit of them all. Myron Gaines, host of the Fresh and Fit podcast (1.58 million subscribers on YouTube alone) posted
Now, I never would have imagine that the word woke includes "thinking the Holocaust is real and Hitler is bad", but that seems to be where we are at now. Gaines is also a former employee of the DHS, which is just another point of evidence of low level gop aligned staffers having pro Nazi/antisemitic views.
But in fact, all of this seems to be par for the course, according to Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab. who also wades into the ring of antisemitic Holocaust denialism with comments like
That's right, at least two major conservative names have directly engaged in unashamed pro Nazi/Holocaust denialism/etc rhetoric in response to the group chat leak and both of them strongly believe that many other high level conservatives agree with them (Myron's use of "We like Hitler and Torba saying it's normal).
As Richard Hanania (Writer of "The Origins of Woke" who has been in many conservative spaces before) explained months before the leak, this is actually pretty common. As he's said before, the two types of comments he tends to get "it can't be that bad" and "lol that's exactly what it's like" such as this agreement from National Review reporter James Lynch
What's interesting is that the one thing both the Nazi denouncers (Hanania/Lynch/etc) and Nazi defenders (Myron/Torba/etc) here both seem to agree on, is that this is common among the young right. There seems to be a broad consensus that this gropyer antisemitic Nazism is growing among conservatives, especially young ones. We've seen this with Kanye and his descent into Nazism, we've seen this with John Reid and Mike Robinson both exposed over their Nazi fetish. We've seen this with Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper. The rapid growth of figures like Nick "six million cookies" Fuentes, Ian Carroll and Theo Von. In fact a neo Nazi inspired kid was even behind a recent school shooting in Colorado a few months ago
EW Erickson says https://x.com/EWErickson/status/1978812093773041964
Ben Shapiro says that unity with radicals will destroy the right wing as it pushes moderate Americans away.
Right wing conservative libertarian speaker Phil Magness says
So with all this recent controversy, how big of a Nazi problem is actually festering, and why do the Nazis seem to feel so comfortable in modern conservativism? They even seem to be dropping hints at the highest levels if the border patrol video was intended as a dog whistle to be dropped before deleting. Is this growing widespread agreement (from Hanania to Torba) that this is just the tip of the iceberg among young conservatives accurate? Will this growing trend of Nazi radicalism destroy the Republicans chances among moderates in the future like embracing left wing radicalism hurt Biden? And how do the non Nazi conservatives and moderates balance fighting off Nazi accusations from the left also working to stem this apparant rise of unashamed nazism and Holocaust denialism?
You know I don't think people are being fair to you. I can only address this by speaking to my own experiences.
I remember being there in 2007 or so, forming swastikas in Club Penguin with the other anons. Obviously at the time this was pure shock value and didn't indicate any serious ideological commitment. Now we may argue about exactly how serious /pol/ is today, but it's hard to deny that it is a lot more serious about Nazism than we were as teenagers in 2007 harassing kids in Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin.
But what about me? Am I meaningfully more Nazi now than I was in 2007? Did those formative years on 4chan have any lasting influence on my politics? It's hard to say, of course from my own perspective our jokes in 2007 had nothing to do with it. My beliefs seem to me to be merely a logical progression based on what I've learned and experienced over the past 18 years. But either way I've somehow ended up reading SecureSignals posts thinking to myself "Hey this guy may have a point" and to some degree embracing beliefs that would be described by some as white nationalist.
Perhaps this is just another manifestation of the fully generalizable Toaster Fucker Problem. 30 years ago I may have done my fair share of "noticing" but dismissed it without a community of noted race scientists like the Motte to further radicalize me. It seems obvious to me that while "haha just joking" extremism doesn't literally mean the jokers hold those specific beliefs in earnest, it does meaningfully shift the Overton Window and creates a space where serious discussion of previously taboo beliefs can blend with the jokes. If you believe that White Nationalism and Antisemitism are very evil then it is reasonable IMO to be concerned about these jokes and want to stamp them out.
Basically I don't think most of the people engaging in these jokes are seriously Nazis but I do think it creates a space for those ideas to spread and does probably contribute to the popularity of taboo far right beliefs if not outright Nazism. To be clear I think the Left has their own version of this same problem, in fact, to a much more advanced and concerning degree.
I feel like I showed up to this site too late and missed all of this because I keep seeing people make side references to this/HBD but no one ever actually talks about it, they just talk about talking about it.
Yeah, there was a time when people would discuss it so often, the more left-leaning mods decided to ban the entire topic for a month. Partly a result of 1-2 posters having a hobby horse, and partly of the more left-wing posters not being satisfied with making moral arguments against it, insisting that it must be false, and stepping on rake after rake in the process.
Most people are happy to leave well enough alone, if you don't press the subject.
My understanding is that the HBD crackdown (more often just: conspicuous non-moderation of rule-breaking anti-HBD posts) was a project by the "bourgeois right" leaning (right but emphatically not alt-) mods, in the class of @Amadan or Hlynka (PBUH), rather than the handful of more "left" ones such as @netstack. This makes sense, too, as to the latter any HBDers are just the fargroup, while the former would feel irritated and threatened by the possibility of association with them ("I just wanted order, discipline and capitalism, but everyone including the racists insists that I am on the racist team").
As part of the pedantic minority(?) that subscribes to HBD as stated but is genuinely not interested in its common application as a resistance band for "therefore whites are superior" mental gymnastics (usually of the "IQ matters, but also the >100-average-IQ groups all have a disadvantage in some nebulous additional category like creativity so they are not actually superior" type), I just find the whole situation sad.
If memory serves the episode I referred to happened on /r/SSC, where neither of the people you mentioned were mods. Hlynka and Amadan started in /r/TheMotte, Netstack only became a mod after we moved here.
I'm also not talking about mere toleration of rule-breaking coming from one side, there was at one point a literal moratorium on the subject.
I remember the moratorium you are talking about, but thought you were talking about a more recent incident (I think we also got a sort of moratorium after moving here for a while? Maybe I'm mixing it up with a moratorium on SS's single-topic SSposting, which felt like another instance of right-wing mods wanting to bury the wrong and cringe kind of right-wing posting?). Not sure who were the mods back then and what was their motivation, though my instinct would be that it must have been similar, since the outgroup/fargroup relations to HBD in the SSC/Motte community have been like this for the longest time.
Didn't happen - pretty sure we've never imposed a topic ban in the Motte. (We have occasionally told individual posters to grind something other than their singular axe for a while.)
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