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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?
the more you call people wanting functional societies "nazis" and any policies which accomplish that "nazism," the more people will will stop caring whether or not you call them nazis and the result of this desensitization will be more comments/jokes like the ones being discussed
at this point, it appears anything other than a current open-air prison with drug zombies is nazism
maybe the comments, or jokes, or even LARPs will turn into something real at some point in the escalating "Nazi!" rhetoric
and so many respond, "so be it"
the foundational issue on the right is most of the people with power are complete losers who are incapable of delivering what their constituents want and they've been lying, stealing, and cheating for decades while wholly failing to deliver
half the commentators you're bringing up aren't "anti-nazi,"( really, many of them have been cheering and doing PR for neonazis in Ukraine for a few years now) it's that they're pro-Israel more than anything else and they see this as an opportunity to purge anyone who isn't from the rightwing the way they've done a few times over the last 70 or so years
This already happened with 'racist', which was replaced with 'white supremacist' around 2021. Nazi is just the next word on the euphemism treadmill
Rather than "replaced," I see it more as "flattened & equated." In the 00s, when you called someone a White Supremacist, it meant something more than just being the type of "racist" who might laugh at some offensive joke or something. In the 10s - far before 2021, by my observation - White Supremacist became one of many "correct" terms to refer to the latter type of person.
This is because it around then that the whole "racism is prejudice plus power" definition broke out into the mainstream, which put forth that racism wasn't merely treating an individual unfairly on the basis of their race, it was being part of a structure that oppressed black people and other people of color (specifying whites and white-adjacents as not capable of being subject to racism). As such, all racism was declared as a part of White Supremacy, and thus some random 4 year old with no understanding of race or racial history who shows any distaste for anyone with dark skin is exactly as much of a White Supremacist as Nathan Bedford Forrest. And Forrest was exactly as racist as that 4 year old, no more, no less.
Around the same time, I saw the same thing happening with "sexism" and "misogyny." In the 00s and before, the latter term was understood to mean someone with a true, unambiguous antipathy for women as women, and "misandry" as the reverse. But because "sexism" was declared a part of being of the misogynistic patriarchy, it was deemed that some 4 year old saying "girls are icky" is exactly as much of a misogynist as Andrew Tate. And Tate is exactly as sexist as that 4 year old, no more, no less.
It's not without reason that people often peg the "Great Awokening" to ~2014. I don't know how the literal President of the United States can be an underappreciated contributor to social trends, but nevertheless--I think that President Obama's direct impact on the federal bureaucracy was to replace broadly egalitarian neoliberal political machinery with explicitly identitarian political machinery.
This article also has empirical data on the explosion of identitarian propaganda in the news media beginning with Obama's first term in office.
More specifically, Obama tried to run / reorganize the government like a Chicago political machine, without the experience in federal-level and federal-system politics to understand why a federation with the continental scale of the United States can't run on the model of an city scale political machine, identarian or not.
There's a... I don't want to say 'reputation,' and I don't have a series of studies to point at either, so I'll just say a [reputation] of rising politicians who go from thriving in lower-level politics to tripping at higher levels because they go from being big fish in small ponds to working in an ocean of interests that aren't so easily corralled. In a city like Chicago, you can capture the local judiciary easily enough that extorting corporations to donate to your city machine supporters as a settlement deal is not only feasible, but self-reinforcing. At the federal level, there are too many established judges across too many jurisdictions with too many Congressional interest hooks to get institutional capture in a mere administration. Without that capture, such an effort becomes a destabilizing, rather than reinforcing, effort for security political primacy. Similar dynamics of inexperience played out in other Obama pushes, such as trying to push / pass the Iranian JPCOA as a purely executive authority fait accompli without bipartisan buildup.
The Obama administration did lean into identarian politics, both privately and publicly via media allies. And it did so in part because that was how Obama could displace and supersede the Clinton wing of the party, which had been the more egalitarian neoliberal political machine that replaced the prior, labor-based political machine that had tension with the Clintons and was neutered following things like the anti-WTO riots.
But the identarian versus neoliberal system friction was mostly internal party politics. The broader national political friction came from the new, inexperienced wing trying to apply a political machine model to a scale where it couldn't work, because they didn't have the relative primacy a political machine needs to operate with such impunity. While Obama himself was popular, the Democratic machine had already taken the drubbing as early as his first election, and even had Clinton won in 2016 she would have ended up in the White House with both the House and the Senate in Republican hands.
...isn't this just the Peter Principle as applied to politics?
Not quite. Peter Principle is the 'raise to your level of incompetence.' This is more of an inexperience issue, which is not the same thing.
Even competent people need time to adjust to new contexts and surroundings. Their ability to do so rapidly is the proof of their competence, but during that period they still make mistakes as they recalibrate expectations.
The point I am trying to make is that Obama was simply new to the federal government. When he won the presidency, he was still a first-term senator. He hadn't gone through a re-election cycle as a Senator to get a sense of how Congress persons needed to stay in touch with their constitutents (possibly part of why he was taken by surprise by the post-Obamacare shellacking), or the dynamics of the presidency changing parties as seen from others in Congress (and thus what a defeated former ruling party could still do as the minority opposition), and he never had experience on the key committees. There were a host of relevant experiences he never had, not because of competence but because of time.
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