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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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I want to pre-register a bet and get some opinions on this one. This death threat is absolutely fake, right? The grammar is ridiculous, and the word and phrasing choice is an absolute parody. Everything about it smells like an educated non-english person larping with zero understanding of what the natives actually sound like.

It reminds me of my college professor who smashed her car windows and wrote "brave dykes will never smash the patriarchy" on it to blame frat boys (which worked on the college, but fortunately not the police & insurance agency).

I expect we'll never hear about it if it turns out she wrote it. But I doubt even the met would grab some random local boy and use him as a scapegoat like my college tried In that incident.

I'm not familiar with this National Action, so I looked them up. Everything about them is written with negative mood affiliation so it should be easy to find out how nasty these people are. The results I think are further evidence this is fake, aside from the insanity of a group like this identifying themselves in a threat, they've never done anything like this before. In fact, actual crimes committed by members are fit a easy to discern pattern. The majority of arrests of members of the National Action are for....being members of the National Action. Apparently the UK can forbid membership in groups like this with criminal penalties apart from actually committing crimes. I'm not British though so what do I know, maybe most folks in the UK like laws like this. IMO status offences enshrined in law are no better than the beliefs the proscribed groups are advancing. Its illegal to simply exist while claiming to be a member. The next biggest bucket of arrests are for words, either spoken or written. None of it is paper letters mailed to people or direct threats against specific individuals. Mostly its internet shit-posting in support of the actual crimes of non-members, like the murder of an MP. While they were 100% uninvolved in the murder there is a desperate need to connect them in the UK press. Also it appears that being a proscribed group puts you outside the protection of the UK's already insane libel/slander laws (nothing on Japan's though). The only actual crime that I would consider a real crime, in that it did demonstrable damage to a person or property, was an attempted murder by someone claiming to be a member after the fact. Some one was also arrested for possessing items with the intent of damaging property but was never charged for it. This simply isn't their MO at all. In addition, since the majority of their crimes are for saying or typing illegal words, there is a pretty good corpus of their work. None of it is written anything like this letter. They write like chavs speak, likely for an obvious reason.

Besides the fact that they're called National Action, I, and I suspect most other Brits, have no issues with organisations like this being proscribed because they aren't just racist and anti-semitic, they're outright calling for the murder of Jews and other minorities which crosses a pretty clear line.

From the Wikipedia article;

Renshaw had called for Jews to be "eradicated" as "nature's financial parasite and nature's social vermin", and had said that the UK had backed the wrong side in the Second World War, since the Nazis "were there to remove Jewry from Europe once and for all"

By 2014, he had written on his blog, "There are non-whites and Jews in my country who all need to be exterminated. As a teenager, Mein Kampf changed my life. I am not ashamed to say I love Hitler."[16][23] He has expressed admiration for Anders Breivik, the far-right terrorist, as "the hero Norway deserves"

On whether it's a hoax, I mean obviously I have no way of knowing but I don't see why it's implausible; the sort of basement-dweller who might join a organisation like this seems exactly the sort of person to write a poorly written screed such as this.