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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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I give it 45% feds, 45% leftist radicals "raising awareness", 8% 4chan trolls bored out of their minds, and maybe 2% genuine hateful idiots.

Why? Their group has a history of operating, and has prominent 'real' antisemites as members. In general, no matter how noble or correct your cause is, stupid people can latch onto it and do stupid things. And they aren't "fake believers", just stupid. Even in a world where the alt-right would NEVER do such a thing, aryan prison gang antisemitism would still exist, and do stuff like this.

Not to dox myself, but as someone who has lived in Florida (including but not only Tampa) for a good chunk of my life, I would lower the fed slightly, lower the leftist radicals a decent chunk and up the trolls and hateful idiots. Maybe like 40% / 25%/ 20% / 15%.

Unless the radicals are dedicated enough to LARPing that they also go out to bars dressed normally and talk about this stuff to really sell the act (though I guess those could also be feds trying to infiltrate? I just know a lot of drunk dudes at the bars here start getting into politics and the Jews do come up). I will add that I would not take it turning out that these folks were actually recent moves from New York or California as meaning they were actually disguised leftists. The people (well, young people, not retirees) who have moved to Florida from New York and California in past couple years seem both more outspoken in their politics and more right wing than the average pre-covid Floridian (once again, ruling out truly dedicated LARPing that extends to work and bars).

Guessing a lot of them are kind of "cutting loose" after being in cities where being vocally conservative was asking to be a pariah.

I think there's a distance between drunkenly ranting about Joos in a bar and soberly dressing up into a Nazi garb, grabbing a swastika flag and standing in public for hours screaming Nazi slogans and harassing the passer-bys. A random low-IQ asshole is much more likely to do the former than the latter. A troll would rather do the latter, obviously.

"Cutting loose" sounds plausible, but there's a huge distance between being openly conservative and waving a swastika flag. It looks much more like LARPing "Conservatives are Nazis" meme than actual Nazis. Most genuine anti-Semites do not march with swastika flags, they are much more likely to do "I am not an anti-Semite, but..." than openly prance and scream "heil hitler". Of course, given it's like four people, among millions there would be exceptions to any rule, but in general that's what it looks like.

Agreed on broad strokes, hence keeping the order of likelihood if not the %s, mostly felt the need to bring it up because my %s would've looked more like yours if this had happened 2015-2019 (prior to that up the feds and lower the leftists) and only differ now due to personal experiences in Florida over the last couple years.

My experience has been that blue collar whites have similar views to their black counterparts about many topics, including Jews, and that the schizo window dressing makes the substance look much more different than it actually is.

Growing up I only ever heard the standard stereotype stuff (but that also applied to every race), plus maybe some conspiracy stuff that was at least ostensibly not actually about Jews even if there happened to be a lot of overlap.

Honestly surprised you didn't hear any in New York City, pre-2020 basically all the antisemitism I heard was from New Yorkers lol (though then it was almost entirely directed at Orthodox Jews).

Frankly most of the stuff I'm used to is anti-black or anti-mexican (obviously also lots of stuff about muslims in the 2001-2011 stretch) the anti-jewish stuff seems to be newer.